My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Within months she had sold her Hampshire home and moved the family to Normandy, buying a house near the textile factory. Mummy, who was sent to a local school, therefore spoke fluent French, though she was always more secure in the vocabulary of the playground than of the corridors of power. I, on the contrary, was quite well-read in French literature and strong on grammar, thanks to Mammy’s unbending regime at Lawnside, but could hardly stammer my way through a couple of sentences viva voce, and it was agreed that a year in France should put right this deficiency.

  Then there was the question of how to pay for this French interlude, since currency restrictions were still tight in 1954. You were not allowed to take more than a pittance out of the country, so my father and Uncle Giles had agreed that each of them would pay for the other’s children when they went abroad.

  All my surviving grandparents urged me to seize this opportunity to spend the year in Paris, home of high fashion, culture, and the most delicious food in the world. ‘The Louvre!’ they sighed. ‘Notre Dame! Dior! The Sorbonne!’ but none of these (not even the food) held much allure for a determined philistine like me, and the thought of having to wear ‘tidy clothes’ – stockings, suspender belt, skirt and high heels – all day and every day was unappealing. Besides, Paris was full of former Lawnsidians who had been sent off to be ‘finished,’ and their letters made it plain that these establishments were just as strictly chaperoned and full of tiresome rules as any English boarding-school.

  Over the next few months therefore, while I earned my keep after a fashion by helping at Fforest Farm and taking charge of the milking, my parents trawled their network of family and friends in search of an alternative to Paris, and eventually turned up a possibility in the shape of the Chateau d’Availles, a big country house ten miles from Poitiers in the heart of la France profonde. Here an enterprising and sociable spinster of impeccable ton and slender means named Marie-Therese Martel-Piault (no relation, as she said sadly, to the brandy distillers) augmented her income by welcoming small groups of foreign girls – never more than five at a time – to her home and introducing them to French life.

  It sounded promising on paper, but plainly needed checking out. Mummy and Daddy cleared a long weekend, zoomed in their sleek black Riley 2½ litre over the ruler-straight but incredibly bumpy, poplar-lined roads to Tours, then wiggled along the white-gravelled country lanes to the miniscule hamlet of St. Julien l’Ars, where the Chateau d’Availles was the only house of any substance.

  Tall, plain and elegant, with slatted shutters, sash windows, stone steps leading down to a long tree-lined avenue and an atmosphere of complete tranquillity, it was the quintessential French country house. They fell in love with it at once, and nearly as quickly with the sprightly, effusive little Frenchwoman who tripped down the steps to welcome them.

  Like Brag, Mlle Martel was a pocket Napoleon who made up for her lack of inches by force of character, and it was difficult to judge her age. Her long hair, uncompromisingly dyed black with no hint of silver, was pulled straight back from her lined and wrinkled forehead, and her mouth was a garish slash of scarlet surrounded by pin-tucks, but her face was dominated by deep-socketed, fine large eyes, sparkling with enthusiasm and mischief. She spoke sonorous, patrician French, each consonant and vowel precisely enunciated, and this clarity was echoed on paper, for her handwriting was some of the most beautiful I have ever seen – bold, flowing and, though regular, possessed of an indefinable dash that made it wholly individual.

  Effortlessly she charmed my parents into overlooking any drawbacks like primitive plumbing and the lack of tennis courts, swimming pool, or even drinkable water. All that could be found in Poitiers, she assured them, and as for company, any girl who stayed with her would meet the pick of the local jeunesse dorée – she gave regular bridge parties and small dances – and we would be invited to all the big houses in the neighbourhood, whose owners she had known since childhood.

  It only remained to check out her claims with the Wimpole Street doctor and his wife whose daughter Sara had already been at Availles for two terms and, when Sara enthusiastically backed up Mlle Martel’s account, to book my first-ever air ticket to Paris.

  Heathrow was an eye-opener to me – so clean, airy, and spacious, with rich-looking, relaxed passengers carrying expensive suitcases and wearing light-coloured clothing of the sort you would never risk in a train. It was a world away from the smutty, gritty, crowded railway stations of those days and, it has to be said, a world away from the shabby, stressful places that airport terminals have now become. We kept an eye open for Sara, who was travelling on the same plane, but Mummy couldn’t spot her, and finally waved me through to the departure lounge on my own.

