The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  I put the phone down in an odd frame of mind. My heart leapt at the sound of ‘inheritance’, only to subside at the qualifications of ‘modest’ and ‘taxes’. The conversation has only really served to remind me of what a mongrel I am, with some French blood here, some German blood there, and a name, although I’ve lived with it for over seventy years, that’s difficult to situate anywhere. Was that why, although I loved England, I often felt so rootless and restless there? At all events, a couple of thousand pounds was certainly welcome, but it was not going to change anything in my life.

  It turned out I was wrong. A few days later a letter arrived, addressing me as ‘Cher cousin’, and I discovered that I was related not only to the amiable-sounding Jacques Küsser, the cousin who had sent the letter, but to a large group of people living in Alsace-Lorraine. To illustrate the point, Cousin Jacques included a photograph of his parents’ golden wedding anniversary where, he informed me, the many ranks of celebrants, mostly Alsatian farmers with impressively thick necks, were also cousins of mine in varying degrees of distance and removal. I scanned the rows of broad, grinning faces for any signs of a family resemblance but could find none.

  My grandmother – ‘Nana’, as we called her – shared the same name as Flaubert’s long-suffering mistress, Louise Colet, but nothing else, not even, I suspect, the same language, since she had been brought up in Alsace at a time when a German or rather Alemannic dialect was most frequently spoken, with French coming a poor second. Yet my father traced his lifelong affection for France to Louise, as well as, more indirectly, to the French origins of the ‘Peppiatt’ name, which, he explained, was a diminutive of ‘Pépin’, or ‘pip’, and came from Normandy where, in the distant past, it had originated as a nickname for a ‘fruit farmer’. My father was particularly fond of Calvados (although he also indulged in every other alcoholic drink on offer), and I sometimes fancy he might have been drawn to it as a kind of distillation of our apple-growing origins. But Pépin was also the family name of the Carolingian kings, my father would add with a flourish, startling his listeners into wondering exactly who they were, before explaining in detail that Pépin le bref, ‘poor, old, short-arsed Pépin’, as he called him familiarly, was himself the father of Charlemagne. In a nutshell, we had probably not only come over to England with William the Conqueror (as a boy, I heard the armour clank and saw the sword flash in the mailed fist), but if you really went back, we were descended from the Carolingian kings. This royal perspective stimulated a foray into some amateur genealogical research which petered out when my father found he could go no further back into our ancestry than a forebear forbiddingly named Nebuchadnezzar Peppiatt, a yeoman in Yorkshire, and a ship’s cook, one Joseph Peppiatt, who plied his doubtless greasy trade around the mid-seventeenth century.

  Failure to establish links with the Carolingians did nothing to dampen my father’s interest in, even identification with, France. Rightly or not, he declared himself ‘part French’, although I don’t think he had our earthy cousins in Alsace-Lorraine in mind when he said it, but rather a kind of bon vivant from the Belle Epoque, quaffing champagne in evening dress and twirling his moustaches whenever he caught sight of a lady’s ankle. ‘The French know how to enjoy themselves,’ went one of his favourite refrains, ‘however, the English take their pleasures sadly.’

  Accordingly French cooking was very much de rigueur in our household, although my mother’s soups never seemed to match the potages that, according to my father, his eyes growing misty at the recollection, Nana’s stockpot had provided throughout the winters of his childhood in London. To compensate for this, my father took over the kitchen himself on Sundays and, with me serving as a sullen scullion, went through elaborate preparations that took up most of the day and left me resenting rather than enjoying the results that he orchestrated with an almost scientific precision. I particularly detested moules marinières since it fell to me to ‘beard’ great, blue-black shoals of them (and if any mussel still sported the slightest hairy filament it was tossed contemptuously back into the sink for me to re-beard), while my father, naturally enough, reserved for himself the star role of pouring regular, judicious amounts of white wine into the bubbling liquor.

