Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  In lieu of the forty or fifty years of life that should have remained to Howard, a plaque was put up in St John’s, Lewisham. It is below the stained-glass window that Albert Alfred gave in memory of Sophia, who had died when Howard, her youngest child, was not yet five.

  The area has changed a good deal since Albert Alfred’s and the Simsons’ day. The jolly, down-to-earth female vicar, who unlocked the church for me one day in the 1990s, said that she had never known why the mem orials were there and was glad to hear about them – it would be something to tell her Sunday school.

  ‘Their name liveth for evermore.’

  But of course it doesn’t. Which is why I have tried to summon back from the very edge of oblivion one dutiful First Lieutenant among innumerable others, a greatuncle dead on the frontier of France long before I was born and who, for most of my childhood, I never even knew had existed.

  Part IV

  MAUD: 1902–1939

  Chapter XV

  MAUD’S SECRET GARDEN

  But why was Maud Tindall working in a French hospital?

  A great many British women nursed in France during the Great War. Those who, like Blanche’s grumpy little sister Mab, were qualified nurses were obvious candidates for full-time paid service: Mab was sent, as a Queen Alexandra military nurse, to a British hospital behind the lines, from where she twice had to be invalided home with pneumonia. But many girls from comfortable middle- and upper-class homes, and therefore with no necessity (as it was then perceived) to work for their living, went out to France and Belgium as unpaid VADs nursing in field hospitals.

  I had thought that Maud might be one of these. But the Hôpital Léon Blanc, at Aix-les-Bains, south of Geneva, which is where Bertie and Blanche’s letters were addressed, was far from the British Front. In fact the town (‘Aches and Pains’ to soldiers) was one where battle-fatigued Allied troops were sent by train for rest and respite. In the hospital, wounded French soldiers were nursed by the French Red Cross, which at that time consisted of three voluntary organisations loosely under one umbrella, including the all-female Association des Dames Françaises.

  How did Maud come to join this Association? The crumbs of information on her life that have survived are few, but significant.

  Maud, like Bertie and Howard but unlike the assertive May, is said to have been bullied by their father, Albert Alfred, and therefore to have become shy and secretive. It cannot have helped that she had been the sick child who was indirectly responsible for her mother’s death in Hastings. As a young woman Maud was still perceived by the family to be ‘delicate’. She had abundant and pretty hair and full lips, but her face was a little heavy and pensive for the taste of the times. Her niece wrote, long after her death: ‘She became a silent spinster … She sometimes took charge of the house when our parents were away and spent her time trying to stop us from doing anything and everything in case we damaged ourselves or the house.’

  As in many families of that era, a faint story persisted that Maud had remained unmarried because she had lost a beloved Someone in the War. But there may have been an overlay here of her feelings for her dead younger brother: she had always been close to Howard, who had been a small boy when their mother died. Maud was not really one of those girls whose potential husbands disappeared into the mud of Ypres and the Somme, for she was approaching forty by the time the War was over: her state of spinster-designate must have been evident already by 1914. A good many late-Victorian and Edwardian daughters of upper middle-class families did not readily find husbands in the way their mothers and grandmothers had done, largely because standards of living had risen and bringing up a family of suitably educated children was now perceived as costly. As a result, men of the same social level were expected to delay marriage till they were financially secure. This meant in practice that many men did not marry till late in their thirties or beyond, by which time they were apt to choose women significantly younger than themselves. So a faultline appeared in marital supply and demand, which carried on from one decade to another. Left behind each time was a cohort of women living lives essentially without a purpose. To be, like the younger Jacob daughters, unmarried and unprovided for was perhaps a worse fate; but to be dependent, however comfortably, on family money, and to have no recognised role in the world beyond being a lady, must have brought its own obscure distress.

