DAD’S YEAR IN FRANCE

T.W. King Montpellier 1937-8 Part 3

The next event that stands out clearly in my memory was the arrival of Monsieur Pineau, long heralded by Madame Castan and Simone, perhaps because they felt guilty that, until he arrived, I was stuck with Daniel at meal times, and also because they were looking forward to the return of a regular guest for whom they entertained a certain respect and affection. He arrived at the hotel entrance accompanied by a crescendo of ear-splitting noise from the engine of the 750cc Norton motorcycle on which he had ridden from Paris where he’d been spending his holidays.

The Castans welcomed him with something of the enthusiasm with which his father greeted the Prodigal Son, and which indicated that they regarded it a privilege to have him aboard for another year. I don’t know why it occurred to them that I should become his compagnon de table, except for the very bad reason, from my point of view, that he, being Canadian (albeit French-Canadian), spoke English. We had very little else in common. He was, I suppose, in his late twenties or early thirties. He was heftily built but running to fat, heavily jowled and completely bald. He regarded himself – and was regarded by others – as a bit of a hunk who was past his best, mainly as a result of debauchery of one kind or another. He was, I think, prepared to allow me to share his table, in exchange for a bit of English conversation, and for the fact that there was still at that time prestige in being English. It also gave him an audience for his tales of adventures and achievements. Born in a village called Rimousky in Québec province, he’d been educated in France and was in the last year of a Doctorate in Physics, I think, at the University of Montpellier. In everything that pertained to this aspect of his life, he was the very model of propriety and convention. He religiously observed all the forms of French politesse and was at pains to present himself as a young man who knew what was expected in public of well-brought-up sons of the gentry. I remember once, for example, that he ticked me off for blowing my nose at table and gave me to understand that that sort of thing was not done in France and that, next time, I should excuse myself and use my handkerchief in the toilet or elsewhere. It was typical of the man that when, at the end of the year, he presented his thesis for the award of the doctorate, he hired a complete wardrobe of morning clothes, to conform with what he felt to be the traditions appropriate on such an occasion. His doctorate was received with mention distingué, tribute no doubt to his scholarship, not to his clothes.

His clandestine lifestyle was distingué in an entirely different sense. With me, and with any of the lads he wanted to impress, it was of the activities of another part of his anatomy, rather than his brain, which he spoke of with the greatest pride, so much so that we tended to regard many of his claims as fantasy. It may be that, to substantiate them, he got oiled up one night and took me to visit some of his “friends” in a house in a fashionable quarter of the town, which, of course, turned out to be a bordello. I have to admit that Madame fell on his neck as though greeting a long-lost friend and valued client, and that, having ascertained that new talent had been recruited since his previous visit, he excused himself, and disappeared for a time, leaving me to read the magazines. René Pey, who was very cynical about it all, reckoned this incident was all a part of the window-dressing in which Pineau indulged and was delighted to hear later in the year that he had harvested the fruits of his folly. ‘Dis donc,’ he said to me, ‘as-tu entendu? Pineau a chopé un chaude-pisse. Espèce de couillon! Je te parie que c’était pas la première fois qu’il en a tiré un coup!’ (Did you hear? Pineau’s caught a dose. Stupid sod! I bet you it isn’t the first time either!).

I think I was as much shocked by everybody’s lack of concern as I was by the misfortune itself, particularly as old Pineau was at the time claiming to pursue a torrid affair with a Mrs Russell, whose cuckolded husband was an expatriate Englishman living in Montpellier.

It was presumably in an effort to repair the damage to his constitution brought on by his excesses that he went to the gymnasium on the side street opposite the hotel. I, who was a keen fitness fanatic when young, went with him, much to René Pey’s amusement (‘Tu es une merde; tu l’as toujours été, tu le seras toujours.’ – you’re a shit; you’ve always been one and you’ll always be one). He made valiant efforts to reduce the flab and to halt the deterioration in his physical condition, but the little good he did himself in the morning hardly compensated for the damage he inflicted on his system at night. The gymnasium proprietor, who’d known Pineau as a twenty-year-old when he was in his prime, used to wag his head despairingly when contemplating the wreck of what had once been a fine figure of a man. The trouble was that, although from the New World, he had enough of the philosophy of the Old to convince him that life was a matter of gratifying his appetites as frequently as possible. It was typical of the man that he decided to take me on the back of the Norton on Christmas Eve that year to faire le Réveillon at Marseilles (164 km), simply because he knew a restaurant where you could eat une bonne bouillabaisse. We made quite a few trips on the motorbike – Nîmes, Arles, Les Baux – on one of which we nearly came to grief when showing off to some girls as we were approaching the sea-front, he forgot to apply his brakes, and we hit the kerb at speed, shot over the handlebars and finished up, fortunately, on the sand. It was part of the macho image he liked to project that he rode such a powerful machine, and it’s sobering to reflect, given what has since happened to the motorcycle industry, what prestige value he placed on riding an English bike at a time when the majority in France, much more sensibly, rode motorised bicycles. Woe betide anyone found messing about with the machine. I remember him surprising a youth trying to mount it on the day his doctorat was conferred on him. The youth probably never recovered from the surprise of seeing a bald geezer in a morning suit booting him up the backside, but his reaction was comical enough. O la vache! he exclaimed as he took off down the street.