  French food, which included occasional celebrations at old French bistros in London like Mon Plaisir, was only one manifestation of my father’s love of things French. Having been brought up with only a smattering of school French, my father spoke it at best haltingly. ‘En Angleterre, c’est différent,’ he would begin, addressing a baffled waiter in one of these bistros who was probably in any case a Greek Cypriot, before tailing off into a random comparison of the two cultures mostly in English, with a few alors! and n’est-ce pas? thrown in. But if he was not fluent, his son would be, and I was packed off alone, at the age of nine, on what seemed – and no doubt in 1950 was – an interminable journey by boat and train, with my ticket and itinerary in a see-through wallet round my neck, down to Béziers in southern France. The idea was that I should stay a month with my host family, improving my non-existent French hour by hour, then return, with my opposite number, Luc, for a subsequent month in London. My French family turned out to possess a large, rambling mansion in a huge garden, and even before I learnt that they also owned estates, farms and vineyards in Algeria, I realised, as children quickly do, that they were considerably richer and more important than my family.

  Luc, in particular, radiated privilege. He was already wearing ‘longs’ and sported a zip-up blouson (as opposed to the crumpled khaki shorts, elasticated snake belt and Aertex shirt I wore). His hair, moreover, was cut fashionably short – ‘en brosse’, as he called it – whereas mine fell lankly over wire-rimmed National Health glasses. I was particularly impressed to find that Luc’s morning toilette consisted of splashing his head and shoulders with liberal amounts of eau de cologne. Once perfumed and dressed, he would call out to the housekeeper who served us breakfast under the plane trees that shaded the house. In what would become a daily ritual, Luc then took me to the games room where there was a gleaming ‘baby-foot’ and a full-size ping-pong table. A tiny, hunch-backed boy from the village would appear out of nowhere and when Luc tossed him a coin (which usually landed in the dust), the boy would carefully polish the table with a shammy leather, and our game, which I always lost, would begin. When Luc returned with me to London, we found window-cleaners at work on the top floor of our suburban house, and Luc’s first question to my startled parents was whether these were ‘our people’, meaning part of the ‘staff’. A little later he gave my mother a summary account of what he liked to eat and how it would be best prepared.

  If Luc’s stay with us was not a great success, our ‘exchange’, which had successfully kick-started my French, also initiated a whole series of family holidays in France. Despite strict currency controls, we generally fared very well, travelling on sturdy Rudge bikes with side panniers, staying in country inns in Normandy and Picardy, and eating vast meals that always began with a vegetable potage and an omelette fines herbes before the main course, which was followed, as surely as summer gives way to autumn, by salad, a cheese plate of bewildering variety and a choice of desserts. My father was in seventh heaven. Somewhere between coffee and Calvados, already fired by a litre or two of rough red wine, he knew that if he could not be a Frenchman, then his son, already blessed by the budding bilingualism of a short stay in the Languedoc, could.

  Other exchanges followed. One of them included, in a mixture of hilarity and alarm, a visit with another French family to the Ile du Levant’s nudist colony, where the ice-cream sellers had nothing on but the trays of Eskimo Gervais that hung from a strap around their neck; only on the village square and beside the port was it required to put on what the locals referred to solemnly as le minimum. Another was organised when I was in early adolescence with a middle-class family in Paris, where the mother of my counterpart, Marcel, developed a crush on me and could think of no better way of exorcising it than by taking me on long walks
through the quartiers chauds or red-light districts in Montmartre and around Les Halles. Formally dressed in a hat with a veil and black gloves, she would walk two steps behind me, clucking with pride every time I was propositioned: later we returned home, arm in arm, jovially assessing the charms, or usually lack thereof, of the girls we’d passed on that particular afternoon. I assumed this to be a deep-seated Parisian tradition, whereby a mature woman would prepare a very young man for the mysterious adventures and temptations that lay before him. I always responded affectionately to this kind lady’s lengthy, warm embraces, but never once did I consider her as anything but Marcel’s mother; so I felt bewildered and aggrieved when her husband, having come back from his day at the office, began eyeing me with undisguised suspicion over the dinner table.

