Twinkle twinkle little star...

Normandy1943…

My brother and I (shown left!) were increasingly in the care of the live-in maid, Simone, employed to help my mother with the house chores and the “babies”. Life in the school house was full of excitement for us children.

Both our parents were busy teaching in the school part of the building and going about their work for the French Resistance. There were many visitors outside school hours and we were often shooed out of the way upstairs where Simone kept us amused.

She had a beautiful voice and knew many old French songs which we tried our best to learn. One of our favourites was “Ah vous dirai-je Maman” to the tune of “Twinkle twinkle star”.

We could would clap in rhythm, stamp our feet, beat a pan with a wooden spoon, march around the room, laugh till we became quite silly……We would count 7 stomps and pause on the 8th and then start again. As Simone’s singing progressed through the song, she would quicken the tempo and, by the 7th stomp, we couldn’t stop without tumbling all over the place. We were hysterical by then and truly exhausted! Quite surprising results from such an innocuous little song!

Sometimes, Simone was not there for us and we were allowed to stay downstairs where we could meet those intriguing visitors we’d never seen before and who spoke in mysterious fashion. We had to be quiet and stay in the corner of the room but we always ended up being spotted by those strange men. They picked us up and sat us on their knees, speaking softly to us in words we’d never heard before, looking very thoughtful. Sometimes, they would reach for something yummy in the depth of their pocket, other times, they would do magic tricks and sometimes, they would start singing a song to make us snuggle up to them.

One day, to our astonishment, one of them started to sing “Twinkle twinkle little star” and we soon could sing “our” song in English. Our father made us promise we wouldn’t sing that version to anyone else. We had a secret! Was it our first one? We were respectively three and four years old.

Most days, we were visited by German soldiers who came to the school building on “business”, to see the village Mayor or his secretary who ran his office from the same premises. Some German soldiers who were so very homesick could not help wanting to hold us and cuddle us, while thinking what war was depriving them of.

Sometimes they got lucky while my mother was busy and they would snatch a quick moment. Some other times, it was difficult for my mother to stop them and we would sit on the doorstep while they too would speak in a strange way.

One November day even, a German soldier started to sing “Morgen kommt der Weihnnachtsmann” to the tune we were so familiar with! He’d managed to teach us the first line by the time our mother appeared and the game was spoilt.

After that incident, the tune, so delightfully developed in Mozart’s Variations, was out of favour. My parents were conscious of the risks involved by us singing the wrong version to reveal our contact with Allied pilots using our house on their escape route back to England. After procuring the necessary travel documents, my mother took us to my father’s aunt in Burgundy and left us there till the end of the war.

This simple tune still holds great fascination for me and I can spend hours listening to Mozart’s interpretation of this very old French melody. It fills me with a mixture of excitement and melancholy, a sense of awe and mischievousness and an indefinable nostalgia for times past.

Grandpère’s garden

During the 1930s and 1940s, my grandparents were living in a big rambling house in Boyardville, on the island of Oléron. This is where I was born and where I spent many holidays. I even spent a whole year there while doctors and surgeons were trying to put my parents right after the onslaught of the war.

At first, there was no electricity and water had to be lifted out of the well situated five steep steps down in the garden. The only tap in the house was at the bottom of a little ornate enamel cistern, no bigger than a watering can. The cistern was fixed on a vertical wooden board fastened to a wall in the kitchen, hanging over a matching little tray that collected the used water.

Grandmère used to fill the container with well water and I could wash my hands, being careful not to be seen to waste a drop. I loved letting the water trickle all the way down my arms. I used to squeeze the cube of carbolic soap so hard that it jumped out of my hands and went flying in all directions. Grandmère turned a blind eye because, in the end, I had the cleanest hands in the house.

Grandpère loved gardening. He’d taken over almost the entire garden, with the exception of one big oval area near the house, near by the well, which was the part reserved for Grandmère’s flowers. The ground was very sandy and no one on the island grew a lawn of any type. Sandy paths ran the full length of the large rectangular plot between very neat raised vegetable beds lovingly tilled with good quality well manured top soil. In the long growing season, watering the plants was a twice-a-day chore, no hose pipe then, watering cans had to be lowered in the well time and time again.

