Part V
JULIA: 1955–2008
Chapter XVII
THE CHILD OF THE METRO
So we are back, through all the different imprints of time and place, with the expanses of Ashdown Forest, where a Wartime child walked beside her mother and was given a lift in a cart.
That child and her mother lived then, and for a good many years afterwards, on the side of the Forest that extends towards the Kentish Weald; the aunts May and Maud lived on the far side, to the south-west. Everyone took buses in those needy, car-less years, and green-and-cream double-deckers trundled regularly up and down hills, past chalk and heather and bracken, dropping passengers off at isolated stops with names like Hindleap Warren, Wych Cross and Nutley. Why did the aunts never visit? More to the point, since they were old, why were they never visited?
Children accept things as they are. The mother was long dead, and the child a grown-up herself for years, before the oddity of this circumstance occurred to her. The mother’s parents lived nearby: every Sunday without fail lunch or tea was eaten at their house, even after the young man in the photograph called ‘Daddy’ came back from the War. But his own parents, Bertie and Blanche, who had also moved to Sussex in old age, were visited only two or three times a year. And everyone else in that once-extensive and clannish family was, to the child, unknown.
It became clear to her much later that some sort of family fracture had occurred. Such visits as were made to Bertie and Blanche (who were addressed, with supreme tactlessness, as ‘Other Granny’ and ‘Other Grandpa’) were animated but filled with tension. Hardly ever did their daughter-in-law say anything about them afterwards that was not critical. Blanche, no doubt, was not the easiest of mothers-in-law. She tended to dominate any conversation, without meaning to. She probably thought (rightly) that her cherished only son had married, too young, someone who, though apparently suitable, was not the right sort of person for him. But there was nothing Blanche could have done, in her teasing, voluble, Anglo-Irish way, or yet Bertie with his didactic organising tendencies, that could have permanently alienated a daughter-in-law who wanted to like them and be liked by them.
Ursula was their daughter-in-law and she did not want to like them. That commonplace responsibility was seemingly beyond her. If questioned about them, she would probably have used words like ‘conventional’, ‘Victorian’ and ‘stuffy’, the all-purpose terms casually applied by those who grew up after the First World War to stigmatise those of an age to have been supposedly responsible for that War. Of all the long shadows cast by the slaughter between 1914 and 1918, a casual, wholesale contempt for the values of previous generations was one of the most insidious and longest-lasting.
The Bright Young Modern pose, which had no doubt irritated Bertie and Blanche in the twenty-year-old Ursula, was indeed no more than a pose. But it was not abandoned as she grew older. The central truth was probably that she did not really want to be an adult woman at all. She resisted, with a kind of panic-stricken myopia that was self-defeating, the idea that she was, like everyone else, in thrall to time and chance. How could she, Ursula, become middle-aged? It was like a personal attack on her.
She had been happy as a child: a tiny home-made magazine, which her own mother kept all her life as a memento, suggests a bright, clever little girl. She had been especially happy as a teenage schoolgirl. She was very happy too when her family, who were cultured and indulgent, sent her to Paris to be ‘finished’. Such was the image of harmless, rather old-fashioned elegance that Paris had among well-to-do English families between the Wars. Her father was a Treasury knight: with his influence, she was readily admitted to a women’s college in Oxford, which was not then the intellectual powerhouse for undergraduates it would later become. These prolongations of boarding school life, with their carefully sheltered modicums of fun and freedom, were, to her, the ideal existence. All subsequent periods of her life were measured against this standard and found wanting. And for coping with life’s blows she developed no strategies at all.