  The Great War evidently gave Maud four years of intense employment. Once it was over she spent long periods with her married sister May. The convention of the time was that a sister-in-law ‘counted’ as a sister to the husband too, and so could share his household with total respectability. Even if May had died an untimely death, under the Church law then prevailing Arthur Giles, May’s husband, could not have married Maud. Therefore, the unspoken looking-glass logic went, there could be no impropriety in a domestic threesome.

  Maud also shared with Arthur Giles a liking for books and a taste for poetry, and both tried their hand at writing it. He and she further shared mysterious jokes. ‘They used to giggle together,’ their nephew remembered, ‘and May used to get cross.’ (‘Don’t upset May!’) The word in the family, one of those jocular sayings that veil an awkward truth, was that Arthur Giles had ‘married the wrong one’. No doubt, from his point of view, skinny, unassuming Maud provided a welcome relief from his large, bossy wife, and it could hardly be considered his fault if Maud adored him – the other half of the semi-secret family joke. Fashionable gynaecologists are in any case accustomed to their patients falling in love with them, and in later life Maud became his patient too. He apparently operated on her ‘several times’ for obscure internal ailments, events which caused some further suppressed mirth to Bertie and Blanche who, like many of their generation, were less naïve than they sometimes seemed.

  But this image of Maud as an archetypal comic spinster, seeking emotional and physical attentions where she could, is far from being the whole picture. Perhaps she did, actually, know more about a number of things than May did, and this was what she and Arthur Giles shared. It is even conceivable that the two of them at some point were lovers, a possibility that family jokes could not quite encompass. He, like most medical practitioners of that era, was a great believer in the sea air of ‘Dr Brighton’ as an aid to convalescence: the wealthy Gileses often rented a flat there in addition to their other abodes. Arthur Giles also had one of the early motor-cars, an elegant open tourer … If Maud and he did actually ever organise some private space for themselves, this would shed a different light on May’s famous edginess.

  But Maud had, in any case, intermittently but for many years, a quite other life across the Channel.

  Her niece recorded:

  ‘She only really came to life in France … There she was a different person. She had French friends, and that was why she nursed through the First World War with the French Red Cross … I never much liked her until, as an adult, I met her in Paris and discovered her to be both a charming woman of the world and a fluent French speaker.’1

  If she was sufficiently integrated into French life before the War to offer her services to France rather than England, and was still at home there when her niece was grown up, in the 1930s, this suggests a long-term attachment. But to what exactly, or to whom? Apparently, once across the Channel, she changed – no, not into an obviously Kept Woman but into a French version of her English self, without the faint connotations of joke and failure that dogged English spinsterhood. There had always been a place in French society for the woman who (it was assumed) had the independence of spirit to reject the arranged marriage, or whose family could not produce the dowry that had to accompany it. So, in France, Maud became a cultured dame d’un certain âge with grey cotton stockings but elegant shoes and gloves, a tendency to attend Mass and a knowledge of Parisian classical theatres and art galleries. Recitals of Brahms and Debussy at the Salle Pleyel. The occasional lecture on the Old Stones of Paris: Les Amis de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, who published regular history bulletins,
were well established by then. Apparently, like a typical Frenchwoman of that kind, she favoured the Left Bank rather than the wealthier Right. But how was her Secret Garden constituted?

  Did she, at some level, make a decision after her beloved brother’s death that she was not going to be defeated, here in France where she had nursed young men more fortunate than he back to health, or at least to life? The land that had been the end of all Howard’s hopes and dreams, and those of so many others, was one that she would continue to cultivate, even to cherish, for his sake. Or was it something more specific that drew her back and back across the Channel over the years?

