As the summer holidays loom and I watch families preparing for their long vacations abroad I find myself thinking back to September 1995 – the month we took one of the greatest adventures of our lives, packed up our small terraced house in west London and handed the keys over to the family who were going to be our tenants for the next year. As we set off for France, we wondered whether we would ever come back.

My husband, Sebastian Faulks, is a writer and could take his work with him. I was at home looking after the children, so the only ties to England were attachments to our friends and families. My husband had lived briefly in Paris as a student and worked on a French campsite as a gap year job. He had a passion for France and an idea for a novel set during the German occupation.

These days the family gap year abroad is becoming more and more popular. For some it’s a way of trying out what may be a permanent move to another country. For others it’s a chance to give children language skills relatively painlessly, or perhaps enjoy a last fling before the inexorable demands of GCSEs and A-levels tether everyone to England.

For Eleanor Fitzpatrick, her sculptor husband and her family of four children, for instance, who are coming to the end of a “fantastic” year in a rented villa in Florence, it’s been a chance to exchange the pleasures of rural Perthshire for those of a “small but important city”, let the children learn Italian and make friends from across the world in their new international school.

“We’ve all enjoyed it,” says Fitzpatrick,” who has reluctantly ruled out the idea that they will stay on for a second year. “My youngest, who is seven, didn’t want to leave home in Scotland at all initially. She even locked herself in the loo, but now, like all of us, she absolutely loves it.” ago, it was really an opportunity to try out rural family life. I was born and brought up in London and Sebastian had lived there all his adult life. We had often wondered whether we would have a better family life in the country, and the year in France was a way of testing this out.

We did our research by asking everyone we knew for suggestions of houses to rent in France and scanning the back of The Spectator and the Sunday papers for advertisements. A shortlist of houses eventually drawn up, Sebastian and a friend set off for a week’s tour of France, checking out those that had sounded most attractive. Our final choice was near Agen in southwest France: a large, square house made of a grey limestone so pale it was almost the colour of chalk. It had tall windows with views across surrounding farmland and swathes of woods made up of the scrubby oak trees characteristic of that part of France. It was not the most practical of houses since it was 5km from the village and I couldn’t drive. But the green hills and the prospect of a hot summer combined to put such practicalities to the back of our minds.

William and his sister Holly, who were turning 5 and 3 the month we arrived, were enrolled at the village school; a charming place perched on the side of a steep slope at the top of the town. We were told that by Christmas they would be fluent in French – which wasn’t quite how it turned out. Within a week or so, they were being collected by a school bus, which came trundling across the valley stopping at various houses along the way.

Pluckily, they hopped on board among all the big French children. After waving them goodbye, I would wander back to the house and make tea. There were no papers delivered except The Week, which was brought by the post lady in her yellow Peugeot.

The rest of the morning was spent having a long bath and reading in bed, as there wasn’t really much else to do. It was a wonderful year of resting and escaping from the busyness of life at home in England. The rooms were large and the views from them immense, but we soon understood why the landscape around was so green: it rained almost incessantly. In winter it was so cold that my husband wore a ski suit to keep him warm while he typed his novel. We had friends out to stay and had time to find out how they were really getting on, in a way which is hard to do if you only see people for a couple of hours over lunch or dinner.

But we didn’t make many French friends, although Holly formed an improbable friendship with an old peasant farmer and his wife, who would sit her on their kitchen table and give her bonbons while they beheaded and plucked chickens and the television blared at full volume.

The social life of families is structured much more formally in France and there isn’t the culture of children inviting each other home for tea after school. I had imagined evenings spent drinking vin rouge and improving my French with welcoming neighbours. We did drink vin rouge with welcoming neighbours, but they were almost all British ex-pats.

At the weekend we would go to the village market, which was as pretty as you could hope for. Trestle tables were piled high with local produce and I knew how fresh it was because I had seen it being harvested early that morning from the farmland adjoining our house. Unfortunately, I had also seen the farmer pouring great plastic containers of fertiliser and pesticide over the same fields all week long . . .

Sebastian sang in a local church choir and the children’s French improved, though slowly.

By the time we left, they had perfect accents but a small vocabulary. The school playground used the international language of Power Rangers (or “les Pooer Ronjays” as William called them).

It was odd coming back to London. I couldn’t get used to having walls so close all the time and the view from the window being interrupted by houses on the opposite side of the street. I sometimes long to escape again and have a chance to read for hours at a stretch, but ultimately our year there made us decide not to move to the country on our return to England. It was quite a lonely time in some ways and we both missed being able to pop into a bookshop or newsagent or decide on a whim to meet for lunch.

I would always encourage people to try living abroad. But go with the intention of staying for a limited time. That way you can come back feeling you have succeeded in doing something adventurous without feeling you have failed if you decide that England is where you really want to be.

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