Nell and the Girls

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Nell and the Girls Page 1

by Jeanne Gask




  Myrmidon

  Rotterdam House

  116 Quayside

  Newcastle upon Tyne

  NE1 3DY

  www.myrmidonbooks.com

  Published by Myrmidon 2015

  Copyright © Jeanne Gask 2015

  Jeanne Gask has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-910183-11-3

  Set in Fournier MT by

  Ellipsis Digital Limited, Glasgow

  Printed and bound in the UK by

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Photographs are reproduced by kind permission of the author.

  Copyright © Jeanne Gask 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  In memory of Nell, and for all women like her.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Prologue: March 1940

  1890–1940

  1.Tom

  2.The Good Days

  1940–1941

  3.The Balloon Goes Up

  4.Departure Days

  5.Hardship Days

  1941–1944

  6.Settling In Days

  7.Jean and an Awful Evening

  8.Internment Days

  9.A Bit of a Fixer

  10.Radio Days

  11.Holiday Days

  12.Friendship Days

  13.Visiting Days

  14.Bombing Days

  15.Rieux Days

  16.Joy and Sorrow Days

  17.Heady Days

  18.Paris Days

  19.The Reunion

  1944–Present

  20.What Happened Next

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Jeanne Elisabeth Gask was born in Calais, the youngest daughter of a British family living and working in France at the time of its fall and occupation in 1940. As a British citizen, her father was interned by the SS and the family was left to fend for itself for the duration of the war.

  After Liberation they returned to join their family in Birmingham and Jeanne finished her education. She married Tony, a typographer, in the mid-1950s and they had three daughters, just like her parents. Home was in Teddington, Middlesex, then Manchester, with Jeanne staying home to bring up the girls. Later the couple moved to Bristol where Jeanne had a thoroughly enjoyable time as a French-speaking, blue-badge Bath and Bristol tourist guide.

  In recent years she attended a Creative Writing group in Bristol and told her tutors she wanted to write a book about her early life in France. They showed her how to get started and followed her progress right through. The result is Nell and the Girls.

  Jeanne is passionate about travel. She is a great fan of the music of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet and belongs to a film club showing old French films. Tony and Jeanne bought a second home in the Charente area of France some twenty years ago, and Jeanne likes to feel she has a foot in each country. She has five grandchildren and lives with Tony in Teddington, Middlesex.

  To this day Jeanne always makes the sign of a cross on every new loaf so that we’ll never want for bread, a superstition she learnt from her stoical mother, Nell.

  Prologue: March 1940

  Tom came home with five identical square boxes.

  ‘Now then you three, line up!’

  He called out, ‘Nell, come in here a minute, we’re going to try our gasmasks on!’ Out of the boxes came the most horrible, grotesque apparitions, straight out of Jeanne’s worst nightmares. She was stiff with terror. Tom, Nell and her sisters tried theirs on. Tom, wearing the fearsome mask, brought his face right down to Jeanne’s level.

  ‘Now, come on Jeannot, be reasonable. Don’t be a silly girl!’ His voice came out of the mask, thin and muffled, and making the most awful sound when he took his breath in, just like Sandy next door when his asthma was playing him up.

  Jeanne sobbed, frightened. ‘No, no . . . I can’t. I’m scared . . . I won’t be able to breathe.’

  Tom was angry now. ‘Come on, don’t be stupid! You can see we’re all wearing them and we can all breathe.’

  Panic set in. Jeanne gave full vent to her hysteria. She opened her mouth wide. ‘Wa-a-a-gh!’

  Tom lunged towards her, her way of escape into the hall cut off by hands trying to grab hold of her. There was only one thing for it – quick! – behind the piano. As luck would have it, the piano had been placed at an angle across the corner of the room. She squeezed in and curled herself up into a very tight ball. Tom could not get hold of her, either from the side or from the top. Her sisters, Marie and Irene, giggled eerily somewhere deep inside their gasmasks.

  Tom took off his mask and threw it to the ground. ‘Oh, I give up. That child’s becoming impossible, Nell.’ As though it was Nell’s fault.

  Jeanne stayed curled up in her haven behind the piano, quietly sobbing to herself until it was safe to come out.

  1890–1940

  1. Tom

  William ‘Bill’ Simpson Sarginson and his friend Willie Peacock left Penrith, Cumberland, in the early 1890s to seek their fortunes. They were both tailors at a time when British materials and tailoring were much sought after.

  Bill was soon employed as First Cutter by the prestigious House of Worth in Paris. He married Jeanne Marie-Francoise Tirefort, a giletiere (waistcoat maker) and they had two children, Marguerite ‘Maggie’, born in 1894, and Tom, born in 1896.