  Boat trains punctuated my life regularly and I could follow their progress from London to Paris simply by the change in smells, from the stale, dusty upholstery in the British railway compartments to the beer and vomit on board, then the unmistakable amalgam of chicory-scented coffee, garlic and sweat that heralded the arrival in France, just as, if I used my eyes, the cold-looking Englishmen in long, grimy macs drinking at the bars on the ferries were replaced by short, belligerent Frenchmen in blue overalls, breathing out plumes of Gauloises and gesticulating theatrically at every twist and turn of the voyage. One of these choppy crossings took me when I was fifteen on an exchange programme to study at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where Verlaine and Proust had been pupils, and Mallarmé and Sartre teachers. But these magnificent names were as nothing to me because when all the English and French students congregated for a break in the school’s sober, colonnaded courtyard on the first day, I lost my heart utterly to a French girl with a mane of tawny hair who, throughout the following fortnight, never once acknowledged my moonstruck face or returned my lugubriously ardent stare. To soothe these pangs, I paced up and down the mysterious-sounding Salle des pas perdus at the nearby Gare Saint-Lazare in the confused hope that losing my footsteps might change my luck. But it did not.

  Another crossing of the Franco-English Rubicon led me from the dank quadrangles of Cambridge (where it was my proficiency at French that earned me a place) to the Latin Quarter’s dark myth of student roistering, high learning and deadly knifings at night. My Trinity Hall roommate and I exchanged our scanty college accommodation for the antique plumbing and creaking charms of the Hôtel Stella on rue Monsieur le Prince, whose clientele consisted mainly of American writers arriving in the wake of the Beats to write their definitive novel about life back home seen from the dazzling vantage of Paris and the discovery of love by the Seine. They criss-crossed the hotel’s narrow corridors at regular intervals, gravely discussing narrative structures, time sequences and transitions with their friends in other small bedrooms before returning to their own to hammer out fresh revelations on their typewriters. In the early evening the hotel became a Tower of Babel, with a dozen machines chattering away, creating pyramids of rising sound and transient emotion. My roommate and I bought all the Henry Millers and other banned books we could from Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, as well as certain keys French texts, like the Chants de Maldoror, in editions where each page had to be carefully sliced open, reading them in varying degrees of incomprehension as we sampled the twinned delights of millefeuille and cheap Préfontaines wine in litre bottles. On most evenings our budget would stretch no further than egg and chips in student restaurants like La Source, but right next to our hotel was the far more sophisticated and enticing Polidor restaurant, where writers from Gide to Artaud, Joyce to Hemingway, had apparently eaten before us, although I found it hard as I peered through the window to imagine such hallowed legends seated at the red-and-white chequered tablecloths, tucking in to their steak-frites. But when on our last evening we did dine there, we felt we had gained access to a very special club, and we watched with envy how regular clients, clearly a cut above the rest, retrieved their napkin with elegant insouciance from a set of numbered pigeon holes fixed to the wall before settling into their preordained place on the banquette.

  However consistently I had been drilled to see France as the ideal alternative to England, I began to waver in my heart of hearts on my very first trip to Italy. It wasn’t so much the extraordinary architecture and painting as the unusual amiability and social flair of the Italians that won me over (‘The French are Italians in a bad mood,’ Cocteau once opined of his compatriots). I learnt Italian and travelled all over the country, marvelling at the fact that you almost never find a city without charm there or a museum without masterpieces. Then I discovered Spain and was so entranced by its extremes of dark and light that as soon as I left Cambridge I dropped more promising professional opportunities simply to go out and live in Barcelona and along the Catalan coast.

