In the Moon

by Alan Holmes

  Following this incident, Brenda had nightmares every night, but the bad dreams miraculously ceased when Madame Poujet gave her a consolation gift of another peeing doll, the twin of the first. I secretly nursed the hope that their dog would take just a small bite out of my behind and that Madame Poujet would then have to buy me a whole room full of electric trains to dispel my nightmares.

  After my expulsion from l’École Sugerre, little time was lost in finding me a new school. For the first time in this process, Father had something to do with it. As far back as I could remember there had been talk of sending me off to an English boarding school when I reached the age of ten. The boarding school would be to prepare me for subsequently attending an English “public school” when I reached the age of fourteen. Mother now wisely urged that I be placed in an English-speaking school in France before going off to England, so that I could adapt to the language change while still close to home. The Dennis School in nearby Sèvres was an English school for boys, and I began attending it in the spring quarter of 1937.

  The staff, including the Headmaster, Mr. Dennis, consisted of only seven people, and they were all English. The school had an enrollment of about eighty boys and was situated in what had once been a luxurious private estate. The property had been abandoned as a residence quite some time before when an obnoxious factory was built next door. The elegant mansion had gone to ruin and was still in a state of extreme neglect and disrepair when I attended the school.

  The house had once had a dozen or more decent-sized bedrooms, and these now served as classrooms for small groups of students. We sat on an assortment of broken-down chairs and benches, and old tables of various sizes and shapes served as desks. This furniture had evidently been bought in junk stores, as no chair or table was identical to any other, and everything was in a dilapidated condition.

  Though I didn’t know it at the time, the Dennis School was exactly what I needed. It was casual and informal in the extreme. The masters and headmaster wandered in and out of the “classrooms,” directing each student briefly, or sometimes collectively, as to our respective assignments. After each of us knew how to proceed, the teacher moved on to the next room, leaving our class of about eight students to fend for ourselves. We were told to help each other as best we could and to leave the things we could not do until the arrival of the next visiting master. That master then helped us with any difficulties we were having, reviewed our individual written work, and set new tasks before leaving us and moving onto another group of students.

  On the whole, the students were well disciplined, doing what they had been instructed to do or making earnest efforts in that direction. There was a fair amount of quiet talking, laughter and merriment during class time, and this was tacitly tolerated.

  Our masters were well liked, and all of them had a good sense of humor. I don’t remember any raised voices or scolding. Their jurisdictions overlapped, and they seemed to be interchangeable in their jobs and assignments. Each one usually knew where the previous visiting master had left off and, if they didn’t, a few simple questions would quickly put them in step.

  My classmates and I had both French and English textbooks, and we moved back and forth between the two languages constantly, almost oblivious to the fact that the change was happening. The masters spoke both languages well, as did most of the students, many of whom were French. The students were from families who were either English or Anglophile, or who anticipated the need for their offspring to be conversant in English as well as in French, as did my own family.

  By the age of seven, I spoke both languages quite fluently, since Father always talked to me in English. My French was better because that’s what Mother, Raimond, and Françoise used around me, and I saw a lot more of them than I did Father. During my years at the French schools I had attended before going to the Dennis School, Mother had sporadically instructed me in the spelling and use of certain English words. Her written English was adequate enough for her to do this.

  I was the youngest pupil at the Dennis School. For reasons unknown, the headmaster had made an exception when admitting me; student ages ranged from eight to fourteen years, and I had just turned seven.

  There was no grading of students, nor were there officially designated classes, or “forms,” as they call them in England. Daily, we found ourselves with new classmates, and we remained in that room with the same students for an entire day. Each of these temporary groups of students consisted of boys of varying ages. The range of ages for students in any given group was seldom more than three years.

  A new organization list was posted every morning showing the reorganized grouping every day. The list also showed each boy the room to which he and his group was assigned on that day. There were about ten groups, and each had its own room for one day; the masters kept track of their visits as they moved from group to group throughout the day by referring to the group’s room number. This may sound complicated, but it seemed to work smoothly.

  As to a method for the daily selection of students, we sometimes discussed among ourselves the possibility of a pattern, but conceded that we couldn’t figure it out. I was already intrigued by the order and organization of everything around me and pondered this question on my own. However, I didn’t daydream or waste much time over the issue as there was always something we were supposed to be doing and little opportunity for wasting time.

  We read our designated texts or scribbled away at our respective assignments and problems which, even within each group, differed from student to student depending on his age and level of ability. However, for a whole period, the subject under study was the same for all students in that classroom. We were urged to compare notes, to help each other, and older students often acted as coaches for the younger ones.

  I remember that on one occasion my group was composed of considerably older boys, and the subject was maths (as we called it). The boys in the group with me had never heard of the “proof-by-nine,” which was taught and used in many French schools, and they were quite amazed by my use of it. In fact, I remember standing before the blackboard, showing the whole class how it was done and then having to give a second performance when the master showed up. He, too, was impressed.