  I was already aboard and fiddling with my seat-belt, unsure how it worked but reluctant to ask, when a commotion in the aisle heralded Sara’s approach. She had both hands full of carrier bags and cardboard boxes, far more than you were meant to take in the cabin, plus a bunch of flowers, and was calling out thanks to someone behind her, apologising to people as she forced them out of her way, flashing smiles this way and that, struggling with the overhead locker until every man within two rows leapt up to help her, and generally behaving like a film star.

  I watched in fascination. She was like a tiny, delicate porcelain doll, with beautifully set hair swept back from her smooth brow and curled into little symmetrical horns above her temples, wide-set greeny-blue eyes and regular features that reminded me of nothing so much as a shopwindow mannequin. Her supple, figure-hugging coat and skirt in soft green tweed were the last word in fashion, and her neat, narrow feet wore highly polished court shoes with stacked heels – again dernier cri. Beside her slender, glossy perfection I felt lumpish and badly dressed and could hardly believe she was only fifteen, nearly two years younger than me, because she looked at least twenty-five.

  We introduced ourselves, and she astonished me again by ordering half a bottle of wine with her lunch. When the steward brought the trolley round she not only bought 200 cigarettes in a large carton, the whole duty-free allowance, but told me to do the same.

  ‘I’ll never get through them,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘No, no – they’re for me. I smoke two packs a day, and blond tobacco’s so expensive in France,’ she said with a kind of weary patience that something so obvious had to be explained.

  Two packs a day? When on earth could she find the time? Was she showing off? I wondered. Joking? Not a bit of it. She filled her cigarette case and lit up as soon as the trolley moved on, leaning back in her seat and inhaling with a tremendously sophisticated air that I longed to emulate.

  Porters, taxi, train to Poitiers – she dealt with everything in what sounded to me like perfect French, all the inflections just right. This was her third term at Availles, she told me, and I hugged to myself the thought of Mummy’s surprise and delight if I could learn to speak as she did. What she didn’t mention then and I found out later was that Availles was her second French billet. The year before she had lived en famille with friends of her mother’s near Tours until the son of the house had become ‘tiresome’ – code for amorous, I suppose – and she had been placed under Mlle Martel’s wing instead. It must have been during this first placement, when she was alone among foreigners, that her French had become so fluent.

  The fatal flaw in sending me to Availles was the presence of other English girls, because of course being typical lazy teenagers, we used our own language not only to one another, but also to all the young men and women who came to Mlle Martel’s parties and were keen to practise their English. Only at meals and in class did we make a real effort: even when we went to lectures at the University of Poitiers there were lots of other foreigners to undermine our attempts to speak French, and I never progressed beyond a certain point.

  That was in the future, though. We were met at Poitiers by Mlle Martel’s tame taxi-driver, small, squat, saturnine Didier, who had already fielded a third pupil for Availles, a dark, chic,
exotic-looking girl wearing a striped pink shirt with a stand-up collar and big turned-back cuffs, tightly cinched by a wide shiny belt into a black hobble skirt. We had noticed her on the train, leafing through Paris-Match, but assumed she was French. She certainly didn’t look in the least English. Her complexion was very pale, her lips and nails a daring frosted sugar-pink, and a narrow lock of her wavy black hair was carefully pulled forward on to either cheek in what Daddy rather coarsely called, ‘Bugger’s grips,’ but others might describe as kiss curls. Long earrings like small warming-pans dangled to her collar. But what struck me most was her truly skeletal thinness. Cally’s wrists and ankles looked as if they’d break at a touch, and it was no wonder her clothes hung so well because they had no bulges at all to contend with. She had a shy smile and a warm, soft voice, and men found her absolutely irresistible.

  Didier was already charmed by the time Sara and I showed up. He shoved in our luggage any old how, and gallantly installed Cally in the favoured front seat of his black Citroen quinze. This quickly became the pattern with everyone we encountered. Male and female, young and old took one look at Cally and fell over themselves to please, aid and protect her from the evils of the world and, most of all, from her naughty, obstinate, health-destroying self.

