Three Men in a Boat meets A Year In Provence.

For once in his life Tweed is feeling bold. He’s had enough of the dreadful headmaster. He’s heading for a quaint village in France with woodwork teacher Jolly and the school Matron, Alice Longbottom. Tweed’s idea is to winkle out the villagers’ secrets and write a colourful bestseller. But they’ll need to pass themselves off as French, and there’s just one problem: Alice doesn’t speak the language.

Tweed says it doesn’t matter. She can speak Welsh and they’ll pretend she’s from Brittany.

‘But Tweed,’ Jolly objects, ‘she doesn’t speak Welsh either.’

‘That’s all right,’ Tweed says, ‘Neither do they.’

‘I don’t think we’ve thought this through,’ says Jolly…

JL Somerset writes:

‘More than thirty years ago, on holiday in a  French village, I began to fantasize a TV sitcom. Three Britons – two elderly schoolmasters, amiable but accident-prone, settle in just such a village, taking with them the school’s Matron. Their aim: to learn the villagers’ secrets and write a book. And of course everything goes wrong.

‘It would never have worked as a sitcom, because of the language problem. The idea lay forgotten until, two decades later, it occurred to me that it could make a novel.

‘I began writing with nothing but a general sense of the characters. The schoolmasters were to be rather old-fashioned and gentlemanly, and the Matron quite the opposite, outrageous enough to be an embarrassment to them. But it would be the Matron who would save the day, forging ahead while the other two tripped over themselves.

‘By this time, there was a new element to the background: Brexit was in the air.

‘I can’t say more without giving everything away. But Pissevin led me by the nose. By the end of the book I’d fallen in love with my creations, and couldn’t bear to part with them. By the fourth and final volume the whole thing had taken on a far greater depth of meaning.

‘I hope that you, like me, will want to follow Tweed and his companions to the end of their adventure.’