Curiously enough, Pineau stopped riding his motorbike and going to the gymnasium, after he contracted his chaude-pisse, on the grounds (with what scientific evidence I never found out) that the vibration of the machine and the physical activity would excite the virus and send it to his brain. Towards the end, he became somewhat withdrawn and I can’t remember whether he or I left Montpellier first. I’d love to know what happened to him.

With Pineau’s arrival, the hotel began to fill up and become much more animated. Among the newcomers were René Pey, who was given a room on the second, or third, floor and with whom I immediately established a friendship that has lasted ever since. His sense of humour, often cynical and Rabelaisian, derisive and contemptuous of the pretentious, impatient of hypocrisy, was very similar to my own. At the same time, he had a very serious side (unlike me at that time), and I always felt that he attached great importance to his studies at the École de Commerce and was prepared to play only after discharging the tasks he was set. I also think that he felt under some obligation to protect me from the consequences of my irresponsibility, and even, on occasions, when I’d had a drop too much, he would take my money from me and return it when I was sober. His compagnon de table was a fellow called Pignet, a self-consciously artistic type, with a mane of black hair and luxuriant beard, against which my rarefied locks, when I sat with them, must have looked like the “before” and “after” of an advertisement for hair restorer. The only thing I remember about the man was that his burning ambition was to own a Simca, a new marque in the French car market at that time.

Then came the Spanish refugees. First, a family of four: father, middle-aged, tall, distinguished, slightly pompous, who might have been a doctor, solicitor or another professional of that sort; his wife, Thatcher-like, as far as I recall; son Fernando, heavy, pasty-faced fifteen-year-old; and daughter, who was younger and so unremarkable that I have forgotten completely what she looked like. They kept themselves to themselves, and I was too incurious to try to discover what had driven them out of Spain, how they were supporting themselves in France, where the kids went to school, and so on, information that, nowadays, I would not rest until I had ferreted it out. The lad used to play gooseberry when I took Bobby Franck around the Jardin des Plantes. The rest is silence and oblivion. For all I know, the father might have been Franco’s man in Montpellier.

Much more interesting were the Francks. The mother was a blond blue-eyed Aryan, in her forties, who was still a handsome woman and must have set a few hearts a-flutter when she was young. The rest of the family: Bobby, in her teens, with jet-black hair and a good figure, who took after her father. She had a pretty bad stammer that, however, seemed to cause her no embarrassment. She dressed well (as did her mother) and presented a striking and attractive appearance. Her brothers Hasso, about 14, and Hans, about 12, were fair-haired and blue-eyed, and just as clearly favoured the mother. Neither of them ever did anything to establish themselves more firmly in my memory. A more memorable character was Max, who was treated as a member of the family, and whom we took to be Mrs Franck’s lover. He was a smallish, bespectacled, balding Jewish man in his thirties, very sociable and gregarious, affable and friendly. I have a lingering impression that he was in the stationery business in Spain. Again, I regret that I was not inquisitive enough to find out more about them. Even when I took Bobby out to the cinema, or for a bit of handholding in the Jardin des Plantes or the Peyrou, I didn’t seize the chance of prying into their private affairs. Occasionally a man I took to be Papa Franck would turn up driving a Citroën car and there would be much excitement in the Franck family circle. Whoever he was, he was clearly very fond of the children, and they were equally fond of him. His relationships with Max always appeared cordial, in fact, almost as though they had a business partnership. Whether the explanation was that the father had stayed in Spain to look after the business while the family was evacuated to safety in France, I never took the trouble to find out. Max always had an eye for business, even in exile. When he learned that I received a monthly registered envelope containing my allowance in pound notes, he arranged to exchange them for a franc or two more than the official rate of exchange. He must have had an idea about what was going on because the exchange rate changed while I was in France from 78 to 172 francs to the pound sterling. He was the sort of guy you can’t help liking but whom you could never trust. When I was introduced to him as, ‘Monsieur King, c’est un Anglais,’ he replied, ‘Ce n’est pas de sa faute’ (It’s not his fault), in such a way that it was difficult to take offence. When my little affair with Bobby, which in the circumstances was never going to amount to much, petered out, it was said that Max had put in his oar to keep the goods intact for himself. There was no past evidence for the allegation, though it was certainly something you wouldn’t put past him.