Though in love with the young man she had met at Oxford and carried away by his eagerness to marry her, she did not adapt well to the married state. Expecting protection as of right, she yet strained mockingly away from most of the concepts embodied in the marriage vows, defending her own ‘unconventionality’ and ‘independence’ while doing nothing to validate these claims. The significant events of the 1930s made little impact on her. Fatally, the Second World War then inserted five years of distance and different experience between her and her young husband, and consolidated her self-image as someone unjustly held back from the life she preferred. Genuinely loving to read, and believing herself therefore intellectual and already enlightened, she let the War pass her largely by, perceiving only its privations and none of its opportunities for growth and change. ‘Of course I couldn’t volunteer for anything with you around,’ she said later to her daughter. But she had always had resident domestic help, and her own mother lived nearby. She wrote (and published, in those days of voracious lending library readers) a handful of ‘amusing modern novels’, slackly constructed, showing a distinct minor talent for dialogue and for the apposite word or phrase, and little insight into the human mind or heart. One reviewer, more perceptive than most at that time, remarked that the characters’ personalities seemed stuck in 1930.
She had not been keen to have a child, but when her little daughter was born she adopted her passionately as an alter ego. Very young, the child (whom I have called Julia) was talked to almost as an adult, had complicated stories and good poetry read to her. For years, Julia thrived on this loving partnership, though distanced from other children by the grown-up vocabulary she acquired and by her ineptitude at childish games. Only later in childhood, when she began to realise she was expected to replicate her mother’s life and tastes entirely – ‘Oh you’ll love tennis, darling! I always have … Don’t worry about boring arithmetic, darling, people like us are never any good at that sort of thing’ – did a degree of unease set in. Forebodings which increased as she began to notice how shaky Ursula’s grasp of current events actually was. But Mummy always knew so much about some other things, so how could one ever explain …
Ursula took refuge in daydreams. Julia, till she was old enough to evolve coherent and separate daydreams of her own, shared these too, as the offered way out of the present that was supposed, in some never-quite-stated way, to have something wrong with it that was not fair. The daydream called ‘One day you and I will go to Paris together, darling’ continued to be a favourite. Now that Julia was a little older, the white-and-gold-towered fairy-tale Paris by a bright sea was replaced by one even more exotic. To introduce her daughter to French (something not taught at the cranky and ‘enlightened’ progressive school to which she had sent Julia) Ursula bought her children’s books in that language. This was a good idea: indeed her daughter was sadly to reflect, long after, that if only Ursula had had to go to work as a teacher then her talents and qualities might have found a proper outlet. Julia was briefly charmed by favourite characters from infancy reappearing as La Famille Flopsaut and Noisy-Noisette, but the book that particularly caught her imagination was called L’Enfant du Métro.
Lavishly illustrated in colour, at a time when in England most children’s books were still appearing in restricted, monochrome 1940s editions, this told the story of a small boy roaming, lost, in the white-glazed corridors of the Paris underground. He discovered to his delight that he had somehow slipped through an automatic barrier (Attention au portillon!) into an alternative Metro in which each station resembled its name. Porte des Lilas, of course, was an ancient gateway hung about with succulent mauve flowers, and Place des Fêtes on the same line was a jolly fairground, but others had a more eccentric charm. At Gare d’Austerlitz, Napoleon and a posse of toy soldiers in white képis flourished sabres on a railway platform full of unconcerned passengers, while in Chambre des Députés elderly, bearded gentlemen with pince-nez lay neatly tucked up i
n rows of camp-beds under a gilded ceiling. With the sonorous and incongruous pairings that have long entertained Metro-lovers, the book’s creator really got into his stride. At Denfert-Rochereau a sinister devil in vie de bohème dress prowled in a rocky landscape, while at Sèvres-Babylone eastern-looking people with long, curling beards disported themselves amid tiers of expensive china. A memory survives of a jolly gentleman waving a welcome from a landscape of classic gods and goddesses (Montparnasse-Bienvenue), and sheep grazing with labels round their necks on a brilliantly green pasture (Mouton-Duvernet). But was there really pictured – or has adult imagination supplied? – a station at Réaumur-Sébastopol in which a huge thermometer-building dominated a fortified town, rising above walls at which a force of tiny men in mid-nineteenth-century clothes were aiming cannons? It is well over half a century since the book disappeared, and it seems to be known to no one and unfindable on any website.1
‘You do know, don’t you, darling,’ said Ursula fondly to Julia, ‘that Paris isn’t really like this?’ But the Paris she now described to her daughter, a shining, tidy city in which people, when they were not playing tennis or going for boat trips on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, sat having fun and coloured drinks on café terraces, was almost as far from the reality. In her Paris, time had surely stood still, and she would once again be reunited there with her real identity as a clever young English Miss.
