by Alan Holmes
For quite some time after that we didn’t see Minette. A few months later, Minette restored her friendship with Mother by apologizing for her behavior.
In the middle of that happy spring term at the Dennis School, Mother decided that I needed to have my tonsils out. A year had passed since my appendix operation, and I remained undersized and underweight for my age. Docteur Narnier told Mother that my failure to thrive was because I had inflamed tonsils, and that these prevented me from getting all the air I needed for normal growth and weight gain. The tonsils absolutely had to come out, he insisted.
Docteur Moronguet, the surgeon who had removed my appendix, claimed it was a minor operation that could be done at home. I still marvel at the fact that Father and Mother went along with this harebrained proposal.
It was all supposed to be very simple, but with the day of the surgery approaching, preparations became more and more elaborate. A room in the house was designated as the operating room, and it then had to be given an extra thorough cleaning. It had to have a washbasin so the surgeon could do a good scrub-up before starting the operation. Father’s bathroom had just been remodeled and repainted and was the logical choice: it shone brighter than did any other room in the house. Father was going to be away that week, so after the operation I could be carried to his huge double bed, not ten feet from where the surgery would take place.
Raimond built an elaborate operating table—actually a kitchen chair supported by a framework of lumber. He tilted the chair back to meet the surgeon’s requirements and to place me at the right height for the surgeon’s maximum convenience. In the days preceding the surgery, I was asked to mount this contraption numerous times, much like a prisoner ascending to the guillotine platform several times before his own execution. This allowed Raimond to rehearse various arm and hand motions near my mouth, studying the advantages of this or that height and various tilt angles for the chair and its crude, homemade headrest. Coincidentally, Docteur Moronguet was about the same height as Raimond.
When he had achieved la position optimum, Raimond painted what Mother referred to as “l’assemblage” with white enamel. “So the germs won’t be able to hide on it,” he explained confidently, but the real reason was probably to hide the scruffy appearance of the old chair and the scraps of lumber he had garnered from dubious places. For good measure, he also painted white an old side table on which the surgeon would place his surgical instruments.
The ceiling light fixture was altered to accommodate more light bulbs. A series of oversize, slightly erotic photographs of Rodin statues (among them, Rodin’s “The Kiss”) were removed from the bathroom walls, presumably to avoid distracting the surgeon or perhaps to keep them from becoming blood spattered.
On the big day itself, Raimond draped a white sheet across the end of the bathroom where the toilet was. “Microbes can fly out of toilets like gnats,” he explained. Then Raimond donned a white surgeon’s gown, which Mother had bought him for the occasion. He would be standing by to carry me to Father’s bed. I viewed all these arrangements with apprehension, though everyone, including Mother, was trying to make it look like the preparation for a musical comedy.
At the last minute, Docteur Narnier called to announce that he was tied up on an emergency and wouldn’t be able to attend. Narnier was supposed to administer the anesthetic. Nonetheless, Docteur Moronguet declared there was no reason why Raimond couldn’t do this simple task. “C’est bête comme chou!” (“simple as pie!”) he said. All Raimond had to do was to hold a folded tea towel snugly against my face and trickle the chloroform slowly over the towel until the small measuring bottle was empty. Docteur Moronguet and Raimond discussed the details of this procedure in front of me and rehearsed it (without chloroform) as I listened and watched with growing dismay.
Mother was holding my hand, and saying things like “everything will be all right,” and “there will be no pain.” By now she must have been wondering how she ever got herself into this situation and was probably even more nervous than I.
With the rehearsals completed, Docteur Moronguet went over to the washbasin, rolled up his sleeves and, revealing arms as hairy as an ape’s, set about a very thorough scrub. When he was done, he ordered Raimond to do likewise.
Raimond did as painstaking a job as the surgeon had done and presented his hands to Moronguet for inspection. Moronguet told him to scrub once more. The trouble was that the skin of Raimond’s hands was rough and stained from years of gardening and numerous other dirty jobs he did daily. The many cracks and nicks on his rough hands were deeply encrusted with soil and still looked black against his now-clean skin. After the second scrub, the surgeon looked at Raimond’s hands once more and said impatiently, “I don’t think your hands will ever get any cleaner, which isn’t good. They must be clean because you may have to pass me implements or just hold things for me. However, it will have to do.”
The surgeon now set about unpacking from a little black case an extraordinary assortment of fearsome-looking scalpels, clamps and other surgical implements, which he set out neatly on the white table at my side. Then, out came the little bottle of chloroform. And two more bottles of it, “In case he wakes up too soon,” Moronguet explained.
At that point, I decided that I could take no more and leapt from the assemblage, bolting for the door. I didn’t get far before Raimond, Mother, and the surgeon jointly grabbed me and forcibly lifted me, kicking and screaming, back onto the assemblage. I continued shrieking at the top of my lungs.
“I can’t operate on a child in this condition,” said Moronguet in an irritated tone. “You must calm him down before I do anything more.” Then he went into Father’s bedroom, saying he needed a smoke.
Mother held my hand and said soothingly, “You are now seven. You have reached the age of reason, and you must be reasonable.” But I continued my loud wailing knowing that if I stopped I was doomed; I was prepared to keep up my ruckus forever if need be.
