In the Moon

by Alan Holmes

  I bravely swung my club, but it went low. The hard surface and dry appearance of the cow pie turned out to be superficial, and a spray of the softer underlying material went flying in all directions, but mainly in the direction of Brenda. As I stood, stunned and appalled at the sight of Brenda’s ruined dress, she immediately accused me of deliberately spattering her with meadow muffin and ran home wailing.

  Filled with regret and fear, I headed reluctantly towards our house. I could see Brenda already laying out a case against me, charging me with malice aforethought, and I dreaded Mother’s reaction. By the time I reached home, the tears of remorse that ran down my cheeks were also tears of genuine fright and apprehension.

  Indeed, it turned out that Brenda had done her dirty work well. Mother was livid and berated me savagely before I had even started to tell her my side of the story. I had never seen her so angry. I kept protesting my innocence but could make no headway swimming against her tirade of angry words. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said—in her mind, what I had done was avoidable and a piece of mischief. I could have been reasonable and resisted the temptation to be naughty, and that was the end of the story as far as she was concerned. My tears and declarations of repentance failed to assuage her anger or spare me from a vigorous spanking on my bare thighs.

  The worst part of this horrid tale was that Brenda declared that she would never play golf with me again and, without her companionship and a little competition, I had no choice but to retire from the game at the age of eight.

  Our visit to the doctor earlier in the summer had reminded Mother that she still had to do battle with my tonsils, which she had failed to conquer when the surgery in Ville-d’Avray was dangerously botched. I also think she may have been trying to kill two birds with one stone: having an operation would keep me out of mischief for a good two weeks. In those days, patients were kept in bed that long for the most minor of surgeries.

  While she was at it, Mother decreed that Brenda’s tonsils would also be removed, though I have no recollection that Brenda was having any problems with hers. Mind you, I wasn’t having any problems either. Still, those vicious tonsils were there, lurking in my throat, waiting for an opportunity to attack, and had to be exterminated. The Boulogne doctor was all for the surgery, and it was agreed that Brenda and I would be “done” at the main hospital there.

  Raimond came with us to the hospital. Brenda and I drew straws to see who would be the first to have the surgery. Brenda drew the short straw but refused to go first, so I gallantly offered to do so. I took care not to mention to her that this was, in fact, the better place in line since it shortened the anxious waiting.

  Following the surgeries, Raimond carried Brenda and me, both of us still unconscious, to the car; we were still under the anesthesia when we reached home. Everything had supposedly gone well this time. But in my case, the tonsils “grew back,” and a third assault was made on them three years later.

  The first few days following our double tonsillectomy in Boulogne are a blur. I do remember that on the first night after the surgery, I couldn’t sleep because of the pain in my throat, and that Father brought me a glowworm in a jar to help take my mind off my suffering. When the glowworm failed in its mission, Father stayed up a good part of the night, reading chapter after chapter of Milne’s Winnie the Pooh to me.

  A welcome distraction from the numerous miseries of that summer was a superb mahogany canoe. Father’s old army friend, Uncle Hill, was frequently a houseguest at Villa Champs de Mai and, as a token of appreciation, he offered to buy us a sand yacht. But for reasons I have always felt were misguided, Father asked that he change the gift to a canoe. Father claimed a canoe was safer and that we would therefore enjoy it more.

  The mahogany canoe uncle Hill gave us came equipped with a sail, leeboards and a rudder. Since canoes are tippy even without a sail, it’s hard to imagine anything more prone to tipping over, and therefore less safe, than our sailing canoe.

  We car-topped the canoe to Hardelot and then carried it across the sand to the water’s edge, where Father spent most of the morning rigging the sail, rudder and leeboards. The wind usually came up during the morning, and by the time he was ready to sail it, the sea was too rough for a canoe, forcing him to cancel his plans. Some mornings, the wind didn’t come up at all, so the sea was calm enough for the canoe, but he couldn’t use the sail to any effect. In Hardelot, there was either no wind or too much wind for a canoe, and seldom anything in between.

