About Francesca Prescott

I was born in London, but moved to Geneva, Switzerland, when I was two and a half years old. My mother made the decision to move when she was finally sure that my father was more than just the gorgeous, sweet-talking Romeo in Speedos she’d met at Milan swimming pool while working as an au-pair. My father was on the Italian national swimming team, his expertise evident in the lane devoted to the butterfly stroke. He’d won many medals and was training towards the Tokyo Olympics when my mother sashayed into his world in a navy blue and white polka-dotted bikini and rerouted his destiny. Winning an Olympic medal may or may not have been in the cards, but he definitely won my mother’s heart. Photographs of my twenty-one year old father suggest that he probably had her at “ciao bella!”, a notion that my mother still rolls her eyes at and adamantly refutes.

The life-altering question was: had my mother stolen his heart? Would he give up his Olympic dreams for a whirlwind romance that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy? Unsure of his commitment and unwilling to jeopardize his chances at aquatic stardom, my mother went back to England, wondering whether she’d ever see him again.

She did.

My father secured a job in Geneva with Alitalia (working for Italy’s national airline was a good way of getting cheap tickets to fly up to see us) and two years later, to my ultra-Catholic English grandmother’s relief, made an honest woman out of my mother at the altar of the Church of Our Lady in Geneva. I have no recollection of the ceremony or the reception, but the photograph album paints a delightful picture, assuring me that I made an awfully cute bridesmaid. My father was hard working and ambitious; he wanted to provide the best for his family. Consequently, he soon accepted a more challenging position with one of Geneva’s many international organizations. My sister Lisa was born, followed by my brother Nick, and suddenly our apartment on the outskirts of Geneva was feeling a little cramped.

My parents wanted to buy a house, but with prices of real estate in Switzerland being prohibitive, they started thinking about building something across the more reasonably priced French border. One day, we went to look at a piece of land located at the top of a small village, about half an hour outside of Geneva. It was a warm and breezy blue spring day and the view was stupendous, stretching for miles across the plain of the Rhône river and out towards the snow-capped Alps. Right behind us, the Jura mountains shivered in variegated greens that darkened with altitude. Cows pottered around adjacent fields, swinging their bells, mooing congenially and nibbling on buttercups and daisies. Below, in the centre of the village, the church tower shimmered in the sunshine. The atmosphere was tingling with the promise of outdoor adventure and I desperately wanted to live here. Luckily, so did my parents. Some months later, we moved into our little prefabricated, not quite finished house, high on a hill in a sleepy French village called Péron.

As idyllic childhoods go, mine surely ranks up there in the top three. Ok, so I didn’t have a pony and wanted one so badly that just thinking about the fact that I couldn’t have one made me cry, but there were plenty of horses and ponies in the area. It wasn’t long before an equine owning farmer in the next village turned out to be more than happy to let me muck out his stables once a week in return for unlimited riding. Even when I grew into a shy, self-conscious teenager and developed an interest in boys, I still preferred to spend most of my free time in pony heaven, riding bareback through the countryside with my pony-mad friend. We’d ride up the mountain and have picnics in secret meadows in the forest. We’d career up and down the bridle-path along the railway line, chasing the little train, waving at the passengers and feeling ever so cool.

My parents had impressive amounts of energy, which was just as well since there was always more than plenty to do. My mother never sat down from the minute she woke up until the minute she went to bed, and even then she would read for hours. She cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed, made clothes, wallpapered, painted, gardened, shopped, drove us to school and to parties and, somewhere in the midst of all that, managed to find the time to give birth to my youngest sister Victoria. Basically, my mother made Wonder Woman look like a wimp. As for my father, he morphed from high powered executive during the week, into construction worker/handyman/gardener at weekends, capable of making practically anything out of a piece of wood and two nails. Our garage filled with tools, gadgets and machines; pretty soon we even had our own cement mixer. I can still see my father mowing the lawn, or traipsing up and down the garden with a wheelbarrow filled with logs, leaves, stones or cement and – invariably - a giggling child or two. But no matter what he was doing, chances are that he was fashionably decked out in flared jeans and a paisley shirt. Ueh! Italian men have an image to live up to!

