From Stage to Page - Our Story ('The DSM')

It is nearly a year since Anna and Stephen Shaw upped sticks, moved to France and took over the running of ‘The Deux-Sèvres Monthly’ magazine. Never having done anything like this before, it was less of a learning curve, more of a vertical line. But what had they been doing before they decided to shake their lives up like so many before them? This is their story.

“Where are you from?” Asked Anna the young Aberdonian drama student.

“Oh you won’t have heard of it. I’m from a small town near Watford called Rickmansworth”. Replied Stephen, another young drama student.

“I worked as a nanny in Rickmansworth, before coming to drama school. It was the worst year of my life.”

And so it was the two drama students first met. Little did they know, thirty three years, two children, several houses and one ageing Labrador later, they would be moving to rural France to start the next chapter of their life.

After graduating from Mountview Theatre School in Crouch End, North London with diplomas in hand, they took on a variety of theatre jobs some paid, some not, or ‘profit-share’ as they are called in thespian circles. Stephen’s early triumphs included the Scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and a leper in a touring production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. Anna’s portrayal of the Glowworm in a production of ‘James and the Giant Peach’ is still talked about in Cumbernauld.

The couple were married at St Mary’s church, Rickmansworth on leap day 1992, saving money on anniversary gifts for years to come.

Eager to get on the property ladder, they bought a small flat in not so leafy (as it was then) Leytonstone, East London. With the screaming sirens, distant riots in Tottenham and M11 link road protesters living in the trees it wasn’t the most sought after area in London, but it had the essential amenities close by: off licence, Indian takeaway and tube station....and it was theirs.

Anna’s father ran his own local newspaper in Aberdeenshire and asked Stephen if he fancied submitting a cartoon each month. To supplement the acting, Stephen started cartooning for a variety of publications, including ‘Shoe and Leather News’, ‘Koi Carp Monthly’ and ‘Trucking International’.

After the birth of their first child, Murray, they decided that they didn’t want their cockney offspring growing up in East London, so decided to move to Peterborough, where Stephen had performed in pantomime a few times. It was also on the main line route to Aberdeen and they could afford a house, with garden.

In Peterborough, as well as appearing in the pantomimes, Stephen managed to put his artistic skills to use and started painting the scenery too. So, for several years the panto season began in August and finished in February. After their second child, Mia, was born, Anna started working for the other great institution in Peterborough, the cathedral. She became administrator for the charitable trust, tasked with raising funds for the upkeep of the historic building. Not known for her religious beliefs it was a strange place for her to spend her days, but over the eleven years she was there she became very attached to the building and the people she worked with.

With two young children, Stephen felt the time was right to hang up his tights and bid farewell to pantoland. So, he packed his spotted handkerchief tied on to the end of a stick and headed into the world of teaching. He started teaching drama at the Peterborough Regional College but when a £60 million pound uber-academy was built right next door to the college, Stephen was lured over the fence and into the crazy world of Secondary Education. The academy was an amalgamation of three local secondary schools and with 2500 pupils, made it the largest school in the country. The state of the art building was designed by Norman Foster (who also designed the ‘London Gherkin’) and possessed all the latest state-of-the-art resources, although when it rained strategic buckets were placed to catch the water from the dripping roof. This was all pre-austerity and it seemed that almost overnight the money dried up, and the academy was looking for ways to reduce costs. Even the high-tech coffee machine was wrenched from the wall and replaced with a jumbo tin of instant coffee.

Stephen was responsible for the annual school musical and used to work himself into a lather with worry. With main characters dropping out at the last minute and a constant reshuffling of parts Stephen’s nerves were shredded. Every March when the musical was performed the Shaw household would be raided for chairs, tables and an assortment of props for Grease, Bugsy Malone, Hairspray etc. Anna would be driven mad by Stephen singing the same songs for six months around the house ‘Look At Me I’m Sandra Dee’ or ‘Sit Down You’re Rockin the Boat’.

An evil plan had been forming in Anna’s head and now the time was right to share it with husband. First she showed him the website of a beautiful Gîte in South-West France, Saint-Jean-d’Angély. She then started listing the wonderful things about the Poitou-Charentes region, producing a map with an ominous triangle marked in felt-tip pen. She had been researching properties in the area (triangle) and thought that in the second week of the holiday, they had just booked, viewings could be lined up. The seed had been planted.

In reality the triangle covered more land than expected and the relaxing holiday turned into a road trip, driving three to four hours a day to different parts of the South-West.

Fifteen minutes drive north of Parthenay is a small hamlet called Jaunasse and it was here the couple found what they had been looking for...an old farmhouse with oodles of character, several barns and outhouses in various stages of collapse, an acre of land, bags of potential and not a straight wall in sight.

On the day of exchange Stephen recalls “We had driven, without incident, all the way from Lincolnshire in a hired van containing a few token pieces of furniture. On arrival at our property-to-be, in my excitement, I crashed the van into our soon-to-be gatepost, leaving a large scrape along the side. Anna later tried to remove some of the paint the gatepost had left with a scourer, but managed to remove large sections of the van’s paint as well.

“There was a distinct feeling the owners (an elderly English couple) were trying to keep us from entering the property in case we had second thoughts. Anna was given a tour of the surrounding amenities (dechetterie, bricolage, recycling area etc.) and I was given a whistle-stop tour of barns, outhouses and how everything external worked (swimming pool filter, chlorinator, fosse, water pump etc.) none of which I was taking in as all I could think about was how much the van hire company would charge us for the damage. Later, when reunited and quizzed by Anna on what I had learnt, the only thing I could remember was that if we put the wrong substance in the chlorinator it would explode...what that substance was I couldn’t tell her.

“They had offered us the odd piece of furniture to help us out, but post-exchange when we eventually crossed the threshold we discovered this was somewhat of an understatement, they had left everything! The house was full of all their stuff; and they had been avid car-booters. Inside it had the appearance of a vide grenier. We spent the following few hours removing all their old furniture and knick-knacks to a nearby barn. We were then about to start unloading our furniture but couldn’t get the rear door of the van open, so everything had to be extracted through the side door. As we staggered back into the house, carrying a sofa, we were plunged into complete darkness as all the lights went out. It was then our new life in France, with all its highs and lows began.”

For the following two years Stephen and Anna ping-ponged backwards and forwards. Every holiday or half-term the car would be crammed full with their possessions including ageing Labrador, and at 3.15pm, the end of the school day, they would squeeze themselves into the car and head south.

On a wet afternoon in February 2018 Stephen said goodbye to all his friends and colleagues at The Thomas Deacon Academy, where he had been teaching for ten years and walked out of the school gate for the last time, dumping his school bag in a nearby bin. Anna pulled up with a car full of their remaining goods, chattels and Lucy the Lab. After a look of anticipation, they set off as the next chapter in their story began.