by Alan Holmes
The golf club was now officially closed, but Mother continued to play there even if the unmown greens made the game somewhat challenging. Fortunately, it was a dry autumn, and the unwatered greens didn’t grow much under these conditions. Since there wasn’t another soul there, she decided that Brenda and I could join her in doing an occasional nine holes. Brenda was once again willing to play golf with me now that there was no longer any danger from exploding cow pies on the course.
It was during one of these clandestine games that we suddenly heard a terrible yelping sound. Mother volunteered that Jock had probably caught a rabbit. The fearful racket continued and was clearly that of an animal in pain. But it was obviously no noise a rabbit would make; besides, Jock was trained not to chase rabbits on golf courses. We agreed that Jock might be in some kind of trouble and stopped our game to look for him.
We found him just beyond a small knoll, lying on his side, his leg caught in a large animal trap and bleeding seriously. Brenda, Mother, and I pulled and tugged at the trap’s jaws for about ten minutes without succeeding in prying them apart. It was a huge steel trap of the type used to catch wild boar, measuring more than a foot across and weighing well over ten pounds. Jock continued his anguished yelping, and Brenda and I were soon in tears at the sight of our beloved Jock in so much pain.
Mother finally decided we had to find a way to make a stretcher. Her plan was to put Jock and the trap on the stretcher in the hope that Raimond would be able to find a way to release him once we reached home.
But first, we had to contend with a stout metal stake to which the trap was connected by a massive chain. The stake had been driven deep into the sand dune. The three of us ended up on our hands and knees, feverishly digging it out of the sand with our bare hands. Once the stake was free, we were faced with having to carry Jock, the trap, the stake, and the chain. Mother—one of the most resourceful people I have ever known—now created a stretcher out of two golf clubs and her golfing jacket.
We then struggled to place Jock gently on the flimsy stretcher along with the trap and all its paraphernalia. I could barely lift my end of the stretcher and its cargo. We were about two miles from the house, and we had bicycled to the golf course and hidden our bikes in the bushes near a hole in the hedge bordering the golf course.
Fortunately, the spacious Carrosserie Nationale was still hitched to my bike because we had planned on gathering more wood on the way home. It now became an ambulance as we laid the comatose Jock, the trap, and all its attachments inside the carriage. The little dog had stopped yelping and lay perfectly still, his eyes glazed and lifeless. Only his short, quick breathing told us he was still alive.
When we reached home, Raimond took one look at Jock, decided he was in shock and immediately went to work on him. He helped Mother and me place Jock, the trap and its attached paraphernalia on the kitchen table and told us to lift the end of the table closest to Jock’s tail so that the dog’s head was lower than his rump. Jock appeared unconscious, but since he was still breathing, Raimond assured us this meant there was still hope.
Mother and I were left holding up one end of the table as Raimond went in search of a crow bar. In the meantime, Françoise found a couple of matching pans and placed them upside-down under the table’s legs so as to relieve us from having to hold our end of the table elevated.
I now turned my attention to petting the little dog’s head and ears the way I knew he especially enjoyed it, and kept whispering in his ear, “T’en fais pas, mon pauvre petit Joque!” (“Don’t worry, my poor little Jock!”) I feared he would not waken, and my eyes filled with tears. Brenda was crying so much that Mother, who had first tried to console her there in the kitchen, had to take her to her room, away from the sight of our suffering dog.
Raimond returned with the crowbar and, without difficulty, pried open the trap and released Jock’s leg. He now set about cleaning the gaping wound left by the trap. Bone was showing but, strangely, the wound was no longer bleeding. Almost all the way around Jock’s hind leg, just above where the leg makes a sharp angle, jagged pieces of flesh dangled untidily, looking like strips of raw meat.
Using cotton balls soaked with a diluted peroxide solution, Raimond swabbed the open wound and rinsed it extensively with bottled water, making a large puddle on the tiled kitchen floor. He then tied the loose ends of flesh into a tidy bundle around the exposed bone with clean cotton string, so that the jagged ends of the wound were almost completely reunited. Several small pieces of flesh still dangled from Jock’s leg and didn’t seem to fit anywhere. To my amazement, Raimond just snipped these off with scissors, saying, “If I don’t do that, he will die of gangrene.” He then made a splint from a wooden date box cover and bandaged the whole leg.
Now that the surgery was over, I worried that Jock would not awake from his sleep-like state. Once more, Raimond knew what had to be done. He went for a bottle of ammonia, poured some out on his handkerchief and held the hanky next to Jock’s muzzle.
The result was miraculous. Jock snapped out of his trance and tried valiantly to stand up but couldn’t because of his splint and the tilt of the table. Raimond lifted Jock and gently set him on the floor, where the little dog stood motionless, teetering on the verge of falling over. Françoise brought him his water bowl, from which he lapped noisily for several minutes. My tears, which all this time had never completely stopped, now really started flowing as I cried and laughed with relief and joy.
Jock limped around with his splint for two weeks and, when it was removed, the wound was clean and nicely healed. The mishap left him with a permanent limp, but it didn’t deter him from his usual boisterous scamper when he joined us on our wood gathering expeditions.