  It is tempting to imagine one mysterious male presence, the classic secret love … Long periods apart, punctuated by almost unbearably exciting meetings in the pre-dawn cold at the Gare du Nord when the overnight boat-train drew in … But we are looking rather, I think, for a family, with a home in which she was made welcome. In particular we are looking – some time in the first ten years of the twentieth century when she was adult enough to cross the Channel on her own – for a young woman about her age with whom she might have formed a bond based on mutual sympathies and reticences. This unknown woman may have had sisters (but in that case would she have needed Maud to fulfil that role?). She is more likely to have had a brother or brothers, youngish men who could be called on to escort the two girls to all the places, including theatres and concerts where, by Parisian custom, they could not quite respectably go on their own. By the same token, a young man could not easily accompany on such an outing a French jeune fille de bonne famille even if she was essentially his sister’s friend. It would have looked marked, and might have been expected to lead to a rapid proposal of marriage … The devastation wrought by the first War was eventually to change all this, but meanwhile a decorous family party, with Maud (with her ‘free and easy English ways’) making up the female side, probably suited everybody.

  Was Matilde Lemoigne, I wonder, the key figure in Maud Tindall’s Parisian Garden, which she kept so firmly to herself in a compartment separate from her own family in England?

  I know that Bertie, after his wearying and lonely year in the Rue de l’Abbaye, never wanted to hear much of the Lemoignes again. But it is clear from the surviving letters of Baillière, Tindall & Cox that Lemoigne was still acting as chief Parisian agent in the early 1900s, and that in 1902 Bertie unbent sufficiently to send a friendly message and an invitation in a postscript to ‘Mademoizelle Matilde’ when there was a question of her having pictures in an exhibition in London. She had always been his preferred member of the family – ‘she is the only lively figure,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘except for little Maurice.’

  Probably Matilde did come to London on this occasion, though I can’t imagine her being allowed to travel on her own. Perhaps Monsieur Lemoigne accompanied her, or her lugubrious brother Paul did: either would have reminded Bertie of the angst he had suffered seven years before. As he had had ample opportunity to observe during that year, French styles of food, clothing, manners and even moral priorities were then very different from the prevailing English ones. When Zola was staying incognito at the same period in London’s suburban belt he was rendered miserable by the traditional English breakfasts, and little boys used to laugh at him in the road outside his hotel because he looked so outlandishly foreign. Perhaps, when the Lemoigne contingent actually appeared in Lewisham in their very French button boots and pince-nez, one of Bertie’s fits of reserve and withdrawal came on, and so it was Maud who chiefly made them welcome. Perhaps she offered to take Matilde shopping or to a matinée. (‘Bertie can’t take the time off from work, you know …’) Perhaps intelligent Maud longed to practise the French she had carefully learnt from a governess or from genteel classes. Or perhaps she simply wanted a real French friend of her own, now that she would no longer be overshadowed by May, who had got married the previous year.

  Perhaps, ignoring the odd slighting remark about them from Bertie, she quietly appropriated the Lemoignes to herself, contrived to visit them in Paris and then, as relationships became consolidated, kept quieter and quieter about them, so that even her siblings were barely aware of the Lemoigne connection being maintained in this way. Monsieur Lemoigne would have been in his sixties by this time and would soon disappear from the annals of Baillière, Tindall & Cox. By 1906 Bertie was married, and Howard up at Cambridge. ‘Mothery’ was occupied with young Doris, her own daughter, and, being a tolerant and rather lazy woman, would have been content to let her stepdaughter, now in her late twenties, go her own sedate, secretive way. Maud had in any case long been encouraged to go away on little restorative holidays, to Folkestone or to country friends.

  * * *

  Maybe it didn’t happen quite like that. Maybe Maud’s secret Parisian life did not involve the Lemoignes as such. But all the scraps of evidence suggest that it involved members of a family of the same sort as the Lemoignes, leading a reticent but cultured and deeply French life. This life, in its very obscurity and difference from her own, combined with its parallels to her own, would have provided Maud with the chance to slip into an alternative identity. By 1912 she was sufficiently ensconced in this role to recommend a good bourgeois family in remote central France who would offer accommodation to a Jacob niece by marriage needing to acquire some French. She also preserved a programme from a multiple prize-giving ceremony at the august and prestigious Académie de France.