Then Raimond pronounced the magic words, “If you’re good and let us do what we need to do, I have a nice surprise for you!”
“What is it?” I asked, bridling my wails to an abrupt halt.
“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise anymore, but I promise you it will be something extraordinary and that you won’t be disappointed,” said Raimond. He had never let me down or disappointed me, so I weighed his proposal carefully for a few seconds.
“All right,” I agreed grudgingly. However, before the deal was sealed, Raimond extracted one more condition from me. I had to allow him to tie me loosely to the assemblage with a bandage so I wouldn’t “accidentally fall out of the chair while asleep.” I could see through that one, but I already knew I was outnumbered and that it was useless to resist or bargain further. Indeed, I was now seven and discovering that “being reasonable” was really quite easy and might even yield unexpected rewards. So I let Raimond loosely tie my legs, my arms, and even my waist to the assemblage with various pieces cut from a bandage roll.
The doctor returned from his smoke and, without washing his hands a second time, told Raimond he was ready to begin the surgery. It was time to administer the chloroform. Docteur Moronget and Raimond donned the surgical masks that already hung from their necks, and Raimond dutifully placed the folded tea towel over my nose and mouth. I watched him slowly trickle the contents of the little bottle as he moved it in a circle above me, and I felt the cold fluid on my face as it seeped through the tea towel. The smell was intense, and the room started spiraling around me as I slurred the words, “Une belle surprise, n’est ce pas?” (“A nice surprise, right?”).
When I awoke, I found that a ball of burning pain had replaced my throat. Mother was beside me, her eyes red from weeping. I remained in great pain and in a drugged stupor for two days, and all I remember is hearing a lot of hammering and sawing and dreaming that Raimond was building a high tower from which I could launch a gli
der. In my dream, I owned a glider big enough for me to climb into and fly. For some reason, I never got around to flying it, though I climbed into it.
When I finally woke up properly, my throat was still painful, and I felt even weaker than I had following the appendicitis operation.
I had apparently lost a huge amount of blood. It seems the operation had not been very far along when I started hemorrhaging badly, and Docteur Moronguet had struggled long and furiously to bring the bleeding under control. He had not been able to remove my tonsils because he could not see them in the cascade of blood.
Mother told me many years later that, at one point, Moronguet seemed to panic. He had yelled angrily at Raimond to apply pressure on my neck. Raimond had stayed calm, followed instructions adeptly and even made some remark which seemed to calm the agitated surgeon.
Once the bleeding was under control, the doctor announced to Mother, who had been holding my hand the whole time, that I might have lost too much blood to survive the next few hours. Although blood transfusions were known at the time, they were rarely tried; furthermore, I wasn’t at a hospital.
Once the surgeon had done all he could, Raimond lifted my limp body out of the assemblage and carried me to the bed in Father’s room, where he and Mother stood vigil over me for three hours until I awoke.
It was back to drinking beef blood, and when I was back on my feet, two weeks later, I weighed considerably less than I did before the operation. I was a walking skeleton. Worse yet, I still had my wretched tonsils.
Oh, yes—the surprise! After I had spent five days in Father’s bed, Raimond carried me to my bedroom, which was also our playroom. There, it took me a moment to notice the change in my electric train setup. When I scrutinized the foot-high platform on which a simple circular train track had previously been assembled, I saw that the track now had a switch point creating a branch line which forked off the platform. Supported on a series of realistic-looking piers, this branch of the track descended in a spiral to the level of the floor. The track then disappeared into a tunnel under the platform and re-emerged on the other side. From there, it spiraled back up onto the platform and rejoined the original loop at yet another switch point. And parked on the track was a new locomotive connected to a brand new passenger carriage.
The loop under the platform had been entirely Raimond’s inspiration, and the idea had only come to him after considerable thought and debate with Mother as to how he could provide me a surprise worthy of his promise. Mother told me that the day after my operation, he had taken the bus into Paris to buy the extra pieces of track with his own money and that he had worked late into the night to put it all together before I was transferred back to my own bedroom.
After Raimond had finished his construction work, he discovered to his dismay that my little flea market locomotive could not pull my one little wagon up the spiraling slope of the track without spinning its wheels. Raimond had been about to dash back into Paris to buy me a more powerful and heavier locomotive when Mother stepped in, went into the city herself, and actually bought me a new locomotive and a passenger car.
Mother had literally been derailed in her goal to keep me from being spoiled, and my railroad empire had undergone a major expansion without my having to suffer a bite in my derrière from that nasty Poujet dog.
CHAPTER 8
The Great Rabbit Race and a Horse Named Lili
In the Spring of 1937, Father bought a summer house called “les Buissons” (“The Bushes”) in Condette, a sleepy farming hamlet about six kilometers inland from Hardelot. Because he considered “les Buissons” too mundane, the first thing he did was to give the house a more original name. Raimond was asked to paint a new sign proclaiming it to be “Villa Champs de Mai” (“Villa Fields of May”). Mother’s birthday was in May, and Father had bought the house that month, announcing that it was a birthday present.