  Nowhere did they try harder than at meals. It was the first time I had encountered an anorexic and seen the curious effect produced on others by someone who steadily refused to eat. It seemed to give Cally a particular power and interest with which Sara and I – ordinary hungry teenagers – could not compete.

  Though painfully thin, she would gently decline the offer of the most tempting foods, and instead of saying, ‘Well, don’t blame me if you’re hungry before supper,’ or words to that effect, Mlle Martel would send down to the kitchen for something different – an omelette, perhaps, or a little individual cheese soufflé – in a way that would ordinarily have sent Celestine, the grumpy, work-worn cook, into screaming hysterics – but no. Minutes later she would plod up the stone steps from her basement kitchen with some delicious offering on a tray, and Cally would thank her, and cut it in half and then in quarters, and add salt, and push it around her plate until it was leathery and cold (and every eye at the table was on her) and then perhaps take one or two tiny bites before saying that was plenty.

  Left to herself, she would have survived on cigarettes and black coffee. Like Sara, she was a chain-smoker, lighting a fresh one from the still-burning stub of its predecessor, preferably a gold-tipped Balkan Sobranie, though these were hard to come by in Poitiers – and she became animated on two subjects alone: fashion and jazz. ‘Classical jazz,’ she always insisted solemnly, as if there was any other kind, and though I knew nothing and cared less about Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and the rest of the great New Orleans jazzmen, I would encourage her to talk about them because I found it marginally more interesting than analysing fashion.

  Her brother Russell, another jazz freak, used to send her records which we played on Mlle Martel’s little wind-up gramophone in the big salon with its double doors and polished floor. We would push back the furniture and carefully lower the needle – it was inclined to jump unless you had a steady hand – and then as the blare of sax and trombone stirred her blood, Cally would take her only exercise, swaying to the music in her hobble skirt and spike heels with some favoured swain, a rapt, dreamy expression on her face, while everyone else jived wildly.

  Mlle Martel had in no way exaggerated her claim that Availles was a social hub. We often had two ‘surprise-parties’ in a week, besides bridge with the neighbours and endless spontaneous droppers-in – generally ravenous young men round about tea-time when Celestine’s famous galette might make an appearance.

  Because the telephone was generally defunct, these callers were seldom expected but always made welcome and urged to stay for whatever meal happened to be nearest. Old or young, priest, doctor, landowner, visiting nephew, aged aunt, they would sing for their supper by regaling Mlle Martel with local gossip, and inviting her to bring her bunch of ‘belles jeunes filles en fleur,’ as they charmingly referred to us, to lunch or tea or play tennis with them whenever she pleased.

  Poitiers society – what one might call the dinner-party set – was then small and tight-knit, with all sorts of class distinctions of which we were ignorant, but Mlle Martel was rigorous about admitting only the scions of families she considered beyond reproach to consort with her jeunes filles at Availles. She had no objection to our meeting boys of less distinguished backgrounds at the University or the riverbank café known as the Fleuve Lethe – the River of Oblivion – but if we encouraged them to visit us in her house they were quickly shown the door.

  ‘You never know what to expect from people like that,’ she would say decisively.

  ‘Beastly old snob,’ Lisa would mutter sotto voce. She was the fourth English pupil and had arrived by car with her parents two days after the rest of us. From the first she made it plain that she was at Availles under protest. She had no interest in France or the French, she thought we were all ridiculously frivolous (she might have had a point there) and that literature and art were a waste of time. All she wanted was to go to technical college in Bournemouth and learn shorthand and typing. Though she was not unattractive physically, we found her difficult to like.

  She had mousy-blonde hair cut in a boyish crop, and strongly marked dark eyebrows above a narrow, pointed nose, which gave her the look of a bird of prey. Her lower legs were thickly covered in hair. In class she made absolutely no effort to speak French, keeping a little book of shorthand symbols on her lap under the table and copying them on to paper when Genevieve, a lecturer from the university who gave us history lessons twice a week, wasn’t looking. (I don’t think she would have dared if Mlle Martel had been teaching.)