  On windless days, Father sometimes took us out for a brief paddle without the sail. I remember these awkward outings and how, with every move Father made, I could feel the canoe tremble with his nervousness. On one occasion, when he took Brenda, Mother, and me for a canoe paddle, I was sitting motionless in the bow, enjoying the ride, when all of a sudden the canoe tipped over. Mother, who wanted to see how far we were from shore, had apparently turned around too vigorously and leaned a bit too much to one side. Fortunately, Brenda and I were wearing inflatable life preservers so we had a pleasant, if unexpected, swim. Father was visibly upset by the incident, even though the water was only three feet deep, so that he and Mother were easily able to right the swamped craft and drag it back to shore as Brenda and I sat in it, waist-deep in water and bemused.

  This incident convinced Father that canoes, like sand yachts, were extremely unsafe, and he resolved that he would never take us out again. I was quite sure that sand yachts were nowhere near as dangerous as canoes and told him so. Father didn’t appreciate my observation and only said, “What do you know about it, Sonny?” The irony was that I knew a great deal about it, having watched sand yachts sailing along the beach for hours on end, often in strong winds. I had never seen anyone injured in spite of witnessing numerous capsizes at high speed and seeing passengers flipped harmlessly onto the relatively yielding sand surface.

  Our beautiful canoe lay upside-down on sawhorses inside the garage until Uncle Bob and his family came to Condette for a two-week stay. Uncle Bob apparently loved sailing as did his two children, Peter and Betty. For a month every summer, Bob’s family rented and sailed aboard a large, comfortable sloop on the Norfolk Broads, a labyrinthine river delta in eastern England. Uncle Bob had brought his 16mm movie projector to Condette and showed us films he had taken of their sailing holidays. It was obvious from his home movies that Uncle Bob, Peter and Betty were excellent sailors, though Auntie Gladys, who went along, never seemed very comfortable about the sport.

  At the time of their visit to Villa Champs de Mai, Peter was fourteen, and Betty was sixteen. Uncle Bob and my two cousins admired our canoe and longed to try sailing it, asking repeatedly if they could do so. On the weekends, when Father was there, he never suggested they go for a sail. However, during the week, when Father was in Paris working, Mother was desperate in her efforts to entertain them and seized upon their request with enthusiasm. I had been thrilled by the home movies of their sailing and pestered Mother to let me go on this canoe outing. She agreed, but only on condition that I would wear my inflatable life preserver the entire time.

  Uncle Bob had heard about our various canoeing misadventures from Mother and carefully planned our sailing expedition to avoid such problems. He chose to sail the canoe at Étaples, where the estuary of the River Canche provided relatively wave-free water, even in a decent wind.

  Raimond found an old piece of carpet to protect the roof of Uncle Bob’s huge Delage motorcar and, with some difficulty, the two men and Peter loaded the canoe on top of it. The canoe was quite heavy and the flat roof of this boxy car was so high off the ground that only Uncle Bob, who stood six-and-a-half feet tall, could hoist his end of the canoe into place. Raimond and Peter, at the other end, couldn’t lift it high enough and had to resort to using a stepladder. Anticipating the unloading process, when Raimond would not be present to help, Mother had the men strap the ladder onto the top of her tiny Simca that would accompany the b
ig car to the launch site. Uncle Bob referred to the Simca, almost concealed beneath the cumbersome ladder, as “the fire engine brigade.”

  When we reached Étaples, Uncle Bob and Peter had the canoe in the water and ready to sail in ten minutes, as though they had done it daily for a living.

  I had donned my inflatable life preserver even before leaving the house in Condette. I wanted to make it quite clear I intended to heed Mother’s injunction and wasn’t taking any chances on her developing qualms about Uncle Bob taking me on this voyage. Mother didn’t seem to notice and made no comment as Uncle Bob matter-of-factly told me to climb into the bow of the canoe when it was time to set sail.

