by Alan Holmes
We spent some time untangling kelp from the bike as Raimond explained what I had found so hard to believe. I could pedal slower and slower and still remain stable, he explained and, by so doing, I would end up going so slowly that all I had to do was put one foot down on the ground and stop. It seemed so absurdly simple! Why hadn’t I been told this before?
Within a day, I was riding with only one hand on the handlebars and within two days, no hands on the handlebars. Mother was terrified and stupefied by my prowess. Fortunately, Raimond was present, beaming with pride and pleasure and reassuring her that I would be fine.
Being able to ride a bike gave me unlimited new freedom, or so it seemed at the time. I was allowed to ride one block in all directions from our house. And I could ride on the beach at low tide, as long as I stayed well away from the water’s edge and went no farther along the beach than where the seawall extended (a distance of about one mile).
What Mother didn’t know was that, while she was away playing golf, I extended this boundary in a direction unspecified by her. I rode down the beach about a half mile until I was opposite Hardelot’s main street and shopping area. There, I carried my bike back across the soft sand strip, up the seawall, and remounted it once I was on the digue. From there it was just a block or so to the town’s bazar (general emporium) that had a large assortment of toys on display. I had neither money nor illusions that I could ever own any of the toys, but I enjoyed the thrill of these clandestine excursions and loved to ogle the toys in the shop window.
One day, I unstuck my face from the windowpane of the bazar to discover Mother standing beside me. She asked me how I had reached this spot. Always candid when caught red-handed, I carefully described my circuitous route to her. “I’ll let you do that, as long as you stay off the busy streets where a car might squash you. But you mustn’t go in the shops. And it’s all right for you to ride on the digue if you like, as long as you don’t knock over anyone promenading there.”
My roaming rights had just been tripled, and I was ecstatic. That same day, Mother and I also visited the bike shop (conveniently found next door to the bazar) and exchanged my rental bike for one that had hand brakes and freewheeling. What a difference and what further ecstasy!
One of my favorite activities on the beach became riding my bike at full speed into or across the shallow tide pools. The resulting panaches d’eau (splash or spray of water) fortified my fantasy that I was driving a speedboat or taking off in a seaplane.
One day, a group of five bike riders, all about my age, stopped to watch my antics as I tore through, circled around and repeatedly raced and splashed across a tide pool with unabashed enthusiasm and reckless abandon. When I ended my performance, sopping wet and in a state of intoxication, I came to a stop near the edge of the tide pool to catch my breath. The wheels of my bike and my feet were still in the shallow water. My audience approached me, and one of them asked me how I could get away with such folies (recklessness) when les parents had strictly forbidden them to ride through tide pools.
I replied that no one had ever told me not to do this and, as long as I wore a bathing suit instead of my usual clothes, what was so wrong with riding a bike through tide pools?
“Aren’t you worried that your bike will soon be completely rusted? One day, it will crumble into pieces while you’re riding it,” one of my spectators warned portentously. Their bikes all looked far nicer than mine, and it turned out that they all owned their bikes, which also looked very new. My rented bike already had its share of rust spots, but it ran well enough, perhaps because Raimond frequently scrubbed the chain, sprocket wheels and other key parts, using an old toothbrush soaked in olive oil.
I offered to let the boys take turns riding my bike through tide pools to their hearts’ content while, in exchange, I did some “dry riding” on their more elegant steeds. It quickly dawned on me that I had the better bargain. The fact that a bike was newer and fancier did not seem to add any particular magic to its riding qualities, and I decided that having to stay out of tide pools was too big a price to pay for the vanity of an elegant bike.
The lending of my unfettered bike won me membership in the group and, before long, we formed une escadrille (a squadron). Among my fellow flyers was a boy we all called by his last name, “Blériot.” His grandfather was Louis Blériot, the first man to succeed in flying across the English Channel in 1909. By coincidence, the pioneer flyer died the same year (1936) that I befriended his grandson. The Blériots owned the largest and most ostentatious villa in Hardelot. “Villa Blériot” had light gray stucco with sky-blue trim. Mother whimsically commented that these were “the same colors as the sky he was flying through in 1909.” However, she disapproved of the color scheme, describing it as too subdued and colorless for a seaside resort.
Many years later, Mother told me a story about Louis Blériot that I found quite surprising. She said that she had seen Blériot take off from the beach (at low tide) on one of his cross-Channel attempts. She also mentioned that soon after takeoff, the plane’s single engine sputtered to a stop. Blériot was already flying over the water but had managed to turn the plane around and make a forced landing in the water close to shore. The plane apparently floated. She said that Blériot climbed out of the plane’s cockpit and sat on its rim so as to be higher out of the water. He then lit a cigarette and puffed away nonchalantly while he waited for the beach guard’s lifeboat to come and rescue him and his plane.
I asked Mother if she had been in France when this happened. She replied that she had never been to France before she was twelve years old. I then pursued the subject by enquiring, “So you must have been in Westende [in Belgium, where Grandpa had a seaside villa] when you saw Blériot’s crash?”
“Of course it was Westende! Where else would I be?”
