by Rose Tremain
There was one primary rule at Mon Fertile: you had to speak French – and only French – from morning to night. This meant, in our first weeks there, that about fifty per cent of our utterances were faulty or absolutely meaningless. The school housed Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, South Africans, Canadians, Australians and Brits. Each of us torturing the French language in our own particular way, we found ourselves inhabiting a kind of Tower of Babel. The Dutch and the Germans – no surprise here – spoke better French than the rest of us. My French O-level and the lost conversations of our early-morning revision sessions seemed completely inadequate to the task we were being set. But there was no let-up in the rules. At supper, every girl in turn had to stand up and admit the number of words she had spoken in any other language than French. Mademoiselle Clara called this method of teaching a ‘baptême du feu’. We would get burned, we were told, but we would ‘soon learn’. There was no other way.
At night, of course, in our room in Tournesol, we could whisper in our own language. And it was during these whispered conversations that Carol Reunert (who was to become a lifelong friend) told me about the disturbing constructs of her life.
Her mother had died when Carol was very young. Her father, Mike, had then married a second time. His bride was called Liz, and – ‘Wait for this, Jenny, wait for this, Rosie,’ said Carol, ‘because it’s really shocking and I’m not meant to talk about it’ – Liz Reunert had once been married to the notorious murderer Neville Heath.
At that time, Neville Heath was almost as feared in the collective imagination as the Notting Hill serial killer John Christie. Heath and Liz had had a son, Bertie, now Carol’s stepbrother, before Heath was hanged in 1946. Neville Heath had savagely murdered at least two women, Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall, in both cases lashing their flesh with a riding whip and biting off their nipples before bludgeoning them to death.
How had Liz escaped? Carol told Jenny and me all she knew, which was that Liz had once, allegedly, been tied to a tree and whipped, but had managed to distract her husband, untie her bonds and flee before he harmed her further. She never went back, divorcing the ‘lady killer’ in 1945. Whipping had been one of the preliminaries to murder, so Liz Reunert might well have become Heath’s third victim.
In the hush of the Swiss night, Carol said to me and Jenny, ‘I wish she had been his bloody victim!’ She didn’t exactly mean this, but she sincerely disliked Liz, who was bullying towards her, showing affection only to Bertie and then to Tricia, the daughter she went on to have with Mike Reunert. Jane had sent me to Mon Fertile because she didn’t want a bluestocking for a daughter, but Liz Reunert had sent Carol away not merely because this kind of education was ‘the done thing’ in rich South African society of that time, but primarily because she felt jealous of her.
Early autumn, the moment of our arrival on the hills and shoreline of Lac Léman, is a fine season. I remember that I found great consolation from how things looked in this part of Switzerland; very different from the steep, tilting landscape of Wengen, which Jo and I had experienced with Nan, but beautiful just the same. Perhaps, in a world that once again felt random and wrong to me, I responded to its orderliness.
When the time for the grape harvest, the vendange, came around, Mademoiselle Clara and Miss Allen allowed us to spend part of our weekends helping with this. These days, vine farmers bring in massive, clever machines that travel between the rows of vines and literally flay the bunches of grapes off their parent plants. But in 1960, when I was at Mon Fertile, hundreds of temporary workers had to be brought in to pick them by hand. Whether a posse of slightly clumsy teenage girls from countries around the globe was really a useful addition to this task, I’m not entirely sure. (I recalled Grandpop saying: ‘Every single task on a farm has a right way and a wrong way to be done, and if you do it the wrong way, then everything and everybody will suffer.’) We probably picked grapes in ‘the wrong way’, but at least we didn’t have to be paid.
I spent most of my time in the vine fields sketching. The colours of the landscape – the vine leaves turning yellow and russet, the reddish earth, the grape pickers in their blue overalls, the clear sky shading to turquoise as the evening came on – struck me as being as beautiful as anything painted by Gauguin. Did I also do my bit picking grapes? I suppose so, because I remember that we all got very hot in the fields and on our way back were allowed to buy bottles of apple juice. I can see the dark little shop in Morges even now, with its massive refrigerated cabinets and its pallid lighting. Whenever we could afford it, we also bought ‘Swiss yoghurt’ – the first yoghurt I’d ever tasted, with bits of apricot and pear whipped into it. Sometimes we could only afford one or two pots between us all, and these got passed and passed around, every spoonful savoured.