  Uncle Bob removed his shoes and socks and handed them to Auntie Gladys, rolled his flannel trousers to just below the knee and gingerly clambered into the stern of the canoe. As he did so, I felt the bow rise perceptibly.

  Mother, Auntie Gladys, Betty, and Brenda waved us goodbye and drove off to nearby Le Touquet in Bob’s car to shop the boutiques in that posh seaside resort.

  With Uncle Bob puffing contentedly at his pipe and controlling the rudder lines, Peter amidships in charge of the lateen sail, and me officially designated the bow lookout, we sailed easily and pleasantly upstream. The Canche River became tree-lined and picturesque as we proceeded inland and the trees and bordering meadows were a lush green, as were the reeds and water plants edging the river. I loved the abundant and overpowering greenness of the scene and was ecstatically happy as we glided along at a good clip, helped by an incoming tide and a good tail wind. We eventually sighted a stretch of shore with a small beach. There, we landed the canoe in order to enjoy the picnic lunch that Françoise had packed for us.

  Uncle Bob strongly resembled Father, except that he was much taller, stronger, and heavier, though not fat. He differed from Father in one other important way: he was relaxed and easy-going. This characteristic quickly earned him my devoted admiration and firmly established his position as my favorite uncle. He consumed most of a liter of red wine with his lunch, after which he had a snooze in the deep grass in the shade of a tree. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone snore and, for years thereafter, I believed that only giant people like Uncle Bob snored.

  While he slept, Peter and I tried to catch some minnows, using the picnic basket and a piece of string as fishing implements. In our quest, we wandered downstream from the beach where we had landed. At a place where the shore consisted of a steep earth embankment, I stood too close to the water’s edge, causing the bank to crumble, and I fell into the river. It probably wasn’t very deep, but it was too deep for me to touch bottom. True to my promise, I had never removed my life preserver, so I started to float easily downstream in the current, which had changed direction when the tide turned during our lunch.

  Peter ran along the bank, calling out and instructing me to paddle towards the shore. But the life preserver was so large and awkward that I found it impossible to make much headway by dog paddling. Although the coast was still a long way off, I wondered if I would be carried out to sea before anyone could rescue me. For the moment, I wasn’t too worried and watched as Peter ran ahead of me along the bank.

  He finally came to a bend in the river where it widened, and the shore once again became a gently sloping beach. There, he entered the water fully dressed and waded out to meet me. As I floated past him, Peter was able to grab my outstretched hand and managed to drag me back to shore, even though the water came almost to his shoulders. Once on shore, we both agreed that it would be wise not to tell his father about my tumble into the river.

  When we returned to the picnic site, we found Uncle Bob just waking up and were taken aback as he said quite casually, “Hullo, have you chaps been swimming? What a splendid idea!”

  Peter and I were both still sopping wet, so I was amused by the fact that it didn’t strike him as odd that we were both fully dressed. We had on basic British schoolboy outfits: gray flannel knee-length trousers, gray flannel shirts, and Peter was even wearing his knitted school tie—hardly swimming attire! Uncle Bob was either very relaxed after all that wine, or perhaps he thought it was none of his business if Peter and I chose to go swimming in our street clothes.

  We rounded up the picnic things, and the three of us clambered back into the canoe and pushed off. We now headed back towards Étaples, doing a lot of tacking back and forth across the River Canche, which wasn’t much more than two hundred feet wide where we were sailing. An outgoing tide helped us against what had become a blustery head wind. Uncle Bob was kept busy shifting his great weight an inch or so each time a gust was upon us and whenever we tacked. I marveled at how nimbly he did just the minimum necessary shifting and how well he had the situation in hand.

  We eventually reached the place along the shore in Étaples from where we had set out. Uncle Bob looked at his watch and announced that we still had plenty of time and that we would continue our course towards the sea, past the colorful fleet of fishing smacks tied along the pier in Étaples. I was thrilled that our voyage wasn’t over yet.

