Extending the Olive Branch - An Interview with Carol Drinkwater

Actress, writer, and olive farmer Carol Drinkwater has taken each of her well known roles in her stride as I found out when I spoke to her about her acclaimed Olive Farm series, the farm itself, and relocating from glamorous London to serene Provence.

From reading the Olive Farm series of books I found that when I met author Carol Drinkwater to discuss the latest book in her trilogy of four at the time, Return to the Olive Farm, she was exactly how I imagined her to be. She is naturally elegant and glamorous but also has an earthy quality to her which I imagine has been ingrained in her from her years farming olives in the French countryside. When ordering her tea during the interview she asked for honey with it which delighted me having just read Return to the Olive Farm which contains a constant thread about the plight of the honey bee.

Although Drinkwater spent many years in the glitzy world of acting, most notably playing roles in All Creatures Great and Small and A Clockwork Orange, her decision to move to Provence was not too much of a departure for her given how she spent her youth. Her family is from County Laois where they had a farm and she would visit there as a child. "My mother is Irish and my grandfather had Irish grandparents. I went to an Irish convent in Kent and then we used to come back here for holidays. My cousin farms there now. I used to go down to the river with my uncle when he was fishing for salmon and things like that. We had horses, we had wheat. It wasn't a huge enterprise; it was quite modest. I didn't really work there - I just used to hang out - but I loved it there. The most idyllic memories of my childhood are there."

Despite this - and the fact that her biggest acting role was of Helen Herriot, wife of a vet and country dweller - it was never a life she had imagined living and the decision to buy a farm was not something she had envisaged for herself. "This has come from I don't know where really. I was looking for a house by the sea to chill out between acting jobs, I met a French film producer of a movie I was working on in Australia, he asked me to marry him, we came back to France and found this house and it turned out to be an olive farm. It was a jungle when we bought it."

This was the start of a love affair with the olive and olive farming which Drinkwater has become enveloped in for several years now and the whole journey is catalogued in the Olive Farm series of books. When asked what it was about her new home that engaged her so much her answer is passionate. "I certainly didn't intend to farm olives - I didn't know anything about olives - but the one thing that was true to who I am was my inquiring mind. I wanted to know more about the olive tree and where it came from. I love the produce and I love being part of something that is part of nature and tradition and I'm partly trying to keep that ancient tradition alive. But it's much more to do with the history and the tapestry of the Mediterranean that draws me; that and my work with UNESCO. That's what excites me now and I think that's more to do with the writer in me than the farmer."

There are two major concerns in Return to the Olive Farm. One is the moral dilemma concerning pesticides, which has now led Carol and her husband Michel to go completely organic. The second was the plight of the honey bee as, when Carol returned home from a 16 month period traveling around the Mediterranean, she found that the honey bees that spent the winter on her farm had all died.

When asked were these her main concerns in writing this book, it appeared she had many concerns about nature, all of which she tried to cover in the book. "I wanted to write a book about my change of awareness after I came back from my journey around the Med where I'd seen things like misuse of the earth and misuse of water for industrialised farming. I came back and the story I wanted to tell was what that journey had done to my eye and to my perception of our farm and the world around me in general. I don't see the book specifically as the being about the plight of the bee; I think that's a very major threat through the book but, for me, it's how to address a moral dilemma about how could I continue to live there if I couldn't live in a way that was true to my own soul or integrity. That, for me, is the linchpin or skeleton throughout the book but, of course, in order to furnish that, the bees, going organic, pesticide use, the poisoning of the earth and man; they for me are the flesh of the story.”

Drinkwater's passion for the olive and the success of the series has been broadened once more into an area she has been familiar with for many years: television: "We're doing a film at the moment of the two books The Olive Route and The Olive Tree." From there, Drinkwater plans to continue her almost diary-like writings of life in Provence. "I definitely intend to write more Olive books; there's a pretty fair audience out there for them so it seems silly not to and I absolutely love writing them."

The reason the Olive Farm series of books have achieved such success is because they represent a perfect mixture of many of Drinkwater's loves and this is apparent in every page. "It’s a marriage of a lot of things: my love of writing, my love of nature, and the actress in me. Lots of things come together and I like that. It makes me feel like I'm enjoying the path I’m on. I'm enormously happy where I am."

Return to the Olive Farm is available now and is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Originally published in Verbal.