Born at the crossing

Three worlds behind him

Alexander Remzi George Swann was born in Tours on 16 May 1972, nine months after his parents married in Portugal. His father, Gordon, was an English painter; his mother, Ülker, a Turkish woman who had become British through marriage. His middle name came from his maternal uncle: Remzi, from the Arabic ramz, “the sign”. English was spoken at home; he learned it before French.

One in a hundred

Even before the birth there was a threshold. Operated on for a fibroid about three months before term, Ülker heard the doctors give the baby a one-in-a-hundred chance. She stayed calm. All her life she would say she knew he would live.

The clearing

The first years were spent in a small house in the middle of a private forest in Touraine, near his grandfather Cecil’s château. A clearing, does, stags, rabbits, pigeons, snakes. A modest life, an artist father, a steady mother.

The hornets

At about one year old, the child was playing in the garden when his mother saw hornets gathering around him. She brought him in. The swarm laid siege to the house — windows, doors, the chimney where the nest was. The fire lit in the hearth only enraged them. For hours, both parents fought with wet towels to hold the house.

The grandmother’s gesture

Before he was two, he swallowed something in the grass and choked. Help was far away; his parents panicked. His American grandmother, utterly composed, laid him across her knees with his head lower than his body and patted his back gently, talking to him. The object came out. The child breathed.

The château

When his parents went to Paris to work, he stayed at his grandfather’s château with his grandparents, his aunt and his cousin: a great park, English habits, a clan that filled the space. His mother came back to see him whenever work allowed.