In the Moon

by Alan Holmes

  In defense of my shortcomings in this regard, I should add that none of the children on the playgrounds of schools I had attended ever owned or played with any kind of ball. I can only conclude that young French children of the time didn’t make a habit of playing with balls, as most English boys apparently did.

  The reason for Father’s sudden interest in me, I later learned from him, was not some innate parental instinct awakening in him, but that Auntie Gladys had put a bee in his bonnet. Gladys had expressed concern about my ability to throw and catch a ball, “Something they don’t do much in France,” she had said in a cautionary way to Father. “The ability to throw or catch a ball is essential to even rudimentary popularity and success, if not survival, in an English boarding school,” she had added. Since my birth, Gladys had never missed a chance to needle Father about bringing me to England for what she called “a proper education and upbringing.”

  I greeted Father’s interest in my ability to catch a ball with no small apprehension. After all, he had never participated in any athletic activity with me, except once. That was when he carried me, protesting and squealing in terror, into the cold ocean in Hardelot. I had been enjoying a ride on his shoulders as he walked along the beach when he unexpectedly turned and waded out to deep water and dropped me in. The purpose of this deed was “to see if the boy could swim,” he later explained to Mother. He did, of course, rescue me when he found out I couldn’t, but the episode had left me nervous about any athletic activity in his presence.

  After breakfast, I discovered to my dismay that Father was serious when he took the blue ball out of the garage and ordered me to join him on the front lawn. Standing about twenty feet from me, he lobbed the ball so that it headed for my knees. I managed to deflect it with my hands but not catch it.

  “You’re supposed to catch it, Sonny, not just fend it off to the side!” he said with a touch of sarcasm. I ran after the ball, carried it back to him, and backed off the required twenty feet. “Next time, I’d like you to throw it to me, instead of carrying it to me,” he now said, barely concealing his impatience.

  Once again, he threw the ball at me. It was heading right for me, somewhat faster than I considered safe, so I turned and ducked to avoid its hitting me in the face. I ran after the ball and attempted to throw it back to him. I was off the mark by a wide margin, and it rolled on down a slight hill, forcing Father to go after it. When he returned to his position, he paused before another throw and said, “The point of all this is for you to catch the ball, not duck when it comes at you! And do make some effort to put your hands where the ball is going to be, or you’ll never catch it, Sonny!”

  This time, the ball came at me, but with an upward arching trajectory. I put my two hands out where I thought the ball was going to be, but it fell short. We continued in this fashion two more times, with the ball once completely out of reach as it flew over me, and the other time with it once again falling far short of where I was standing. On Father’s fourth throw, its trajectory actually coincided with the space between my two hands. At least his throwing was improving! But I was so startled by the coincidence that I failed to grasp the ball as it slipped through my hands.

  “It’s no use, butterfingers! You’re absolutely hopeless!” Father said, sounding displeased and exasperated. He walked away, leaving me grateful that this humiliating episode was over and that he didn’t have his heart in this project any more than I did. I went to the garage, put the ball back in its place of disgrace, wheeled out my bike and pedaled around the periphery of the garden ten times at breakneck speed. I was very good at bike riding. And tree climbing, too. Who needed to catch a ball, and why would anyone want to?

  There were few things Father didn’t do well, but teaching a young child something completely new happened to be one of those things. Even though I still remember the ball-catching fiasco vividly, I never attached much importance to it; I adored Father, and he could do nothing very wrong in my eyes. He occasionally did things I didn’t like, but I believed he knew best. I always thought of him in terms of the good things he did for us—such as providing us with a nice house and a huge garden to play in, employing Raimond and Françoise, and reading to us every night if he arrived home before Brenda and I went to bed.

  Father was a superb reader of children’s stories. After our bath and supper, Brenda and I went to the living room in our pajamas, where, having just returned from the office, he usually sat enjoying a glass of sherry. Sitting on the arms of Father’s huge armchair, on either side of him, we listened attentively as he read to us from Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Babar the Elephant, or from one of the many Beatrix Potter books. His voice was gentle and beautifully modulated, neither sentimental nor syrupy, and his innate kindness, his respect and love of things simple and true came across in the reading. His marvelous sense of humor made the funny parts of a book seem even funnier than when someone else read them.

  Brenda and I saw very little of our father. On Saturdays, he often played golf all day, so that left Sunday dinner and Sunday afternoon as the only times we were with him. On these occasions, the dictum “children should be seen and not heard” generally prevailed, though I was allowed to speak if I first raised my hand and was recognized.

  I was expected to show up on time for dinner with my hands and face clean and my hair combed. On one occasion, I had dilly-dallied too long in the garden and, pressed for time, I thought I could get away without washing my hands if I just wiped them on my pants. I certainly couldn’t show up late for dinner; that, too, was a mortal sin in our household.

  The fact that my hands had not recently seen soap and water was instantly apparent to Father, who dragged me by the collar to the cloakroom. There, holding me bent over the toilet, he swung a long-handled hairbrush at my posterior with high velocity. The burning sting of that one spanking stayed with me all afternoon. Before returning to the dining room, he scrubbed my hands vigorously with a nailbrush until they were red and sore. That was the only time Father ever spanked me, and I made sure it never happened again.