How else were we ‘finished’ in that autumn term?
We learned to type. We’d been told that what awaited us, once we’d been ‘finished’ (and prior to marriage, of course – marriage to a rich man), was secretarial work. We’d work for men who had been educated to be whatever they were capable of being, and we would serve their needs. There was no question of us aspiring to be. (This was 1960, and feminism had not yet come storming into the world.) We were to facilitate the dreams and ambitions of others, the male of the species.
For this facilitation, learning to type was essential. Mon Fertile would give us ‘the rudiments’, and we’d then go on to do full-time secretarial courses in our home countries. One hundred words a minute of shorthand (or more if we wanted the ‘really interesting’ secretarial jobs) was to be our eventual goal. The men would dictate at speed and we’d capture their wise words in clever hieroglyphs.
So that was it, then? That was going to be the limit of my future?
Could it have been true that the parents of all the girls at Mon Fertile – reasonably educated girls from seven or eight countries – had no better aspirations for their daughters, in 1960, than this: that we be assistants to the careers of others, and afterwards their obedient wives?
It was true.
As I sat in the typing classes, echoes of Joyce Hatto bleating, ‘Fingering! Fingering!’ whipped round my bored and exhausted head. I remember longing to be back at Crofton Grange, seated at the ancient school Bechstein with Joyce, at a moment in my life when so many things appeared possible.
Far more interesting than the hours spent bashing away at the ancient Olivettis and Adlers were our French literature classes. We struggled mightily with the plays of Corneille and Racine, which, in their curious formality of language, remained stubbornly inaccessible to us. Shakespeare, so difficult-seeming at first, had yielded to our perseverance, setting down before us a whole universe of new thought, new meaning and new emotion. But Racine and Corneille somehow refused to be approached. We tried to wrestle with them, to tame them, but we couldn’t. They seemed to be saying to us, ‘Listen, barbarians! We are French and we live inside a very ornate château built entirely from learned poetic secrets and conventions. You may come in, if you dare – you who mangle the French language – but you will never have the key to unlock the knowledge of our world that you seek.’
But there were other French authors who were more friendly towards us. The work that meant the most to us in that first term in Switzerland was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, which we read first as a book and then put on as a play.
Le Petit Prince is of course a very simple story, more suited to our (improving, but still low) level of discourse in French. It’s an allegory for children about vanity, loyalty and death that has captured the hearts of grown-ups for a century. An aviator is forced to land in a desert, a thousand miles from anywhere habitable, where he’s visited by a tiny beautiful boy, styling himself a prince, whose home is an asteroid. (‘Saint-Ex’ himself, a pioneer airmail pilot, had once crashed in the North African desert. Later, he became a wartime pilot, flying observation aircraft out of Corsica. He was killed in 1944.)
The Little Prince has previ
ously dropped in on other miniature worlds, encountering a king, a businessman, a fox, a lamplighter and other eccentrics, and recounts these adventures to the stranded airman. Saint-Exupéry offers a particularly memorable and farcical meditation on the whirling nature of time in the boy’s encounter with the lamplighter. The asteroid on which this character lives is so small that mere seconds pass between day becoming night and night again becoming day. Thus the lamplighter’s task is endless and without pause: ‘J’allume, j’éteins. ‘J’allume, j’éteins.’ His world has no other meaning but this.
The Little Prince longs to return to his own star and to the single pampered and fussy rose he has nurtured there. The story’s power lies both in the sweetness of the boy and in its startling resolution, whereby the Little Prince must die in order to let his spirit fly home.