  If we completed our assignments before the arrival of the next visiting master, we chatted amicably until he appeared. The resulting free-for-all discussions were wide-ranging and often became animated but good natured debates. The subjects might be about such things as the Tour de France bicycle race, whether or why the Maginot line was truly impregnable, the latest model Citroën, or a trip someone had taken with his family over the weekend. I remember how pleased I was that older boys would let me join in freely and even listened to me and asked me questions about what I said.

  Once, our discussion was about whether the authorities should have stopped L’Homme Volant who, with wings strapped to his back and much fanfare, had jumped off the Eiffel tower and promptly plummeted to his death. We all chimed in with our two centimes’ worth.

  Upon his arrival in the classroom, the visiting master listened attentively to our comments and chitchat. If he thought the subject worthwhile, he would allow the discussion to continue for a short time and even participate in it.

  There were three periods in a day, each one roughly an hour and forty-five minutes long. The break between the two morning periods was the high spot of the day for me, because the local baker brought over and sold us petits pains, exquisite little loaves of brioche bread still warm from the oven. His bakery was conveniently next door to the school. Mother dutifully armed me every day with a fifty-centimes piece for my purchase. Both the little coin and the small loaf it bought were almost sacred to me, and the coin afforded me my first experience with money and buying.

  No ink wells and no black smocks! We were actually told not to bring pens to the school, and I remember being vexed that I wasn’t going to be using my new f
ountain pen. We used pencils and carried a supply of them in special wooden pencil boxes. It was one of Raimond’s daily tasks to sharpen my stash of pencils with a kitchen knife, and I left for school provisioned with enough sharp pencils to last me all day.

  The other boys carried penknives and sharpened their own pencils in class. Everyone wore a scout’s belt with two special rings built into it. Each boy’s penknife was attached to one of these rings by means of a snap-hook. From the second ring on each belt dangled a three-note whistle that we used during recess to summon friends or for tactics during our games. These items were de rigueur, along with short dark blue scout pants made of a coarse, heavy flannel.

  Mother reluctantly agreed to the flannel pants, which she viewed as ugly, cumbersome and, even worse, they were cut in the French rather than the English style—way too short. The snap-hook belt and the whistle she accepted, but she strongly objected to the penknife as being unsafe for a seven-year-old. But without a penknife, I felt wholly inadequate and unworthy.

  It was Raimond who understood my anguish and who bestowed on me an official scout’s penknife. Although he carefully instructed me in its safe use, I soon confirmed Mother’s foresight when I sharpened a finger instead of the pencil I was holding. Poor Raimond! That was the only scolding he ever received from Mother, and he earned it for an act of kindness towards me. As for me, I lost my right to carry a penknife.

  Mother was a born problem-solver and soon found a way to stop me from pestering her daily for the return of my penknife. With a remarkable degree of trust, she allowed me to wear the penknife on my belt, on condition that I would never actually use it or even open it to admire the blade. The solution suited me fine. The knife dangled from my belt, a symbol of true boyhood, and this, as far as I was concerned, was all that mattered. In addition, I persuaded Mother to agree that on my eighth birthday, I could begin actually using the knife. In the meantime, I was allowed to use my penknife’s corkscrew. In a wine drinking country, no penknife comes without a corkscrew!

  Thereafter, I made a special point of being in the kitchen just before meals so I could officiate at the opening of the wine bottle. The ever-patient Raimond reluctantly allowed me to turn my corkscrew into the cork, as long as it was only a vin de table and not one of the grands crus usually served with Sunday dinner. Raimond did the actual pulling of the cork. He, too, was displaying a great deal of trust in me; it’s so easy to mangle a cork by inserting the corkscrew crookedly.

  Class work at the Dennis School ended at three o’clock, after which we spent roughly two hours at “games.” This was a novelty for me because the French, unlike the English and Americans, saw no need for sports in school. The choice of a sport at the Dennis School was either soccer or “rounders” (a primitive form of baseball), or we could choose free play in the school’s vast garden. We played all games and sports in our street clothes, without special shoes or boots. The school had no showers, no changing room or even a locker room.

  The playing field was in the far reaches of the four-acre garden and well separated from the school’s main building by a grove of large trees. These great oaks, chestnuts, beeches, and lindens were spaced far enough apart so that, after years of neglect, a thick undergrowth of brambles, nettles, various small bushes, and tall grass flourished beneath them. This jungle was crisscrossed with a labyrinth of small, winding paths, ideal for all sorts of games. I have fond memories of heart-pounding excitement as we played “prisoner’s base,” “hide-and-seek,” “capture the flag,” and other games in this small wilderness.

  On rainy days when we couldn’t go out for games, we gathered in the ornately stuccoed drawing room of the old mansion, and the older boys took turns reading to the rest of us as we sat or lounged on the floor. It was here that I first encountered Treasure Island and Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Once a book reading was well under way, I prayed for rain every day because I was so impatient to hear the rest of the tale.

