

Carol Drinkwater has sold over a million books about her life on an Olive Farm in the South of France. She was the kinky nurse in A Clockwork Orange, James Herriot’s wife Helen in hit TV show All Creatures Great and Small and writes beautifully evocative novels that bring the sights, sounds and smells of France to life in a way that will make you feel you’re sipping rose on a vine-covered terrace overlooking the glistening Mediterranean in the warmth of the summer sun, with a bit of danger thrown in for good measure.
On this episode we cover:
How her books are ‘Enough to make you rush straight to the Eurostar’.
The Olive Farm in the south of France
Their newish house near the Champagne area about an hour outside Paris
‘La France profound’
Her Olive Farm books having sold over one million copies worldwide
The Frenchman in Australia who proposed on their first date
Long distance love affairs
Going to Cannes for the Film Festival
Dreaming about a house by the sea
But finding an olive grove instead
The Italianate ballustraded villa in ruins
Cobwebs, Bugs, beetles and magnolia
Knowing she had come home
Pumping water from a stream (for 33 years!)
“Just knowing’ about the man who proposed and also the house
Dom Perignon with the richest lady in Belgium
Hiding their old Volkswagen at lunch at the Hilton
Every stray dog in the world coming to The Olive Farm
Becoming known as the Queen of Olives
Spending 17 months travelling the Mediterranean
Finding 6000 year old olive trees in Syria and Lebanon
Her acting career
Being Helen Herriot (James Herriot’s wife) in All Creatures Great and Small
Her seminal appearance in A Clockwork Orange
Working with Stanley Kubrick
The shock of having to perform naked
Persuading Kubrick to just go with topless
Watching the film for the first time (in Bromley, with her mum!)
The series of films The Olive Route, filmed around the Mediterranean
Getting a contract with Michael Joseph Books (Penguin) for books:
The Forgotten Summer
The Lost Girl
The House on the Edge of the Cliff set near Marseilles
How location is so important in her books
Having to know the sounds, the smells, the flora, the fauna, the weather, what people eat…
The highest sea cliffs in Europe at “Calanques”
France being sparsely populated compared to the UK
Living in a hamlet with around 14 houses
The cosy winters in the fireplace as big as a room
Their 13th century house with walls as thick as cars
The 17th century priest’s house
The beautiful scenery, food and wine in her books
Her book The Lost Girl based on the Paris attacks and the Bataclan
The traumatic passing of her mother and the words that inspired her to write about the attacks
Walking to all the sites where the attacks had taken place
The shock of France post-attacks
The unexpected death of her mother just after Christmas
Watching every piece of footage from the attacks for research
Feeling her mother’s influence when she wrote
How Paris came together after the attacks
Finding ‘humanity’ the stand out memory from Palestine and other places she visits
The gifts of being invited into other women’s lives and hearing their stories
How humans are fundamentally good and are not born with prejudice
The ‘streets coming to life’ in Ramadan after dark in North Africa
Ordinary Muslims and Jews wanting peace
Her new book – The House on the Edge of the Cliff based in Paris, at the Sorbonne and the famous Paris student uprising of 1968
The 1960s and 1970s being ‘the last great period of optimism’
Bob Dylan, Mamas and Papas, Bob Marley and the great music featured in the book
The picturesque outdoor jazz festival at Juan Les Pins and the song that takes her back to the sunset, the heat, the wash of the sea, light clothing, open-toed shoes, tanned skin, a chilled glass of wine and being in love.