  After dinner on Sundays, my parents had coffee in the garden if it were sunny and warm, or in the drawing room if it were rainy or cold. When we didn’t have guests, reading after lunch on Sunday afternoons was a lifelong ritual for my parents. As Mother and Father both submerged into the silence of their books, the quiet hiss of a smoldering log in the fireplace and an occasional sigh of contentment from Jock on the carpet were the only sounds to be heard.

  Later in the afternoon, if it weren’t raining, Father usually went out to do some gardening. He lavished his attention on two rock gardens that grew luxuriously and contained mostly wild flowers he had carefully brought home from distant places, including some plants from Africa. The rock gardens were off limits to Raimond, except that he was expected to weed and water them in a very specific manner, something he did conscientiously.

  Because Mother felt that Father saw so little of Brenda and me, we were expected to stay in the living room with them on Sunday afternoons. Since they were both engrossed with their reading, I was allowed a small toy with which I could play. Making highly authentic-sounding engine noises was an essential accompaniment to the pushing of a toy car along the carpet, but my doing this apparently drove Father crazy.

  Mother, who dedicated her life to the cause of family harmony, solved the problem by providing me with what she called “ton jouet du dimanche aprés-midi” (“your Sunday afternoon toy”). It was still a push-along toy, but one that required no noisy renditions to provide me with gratification. It had been a Christmas gift from Minette to Mother, an elegant and unique belt, which Mother had decided to banish from her wardrobe.

  The reason this belt held such attraction for me was because it was a superbly executed, though stylized, representation of a snake. Mother couldn’t stand the sight of snakes and wanted nothing to do with it. Its exquisite rendering of a serpent
’s appearance was both its virtue and its curse. It was made of hundreds of small metal pieces that interlocked and overlapped, forming the scales of the serpent’s skin. The belt’s clever design endowed the reptile with graceful flexibility and gave it credible solidity. Resting on the floor, it would have felt like a real snake if you had stepped on it. The bright green eyes were fake emeralds, and its two fearsome fangs somehow latched into the tapered tail to close the belt.

  Noiselessly, I made the snake slide around chair legs and under sofas. Jock eyed it nervously and moved to another spot on the carpet whenever it slithered within a few feet of him. I adored my Sunday afternoon toy and could play with it contentedly for hours, sometimes pretending it was a sleek and super-silent high-speed train.

  Long drives in the surrounding countryside were another occasional Sunday afternoon diversion. Again, Mother saw the drives as an opportunity for Father to get to know Brenda and me, despite the fact that all we did was sit in the back seat without saying much.

  Here too, I indulged in that same pastime—or bad habit, depending on your point of view—of imitating car engines. Actually, I wasn’t imitating a car. Rather, I thought of myself as a car when I made these noises. Although I knew Father didn’t like my sounds, I was sure I could get away with my renditions whenever the real car’s engine was running loudly enough to blend with the quieter purring of my own engine.

  I was so good at controlling these sounds that I successfully indulged in my motoring ritual on numerous outings until one day when, in the middle of nowhere, Father suddenly slowed and brought the car to a stop. My own engine slowed down commensurate with the deceleration of Father’s car, and I shrewdly switched off my own engine and coasted silently before the real car’s engine reached an idle. After stopping the car, Father got out and looked under the hood, then climbed back into the car saying, “That’s very odd, I could swear I heard a strange engine noise—it was quite distinct—and the pitch increased whenever I speeded up and decreased when I slowed. But when I opened the bonnet, the noise had completely disappeared!” Father was easily upset, if not obsessed, by strange or unwanted noises and went out of his way to pursue them to extinction.

  Mother, who was well acquainted with my automotive behavior and preferences, surveyed the back seat, saw me doing my best to look innocent and said, “It’s Alain again, pretending he’s a Citroën.”

  Father turned and looked me straight in the eye and said quietly, “Alan, I happen to be driving a very comfortable and quiet-running Peugeot, the sound of whose smooth engine I profoundly enjoy—not one of those noisy Citroëns. Would you be kind enough to park your car and join me in the Peugeot as a silent passenger?” I quietly heaved a sigh of relief and complied with his request.

  On another Sunday afternoon, Father had gone out to do some gardening, and Mother had stayed indoors to work on a difficult picture puzzle whose pieces were spread out on a card table in front of the living room window. Every now and then, I arose from playing with my snake on the floor, stood beside Mother a few minutes, picked up a piece, popped it into its rightful place, and returned to my snake. It was while inserting a piece that I glanced out of the window and noticed Father traveling across the lawn in great haste, carrying a watering can in each hand. I didn’t give the matter much thought.

  Mother’s puzzle, which represented the Coronation of King George VI in Westminster Abbey, was nearing completion. I was fascinated by the details of the King’s regalia and the various surrounding personages in their elaborate finery as portrayed in reduced size on the puzzle’s box cover. I was anxious to see the full-size completed picture, so I eventually abandoned the snake and devoted my entire attention to helping Mother put the last few pieces into place. As I worked at this task, I once more saw Father dash by the window with his watering cans.