Soon after this incident, Raimond was ordered to report for military duty. He must have been almost forty years old but, even so, he would still only be un simple poilu, a simple foot soldier. Raimond was such a kind and gentle man that it was hard to imagine him as a toughened and effective soldier, though his recent performance in the treatment of Jock’s mishap would certainly have qualified him as a medic in the army.
Anticipating the approaching winter, Mother knitted Raimond a dark gray balaclava and made a special trip to Boulogne to buy him thick wool socks, long woolen underwear and a pair of wool-lined leather gloves. Françoise made Raimond a pâté de foie gras to take with him so he could spread a little on his daily bread ration.
On the day of Raimond’s departure, Françoise broke into one of her sudden rages against him, saying that he would be unfaithful to her while away. Frying pans were flying, and poor Raimond came sobbing to Mother.
Knowing that she was safe from flying pans if Brenda and I went along, Mother led us into the kitchen and tried to talk Françoise into a state of relative calm. She told Françoise that the best way to ensure Raimond’s faithful return to her was to be sweet and loving to him at this sad and painful time. “Is throwing pans and shouting wild accusations at him any way to be sweet and loving?” she challenged, then adding in a dire tone, “When he’s gone, you will feel terrible for the way you treated him!”
Françoise almost instantly switched from a raging fury to uncontrollable grief, now crying and wailing that surely Raimond would be killed. At this revelation, Brenda and I, already massively saddened by the prospect of his departure, immediately joined in the chorus of sobbing and wailing. Poor Raimond! It must have made his anguish so much worse to see us all in such a state.
It was pouring rain as we watched him squeeze into the little Simca and head for the station with Mother at the wheel. Brenda, Françoise and I stood at the side of the driveway, crying in the rain, as the little car splashed out of sight.
I was inconsolable for days after Raimond’s departure and couldn’t take my mind off the picture I envisioned of him standing in a muddy trench under leaden skies, shells bursting all around him.
The opening of s
chool helped ease the despair I felt after Raimond’s leaving Condette. I can still picture Brenda and me riding our bikes to school in the rain, wearing boots and rubberized capes that covered even our handle bars, with little Brenda struggling to keep up and me circling back frequently to coax her on. It was a two-kilometer ride along a winding country road, and I was proud that Mother entrusted Brenda to my care for this journey. We came home for lunch, and in the afternoon, I went back to school without Brenda, who only attended school in the morning.
I didn’t stay at that school for long, but I think that within any comparable time span I learned more than I have anywhere else, before or since. After the English-speaking Dennis School and the easy-going American School of Paris, I had a lot of work to do before I would be caught up to the level where I should have been for my age in a typical French school.
The nuns brooked no nonsense. Sister Martine, my teacher, was merciless with her knuckle rapping, which she administered whenever I looked up from my book. She also meted out this punishment if she found any sort of drawing or doodle on my paperwork, which was often. I eventually acquired the impression that she taught the class standing behind me, spying over my shoulder.
Sister Martine also refused to let me out for recess until my assignment was done, and done correctly, so I have no memory of ever enjoying a recess at that school. She wouldn’t even let me go to the toilet, saying that my discomfort was my penance for being so slow and lazy. One day, after hours of bladder anguish, I had an “accident” when Sister Martine whacked me on the knuckles for the fidgeting brought on by my state of necessity. I suffered in soggy silence fearing an even more horrible punishment she might inflict if I complained to her of my plight.
Every evening I had homework assignments which kept me up late into the night; I also spent most of my weekends doing homework. Mother, who thought I was finally being cured of being “constament dans la lune,” kept up the pressure on the home front. She maintained a sharp eye on me as I did my homework and reprimanded me if my attention strayed. At least she didn’t beat me when it did and, thankfully, she allowed me to go to the bathroom.
Our main subject was French grammar with its endless conjugations of irregular verbs in all their moods and tenses; the subjunctive pluperfect of pouvoir (to be able) comes to mind. In geography, we memorized the location of every département (county) and river in France.
Another important subject was maths where, in the six-week period I attended the school, I had to catch up on fractions, decimals, ratios, percentages, and the metric system. I had covered none of these topics during my two-year, English-speaking hiatus, but thanks to my designs, I was already well acquainted with the meter and the centimeter. And of course, my cycling expedition to Étaples had made me intimately aware of the kilometer. Unbelievably, French children of my age had already studied and mastered the whole metric system thoroughly. (When I say the whole metric system, I’m referring to its every nook and cranny. Does anyone ever use the decalitre, the décigram or the hectomètre?)
The maths problems became more practical; for example, I was now being asked to calculate the weight of the water contained in a dimensioned water tank—filled to 3.75 centimeters below its rim. The tank was round, so they also taught us the concept of the ratio pi.
Fortunately, maths was not difficult for me. I found Sister Martine’s explanations logical and straightforward. I seemed to understand the point of the matter at hand and was able to work with the new concepts almost immediately. While I found the problems fun and intriguing, I would have enjoyed the maths more if Sister Martine hadn’t been such a martinet. My good work in maths bought me no reprieve from her ferocity. If I correctly completed my maths assignment before the end of class and thought I would be released for recess, I was mistaken. There were always a few confounded conjugations that Sister Martine remembered I had to straighten out. This teacher knew only ruthless perseverance, and mercy was not among her virtues.