I questioned her further. “Are you sure it was Blériot you saw? And that he was making a cross-Channel attempt? How could you see the cigarette-lighting business from so far away? I mean, were you close to where he crashed?”
“It was Blériot,” she insisted impatiently, speaking in English. “I saw him making his plane fly off from the beach with all the people running next to him until he was flying in the air. He had not yet flown across the Channel from Belgium, and his crash was told in all the newspapers, and so was the photo with him smoking a cigarette while he was sitting in the water on top of his plane. It was mostly wood with a little cloth, so he was floating quite well. They used a photo from somebody who was in the lifeboat that was going to rescue him. Myself, I didn’t see the cigarette. I was on the beach not far away and saw the big splash of his plane when he crashed in the water and sat on it, floating when the lifeboat was going to pull the plane back to the beach with rowing.”
Mother’s description was finally clear. After Blériot’s world famous 24-mile cross-Channel flight from France to England, he apparently attempted a longer flight (about seventy miles) from Westende to England. Whether he made another try from Belgium, Mother couldn’t tell me.
It was during the summer of 1936 that I became interested in the matter of nationality and the importance people attached to it. I believe that Raimond may have had the most influence in the matter, though I don’t think it was through a conscious effort on his part. Raimond was fiercely proud that he was French and couldn’t resist any opportunity to celebrate France’s achievements. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t point out, as he read Le Paris Soir newspaper, that a French football team had beaten some European rival. He never missed a chance to demonstrate how the French were good at everything, and he never mentioned or lamented French defeats or losses.
Of special interest to Raimond and me were the biweekly races between the two competing transatlantic ocean liners, Cunard’s Queen Mary and the French Line’s Normandie. Whenever either of them completed a crossing between Europe and New York, le Ruban Bleu (the Blue Ribbon) was awarded to the ship w
hose port-to-port time had beaten the previous record, often by only a few minutes over a trip that took five days. The results of this contest elicited much fanfare and attention in the newspapers.
If Raimond seemed unusually subdued, it usually meant that the Queen Mary had surpassed the Normandie in a recent crossing. He could then be seen reading the paper with deep and frowning attention, carefully scanning every phrase of the newspaper article for minute scraps of information which might explain this untenable state of affairs. When he found a possible reason, there would be a relieved “Aha!” followed by the reading aloud of the explanation: there had been unusual storms or headwinds (the steamers never crossed simultaneously), the Normandie had been forced to take a more circuitous route around icebergs, or heavy fog had forced the Normandie to reduce speed. For Raimond, there was not the slightest doubt that the French were superior in anything that mattered, but he conceded that the British ran a close second.
I had the vague feeling that I was British and that Father had settled the matter in some mysterious way. Nevertheless, I held Raimond’s intelligence in high esteem and found his arguments in favor of being French quite convincing. I wasn’t sure that I had any choice in the matter, and if I did have, I would someday need to decide who was supplying me with the more plausible observations and facts concerning matters of national superiority, Father or Raimond.
It may seem strange that I would consider Raimond’s views more significant than Father’s; the difficulty was that Father never said much to me about anything, whereas Raimond daily referred to some new French triumph or national virtue.
On the other hand, there were the occasional statements from Father for which Raimond did not have a good rebuttal. For instance, Father once said that he felt safer flying on Imperial Airways than he did on Air France. When I asked him why, his reply had been, “The British have better aeroplanes, and the French pilots fly as if they were still fighting aerial dogfights over the trenches.”
When I repeated this comment to Raimond, his answer was in the form of a list of aircraft performance statistics obtained from a book on French aviation. His most recent data was for aircraft that were new in 1930.
I wondered if the British had taken the lead in the intervening six years. Coincidentally, as a Christmas present, Uncle Bob in England had sent me a book showing all the very latest British aircraft. It provided performance data for each aeroplane shown but had nothing on current French aircraft. Most notably, the book showed the two previous years’ winners of the Schneider Cup Seaplane races, and they were both British monoplanes designed by a man named Mitchel, whose seaplanes were apparently winning these races by huge margins.
Raimond pointed out that these single-passenger, one-of-a-kind, specialized planes did not count in the airliner contest under consideration. As to the flying style of Air France pilots, Raimond, who had never flown in a plane, explained that the only time French airline pilots did aerobatics was to avoid bumping into some of the heavier clouds and that they did so very adroitly. It was difficult to argue with him as I, too, had never flown.
Another realm of contest between the two nations were the fast, steam-powered trains, which were setting world records in regular passenger service. England had the Flying Scotsman traveling between London and Edinburgh (at an average speed of something like 130 miles an hour), and France had La Flèche d’Or (the Golden Arrow), running between Paris and Marseille. Hardly a week went by that a new speed record wasn’t reported in the Le Paris Soir, even when the improvement was only a few seconds over a journey that took almost a day.
Father, who read the Daily Mail and the London Times, only occasionally mentioned new records achieved by the Flying Scotsman. The British generally seemed to rest on their laurels for some time before having another try. The French struck me as jumpy and high strung, whereas the British were more easygoing and orderly in the way they went about doing things. I could see virtue in both characteristics: in one, I could see excitement and, in the other, a dignified wisdom and prudence.