In our play, directed by an elderly, clever teacher called Mademoiselle Lelièvre, I was cast as the rose. Perhaps my name suggested it, or perhaps, dressed in the expensive clothes Jane had bought me, I came across as a pampered person. To my amusement, Carol Reunert has called me ‘La Rose’ for fifty years, and every time she says this, we are both transported to the shores of Lac Léman and our sweet success with our play of Le Petit Prince.
It must have been very simply done in the cavernous old barn, but then the set is an empty desert, not the castle of Udolpho. The costumes were simple, too. I wore a green leotard with brown tights and a home-made ruff of cardboard leaves round my neck. I wanted to dye my hair red (captivating idea!), but this wasn’t allowed, so I think I wore some kind of scarlet hat – perhaps even a bathing hat, of the kind made fashionable by Elizabeth Taylor, with little rubberised flower petals all over it.
The reason the play succeeded was that our struggles with the words were, somehow, at last overcome. It was the first opportunity we had to live something in French. The lines and the acting gradually became one. In my desire to convey both the wilfulness and the vulnerability of the rose, once I’d mastered the lines, I forgot that I wasn’t in my own language. And the humour and sadness of the piece, sentimental and quirky though the whole thing is, couldn’t fail to move our audience: captive girls being finished before their lives had properly started, and their ageing, slightly sorrowful teachers.
How many English words have you spoken today?
None.
It’s interesting to remember that I did no writing at Mon Fertile: not one poem, not one play or story. Nothing.
This is explained, in part, by the fact that I was trying to cram another language into my head. And I have understood, since that time, how being cut off from English speech affects my work. Writers need to swim in a language, like wicked sharks in the deep. Take us out of the ocean of words and we start to die. But I think I also did no writing in Switzerland because part of me had abandoned the whole idea. When I was on my ‘Oxford path’, with Robbie, taken to tea with John Masefield and confiding my secret hopes to him, it was possible to believe that I really would go forward and achieve some of the things that had eluded my father; that I would be good enough, dedicated enough, thoughtful enough, original, witty and clever enough to be taken seriously as an author. And now, finding myself being ‘finished’, scrubbed and shined up for a different kind of life as somebody’s secretary, somebody’s wife, I gave up.
Was there a moment when I consciously turned away from the future I’d nurtured inside my head for so long? Or did I just try to stop thinking about it and let it fade away? I can’t remember, but I know some kind of rejection of that imagined ‘writer’ self took place during my year in Switzerland.
In the winter term, the school moved up to the mountains.
Les Diablerets is now an expensive, crowded ski resort. But it was a village in those days, with a couple of ski lifts, one or two cafés, a fabulous French patisserie shop and a small skating rink. We were housed in three spacious chalets – fifteen girls to a chalet – and the one I was put in was known as Chardon (Thistle).
Life inside Chardon was presided over by a young teacher called Pierrette Monod. Her physical presence was almost ugly: a very white, round face stippled with dark moles, and a dumpy body. But there was an innocent sweetness about her to which we all responded. In her early twenties, she wasn’t so much further through her life than we were, but the thing she liked to tell us, repetitively and endlessly, was that she was already cynical about the world. ‘J’ai perdu mes illusions,’ she used to say. The subtext of this was: ‘You wait and see, you who are so privileged and blithe, with your rich parents; you will soon understand that the future won’t deliver what you hoped for.’ I wanted to reply that I already knew this, but I remember having the suspicion that Pierrette’s ‘lost illusions’ were of a more terrible kind than mine, so I kept silent.
Or perhaps I didn’t. Pierrette soon had the status of friend.fn1 A photograph of the four of us – Pierrette, Jenny, Carol and me – eating fondue at Les Diablerets’ Café de la Poste seems to confirm how close we all felt to her. Perhaps, on some February evening, with the weight of snow making the roof of Chardon creak, with the darkness outside suggesting the unknown darkness of the life to come, I told her about my lost hopes and the ridiculous future planned for me. Perhaps she told me what sorrows had whipped away those illusions of hers, but if she did, I’m ashamed to say that I can’t remember what they were.