Years later, Mother confided to me that she would have much preferred to continue renting a villa in Hardelot, a lively, bustling seaside resort, a place she loved as much as I did. Condette was quiet and peaceful, but too quiet and too peaceful for everyone in the family except Father. He abhorred the Sunday crowds on the beach, and since he was only there on weekends when the crowding reached a crescendo, Hardelot was far from ideal for him. Father longed to spend his leisure hours in a more serene and rustic setting. His goal was achieved in spades when he bought the villa in Condette.
I hadn’t been in Condette more than a day before it sank in that Villa Sombra was to be the last villa we would rent in Hardelot, and I was thrown into a deep gloom over my new surroundings. I could see Mother was not her usual cheerful self either, but she was a good sport and not inclined to protest or resist Father, so she promptly threw her considerable energies into making the new house a success.
Father immediately started transforming Villa Champs de Mai into his dream house. This involved remodeling four bedrooms downstairs and adding four new bedrooms upstairs in what had been a huge attic. In each of the eight new bedrooms, he installed electric lighting and wash basins with hot and cold running water. The original house had been a hunting lodge entirely devoid of these amenities. A single hand pump in the kitchen had taken care of all the household’s water needs.
Father imported from England a special brand of stove, the famous Aga cooker, probably the best in the world at the time. In France, it’s hard to imagine a household item that plays a more important role in daily life than the stove, yet the French had nothing that compared with this magnificent British invention. The Aga was far too elaborate for Françoise, whose short temper was further shortened by the fact that she couldn’t read the English instruction manual. However, with Mother’s assistance in translating, and with technical help from Raimond, she gradually mastered this Rolls Royce of stoves and, by the end of the summer, she liked it so much that she wanted one for the kitchen in Ville-d’Avray.
Though lacking other amenities, one thing the house did have was a spacious and well-built larder. Three huge meat hooks attached to its rafters hinted at whole carcasses of wild boar or stags that may have hung there in times past. In spite of this excellent larder that stayed at 55 degrees Fahrenheit no matter what the outdoor temperature, Father insisted that he wanted an electric refrigerator, something rarely found in French households in those days. It was such an exotic item that the only model he could find was an American-made Frigidaire. During a visit to the United States, Father had developed a taste for dry martinis and had become addicted to having ice in his drinks.
We had always managed nicely without a refrigerator, and Françoise couldn’t see why things shouldn’t continue that way. She refused to turn on the refrigerator, protesting that she didn’t like its quiet humming. However, the refrigerator wasn’t a total loss. Françoise unplugged it and found it a convenient place to store bits of string, reusable scraps of paper, and other miscellaneous odds and ends that didn’t quite seem to fit in anywhere else and that she wanted out of sight.
Nevertheless, ice was now needed for Father’s martinis, and Mother, who knew that having a harmonious household depended on humoring both Françoise and Father, made a point of buying a very large block of ice from the wine merchant in Étaples before Father’s weekend return from Paris. In the larder, covered with old cartons to delay its thawing, the ice lasted us through the weekend.
The block was large enough so that it also provided crushed ice for a hand-cranked ice cream maker, which made ice cream far superior to anything a refrigerator could produce or that we could buy in any shop. Françoise’s most famous dessert was melon ice cream.
It was Raimond who deserved the real credit for the making of this exquisite confection. After Françoise rounded up the heavy cream, crushed melon pulp, sugar, a pinch of salt, and some ground vanilla, it was Raimond who did the hard work of cranking the ice cream maker’s handle for at least twenty minutes. As this mast
erpiece neared completion, I made it a point to be present for the removal of the paddles that churned the ingredients. Someone had to undertake the messy chore of licking off the gobs of ice cream that clung thereto, and I gallantly volunteered for the task.
Before completion of the new construction, Villa Champs de Mai appeared run down and had a fusty smell. The place was depressing in the extreme, and I sorely missed the cheerful and festive appearance of the villas we had rented in Hardelot. I longed for the beach and I missed the sea. Instead, the house in Condette fronted on the village’s communal pasture, a vast meadow, at least a mile across. Almost every farmer in Condette owned one or more cows, and some fifty animals grazed in this marshy pasture right in front of our house. I didn’t have anything against cows, but I found their lowing at first dawn a poor substitute for the steady rumbling of the ocean’s breakers, loud when the tide was up, faint at low tide, but always present in the background.
I missed Hardelot’s animated passing scene and the sound and promise of children playing on the beach. No shrimping, no sand castles, canals or dams, no sand sculpture contests, no sand yacht watching, and no high speed bicycling into tide pools—in short, where was fun?
Upon hearing of our new house in Condette, I had anticipated with great pleasure riding my beloved pale yellow trolley to Hardelot every day. I remembered that the little streetcar passed within a quarter mile of Villa les Buissons during the summer we had spent in Condette three years before. The daily ride to Hardelot could well have been a pleasant and exciting way to retain our ties with that seaside paradise. However, the very year Father bought the house in Condette, the trolley service was discontinued. Most of the residents of Hardelot now owned cars, and the women shrimpers alone couldn’t make it pay.