My parents are French, though they worked in many different countries, and when I was a child, we used to go back to France for a long holiday every couple of years, leaving our usual life in Australia behind. We left a world of city bustle and busy roads, English at school, and a suburban Sydney block for a very different one: a beautiful, haunted village house deep in the green southwestern French countryside, not far from an ancient wood which had the reputation of being enchanted. These worlds, and our experiences in them, couldn’t have been more different. In Sydney we weren’t allowed to venture outside the front gate on our own—our parents being terrified of cars, of strangers, of misadventures of all sorts— while in Empeaux, the quiet village where we lived in France, they relaxed, and we could roam free. We explored up and down the house and ranged over the huge park-like gardens, hung around in the village with the other kids, and took our bikes on long adventures to the woods, the river, or the next village.

Our house in Sydney wasn’t very old, though it was older than many in Australia, and we knew every inch of it. Our house in France, with its cellars, attics, passageways, big rooms full of gorgeous old furniture, and resident ghost, seemed an inexhaustible source of wonders and adventures. More than two hundred years old, its outbuildings dated from the Middle Ages, as did the bricked-up well (where,  …