Jeanne Elisabeth Gask was born in Calais, the youngest daughter of a British family living and working in France at the time of its fall and occupation in 1940. As a British citizen, her father was interned by the SS and the family was left to fend for itself for the duration of the war.
After Liberation they returned to join their family in Birmingham and Jeanne finished her education. She married Tony, a typographer, in the mid-1950s and they had three daughters, just like her parents. Home was in Teddington, Middlesex, then Manchester, with Jeanne staying home to bring up the girls. Later the couple moved to Bristol where Jeanne had a thoroughly enjoyable time as a French-speaking, blue-badge Bath and Bristol tourist guide.
In recent years she attended a Creative Writing group in Bristol and told her tutors she wanted to write a book about her early life in France. They showed her how to get started and followed her progress right through. The result is Nell and the Girls.
Jeanne is passionate about travel. She is a great fan of the music of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet and belongs to a film club showing old French films. Tony and Jeanne bought a second home in the Charente area of France some twenty years ago, and Jeanne likes to feel she has a foot in each country. She has five grandchildren and lives with Tony in Teddington, Middlesex.
To this day Jeanne always makes the sign of a cross on every new loaf so that we’ll never want for bread, a superstition she learnt from her stoical mother, Nell.