Carol Drinkwater interview copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

            Some of us dream small dreams.  We take the job that seems like a secure one and we marry the man or woman that we can put up with and who will put up with us.  Wanting to stay close to home, we live among our own people.  Better the devil you know, we say to ourselves.  Even if we fantasise about fantastic wealth, and tropical sunsets, and being swept off our feet by handsome strangers.  Carol Drinkwater is not a woman to dream sensible dreams.  She didn’t settle for an ordinary life.  On a boring wet Monday morning, while the rest of us are on our way to work, or dropping the kids off at school, seething in rush-hour traffic and day-dreaming of far-off places, more romantic places, Carol Drinkwater is living our day dreams for us.  She is sipping champagne outside her home in the South of France and as the sun beats down out of a forget-me-not blue sky, she is contemplating cherry trees, “endless stretches of soft breezy greens and audacious scarlets,” the scene puts her in mind of a Gustav Klimt painting”Poppies amongst the Poplars””.  Close by, the Matisse blue Mediterranean  laps gently at the shore and later, she will hurl herself into the ocean’s welcoming waters and splash to her heart’s content.  When she gets home, her handsome husband will prepare dinner, having busied himself in the kitchen all afternoon, chopping and marinating.  After dinner, the couple will roam the garden by starlight, wine glasses in hand, making love in the spring grass, “recumbent  on the earth, flushed embraces beneath sprays of apple blossom…”
             Carol is an actress and a writer, most famous for having played James Herriot’s wife Helen in the TV series ‘All Creatures Great and Small”.  She and I bump into each other in the Shelbourne Lounge, the day before we are scheduled to meet and I marvel at her bare, tanned legs, in a floaty chiffon skirt and delicate pointy-toed sandals, as I shiver in my thick tights and boots.  It occurs to me that being an actress, she can imagine that she is always located in sunny settings.  On the day that we meet, she is redolent with glamour, and speaks in a plummy posh English accent.  She is in Dublin to promote “The Olive Season” a memoir of her love affair with an olive farm near Cannes which she and her husband purchased, soon after they met.   It is, she says, also a love affair with him and with the culture of rural France.  This book is part two of a trilogy, the first book ‘The Olive Farm was a sensational hit and described the buying of the farm and the meeting of Michel, her husband.  The new book describes their romantic wedding on a Polynesian island, many years later and Carol’s discovery that she is pregnant and eventual miscarriage and coming to terms with the grief that ensues.
But to begin at the beginning,  Carol is the daughter of Irish parents, and spent many summers at the family farm in Laois, as a girl. Her mother was a great beauty a Gina Lollobrigida lookalike, who bumped into her father at a dance in London, where he was an RAF officer and she was a nurse.  They were married soon after they met and Carol was conceived during the honeymoon at the Grand Hotel in Torquay.  The honeymoon was idyllic, but the relationship went downhill from there.  The young Carol hid in her bedroom and listened to her parents fighting downstairs.  Her mother, she says, had withdrawn, sexually from her father and he in turn had embarked on a series of infidelities.  The rows often turned violent and Carol was openly blamed for the mess that her parents were trapped in, their marriage.  Carol had escaped into make-believe, dressing up, acting out plays and pretending as much as possible to be someone else, somewhere else. While working as an actress in London, in her late thirties, she took a trip to Australia that was to change her life completely. 
The man who was to become Carol’s husband was a tall and handsome film producer, who had invited her to Sydney to work on a television series.  He fell in love with her and proposed, within moments of meeting her, in the restaurant of their hotel.  Carol wasn’t repulsed by the offer, but neither did she accept it.  The couple dated a few times and Michel had, he said, fallen in love with her at first sight. 
But how did he know?  I ask her, fascinated.  Did you ask him?
“I don’t know.  He just took one look and fell in love.  He says it was the moment he saw me, he knew instantly.”
And what did you think of him?  I persist, revelling in the romance of it all.
“I didn’t know until we had known each other for a short while and I arranged to meet him in London, at a hotel.  His flight was delayed in Rome and he took a taxi and was stuck in traffic for ages and he was two hours late.”
It’s weird that you waited, I say.
“I know.  I’ve never waited for anyone else that long.  But he walked in and he was wearing a tweed jacket and he put his hand out and said ‘I’ve kept you waiting this long, will you give me five more minutes to change my shirt?”  And the way he said it, the way he batted  those blue eyes, I thought I will never resist this man!  And that was our third meeting.  I knew then.”
This is someone’s real life, I remind myself.  It’s a very Mills and Boon story, I say.  Carol is not impressed.
‘It’s definitely not Mills and Boon”she huffs.
The wedding, though, was straight out of a novel.  Having proposed again, three years later, Michel was given a challenge.
