Famille Deniel

When I was 20 I headed off to France to be an au pair girl. Initially, I was living with a family near Chamonix who had a 4 year old and a baby but the couple's marriage was ending so my au pair company found me a new family with triplets.

These triplets were three. Three three year olds, can you imagine. Chloë, Coralie and Manon were there names and they were non-identical. I never asked but I suspect they were IVF triplets.

We lived in a very ordinary looking house supplied by the host father's workplace in suburb called Feyzin. 

We lived next door to a black man who was married to a white French woman. They had older kids. The triplets were fascinated by him and would regularly go to the boundary fence, just wire grill and Manon in particular, the cheekiest by nature, would put her index finger through the fence and try to touch him and when he moved away she would giggle.

I always wondered what happened to these girls and then I found them again on Facebook and collected them all except Manon. I never bothered to friend her and about a year after friending them all I deleted my account so I lost contact with all of them except for Coralie who was also on Instagram.

Chloë had become a social justice advocate. Coralie was a lingerie model for a while and then had a baby to a black french singer and they had a beautiful baby boy. Manon was utterly gorgeous and worked in an artisanal boulangerie for a while. 

 Muriel was their mother. She was very thin and very tall with super curly hair. She was married to an equally tall, handsome, blonde husband called Philippe who was often away for long stints as a salesman for bungee rope rubber.

I lived downstairs in their quite plain box of a house, owned by the company Philippe worked for, in an ordinary suburb on the outskirts of Lyon.

Muriel dressed to kill in Kookai and a whole host of other high street equivalent French fashion brands. When I came along she decided to start working again and became a commerce teacher.

Muriel and Philippe were my first experience of couples fighting. My own parents never fought, not even once. I never, ever heard dad say a harsh word or raise his voice at mum whereas as Muriel and Philippe, well I heard that tell each other to fuck off several times during my stay with them.

Muriel was shit at housekeeping. The works. Could not cook and was often the brunt of her relative's jokes. Could not fold linen. All that domestic goddess stuff.

Muriel had had IVF triplets. Three gorgeous girls - Chloë, Coralie and Manon. Chloë looked like Muriel, Coralie like Philippe et Manon was something completely else - impish looks and cheeky personality to match.

I remember the parents-in-law of my first host family rining me up while I was in Muriel's care. My first host parents were getting divorced and they wanted me to testify that the host mum was violent towards her children and unfit to be their mum. I got off the phone very upset. Muriel told me to hang up on them next time they rang.

When you're an au pair you earn very little because it's all about the student experience, 20 hours of learning French at L'Alliance Française de Lyon and 20 hours of housework/childminding. I had a massive shoe fetish, which if you've ever seen how well made French shoes are, you'll understand and I had been saving for ages for a pair of bottines - ankle boots - with kitten heels, gussets and the most gorgeous embroidered suede tops. They were 800 francs and I earnt 120 francs a week. Then one day they were half price and all of a sudden I came home with them. Muriel, with her keen eye for fashion saw them, loved them and then came home that night with a matching outfit for me. I was very, very touched.