Father could convert miles-an-hour to kilometers-an-hour and Raimond could not. Father even did it in his head! Surely this was a clue as to who knew the most. To this observation, Raimond’s rejoinder had been, “Who cares about miles-an-hour? Who else in the world uses miles?” Raimond’s world didn’t extend much farther than continental Europe or, perhaps, French borders.
Why was Father living in France if he thought England the better country? He never said outright that England was better, but implied as much—as opposed to Raimond, whose statements were far more explicit. Why did Father own two French cars and boast that the Peugeot was better than anything the British made, even better mechanically, than the Rolls Royce? And why did he buy all his suits and golf clubs in England? And where did Belgium fit into this complicated picture? After all, Mother occasionally reminded me that I was half Belgian—that’s how she interpreted the fact that she was originally Belgian and had acquired British nationality through marriage. Then, Raimond pointed out that I was actually French because I had been born in France and that French law was unequivocal on that score. There was really no argument about my nationality in his mind.
When I told Father about Raimond’s assertion, his reply was short and to the point: since he was British and I was his son, I was automatically British. To add to this chauvinistic clamor and confuse me even more, Mother outdid herself extolling England and all things British, but then she raved about French fashions and made fun of the way British women dressed. She also thought French perfumes, books, films and plays were superior.
Looking back on it now, it’s obvious that my parents were in the enviable position of being able to buy and own the best of everything that was available in whichever country those items were to be found. As to my own affinities at the time, I think that Mother’s loyalty to Father set the strongest example and that, little by little, I became convinced that I was British, though I felt it possible that something could come along which might make me change my mind. After all, I had never lived in England and hoped I wouldn’t be let down when I went there.
In the meantime, I was tactful about mentioning my sentiments around Raimond. I loved him dearly and didn’t want to hurt his feelings or offend him. When he got a little carried away with his chauvinism, I joined him in his good feelings about France. At school, no one seemed to think I was British, and the subject of nationality never came up.
I already knew that when I was ten I would be going off to boarding school in England. Based on this, it seemed inevitable that I would end up in England on a bigger scale of life than just schooling. Everything I had ever heard about England sounded wonderful, and I used to daydream about all the new and marvelous things I would discover when I finally went there. For now, I reveled in the French aspects of my life and savored the possibility that things might even be better in England. Perhaps I could even do what Father seemed to be doing—enjoying the best of both worlds.
Brenda, who neither asked about the subject nor paid the slightest attention to any of these important considerations and arguments, never swerved from a lifelong fealty to England and maintained she couldn’t wait for the day when she could marry an Englishman and live in England. Where she found such strong convictions puzzled me. I now realize that Raimond had no influence on her the way he had on me.
On my sixth birthday, I received from my Auntie Gladys, Uncle Bob’s wife, a complete English schoolboy’s uniform (minus any school crests, which usually adorned the blazer pocket and flannel cap). The gray flannel blazer, cap, and knee-length shorts were even accompanied by a matching gray flannel shirt and gray knee-high wool socks. I wore this all-gray outfit with pride on weekends when we had guests and when Mother took Brenda and me shopping in the more elegant boutiques of nearby Le Touquet or the finer shops of Paris. It was made clear to me that to be elegant and properly dressed, I had to don my British at
tire.
Auntie Gladys also brought me a Royal Ensign (on a short stick) as a gift when she came to visit us at Villa Sombra, and urged me to fly it on any sand castle I built. Although I didn’t know it then, it’s obvious that my indoctrination was already well in progress.
An incredible and unforgettable scene from that summer which I will never forget occurred on a somber, stormy day in early September. A seaside resort in rainy weather can be a dreary, depressing sight, especially after the summer’s end when there are few souls about. In an effort to fend off the blues, Mother had a fire going in the fireplace. She sat by the hearth sewing contentedly, but I found myself restless and hoping for a clearing in the clouds so I could go out bike riding.
I eventually peered through the rain-spattered window of the Villa Sombra and saw an unbelievable, disquieting sight. An army of darkly clad people was marching out of the sea onto the beach directly in front of our villa. It was nearly high tide, so they weren’t that far away. I hurried to Mother to describe this unsettling scene. She refused to believe me. In a distracted, indifferent tone she just said, “Alain, what are you inventing now? You and your imagination!”
Undaunted by her remark, I went back to the window and looked again. Near the water’s edge, I could now make out numerous fishing boats with small sails and several horse-drawn carts on the beach, some of them in the water up to their axles. On the beach were dozens of people, all scurrying around, occasionally stooping over, picking up large fish and dumping them in huge baskets that dotted the wet sand. A hundred or more men were in the water up to their chests, fully dressed, and marching together in a line, first in one direction, then back again, apparently pulling hard at something under the water.
Once more, I described the scene to Mother in excited tones and finally roused her curiosity. As she came towards the window, I begged her to take me to the beach so we could have a closer look at what the people were doing.