They are taller than me. I lean out the back window trying to catch them, letting in the warm French air as we drive past. Sunflowers, a blaze of yellow and gold. They always looked like an audience, faces turned in the same direction, quietly tracking the sun across the sky.

We had been living in South-West London. My parents scraped together the money for a deposit. It was an honest house at the end of a cul-de-sac that would rattle when the trains went past. Dad was working in the music industry. He’d trained as an electrician when he was seventeen but decided to try and follow his love for music. My earliest memories are of him blasting entire albums from his bedroom, his floppy hair falling over his face, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

Me and my brother in France

They often talked about living differently. Mum had an allotment where she grew vegetables and always dreamed of having horses and chickens one day. She wanted to live naturally, was spiritual, and questioned the way things were. Money was always tight. I once heard that they had to sell their CDs so we could afford the train fare to visit my nan. One day they’d had enough. The house was sold and we left in a campervan.

For three months they searched France for a place to fix up, me and my brother in the back. I don’t remember it but there’s a photo of us in the window of the campervan. We look so happy. Eventually, they found a place in the Charente—a wreck of a house for next to nothing. It didn’t have a garden, but there was a small green and an arboretum nearby.

There was a kind French man in the village who didn’t speak a word of English but always greeted us with a warm, toothless smile. He would pull a toffee wrapped in gold paper from his pocket, presenting it like a small surprise each time and it felt like a moment of magic. Sometimes we would pack up a picnic and head to the local river. We would stay all day, swimming beneath a beautiful waterfall and playing for hours in the current.

The days were punctuated by the Sunflowers. I’d stare hard at them, trying to catch the colour with my eyes before it faded. They made the day feel slow and certain. Bees lazily drifting between them. Their spines so thick and firmly in place.

We lived there for a while and my brother even went to school in the village. But when Mum found out she was pregnant with my sister, they decided to come home. We didn’t have anywhere to go at first, so we stayed at my nan’s house. Every summer, we returned to France. Sometimes we’d go for weeks, even six weeks at a time, but never for long enough.

Somehow, the Sunflowers have become a part of me – or I a part of them. There is always sadness when they are gone, when their bright faces lower and their bodies turn back to the soil. But the moment I see one, I am that small girl again, looking up to the sky as they once rose above my head.