One Saturday in mid-October, Brenda, Mother, and I went to Boulogne harbor to meet Father, who was returning from England by boat because flights from London to Le Touquet (our local airport) had been discontinued. During the drive home, Father calmly announced that in two weeks I would be going off to a boarding school in England.
Mother was as stunned by this revelation as I was and immediately objected on the grounds that I wasn’t ten years old yet—I still had a year to go before the preordained date of that dreadful eventuality.
“The present arrangement isn’t at all satisfactory,” Father asserted. He had long ago decreed that ten years was the age at which I should start what he called “serious schooling” in England. He was obviously unaware of my scholastic progress under the auspices of the good nuns of the Sacred Heart. He may also have been concerned about my attending what was essentially a school for girls. Even though the school had succeeded in enrolling a small contingent of boys, most of the students were girls. I’m inclined to suspect that Father had found a good pretext to do something he felt was already overdue.
That night after I went to bed, I overheard my parents’ tense discussion of this matter. Mother thought that nine years old was much too young for a boy to be sent to boarding school. “In fact, even ten is too young in my opinion,” I heard Mother say reproachfully.
Father’s reply was that in England, families of our standing sent their sons off to boarding school at the age of six. Mother’s riposte was that we weren’t standing in England, we were standing in France.
This was the first and only time I ever heard my parents argue forcibly. I drifted off to sleep listening to them, confident that Mother would win the argument and that I wouldn’t be going off to England until at least the following year.
The next morning, Mother looked like a limp rag; quite evidently, she had lost the battle. My heart sank. I had been told nothing about what English schools were like or what to expect, and the thought of being so far away from home, all alone among total strangers, was enough to fill me with dread. Overcome with anxiety, I begged Mother to plead once more with Father. She declared grimly that it was no use. He had his heart set on it.
In the meantime, Father did his best to reassure me. He unpacked a glossy brochure displaying photographs of smiling boys having lunch, boys at ease on their beds reading books, boys playing soccer, boys playing rugby, boys playing cricket, boys at play in a room full of model trains, boys at work in a wood-working shop, and boys climbing into elaborate tree houses. Yet another photo showed a group of men all wearing black gowns and mortar boards, which Father explained was the teaching staff. In each photograph everyone looked happy and carefree. The Abinger Hill School appeared to be an idyllic place.
The school, Father explained, was situated on a heavily wooded two-hundred-acre estate in Surrey, where each boy supposedly built his own tree house. It sounded rather like the Dennis School I had liked so much. Both schools were English and perhaps all English schools were run like the Dennis School—the best school I had ever attended, I thought. And the prospect of a whole room devoted to model trains was also a definite plus. My spirits lifted somewhat, but the idea of separation from the family still preyed on my mind.
Father explained that Aunt Lottie (his sister in England) had reviewed many other possible schools before becoming convinced that the Abinger Hill School was the best available. She had discovered the Abinger Hill School through a close friend who knew the school nurse there. This was definitely another point in its favor since I adored Auntie Lottie. She and Father had visited the school and had seen the train room, the carpentry shop, the swimming pool, the bright, cheery classrooms, the pleasant dormitories, and even some of the elaborate tree houses for which the school was famous.
“You’re bound to love it there, Sonny, and in a few days, you’ll have masses of new friends,” Father said reassuringly. This last statement was another strong point in its favor;
I had often thought that what I needed most were more friends.
When Mother asked him why I had to go to an English school, Father’s reply was, “The French and Belgians are quite good at a lot of things, but raising boys to be real men isn’t one of them.” It was clear I was going to Abinger Hill, and that was final.
I continued attending the convent school until the time for my departure in early November. One Saturday, Mother, Brenda and I went to Boulogne and shopped for things on a list of items needed by boys attending Abinger Hill. Most of the items on the list could only be bought at a special school outfitter in England and they would be purchased under the supervision of Auntie Lottie when I reached England. For this purpose, three days in England would be set aside before I actually began attending Abinger.
Mother’s purchases in France were limited to handkerchiefs, washcloths, towels, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and a soap box, a clothes brush, and a pencil box. By way of a pencil box, I chose the very latest model that incorporated a built-in pencil sharpener and a small drawer for collecting the pencil shavings. She also bought me a pair of shoes because the best pair I had was somewhat worn, and there had been talk about shoe rationing.
All non-consumable items on the school list were to have my name clearly and indelibly marked on them. Mother painted my initials on the clothes brush and the pencil box with white enamel wall paint, using a sable watercolor brush.
After the shopping, Mother took me to the basilica and found a priest to hear my confession, something she felt I had better take care of before leaving. For good measure, she bought me a small medal called a “scapular” and a small-linked chain so that I could always wear it around my neck. On the little triangular medal was a representation of Saint Christopher carrying the infant Jesus, overlaid in clear blue enamel.