  She was on one of her visits to Paris – or, more likely at that time of year, enjoying the country-cottage idyll at the end of the tram-ride in Châtillon – at the beginning of August 1914. When war was declared in France on the 3rd, a day earlier than it was in England, the population was caught unawares. In France, unlike England, a general mobilisation was at once announced. Fields were left unharvested as hundreds of thousands of men between eighteen and forty-eight rushed to join or rejoin regiments: since 1870, military service in youth had been a near-universal male experience. Peasant women and the wives of small shopkeepers had their hands full trying to carry on the farm or the business, but higher up the social scale wives, sisters and daughters queued to volunteer in their own way. Within a few days sixty-eight thousand women had offered their services as unpaid nurses to one of the branches of the French Red Cross. Among them, evidently, were Matilde – or a prototype Matilde – and Maud.

  By November, the northernmost parts of France were invaded. The armies were literally entrenched, across the swathe of France and Belgium known as Flanders, approximately where they would remain for the next four years. The traumatic loss of husbands, brothers, sons and childhood friends had already become a reality of daily life.

  By the time the War ended, the French dead numbered almost one million three hundred thousand, with another three-quarters of a million permanently disabled. Virtually every town and village in France erected a monument engraved with the names of their dead: the exceptions to this were eighteen out of the twenty Paris arrondissements. The excuse was that such monuments would be ‘too expensive’. The only two arrondissements which did erect War memorials, inside their Mairies, were the eighth (which could hardly plead poverty since it contained some of the wealthiest streets in Paris) and the sixth, which covers a large slice of the Latin Quarter. The original Lemoigne flat, in the Rue de l’Abbaye, was in the sixth.

  Since an anxious question must hang over the fate of all men born in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and therefore of an age to have fought in the Great War, I sought out the Mairie’s list of the dead of the sixth. In a forgotten back hall at the foot of a staircase they stand, stone column after stone column of names, over seven and a half thousand of them from one Paris district alone. But no Paul, Emile or Maurice Lemoigne is among them, in fact no Lemoigne at all: the name is not a common one, at any rate with that spelling. Further research at Châtillon produced no dead Lemoigne either.

  This, of course, proves nothing. In the twenty years since Bertie stayed with them in the Rue de l�
�Abbaye, the young Lemoignes would have grown up, gone out into the world, and might well have settled in other parts of Paris, France or the world. A wider internet search did produce an Emile Lemoigne who was killed in the first months of the War. On enlistment he was registered as living in the 51st Département, the Marne, which is not very far from the Paris basin. He was born in 1881, which would accord with the impression of him in Bertie’s 1995 diary as a schoolboy and would make him two years younger than Maud. By the summer of 1914 he would have been thirty-three. Could he, possibly, have been the lost love to which tentative, post-War allusion was made? But such is the extreme French reticence about personal records, even about such commonplace public facts as birth and death, that I was not able to access any information about him that would enable me either to identify him definitively as Matilde’s middle brother or to exclude him from my quest.

  However, in the course of this trawl for the dead, I came across something unexpected. I had had particular foreboding for ‘little Maurice’, the other ‘lively figure’ besides Matilde, since he was the youngest and therefore the most likely to have seen active service. But it turned out that Maurice (born Paris 1883), though he did apparently volunteer in 1914 and served throughout the War, went on to have a distinguished career as a microbiologist. So time has not carried him quite beyond the reach of the living as it has borne away the rest of his family, which is why I was able to learn the outlines of his life. He studied agronomy, worked on trace elements in soils and on the way bacteria break down and eventually purify contaminated substances – in itself an effect of time. He rose to be head of a department at the prestigious medical Institut Pasteur in Montparnasse, gave lectures at the Académie, that pinnacle of French intellectual achievement, and in old age was honoured by election as a member of its scientific section. Is this where the relevance of Maud’s otherwise unrevealing Académie programme becomes apparent?