  We led a peaceful, well-ordered life with infinite leisure to gossip and giggle, to paint our nails and dream, or lie on the lawn listening for the scrunch of wheels on gravel that heralded the arrival of a visitor.

  As it grew hotter, the mournful cries of the peasants driving oxen – ‘Bayard! Bayard!’ started at dawn and ceased in the middle of the afternoon, when the whole of Nature seemed to close down under the searing sun. I found it amazing that oxen-powered machines with a man trudging behind could plough, sow, reap and carry the corn off the enormous fields surrounding our château. They lumbered forward at a snail’s pace, but they kept going hour after hour, and by mid-July the stubbles were bare and the harvest safely stored.

  Every morning began for me in exactly the same way. As the whiff of coffee wafted up from the terrace below our bedroom, Sara would stagger out of bed and throw back the shutters. Then she would pad across the polished boards to examine her pretty petal-fresh face in the mirror over the fireplace and utter a sepulchral groan.

  ‘God! I look a wreck!’

  After breakfast, morning lessons took place round the table in the small salon. Genevieve or Mlle Martel would talk about history or French literature while we took notes, but it was all quite light-hearted and the lesson often degenerated into a discussion of last week’s film or last night’s party.

  Twice a week we took the bus into Poitiers to attend lectures at the university, and if we missed the last bus home there was never any difficulty about hitchhiking. A hopeful thumb, a pleading look, and some little Renault or Citroen Deux Chevaux would draw up, cram us in, and deliver us to the end of Mlle Martel’s tree-lined avenue.

  Towards the middle of term, we were all invited to the Summer Ball at St Maixent, the military academy at Niort where several of Mlle Martel’s favourite droppers-in were officer cadets. This promised to be a really slap-up party, marquees, bands, a funfair, dancing until dawn… Mlle Martel hired a small bus to take us there and back, and summoned her sister, Madame Germaine, from Paris to act as auxiliary chaperone.

  The two sisters could hardly have been more different. Whereas Mlle Martel was the epitome of good breeding and good behaviour,
a pillar of respectability, Madame Germaine was distinctly raffish in appearance, and had led a bohemian life. She claimed to be an artist, though the idealised puppies and kittens with bows in their hair and little girls with enormous eyes that decorated various tiles about the house were hardly High Art, but she was on friendly terms with many well-known intellectuals of the Left Bank, Jean-Paul Sartre among them. She had an illegitimate son, Guy, who worked as a journalist on the Figaro. Her hair was as starkly orange as Mlle Martel’s was black, with no pretence that it was anything but dyed, cut in a heavy, straight, Cleopatra fringe only just clear of her long green eyes, and her complexion was dead-white, like an absinthe-addict.

  For our part, we went into a frenzy over what to wear. Cally flew back to England and returned with an immense cardboard box, out of which she drew a dream of a ball-gown: midnight blue net with spangles, strapless, with an enormous skirt, and a matching stole with which to soften her sticking-out collarbones. She put it on and twirled gravely for our inspection, beautiful, ethereal, a very hard act to match.

  Sara and I wrote passionate letters home, and both our mothers came up trumps. She went into Poitiers and returned triumphant with a slinky, silky, greeny-blue creation that matched her eyes, and I was taken in hand by Therese Lefevre, a chicly chignoned young woman who sometimes helped Mlle Martel. Together we visited her dressmaker, and with her devised a striking black strapless number, with fuschia flying panels attached at the hip to create a tulip-like effect. These panels caused me a good deal of trouble at the Ball, because they caught on the tops of little spindly gold chairs as I sashayed past, and the frequent sudden tugs as I was brought up short, plus the crash of the falling chair rather undermined my attempts to glide about with becoming grace.

  And Lisa? She produced a letter from her uncle, asking her to join him in Paris for the very same weekend as the St Maixent Summer Ball – such a pity, but she really couldn’t refuse his invitation – and on the Friday evening while we were primping and curling and nearly hysterical with excitement, Didier duly drove her to Poitiers to catch the Paris train.