  After we sailed past the hustle and bustle of the fishing boats unloading their catch, Uncle Bob crossed to the south edge of the widening estuary where the bordering reed beds made the water less choppy. Once in calmer water, we glided swiftly on a close reach, parallel to and near the edge of the reeds.

  The tranquility of our journey was unexpectedly broken by a great roar that grew louder and louder. Suddenly, we had a glimpse of its source as a large airliner loomed over the reeds, coming straight for us. We were at the north end of Le Touquet aerodrome and directly beneath the flight path of any aircraft taking off.

  The gigantic biplane was barely off the ground and lumbering ponderously towards us as it rose ever so slowly. We ducked instinctively, and I could swear the huge craft passed over our mast with only a few feet to spare. The blast of air from the plane’s prop wash caused the canoe to lean violently, and water came cascading over the side as we teetered perilously on the brink of a capsize. Peter released the sheet, nimbly climbed onto the high side, and the canoe righted itself, but not before taking on a sizable amount of water.

  “Jolly good show, Peter,” said Uncle Bob in his usual calm, unexcited monotone and resumed the contemplative puffing on his pipe. We were barely afloat, with only a few inches of freeboard.

  Up to this point, sitting in the bilge, I had stayed dry, but now I was sitting in more than three inches of water, which sloshed back and forth like a miniature tidal wave within the canoe. Uncle Bob and Peter, on wicker seats, sat slightly above the water in the bilge.

  Oblivious to our plight, Peter exclaimed excitedly that the plane had been a Handley Page Helena airliner, a huge four-engine biplane used on the Imperial Airways route to India. Animated, and still ignoring our precarious condition, he continued, “For the trip to India, it has to land about every five hundred miles to refuel. It has sleeping berths for eight passengers, as well as a cabin for twenty more seated passengers. What extraordinary luck to be right here as it was taking off! It was worth getting a little wet just to see that magnificent machine from this vantage point!”

  He could well speak of getting a little wet—he wasn’t sitting in three inches of water! But in truth, I agreed with Peter; it had been a remarkable sight, though I would have preferred a side view instead of the bottom view.

  We had no bailing can, and there was no beach nearby to which we could repair to dump out the water, so we had to turn around and head back to our launching site. The canoe was now sluggish and low in the water, and barely moved upstream in the outgoing current we were bucking, but a beam breeze was strong enough to afford us some slow progress.

  The trip back to our launching point took a long time and gave me the opportunity to work furiously at bailing with a small celluloid goblet I retrieved from the picnic basket. We weren’t in danger of sinking, but I didn’t want our voyage to end
and desperately hoped that if, through my efforts, the bilge could be dried before we reached homeport, Uncle Bob would turn us around and we would sally forth once more.

  The water level in the canoe went down perceptibly, and my efforts elicited a low-key “Jolly good show, Alan,” from Uncle Bob. I was eventually thwarted in my struggle to achieve a completely dry canoe by the fact that Uncle Bob made the canoe stern-heavy. Most of the remaining water congregated under his great presence and out of my reach. Nonetheless, by the time we made homeport, I could claim that at least my end of the canoe was dry.

  The ladies were on the beach awaiting our return. It had been a magnificent day. For many years thereafter, I reflected on it as the greatest day of my life. In Condette on the morrow, life seemed more humdrum than ever.

  In another effort at keeping me busy, Mother enrolled me in a swimming class. The lessons took place on the beach in Hardelot every afternoon when tides were suitable. The Penguin Beach Club had built a wooden tank about thirty feet square and five feet deep, well below the high tide mark where, twice daily, the high tide refilled it with a fresh batch of clean seawater.

  Six sturdy posts incorporated into the pool’s construction supported three parallel cables which spanned the pool about three feet above it. Pulleys—one on each cable—rolled along the length of the cables and, by means of a short tether connected to a canvas belt around a swimmer’s waist, kept him from sinking. The student swimmer swam back and forth the length of the pool, hauling the pulley behind him as it rolled on its cable.