  Mother was sitting with the window to her side and must have seen him out of the corner of her eye. “Who was that going by the window just now?” she asked, deep in thought over the piece she was holding.

  “That was Father,” I replied. “He’s been going by every five minutes like that.”

  “That couldn’t have been Father. It had to be Raimond. Whoever it was went by very fast, and you know Father never runs,” she said, still in a distracted voice and paying more attention to the puzzle than on what she might have seen through the window.

  “Raimond and Françoise went to Paris to see a film,” I reminded her. “I’m sure it was Father,” I added casually.

  “I refuse to believe it. Your father has never run in his life. He does not know how to run—why would he start running today, of all days?” she insisted. Then absent-mindedly, for she was still focusing on the puzzle, she said, “I’d have to see it again to believe it.”

  We both waited, looking out of the window and, before long, saw Father saunter by in the opposite direction, carrying two watering cans that seemed to be empty. “There—you see!” said Mother, “He is walking in his usual slow, normal way. I don’t know who it was I saw running before, but it wasn’t your father.”

  I told her to keep watching out the window and popped another piece into place on the puzzle, quietly certain we would see him race by once more.

  Sure enough, a couple of minutes later, Father again passed the window doing the hundred-yard dash, carrying two large and unmistakably full watering cans. This time, I noticed the reason for his haste. The lower seams on both metal watering cans were leaking badly and were squirting small jets of water in all directions around him as he ran.

  Mother burst into laughter, and the more she laughed, the harder she laughed—peals of laughter, until the tears streamed from her eyes. When Father whizzed by five minutes later, she was still laughing uncontrollably. I began to worry about her, so I opened the window and, as Father walked by once more with his empty cans, I told him Mother was acting strangely and that he’d better come in and see.

  When Father arrived in the drawing room, he asked Mother why she was laughing so hard. “Because I’ve never, ever seen you run before—I didn’t think you could!” she said, slurring her words as she struggled to speak between bursts of laughing.

  “Of course I can run,” said Father indignantly, “when I have to—those watering cans were leaking badly, and there would be no water left in them if I walked,” he added defensively. This only brought forth even more laughter from Mother, who had by now completely lost control of herself and sounded more as if she were crying than laughing. Father led Mother to her bed and called Docteur Narnier who immediately came over and decided that she needed a sedative. At dinner that evening, she was better, but would occasionally have an isolated and unprovoked fit of laughing. Fifty years later, I could still start her laughing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, just by mentioning Father and his leaky watering cans.

  I too, had never seen Father run, nor had I ever seen him in a hurry, except on that one occasion. It was completely out of character for him to run or hurry. He would rather have missed a train than run to catch it. I once heard him say, “I haven’t run since I was a boy. It’s just not dignified for a grown man to run, unless the house is burning down.”

  One of Father’s friends was an aviator who went by the name of Mormilly. In those days, aviators were usually people who were independently wealthy and could afford to dabble in aviation. Or they were men who had flown in World War I, and had so distinguished themselves in aerial combat that they were sought after as test pilots or stunt flyers. Mormilly came under both headings.

  One of Mormilly’s favorite stories was about how the French trained and graduated their fighter pilots during World War I. According to him, on the day of their first solo flight, the student pilots were provided with a plane that was identical to the one in which they had trained. As they sat in the cockpit ready for takeoff, they were told that the controls (rudder pedals, joy stick and throttle lever) had all been r
eversed in their mode of operation. “That way, we ended up with pilots who really had their wits about them,” Mormilly boasted. He never told us what happened to the ones they didn’t end up with.

  In the autumn of 1936, Mormilly was involved in the development and prototype construction of the first French warplane to have a retractable landing gear system, and he invited Father to witness the plane’s maiden flight. The event took place on a Saturday afternoon, and the whole family was invited to be present on this momentous occasion. Mother, knowing of Raimond’s passion for aviation, convinced Father that we should bring him along.

  We arrived at Orly aerodrome (in those days, just a grass field with a few corrugated steel sheds), proceeded to one of the hangars, and found Mormilly who was wearing a huge, leather flying coat. He was up on a stepladder tinkering with the plane’s engine. Standing nearby were not only a handful of his work associates (some in uniform) but also a coterie of Mormilly’s civilian drinking cronies.

  The plane was a single engine monoplane of medium stature, too boxy to be a fighter plane and too light to be a bomber, and ugly as a warthog, as were all France’s warplanes of the period. Mormilly remained on his ladder for well over an hour, during which time his audience waited patiently, talking and joking among themselves.

  Although the plane was in a hangar, its tail poked out through the large, open door. It was a bleak November day with a light overcast. There was a chilly breeze and, even in the hangar, out of the wind, it was cold. Mother, Brenda and I retired to the warmth of our Peugeot that was parked just outside the hangar. We waited there until Raimond came out to tell us that Mormilly was ready.