The garden was entirely walled in except for a wooden gate leading to the driveway. We were warned of visitors by a loud bell on a spring rigged up on the gate itself. Right at the end of the garden, grew an enormous fig tree laden with fruit in the summer. My brothers and I would climb up the tree and gorge ourselves till our stomachs couldn’t cope anymore. Sometimes, we took our children’s magazines there and read in the shade, often falling asleep on a precarious platform we’d rigged up on the lowest branches when it was too hot to do anything else.

Halfway down the garden, at the end of a well trodden path, was the one and only privy, a little windowless brick building with a tiled roof. It was built over a cess pit and consisted of two little rooms back to back with a wooden floor and a large fixed wooden box in each. In either room, you had the choice of three holes where to sit, each hole a slightly different size to suit the user and with a wooden lid. I was always terrified at the thought of dropping the lid down below! In fact, the whole contraption terrified us as it felt that one day one of us with small bottoms would disappear down there, never to return. The smells, the flies, the spiders, the cold draft from down below………….we had to steel ourselves to go and we always used to do so “en famille” for reassurance.

The supply of paper used to hang on a string by the door, newspaper squares meticulously cut which Grandpère always read before using, just in case he’d missed a bit of news. It was quite light in there because, although the doors were made of oak, the fierce sunshine had dried great big gaps between the slats. Hardly worth locking yourself in, anyone could reach the metal hook latch inside by sliding their hand though those gaps. We always tried to use the toilet in daylight, going at night meant carrying a candle in a jar. Fortunately, we had an enamel toilet bucket with a lid in all the bedrooms for night use. Every morning, we had to do the slops, a very noisy and quarrelsome affair.

Apart from growing cherries, pears, peaches, apricots, apples and soft fruit, Grandpère grew all sorts of wonderful vegetables. Right next to the privy was the thriving asparagus bed and next to that, enormous artichoke plants. Then there were peas, beans, carrots, herbs, leeks, cabbages, tomatoes, lettuces…………..through the year, and more than enough for our needs. In fact, one of his sisters used to come by every week and he would fill up her hand drawn little cart with kilos of produce for her to sell at the market and supplement to her war widow’s pension.

However, the big bugbear was, and still is, that the island was riddled with termites! Termites rarely munch on live plants, they prefer dead wood, especially if a little damp. Grandmère used to push old broom handles or sticks into her flower bed (carnations were her passion) and every morning, she would pull them up and shake them into a bucket. Dozens of squirming ghostly termites fell in and much expurgated cursing would be heard. For some reason, if she forgot the precaution, the next morning, the entire bed of carnations could well have keeled over. She had her own private war against the dastardly insects and kept a vigilant eye on any sign of their activity.

Grandpère was not just a keen gardener, he also loved shooting and catching eels with his cousins at the week-end. He subscribed to the “Chasseur Français” magazine. Grandmère used to get impatient with him reading it for hours on end. Eventually, he took to reading it in the little house in the garden which he regarded as a sacred place for privacy. One day, he disappeared down the garden path, armed with his newly delivered magazine, Grandmère raining warnings on him that lunch time was near (he was always very punctual for his twelve o’clock lunch).

That day, 12h00 went by, then 12h15, Grandmère was furious…another occasion for expurgated cursing. She finally resolved to go and draw him out of the dreadful place. As she approached the privy, puffs of sandy dust rising under her impatient feet, she could hear a muffled sort of cry for help coming from that direction. She quickened her step, her fury fast turning to wonder she pushed her hand through to reach the latch in the door and was met with such an awesome sight she would never forget.

