BATH LIVES
“I wouldn’t have written a book if it wasn’t for cafés” school and my son even made friends with an octopus that lived under a rock in the sea near to our house. On holiday in Reims, we visited the Veuve Clicquot cellars. I was
HELEN FRIPP The historical novelist on how a comet inspired her writing, and being sacked from McDonalds Helen, who is West Country born and bred, aside from a stint living in France and London, has just signed a two-book deal with Hachette/ Bookouture for her current historical novel The French House, based on the life of the Champagne widow Veuve Clicquot. Her second book is about the Impressionists in Belle Epoque Paris. The novels will be published across the Englishspeaking world, and so far the translation rights for The French House have been sold in Russia, Romania and Greece. By day Helen also works as an associate director at Clearly PR in Bath. The first thing I remember writing was in primary school – a poem about Christopher Columbus. I remember
imagining him standing on the docks and wondering how it must have felt to look out to sea and
82 I BATH LIFE I www.mediaclash.co.uk
long to get out there – even then, historical figures fascinated me. I worked in McDonalds when I was a student, but I was sacked after three weeks.
I was incredibly clumsy, always dropping things, and getting the orders wrong. I used to help a friend who ran the BAFTAs and would escort celebrities down the red carpet. One year I was looking
after Anna Friel, I got flustered and stood frozen like a rabbit in the headlights in front of the paparazzi as the cameras flashed and they screamed at me to get out of the effing way.
We lived in a little fishing village called Collioure at the foot of the Pyrenees. It was
the dream. A house with French windows that spilled out onto the Mediterranean, the market every week, sea, sunshine and village life. The children went to the local
struck by Barbe-Nicole Clicquot’s story and wondered what motivated a rich young widow to build a Champagne empire in the way she did. It was totally against the conventions of the time and she could have faded into an easy, gilded life. I started to research her a bit more, and when I found out about the ‘Year of the Comet Champagne,’ I was hooked.
The story goes that in 1811, a comet passed over the sky, clearly visible for the
whole summer, heralding the best Champagne harvest in a generation. The rush was on to get the vintage comet Champagne to the big markets in Russia, but they were thwarted by the Napoleonic wars and the trade blockades. Barbe-Nicole led the race and got through to St Petersburg with her comet Champagne, helped by a renegade band of fallen aristocrats, desperadoes and her ever-faithful salesman, Louis. It was a story just waiting to be told. I wouldn’t have written a book if it wasn’t for cafés and that’s
where you’ll find me every day before work, scribbling away for as much time as I can steal. I also work with another writer who lives in France and we speak every week for encouragement and to feed back on each other’s writing. I’m a really sociable person, so even though writing is essentially a solitary pursuit, I find ways of making it as sociable as possible.
There’s always a reason not to write. Wrong chair, wrong desk.
Or you’re just not feeling it. You can’t, you won’t, you need some air
around it. As someone with a day job and a family, I could go on… Ultimately, whatever the barriers, if you don’t just sit down and write, you’ll never have a book. My husband is a writer too, he runs a magazine about documentary film production.
My daughter’s studying music in London and my son’s off to university in September, and loving his job at Homewood Park at the moment – apparently the food’s amazing, which will always make him happy! We live on Kensington Gardens near London Road. I’m up the
hill a bit, so I love having a view to the hills and across the rooftops. I also love London Road now the Clean Air Zone’s kicked in. It makes an incredible difference and has transformed it from being a miserable, polluted cut-through for massive lorries into a lovely wide boulevard shared by cars, cyclists and walkers alike.
I love my day job. At Clearly PR we work for a real variety of clients, and in a different kind of
way it’s still all about telling stories – even the driest of companies has an interesting tale to tell if you ask the right questions. My top tourist tip would be the Lady Lena. It’s a wooden
motor launch that you can hire for a trip along the canal. You can take your own food and drink and they’ll lay it out on a on a long table with a white tablecloth for you while you drift along sipping from crystal, gossiping, eating and watching the ducks skim the water. Bliss. n
For more: www. helenfrippauthor.co.uk