  The soccer and rounders playing field, which had once been a vegetable garden, was surrounded on three sides by high masonry walls and, on the fourth side by the “wilderness” just described. Soccer balls never cleared those high walls or made much headway into the jungle. It would have been an ideal spot for a playing field, except for the fact that it was dominated by a tall, brick smokestack, which looked as if it were leaning towards our field and about to fall on us. The stack usually belched thick black smoke and, on some days, the wind carried the smoke and soot towards our playing field. The factory also emitted a continuous and unpleasant whining noise.

  “Tu es noir comme l’ace de pique!” (“You’re black as the ace of spades!”) was how Mother often greeted me when I returned from that school. The soot from the smoke stack drifted down on us like snow and accumulated everywhere on the grounds, so that we became dirty even when the wind blew the other way. Needless to say, there were now no teachers cleaning me up before sending me home. Mother—who didn’t know about the smokestack that wasn’t visible from the mansion—was baffled as to how I became so grimy.

  I couldn’t understand why Mother was so upset. Even before I attended the Dennis School, Brenda and I always had a communal bath at the end of the day, come rain or shine, whether we needed one or not. So why all the fuss about a little extra dirt? Why not make the bath really worth taking? Besides, getting dirty was one of the great pleasures of life, or so I thought at the time. Perhaps it was those black rings which daily graced the bathtub that upset Mother. In any case, I was not about to enlighten her as to the origin of the dirt, for I really liked this school, and one could never tell what she might do if she knew the truth of the matter.

  Pierre, my best friend at the Dennis School, had no such problem with his mother, whom I heard greeting him cheerfully at the school door with, “Je vois que tu t’es bien amusé à te salir!” (“I see you’ve had all sorts of fun getting yourself dirty!”) She, like Mother, probably didn’t know the real source of the grime and that her son hadn’t deliberately made himself dirty; but unlike Mother, she understood what makes young boys thrive. It wasn’t so much the process of acquiring griminess that mattered, but the fact that being grimy at day’s end usually meant the day had yielded a fair share of unfettered fun.

  At about this time, it must have become clear to Mother that Raimond and Françoise were excellent babysitters for Brenda and me, and that the couple’s work and routine seemed unimpaired by the extra responsibility. Mother queried Raimond and Françoise about their feelings on the subject. They replied that they greatly missed their son, so they were more than happy to have children to watch over, even if it interfered a little with their work.

  The frequency of Minette’s being asked to babysit Brenda and me gradually decreased, and she was tactfully eased out of her job. Minette remained a good friend of Mother’s despite the fact that one of Minette’s traits greatly irritated Father, who described it as “a surfeit of gall.” It was during the Minette phasing-out period that she amply demonstrated what Father meant by this term.

  Mother and Father were having a gala formal dinner for some of his business friends and their wives. There were to be eight guests in all. Because Raimond and Françoise were so busy with preparations, as was Mother, Minette was engaged to see that Brenda and I had our supper in our playroom and that we were put to bed before the guests arrived.

  Late that afternoon, when Minette arrived at the house to assume her duties, she was carrying a suitcase that she managed to smuggle in without anyone noticing. After she had seen to our supper and tucked us in, she pulled out the suitcase and, in the unused guest room, changed into an evening dress and made herself up for an elegant soirée.

  Then, she waited patiently for the right moment and came sweeping majestically down the spiral staircase in the front hall, just as Father’s guests were arriving. Her timing was apparently chosen so that Mother could hardly remonstrate with her over the fact that she
had not been invited to the party.

  Raimond, who was in the entrance hall taking guests’ coats, immediately recognized that there was a problem. He went out to the kitchen to alert Françoise to prepare for an additional guest at the table and then realized there was a further complication.

  At the last minute, one of Father’s out-of-town business colleagues and his wife had unexpectedly arrived in Paris. Father had found it awkward not to invite them to the dinner party, too. Although the invitations had originally gone out for eight guests, Françoise had prudently special-ordered twelve partridges, so that Father’s additional last-minute guests created no problem. However, here was Minette, a thirteenth person at the dinner table. Where would they find an extra partridge at this late hour?

  Raimond rose to the occasion with brilliance, demonstrating how adept and ingenious he could be. He saved the evening by slicing one partridge neatly in half and resting each half on a potato. The two potatoes used for this delicate operation were carefully chosen for size so that the “semi-partridges” rested at the same height on the plate as their unhalved counterparts. For this to work, all the partridges had to be served lying on their sides, instead of on their backs, as is the usual fashion.

  By careful arrangement of parsley and other victuals around the supporting potato on each of the two diminished plates, Raimond succeeded in making each half-partridge look like a whole bird. He then served these half-birds to Mother and to Minette, respectively, taking care to forewarn Mother of his legerdemain. Minette was left to discover the shortfall on her own, and was, so to speak, hoist with her own petard.

  The next day, when Father heard about Raimond’s sleight of hand, he guffawed and was all praise for his feat.

  Minette got herself into even deeper water during dinner by telling off-color jokes of the crudest variety. By the end of the evening, she had consumed too much wine and, in slurred speech, complained that there were no single men at the party. She culminated her performance by making indecent proposals to two of the men in front of their wives.