No one in England could get to Paris in the years immediately after the War, except the wily and privileged: no foreign exchange was generally available till 1949. Ursula’s dream was therefore, for the time being, well protected. Tales that did filter back, from lucky travellers to the Continent, suggested a Paris unchanged by four years of Occupation, a city without the bombed ruins that pockmarked London, and where meat, eggs, cream, wine and pretty clothes were there for the asking. To a stringently rationed England, held for several years more in the prudent grip of what was known as Austerity, with stodgy food and bread itself in short supply, it was not surprising that Paris appeared as a lost Eden. The fact that, in unregulated France, the franc was now falling in value month by month, reducing many Parisians to penury, was not widely realised across the Channel.
Ursula’s Parisian experience, at eighteen, had been of life in the large Montparnasse apartment of one of France’s innumerable black-clad ladies whose husbands had been killed at Verdun or on the Marne. Madame Bazin (as I will call her) took in, two or three at a time, English girls de bonnes familles, and had nephews and nieces whom she also entertained when they were not studying for their bac. From these friendly playmates (who were later to turn into ambitious and slightly eccentric adults) Ursula quickly picked up French, and this accomplishment possibly went to her head. To talk fluently in a foreign language requires a heightened level of concentration that is apt to make the speaker feel he or she is living with a special intelligence and intensity. Years later, Julia discovered this for herself. But as a child, listening to her mother’s accounts of ‘the fun we had, darling!’, and slightly baffled because the animated recitals of trivial excursions did not seem to amount to anything she had come to think of as grown-up and exciting, she formed the impression that she was being told about children of much her own age.
Having at last been sent to an ordinary school where French was taught, she now had a French lesson book that seemed to cover the same territory. In it, Pierre and Solange lived in an over-furnished apartment with their Maman and Papa, a fluffy white dog called Plonplon and a black-clad servant called Liliane. When not involved in perpetual preparation of études and devoirs, Pierre and Solange promenaded in the park (neat box hedges surrounding gravel and a képi-ed policeman in charge) or – more daringly – jouaient au tennis. Meanwhile Papa went to his unspecified bureau while Maman allait aux grands magasins, or, as an occasional respite from the burden of shopping for sewing silks and hat-trimmings, prenait du thé with female friends. On Sunday, the family prenait un tramway for une sortie à la campagne, where Papa pointed out various birds to them by name.
The only charm of this boring non-story, as far as Julia was concerned, was that it existed in two different versions, both of them antiquated. Of the twenty-odd battered copies that had been handed round the class by the French Mam’zelle at the beginning of term, about half showed Papa in a bowler and spats (like Babar the Elephant) and Maman in a waistless dress and cloche hat. Solange, similarly waistless, had white socks and a drooping hair ribbon, and Pierre very short shorts, white socks too and a Breton cap. But in the rest of the copies, still more tattered wrecks of a yet earlier edition, with pages chaotically adrift from what had once been the spine, Papa, bearded, was in a frock coat and top hat, and Maman was in a floor-length and much-frilled dress with a hint of bustle. Solange, similarly befrilled but in a shorter version, had stockings, button boots and long ringlets, and Pierre wore a sailor suit. The cumbersome décor of the flat, however, seemed much the same, as indeed did the appearance of Liliane and the eternal Plonplon. In the older edition, the tennis chapter was missing (‘You will have to share books for this lesson, girls’) but otherwise nothing at all beyond the clothes had apparently changed in bourgeois Parisian life between 1880 and 1930. And of course the participants had not grown any older.