When my parents weren’t too busy building walls, tiling bathrooms and terraces, digging flowerbeds, or running kids around, they liked to throw parties. We had fabulous, bohemian barbeque parties that would start in the afternoon and go on until late at night. We’d crank up the stereo and bump and boogie under the moonlight to all those fabulous Seventies tunes. My father’s friend Angelo would bring his guitar and sing Italian pop songs in a voice filled with smiles. Baby-faced Jean-Claude would join in on the harmonica. Cheeky Francis would sing back-up vocals and flirt with all the ladies. Everyone would eat and laugh and sing and dance, downing vast quantities of Chianti. Since children were never excluded from these parties, there were always hoards of little kids racing around, buzzing on a Coca-Cola high, their faces smeared with tomato sauce from our delicious homemade pizza. But I was older than any of the other children and was more interested in hanging out with the adults, proud to show off some of the dance moves I’d picked up at school discos. I also had a bit of a crush on Jean-Claude…

We often went to Italy for a couple of weeks during the summer holidays. My mother would pack everything including the kitchen sink, and my father would throw up his hands and say, “Madonna Santa, Sylvia, we will never get all this in the car!” My mother would just smile and shrug and the Madonna would work her packing miracle and somehow everything would fit inside and on top of our old black Ford Taunus. With our roof rack skimming the ceiling of the Mont-Blanc tunnel, we’d rattle down to Italy, stopping off in Milan overnight to visit my grandparents. My tiny Italian grandmother would cook us something fabulous: a risotto starter, followed perhaps by scallopine al limone. After dinner, while my tiny grandmother scurried around cleaning up, my enormous grandfather would settle down on the blue-grey velvet couch that was so horribly prickly and fall asleep watching television. The next morning we’d pile back into the car and head south to Marina di Carrarra, our holiday destination being a two roomed apartment with no bathroom in an old house that, if I recall correctly, belonged to my father’s aunt. One room multi-tasked as a kitchen/dining/living room, the other as a large bedroom into which we all piled at night, clambering into an impressive line-up of orange metallic bunk-beds. There was a toilet in the stairwell half a floor down, and we got washed in the ice-cold fountain in the courtyard. Rudimentary? It certainly was, but after a stifling day at the beach, nobody cared. The house also had a magical garden, a mad riot of vines and vegetables that was tended by a lovely old man with the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, whom my brother nicknamed “my man.” “My man” had a hutch full of rabbits, indubitably destined for his personal consumption, but what we didn’t know didn’t upset us, and we loved cuddling the babies.

With my maternal grandmother being English, we often went to visit her during the school holidays too. When I was very young, Nana lived in Ormskirk, Lancashire, a small town in the north of England, where she owned a women’s fashion boutique. Her sister, my Great-Auntie Beatrice, owned a lingerie shop on the same street. Nana and Auntie B. had both lost their husbands when they were very young and, for the rest of their lives, did practically everything together. When they sold their businesses and retired, they bought adjacent apartments in New Milton, a quiet little town in Hampshire on the far sunnier south coast of England. I was particularly thrilled: New Milton is minutes from the New Forest, a vast National Park where thousands of cattle and - more excitingly - wild ponies roam free. I loved spending weeks at Nana’s place, going for long rides in the forest with the riding school, sunbathing on the windswept, rugged beaches, buying books and magazines at the local bookshop, eating English sausages and bacon, and watching all those wonderful television programs.

Looking back, I can see that the love and stability of my childhood and teenage years got me through some of the dodgier days of my early twenties. Without this background, I might have not have been able to rectify my trajectory and skedaddle back to the comfort of my authentic self. Of course, my youth wasn’t all peaches and ponies; we had puddles and potholes too, but generally, it was warm and rosy and lots of fun. When my wonderful Nana passed away in the spring of 2006, I sat in church at her funeral, listening to family members recount meaningful moments and amusing anecdotes about her life. Suddenly, I was flooded by an emotion that blurred the frontiers between joy and sorrow. I saw more clearly than ever before that the giant jigsaw-puzzle of meaningful moments that makes us who we are is linked to the individual puzzle of everyone we come into contact with. We absorb aspects of everyone’s individual puzzle, coloring our personalities with kaleidoscopic splashes that affect the overall picture we leave behind at the end of our life.

A picture may paint a thousand words, but since a jigsaw-puzzle is made up of a profusion of mini-pictures, as far as I’m concerned, the big picture can only be described with words. I’m not very good at painting, but I love playing with words, building a story by drawing on the kaleidoscopic splashes that have colored my life so far. I’m hoping that by sharing my stories with other people, I might leave a little colorful splash somewhere on their jigsaw.

Click here to read more about Francesca and her new book, Mucho Caliante!

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