  After a year in Spain trying to write whilst gazing penetratingly at the Mediterranean and indulging every other romantic illusion, I returned to my previous life in London, moving back into the basement flat in Chelsea I’d been sharing with two Cambridge friends, reigniting old flames, renewing old friendships and eking out the small allowance my mother sent me with translations and other literary odd jobs for publishers. I also started going out on the town again with Francis Bacon, who had never ceased to fascinate me, both as a man and an artist, since I’d interviewed him for a student magazine while I was still at Cambridge. Champagne in grand hotels followed by extravagant dinners in Soho, skilfully orchestrated by Francis to introduce me to upper- and lower-class bohemia, gave me a transient feeling that I had somehow ‘arrived’. But as my flatmates forged ahead in their recently initiated careers, it became obvious that not only had I not arrived but that I was currently, and possibly permanently, going nowhere. I had frittered away over a year in Spain and had little to show for it beyond a miscellany of half-written short stories and a fast-fading tan. Still, I was glad to be back among old friends and to luxuriate in the familiarity of old habits, inimitable expressions and a shared sense of humour. And I filled in my days not unhappily with daily walks round the Brompton Cemetery and regular trips to the launderette, while dallying over the best ways to transpose, or even reinvent, the strange written world of the then little-known poet and painter, Henri Michaux, into English.

  My father’s long, Francophile arm was nevertheless about to reach out again. He had heard that I’d still not found a job, indeed any form of regular, gainful employ, and he was irritated to discover that my mother had been financing this idle way of life by the fivers and tenners she carefully concealed in her regular letters from home. It was bad enough that I had been lounging around in Spain, where nobody apparently worked anyway, he announced in his booming voice, but that I should be back in London lounging further still, and at his expense, was too much. Without further ado my father instructed his secretary to search the classified ads every morning on the front page of The Times for any job that might suit my scanty qualifications. Things then seemed to go mercifully quiet, and I went back to mornings watching clothes spin-dry and afternoons, when the flat was blissfully empty, spent in obstinate seduction of old and new flames beside the living-room gas fire.

  The week was barely out, however, than my father was on the phone.

  ‘Got just the job for you, boy,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Top-quality magazine looking for junior editor. Right up your street. Full of art and books. Some pretty good recipes as well!’

  I felt doomed at first, then perked up slightly when I heard the ‘art’ bit. I’d been offered a post as junior art critic by The Observer on the strength of some exhibition reviews I’d done for them while at Cambridge, but the allure of Spain had convinced me to turn it down. This might be a way, I realised, of making up for that rash refusal.

  ‘Best of all, boy, it’s called Réalités,’ my father resumed. ‘And it’s in Paris. Imagine. Paris!’

  My spirits drooped again, this time seriously. Life in London had become very tolerable, with or without paid work. At least I didn’t
have to drag myself into an office every morning and put up with the rush-hour tube. Better still, my fireside skirmishes had at last ended in such a delicious victory it wasn’t at all clear who had captured whom or whose strategy had been finer. All I knew, as the flames flickered up over the reddened grate, was that I had fallen in love with a beauty all the more seductive and mysterious for having a touch of the East in her blood.

  ‘My grandfather was a seafaring man,’ she explained cheekily in the morning as she kissed me goodbye.

  If I keep a low profile, I think to myself, the whole Paris idea might blow over, as things do, and I can go on exploring my newly found love. Even so, now that I’ve flipped through a couple of recent issues of Réalités, I can also see myself quite happily writing on Picasso’s Cubism or Classicism for them, or on the nouveau roman, the Nouvelle Vague, the nouveau whatever. If only the magazine were in London. Paris is all very well for a visit, stimulating even, because it’s so different. That’s the problem. London is comfy. You go to a pub to have a drink and a laugh. In Paris, on the other hand, people only seem to laugh out of sarcasm. You sit alone or in little, intimate groups on café terraces and dissect the people passing by, superciliously picking holes in how they look and what they’re wearing. I know Francis Bacon keeps telling me when I’ve seen him recently that the French know how to ‘present’ themselves better than the English, that they’re more intelligent than the English. He may well be right, but there’s a clannishness and an innate disdain to Paris that I dislike and fear.