Meanwhile, we all settled down to doing what we’d come to Montpellier to do. I started attending lectures at the University, on Philology with Professor Grammont – who had something of a reputation in academic circles – and on French literature with Professor Bouvier. I have to admit that I wasn’t fired by great enthusiasm for my studies, particularly as they were often shared by bums and hoboes who, following the excellent French liberal tradition, were allowed to drift in off the streets, ostensibly in search of enlightenment at the feet of the master, more probably to keep warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer. Added to this, the lectures I attended presumed a background familiarity with a corpus of French literature that I lacked and an understanding of the spoken words that was slow to develop. There was also the snag that any lectures scheduled for the afternoon had to compete with the conflicting demands of my social engagements or, more often than not, after the usual litre of lunchtime plonk, with the categorical imperative of the siesta. My vague intention was to prepare for two parts of the four-part Licence-ès-Lettres – the French equivalent of the B.A. Degree – but I was never certain I was attending the right lectures or convinced I was in with a chance. It was no surprise to me that when, at the year's end, I presented myself for examination in literature, I discovered that the questions were based upon a novel – I think it was Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir – that I had never read. Copies of the book were made available for reference and quotation during the examination and, after a quick riffle through the text assured me that it had something to do with War and Peace, I wrote a scintillating essay on the Tolstoy novel, which I had read, transposing names and locations as necessary, which, naturally enough, failed to satisfy the examiners. I was more successful in the Philology examination (Écrit) and would have been far more successful in the Orale, but for the fact that my celebrations of the former left me slightly confused. More out of sympathy than conviction, le Professeur Grammont awarded me the certificate of Philology avec mention passable, i.e. the lowest grade of pass available, an accolade René Pey found greatly amusing. It’s sad to reflect that I have a clearer recollection of the terrasses of the cafés on the streets leading to the University than I have of the University itself, and even sadder than I couldn’t put a face to anybody – student or teacher — with whom I must have rubbed shoulders at the time within its hallowed precincts. Meanwhile, René was doing well in Commerce; Pineau was wowing them in Physics; Max was putting money in the bank, Franck; in fact, everybody was doing fine.

For relaxation – or, rather, exertion, because relaxation was my normal state – I played football as a fullback for Le Stade Pierre Rouge. It was an amateur team made up of students and local lads, a member of a league or group of village teams in and around Montpellier. Don’t ask me how it was financed or organised – in matters of greater import I was too indifferent to find out. It was probably the job of the captain, a lad named Bruzy, who was rich enough to have a car (a banger) of his own, known as le Bolide (the Meteor), in which he would take us “for training sessions” to Palavas. I remember other members of the team for their names rather than their faces: Desmarets, Cambolive and, in one case, for his sensitivity to English verse.

I enjoyed the après-jeu as much as the games themselves, and cherish a particularly fond memory of coming back along the coast after a match and stopping to admire the sunset looking towards the Pyrenees. One match I didn’t enjoy was when we played against a touring side in the area. Whereas I’d been chosen because I was English (we still had a reputation), the others had been chosen because they could play football. It was the first time I realised how far we were slipping behind the rest of the continent.

For further diversion, there was always the cinema, when we had any money. When we hadn’t, we used to go around the corner to a pleasant, tree-shaded square behind the hotel and spent time, but little money, playing belote in the Café De La Paix. It’s an activity with which I associate particularly Pierre (Puer) Descamps, a fellow student of René Pey at the École de Commerce, who was one of our close companions. Clear in my memory of the café also was the patron, Monsieur Bosc, a rotund, white-haired figure, the embodiment of bonhomie, whose oft-repeated joke when reminded that I was English, was ‘Il speak Eengleesh le matin; il se pique (gets pissed up) le soir’, an interlingual jeu de mots that he found irresistibly amusing and that invariably drew the comment ‘Quel couillon!’ (What a prick!) from René Pey. There was one occasion when I hit the jackpot on a fruit machine, either in this café or in another that we patronised near the Hôtel de Ville. Needless to say, I can’t remember anything of the subsequent events of that evening.

For longer excursions, I was indebted to my friends for invitations and transport, or both. René Pey’s parents invited me to spend a day with them at Saint-Laurent d’Aigouze, but I don’t remember whether René took me by car or whether we both travelled by bus. I spent another day in Béziers at Puer Descamps’ house. On both occasions, I remember fabulous meals arrosés by a variety of the choicest wines (René Pey tells me he visited Puer Descamps after the war and found him living in pretty squalid conditions with a tribe of kids!). I visited Les Baux, Nîmes, and Arles on the back of Pineau’s motorbike (before he caught the clap) and Saintes Maries de la Mer with René Pey.