“I said “I will marry you only if the king of Tonga will perform the ceremony”she tells me.
I am curious.  If you want to marry a man, surely, you just say yes, when he proposes.  If you don’t, you say no.  What kind of person sets their man a challenge that is straight out of a fairy tale?  Is she living out a fantasy?
“No, I just said it because I thought it would be impossible, I thought it would end the question.”
But most women would just say no, I insist.  This was a challenge.
“I didn’t see it as a challenge, I saw it as an end to the conversation.  It wasn’t that I didn’t love him and it wasn’t that I didn’t want to get married.  I was just scared of making that commitment.”  Considering the role model for marriage that her parents had presented, it is perhaps not surprising that Carol was reluctant to commit.  But Michel was persistent.
A while later, she received a fax from the King of Tonga’s personal secretary.  The King would be delighted to marry the couple and flights had been booked. Michel had arranged the whole thing. 
Tragically, the wedding didn’t take place because the King was a devout Methodist and there could be no beach ceremony and no champagne.  There would have to be a serious wedding in a church with prayers and hymns.  This wasn’t the scene that Carol had pictured, so they cancelled the whole thing. Michel wasn’t miffed.  He waited a further three years, before having another go.  This time the couple flew to Rarotonga, a Polynesian island.  Instead of tropical sunsets, however, they found themselves in bucketing rain and the wedding was almost shelved again.  Luckily a kind man flew them to a different island where the sun always shone and they were able to have the wedding the way they wanted it. 
The grass isn’t really greener on her side of the fence though, she emphasises.
“Both of the books have a very positive, very romantic upside.  But they both have a thread of tragedy that runs through them.  In the first book, my father dies and we are in terrible financial straits.  In the second book, I get pregnant and lose the baby.  But that’s life.  I’m not trying to tell stories that are just idyllic romances.  As with any relationship, there are good times and bad times.  But I wouldn’t change the choices I’ve made for anything, even on the bad days.”
Writing about losing her child was, she says a difficult decision, because the loss was so painful.  The doctor told her that she would never be able to carry a child for the full term.  ‘I am stunned,” she writes.  ‘The blow all but paralyses me, arresting my breath as though my life were hanging in the balance.  In one clean swoop, dreams have been demolished.”
She came through the grief, however, and found joy and peace of mind on the other side, which is why she chose to write about it, to demonstrate to others that there is life beyond loss and pain.  She still feels the presence of the little girl who she calls Carrot and believes that her soul was only meant to ‘touch base” with this realm and then move on.
Despite her traumatic childhood, Carol genuinely seems to have found true love and her relationship with Michel is not like that of her parents.  Partly, she says because her mother was financially dependent on her father and she and Michel are independent of each other.  It is inspiring to read about such a marriage, I tell her, and to know that it is possible.  The olive farm, also, plays a key role in her healing journey.
“A house is so much more than a house,” she says.  “Our home is our shelter from the world, a place where Michel and I can heal ourselves, lick our wounds and each others from the blows, the calamities and uncertainties of life.”
But for all of us who live in cities and fantasise about moving to the South of France, she doesn’t think it would necessarily make our lives perfect, to do it.
“No.  It turned out this way for me because I’ve worked incredibly hard to make it work and I’m very resilient.  Also the house we found just happened to have these incredible trees that just happened to produce these incredible olives.  We didn’t plan any of that.”
They paid around two hundred thousand pounds for the farm, which seems like a steal. 
“But it needed everything doing to it, it hadn’t been touched.  People thought  we were crazy and we were.  Completely madly in love and crazy.  It was a wild and impetuous decision.  We had no money at all. But being wildly in love affects your judgment.”
The French are notorious beaurocrats and even to purchase the farm was a lesson in patience, but the couple set to work and made a success of the place, so much so that they have been granted  a much prized olive certification of excellence and they now produce 250 litres of extra virgin olive oil a year.  At lunch, she insists on substituting olive oil for the walnut oil that is being offered with the salad.  Her friends were dumbfounded, she says, because she knew absolutely nothing about olives, before they bought the farm.  When I ask the question which most people ask, would she recommend that a person pack up and move to the South of France, in search of happiness, she hesitates.  The South of France isn’t necessarily for everyone, she says.  But what is important is to follow your heart and do what you love to do.  To not be held back by fear and limited thinking.
But isn’t there a conflict in all of us between doing things that are logical and doing things instinctively, I ask?  Wouldn’t we all live very different lives, if we followed our dreams?
“People would never have gone to the moon or climbed the Himalayas if they were logical.  I went up the Amazon on my own, on a cargo boat with Indians, I was the only white person there.  Other people say I will be killed one day and maybe one day I will, but I lead an incredibly rich life.”
The Olive Season is published by Abacus 10 euros