In the tedium of lessons usefully devoted to irregular verbs, Julia formed the dreamy impression that in the Paris to which she and her mother would one day be transported, time did indeed run differently. Everyone her mother knew there would still be young. Mummy had no doubt lived in that very flat, or one entirely similar, with people dressed in those same clothes. One day soon they would make the epic journey to see it.
Julia knew nothing of the Lemoignes, but it occurs to me today that the atmosphere of oppressive respectability and lack of physical space, which was breathed out from the dog-eared, scribbled-on pages of that ancient French primer, accurately portrayed what Bertie had encountered in his own youthful stay in Paris.
But Ursula’s Pierre and Solange were evidently more entertaining than Bertie’s version, and through the 1930s contact with them had been maintained. Like huge numbers of Parisians in every era, the family came from elsewhere in France. Their roots were in the Basque country near the Pyrenees, where they still had parents, uncles and aunts. Since Biarritz, the main town of the area, had become a fashionable resort much favoured by British visitors, it was there that jolly holiday reunions took place. Ils jouaient au tennis, no doubt, and there were more boat trips, and swims, and of course sessions on café terraces over drinks that were now gin-fizz and sidecars. Being très modernes (unlike, they thought, all the generations behind them), the Pierre-Solanges and their entourage were not going to agree to arranged marriages. Elaborate clandestine and not entirely clandestine relationships were carried on. These were generally described as flirts, an English term imported from more innocent times and somehow fossilised in colloquial French: this no doubt enabled the older generation in Biarritz comfortably to close their eyes to what modernité might actually entail.
Little of this impinged on Ursula, however, once she had turned up in a sports car with her handsome, if rather shy, young English husband. The Pierre-Solanges were pleased for her: that was just the sort of partner, and car, that chatty English girls were supposed to have. They were even more generously pleased when a mysterious crise de foie, that blighted one holiday and required the attentions of a doctor-uncle, turned out to be the first signs of a pregnancy. Julia had been conceived.
But the holidays in Biarritz or Paris were then almost at an end. Not because of the baby – middle-class mothers at the end of the 1930s still had uniformed nannies ‘in sole charge’ – but for larger reasons. On the far side of those Pyrenees that were shadows in the sky above the café terraces of Biarritz, the Spanish Civil War had already sent another wave of political refugees into the supposed safety of France. In early September 1939 came the declaration of the Second World War. This time round, at least, French farmers had been able to get
the harvest in before being summoned to their regiments. Those English who were still nonchalantly holidaying in French resorts (‘War? Well, we’re poo-pooers. I mean – Chamberlain won’t let it happen, will he?’) hastily regained the British Isles by whatever boats were available.
Later that autumn, Ursula’s husband was in uniform. Like his Uncle Howard in the previous War, he thought it best to volunteer before the decision was taken out of his hands, much to the grief and anxiety of his parents who feared a terrible repetition of the previous slaughter. In addition, Tom (as I will call him, in an approximation to his mother’s baby name for him, which stuck throughout his life) had been fragile as a child. Bertie and Blanche had been afraid, early on, that he might not live. Though he had grown into a happy, intelligent young man, and a good tennis player, there was still the family feeling that Tom was more delicate and sensitive than other young men. How would he cope with Army life? Blanche, in particular, was inclined to see in her son the wistful, blue-eyed ghost of her youngest brother, Donald, whom she had failed to save from exile in Canada almost forty years before.
Ursula always loudly maintained that Tom had been ‘horribly spoilt’ by his mother. While this assertion was part and parcel of her general enmity towards her in-laws, she may have been right about it. For Tom, though universally acknowledged to be a sweet-natured fellow, was also admitted to be rather young and silly still for a married man now rising thirty. Like Bertie before him, and with similar lack of real enthusiasm, he had dutifully gone into the family firm, but he was not, at that stage, cutting a particularly convincing figure there, and he knew it.
Footprints in Paris Page 24