The termites had got the better of Grandpère, they’d chomped enough of the wooden supports to allow the floor and box of the privy to collapse into the cess pit. Grandmère being a diminutive lady could not manage to help him out of his predicament and she had to summon the neighbours who roped him out of there. Countless buckets of water, scrubbing brush, carbolic soap, cursing of the non-expurgated kind……Grandpère was not re-instated into the conjugal bedroom for a few weeks, due to a pervasing malodour that put his wife’s nose out.

After that, poor Grandpère was the butt of many jokes for a long time but he could laugh at himself too and I dare say that his popularity in the village gained by it. Soon after this episode, mains water, electricity and mains drainage came to the village, and the little house in the garden was turned into a shed. Grandpère installed light and brought an old armchair to his sacred place so that he could take refuge from the demands of house duties….and to enable him to read his magazine in peace. No hard feelings!

Smells and childhood memories

Sometimes a childhood memory comes flashing in and you wonder why. Then the cause becomes apparent, a familiar and unmistakeable smell pervading your surroundings and, this time, not immediately associated with the distant event.

With the smell of chopped parsley, I recall standing in the kitchen, aged maybe four or five, nose against the edge of the pine table. My mother is furiously chopping mountains of parsley from the kitchen garden which she is going to mix with stale bread and milk. This mash is going to be fed to the newly hatched ducklings that my parents are raising in the yard to supplement our WW2 meat rations.

What fascinates me is the speed of her action, dangerously rocking the half moon chopper to and fro. I remember grabbing the table edge, fingers atop and wriggling them very gingerly toward the chopping board until I spook myself and pull away swiftly in horror. My mother glances at me with her lovely velvet eyes, a quick smile on her face.

I remember vividly the time when I distracted her while she was filling jars of freshly made strawberry jam. The contents of the ladle spilled onto the back of her hand and she screamed. She wore a big bandage for an eternity and I am still feeling some form of guilt, 60 years on, whenever I get the smell of hot strawberry jam. Funnily enough, she doesn’t bear the scars nor does she remember the event.

A great variety of smells remind me of my grandparents’ home on the island of Oléron where I spent so much of my happy childhood. I can spot the scent of summer jasmine anywhere for my grandmother grew a big bush in her courtyard. My father disallowed birthday celebrations and when my big day used to come, in August, my grandmother would fill all her vases in the house with jasmine. Nothing was said but it made me feel very special and I loved my gran for her defiance! I now grow jasmine in my Dorset garden and the late afternoon scent on the patio brings me back to many decades ago.

The island was riddled with termites and my gran used to place Nescafé tin lids under each leg of her beautifully waxed furniture. She used to fill those lids with paraffin to prevent the insects from attacking the wood. As I grew older, I recall being trusted with a pipette, filling all the lids in the house. To this day, I can’t catch the smell of paraffin without recalling the beautiful smooth feel of highly polished wood.

The pungent smell of mothballs takes me back to the endless hours I spent rummaging in my gran’s trunks where she kept the old clothes she had so lovingly made through my mother’s childhood and adolescence. Of course nowadays, anti-moths products are tamer on the nose and it is rare to spot the unmistakeable aroma of naphthalene.

When you are estranged from your country of birth, it is quite amazing to realise how many smells suddenly welcome you that you hadn’t really missed while you were away. As soon as I landed back in France after being away for a year or so, the smell of French cigarettes would recall memories of my family of smokers, Pastis brought memories of my years in the South of France, hot French bread reminded me of breakfast with my grandparents……I couldn’t wait to get to my destination!

However, with restrictions on smoking, entering France is less strikingly characteristic. I remember when, a few years ago, walking in Blandford, I suddenly was overcome by thoughts of France and realised I could smell a Gauloise being smoked. I turned the corner, I was confronted by Mr Onion-man and his bicycle laden with his overpriced strings of onions. As I got nearer, the smell changed somewhat and the magic was rather spoilt.

Now that I feel my home is in England, as I come back from a time away from it, I look forward to smells of this country such as freshly cut grass or bacon being cooked, but I think that because I didn’t experience such smells while I was very young, I don’t necessarily associate them with distant or deeply meaningful memories.