Anglophone years
From Claire Ozel Wiki
A year at the Lycee Charles de Gaulle, South Ken. London. For us the only change from our school in Grasse was that we took the tube, not the bus. And other passengers mostly spoke English, not French.
Applying for a French university was more difficult from London. 'Why not try for a British university?' I filled in the UCLES form, and found myself studying Genetics and Cell Biology at Manchester - one of the few places I knew in Britain: I'd been helped by an astronomer from Jodrell Bank when I'd wanted to buy a telescope several years earlier.
Only 3 years at university so only 2 summer holidays(many METU [[1]] students study for 5 years, 1 learning English, and 4 in their departments; so 4 summer holidays!). In the first a friend and I spent 10 weeks touring the eastern seaboard of North America: Canada and the US, from Toronto to Quebec, Boston, NewYork and Washington. The second summer a group of us took kids from a Battered Women's Refuge camping in Portmaddock; and I had my first visit to Galway.
On graduation, I wanted to go somewhere I could study in English, live in French and do cross country skiing... Where else but McGill, Montreal, Canada. I did occasionally ski to work through the Mont Royal Park during the 5 months of snow. After my first year in Canada, I returned for 2 weeks in Britain, but...
Another brain operation cut short my Canadian visa, and my life once again bounced off in an unexpected direction: back to Britain. 3 months in the America's (north and south), 3 months nearly settling in Aberdeen. Then 4 years of PhD research developing DNA transformation of Coprinus Cinereus at Manchester University. Fascinating but frustrating. I'd not yet found my path in life. Cycle maintenance, lab technician, carpentry, primary school teaching all enabled me to pick up skills (and O levels in English and Maths, to complement the Astronomy and Scottish Gaidhligh O levels I had previously acquired).
The turning point was again unexpected. Days before Chernobyl, in April 1986, I'd moved into my 'own' house: a 1908 terraced house, '2up,2down' built for workers on the Trafford Industrial Estate. My neighbour Les had lived there since he was 5 and could tell so much: where the bombs fell in the war - explaining the gap in the row at the beginning of the road; the 'knocker upper' who used to walk down the street around 5 am, tapping on the top windows, waking people to catch the Number 52 tram to be on time for work; the people who'd kept chickens in the back yard during the war, and painted the walls black (I can't remember why), explaining why some of the bricks in the wall were black; who first had electicity connected - and everyone gathered round to watch them turn on the first light bulb, that flashed and went out; and who was the last to have an inside toilet. Unlike the Moss Side back-to-backs built in the nineteeth century, the Rusholm terraced houses each had a back yard as well as a front entrance; in the back yard there was the toilet, and the coal cellar. When I moved to 41 Thornton Rd, a friend helped me transform the back yard: digging up the concrete, he used the bricks from the toilet and the coal cellar to make raised beds, and soon a garden was growing herbs, veg, and anything for insects, birds and other wildlife.
