Nine months on the Loue. 8. Postscript 2026.

 Exeter, April 2023.

Jill’s letters end here, just before her return home, and the last letter, in an unstamped envelope, was probably never posted, and returned with her. Almost sixty years on they have finally been sorted, edited and printed out, to capture some of these early memories of a way of life so different from Croydon.

Jill by the bridge at Champagne-sur-Loue, perhaps during her return visit

Jill did not return to Champagne-sur-Loue later that year although she made a return visit from 22 March to 1 April 1964. She worked for her GCEs and A-levels at Croydon College and worked as a library assistant in Croydon Libraries. In 1968 and 1969 she completed a two-year course in librarianship at Manchester College of Commerce (now Manchester Metropolitan University) and returned to work in the reference department of Croydon Central Library. In 1971 she married Ian (Maxted), whom she got to know in Croydon Library in 1967. We visited Susanne and Roland Servant in 1972 and then there was a gap until 1988 when we visited Champagne-sur-Loue with our children Neil and Kate. In March 1988 she wrote in her travel diary:

“We explored the village, which in many ways seems changed beyond my recognition. The convent, now called the Château, is locked up with shatters tightly closed. It obviously been maintained however and has been re-pointed. Suzanne says it has been closed for around 20 years except for occasional use as accommodation for the center for meditating the future as that established at the salines in Arc-et-Senans. It is opened perhaps once a year. The school is still recognizable but overgrown and I was able to point out my bedroom window, the study and kitchen to the family. It all seems very deserted and strange when I try to visualise it with girls running around the lawn, Vivi the goose chasing people who passed too close to an egg she had laid by the footpath across to the convent, sœur Martine kicking her 2CV in the driveway, the gardener smoking by the cellar where we kept the bikes, or sœur Irene stumbling on the steps with her coffee pot as she scampered across to pour me out that remains from the sisters’ lunch. Perhaps the convent struck me in most poignantly, for the school is lived in and lights shone from its interior. The shutters hide so effectively the chapel, the sisters’ dining room, the room where I had German measles and the room with the radio and record player. The hole in the side of the steps up to the convent is moss-covered and it's hard to see Gitan's ghost there, however hard I look. I can however vividly recall looking down from the shuttered window of the room in which I spent two weeks with German measles to the spot where I now stand, remembering the pupils from the school who would pass me up messages and flowers on a string lowered down to them from above. My mind's eye too can see beyond the shutters of the dining room and recall it with the door wide open to the spring sunshine, the japonica and trees with pink blossoms outside the door and the vases of flowers on the dark, shining, wooden table within, surrounded by rush-seated chairs, the floorboards bare but gleaming dully, and pewter jugs in the window recesses. One of the nuns would be passing through the room with a basket of laundry under her arm on her way to the buanderie in the school with its mangle and big stone sinks. The clos behind the house was covered in mud and has been fenced off so we have not yet ventured up there, however Suzanne says there is now a walk up from the road and they have even built themselves a small cabin near their vineyard for picnic meals on summer evenings. “

 

From then until just before Covid in 2020 we maintained contact with the Servant family in Champagne-sur-Loue and also with Sœur Martine until her death while resident in a convent at Mathieu near Caen in 2004 as well as with Danielle who married an army officer and moved to Brittany, where she remained active in the world of crafts until her death in 2006. We made several visits to the Jura and Brittany after our retirement from libraries in 2005, and these are detailed in the blogs of our travels with Modestine, our little camper van.

Jill was diagnosed with Alzheimers in 2022 and these letters were completed by me in 2023 in an attempt to recover memories for her, but it was too late, and she thought that nobody would be interested anyway. She died on 2 July 2024

Ian Maxted

Updated 4 February 2026