Lawrence Bohme presently resides in the French Basque Country where, since retiring from his work as an external Unesco translator in Paris, he has been writing the story of his long and adventurous life, entitled "My Very Long Youth". . Fascinated by history, art, food, cinema and "life", Lawrence has selected a number of articles and extracts from his book, reflecting his years in France and, also, his many visits to Italy. Among the pieces selected for this colourful and free-wheeling anthology: French Seasons...My First Trip To Paris, December 1960 / Chez Véquaud, Avenue Parmentier / Sainte-Chapelle, Pont Neuf And Le Vert-Galant / "Paris, à nous deux" / La Rue Champollion, Cinema Street / Place de la Contrescarpe / The Belly of Paris / Mount of Martyrs / Steak Tartare At Le Drugstore / Earthly Nourishments / The Laughing Cow / Bridge of The Arts / Two Parises / Villa Externa To Place des Ternes / Rue Poncelet, Horn of Plenty / The Red Balloon / Baudelaire, Mon Frère / Verlaine and Rimbaud, The Two Poets Who Go Together / Montesquieu, My Favourite "Philosophe" / Flaubert And The Lost Art of Letter-writing / The True Story of Heloise and Abelard / The Algerian War In Paris / Down Napoleon's Road, 1982 / Moustiers Sainte-Marie, a Medieval Shrine / Three Singing Poets, Brassens, Trenet and Ferré / Blood of Talleyrand / Four Burgundian Churches / Long Winter In Quartier Croulebarbe / A Tale of Two Tyrants / Rich Kids' Revolution / Three New Bridges / Other Curious Changes...and Italian DaysPorta Settimiana, My Corner of Rome / Santa Maria in Trastevere, Church and Piazza / Roman Divorce / Two Similar But Different Domes / Siena Made Me / La Casa di Carmelo / All For the Sassetta / Day-dream In Perugia / Up a Ladder In Arrezzo / Assisi, House of Art / The Mystery of Ravenna / Last Try In Sicily / No, We Are English / Arabs and Normans, Enemies Who Created a Style / Unearthly Silence
About the Author: Lawrence Bohme was born in London in 1942, "under Hitler's rockets", to a German war refugee father and "a very adventurous young Englishwoman". In 1946 his family left "dreary, threadbare England" to settle in Vancouver, where Lawrence's father set up a business and his mother Joan studied painting. When he was 14, Joan divorced Lawrence's father and with offspring in hand set out on a long odyssey as a budding abstract artist, living "not quite hand-to-mouth, but almost" in Mexico where Lawrence learned his first foreign language, and then in Jamaica "still a British colony and as close to an earthly paradise as I ever saw". But island life was too cramped for vivacious Joan and by 1958 they were tucked into a tiny flat in New York's Greenwich Village, "which she had read about in a newspaper as a good place for bohemians and artists...". There, Lawrence flourished, "meeting kids whose parents and grandparents were born in Italy and Russia" and, "thanks to the Blackboard Jungle-style high school my mother put me in, made friends who introduced me to Harlem and its fascinating people". In 1960 Lawrence chose to attend university in Madrid and sailed to Spain, where he was soon "spending more time in taverns and bullfights and hanging out with anti-Franco students than at the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras", eventually finding his way to Montefrio, the olive-farming town near Granada where he was to live, later on in life, for over 20 years. There, he became the friend "until his last breath" of the great flamenco singer Manuel Avila, "who was also the village butcher". Disappointed with the ultra-conservative Spanish University, Lawrence - now with the German painter Lilo in tow - went to Paris to enroll at the Sorbonne, where he studied French Civilization and discovered his beloved poets Baudelaire and Villon. Finally, in 1963 and "a bachelor again, I decided that school wasn't for me and set out for Rome to work in hotel, but ended up in Sicily looking for a village where I could teach English to fishermen's kids in exchange for sardines and wine..." In the end, though, "I found all that two years later in a favela of Rio de Janeiro where I stayed five happy years". After two decades of of practicing the trade of pen-and-ink postcard designer in Haiti and other Caribbean islands, Lawrence returned to Paris in 1981, where he became a Unesco translator. He now lives in the French Basque country "writing all this down" in his book, "My Very Long Youth."