My friendship with Carol had been cemented in the autumn term, and when the move to Les Diablerets came, we asked if we could share a room. We were informed that our preference could be accommodated, but that there were no double rooms in the chalets, only rooms for three or four. One of the new girls was going to have to be housed with us.
New girls!
Carol and I thought ourselves very sophisticated by this time. Our French wasn’t bad. We could just about understand the Radio France news bulletins. We’d wrestled with Racine. We’d starred in a play. We’d become favourites of most of the teachers, because we amused them. We could type at twenty-five and a half words a minute. We’d taught each other about make-up and hairstyles. We’d shared the terrible secret about Neville Heath. We didn’t want a new girl, fresh from her school in England or South Africa. We were ‘Carole et La Rose’, a fighting duo, making the best of being ‘finished’, and we didn’t want our status disturbed.
When the small posse of new girls descended from the coach outside our chalet, Carol and I knew that we had about thirty seconds to size them up and approach the one we liked the look of best, before she was grabbed by someone else.
She was called Virginia (Ginny) Lathbury. She was the elder daughter of General Sir Gerald Lathbury, who had been wounded during the British Army’s daring but ill-fated mission to seize the bridge at Arnhem from the Germans in 1944. Perhaps we saw something of the heroic father in her very sweet face. Then we noticed that her hair was permed, and this made us falter for a split second: could we, who now wore carefully applied black eye make-up, whose role model was Juliette Gréco, share our room with a girl with permed hair?
Yes, we could. (We decided that the perm was indicative of an insensitive mother, not an insensitive girl.) We pounced on Ginny and gave her no choice but to install herself in our chaotic little dorm.
Poor Ginny. Like me, she’d been closeted in a girls’ boarding school, Daneshill, for years, then hauled out of it to be finished off in Switzerland. She told me later that Carol and I were not quite what she’d been expecting by way of room-mates: far too boisterous and know-all-ish, far too untidy, far too much Max Factor around the eyes! But she got used to us. She early revealed a lovely sense of humour. She took in her stride her introduction to Piggy, who had crossed Europe with me and now spoke with a low, lugubrious voice to anybody who would listen to him – in both English and French. He was prone to notice life’s small difficulties with a sorrowful sigh, and this amused Ginny.
Carol and I concluded that she was a ‘good sport’. On that winter’s day in 1960, we’d had thirty seconds to select a room-mate
and we’d chosen well.
The main focus of our winter was to learn how to ski. I’d never thought that learning to ski was high on my life’s agenda. (No ski runs in Oxford, Jane dear …) But I was now kitted out with the full piste-ready wardrobe and had to give it my best shot.
Our instructor, Monsieur Borloz, was a good-natured man in his forties, tanned from the sun and the ice glare on the snow. The German girls and one or two of the English contingent already knew how to make slalom turns and were taken out of Borloz’s group and whisked higher up the mountain in a cable car. We stayed on the nursery slopes, spending long hours of each session stepping sideways upwards to get back to where we could risk a few tentative downhill manoeuvres. Before each run, Monsieur Borloz would remind us that we had to face outwards, towards the void. His shorthand for this instruction was ‘tits to the valley’, which these days sixteen-year-old girls might reasonably object to as sexist mockery, but in 1960 just made us laugh. And throughout my life, with my family and close friends, ‘tits to the valley’ has been used as a hilarious exhortation to persevere, to confront things head on when times are bad – a not unhelpful example of the way humour can defuse fear.
Carol showed an aptitude for skiing from day one. She had instinctive balance and grace. I had neither. From the moment I launched myself down a slope, I felt as though I was destined to hurtle on, faster and faster, until at last I would crash into a stand of trees or disappear over some unseen cliff face. I knew – in theory – how to make the turns that look so easy when you watch a good skier executing them. My left-hand turns felt just about feasible, but turning to the right – flipping the skis round with a deft shimmy of the hips – always appeared to me as something more or less impossible to achieve, like trying to fly. And you can’t just keep turning left on a ski slope; you’ll soon be facing up the hill and sliding backwards.