  When Tom was baptised, the Catholic priest refused to name him Tom as it was not a saint’s name but said that Thomas would do. Bill insisted that he wanted the child named Tom after his uncle back in Penrith. The priest agreed, but only if the boy also had another name, that of a saint. Bill and Jeanne thought quickly, and so the boy was named Tom Paul, after the acceptable name of a saint. Bill had Tom registered as a British citizen at the British Consulate in Paris.

  The family lived in a flat in central Paris: 22, rue Cler in the shadow of Les Invalides.

  Bill had a workshop where he had a full-scale model of a horse, as he specialised in ladies’ riding habits en amazone – meaning side-saddle, to ride in the Bois de Boulogne. The model enabled him to drape the habit to his satisfaction and the children were allowed to ride on the horse when they visited occasionally. On one of their visits they met one of Bill’s clients, a Belgian princess who entertained the children by letting her jewel-encrusted pet scarab beetle run up and down the mantelpiece much to their delight.

  While in Paris, young Tom was taken to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. What a treat that was for a boy, he was most struck by the Whirling Dervishes, one on each corner of the showground, who, he said, never stopped spinning for the whole four hours. He also saw La Goulue, the dancer depicted dancing on Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous posters of the Moulin Rouge. She had become known as the ‘Queen of Paris’ but, by the time Tom saw her exhibited in a lion’s cage in a circus show, she was old and well past her glory days.

  When the children were in their early teens, Bill was promoted to manager of Old England, an establishment promoting
British tailoring in Brussels, and the whole family moved there. They lived in rue de l’Arbre Beni, Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels.

  Maggie was apprenticed to a leading Belgian milliner and was to make the rosettes for the wedding bonnet of the Belgian Princess Marie-Jose who married the Italian Crown Prince.

  Bill had advised Tom to go into Electricity. ‘That’s where the future is, my boy.’ And so, in 1912, Tom was apprenticed to a Swiss firm in Brussels, Appareillage Gardy, learning about high and low tension switchgear.

  When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, Tom and Bill were arrested and taken to the Ecole Militaire together with other British subjects at the end of August 1914. Bill, observing the comings and goings of crowds of people, all seeking help or information of some sort or other, said to Tom, ‘Look, I think we can escape. Just follow me, don’t look right nor left.’ And that’s exactly what they did. They threaded their way through the crowd looking neither right nor left, and found themselves back in the street and free.

  They couldn’t go home and so stayed with kind friends: Bill at one house and Tom at another. They met Jeanne and Maggie, who were still free, at church on Sundays or in the park to exchange news and washing. Jeanne and Maggie were repatriated to England soon after by the Americans who were not yet in the war.

  When a decree was issued that anyone sheltering British subjects would be shot, Bill decided that it was time to escape, as they didn’t want to put their friends in danger. It is thought that they were helped by the Edith Cavell organisation; although this is not certain and records no longer exist, her hospital was also in the Ixelles district of Brussels.

  Bill and Tom took a tram all the way to the terminus towards the Dutch border and then started to walk. They were helped through the Dutch marshes and over the border by tobacco smugglers, who were paid for their trouble. They were now free and in neutral Holland. With very little money left, they made their way to the British Consulate and were given places on a Dutch fishing boat. On the way over, they narrowly missed a mine and finally landed in England on January 13th 1915.

  They were grilled by the authorities in London for a fortnight to make sure of their identity and were fed, clothed and given work by the Salvation Army, for whom Tom retained a lifelong gratitude.

  When the authorities allowed them to go, they made their way up to Penrith. Bill got work in Barrow-in-Furness, and Tom working on electrical maintenance in Carr’s Biscuit Factory in Carlisle. However, it was not long before Tom was longing for more excitement and enlisted. He joined up on June 22nd l9l5.

  He found himself in Farnborough doing his basic training in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps (forerunner of the RAF) still knowing very little English.

  The widow of the exiled Napoleon III, Empress Eugenie, lived nearby in a large house on Farnborough Hill and had opened part of it to be used as a hospital for wounded officers. She would attend church parade every Sunday at the training camp and would send for Mon Petit Francais, her little Frenchman, and Tom would go forward and respectfully have a chat with her.

  After training, Tom was on the move again. Jeanne and Maggie came to say goodbye to him and he was sent back to France. He found himself in Pont de L’Arche, near Rouen, working on the maintenance of planes and transport. He was billeted with Monsieur and Madame Desrue, owners of the village grocery shop, and enjoyed helping out in the shop on his free days, sometimes being left completely in charge. He remained friends with the couple for many years.

  When demobbed, he came back to England and completed his apprenticeship at Trafford Park, Manchester, under an ex-servicemen’s scheme. He then worked at various firms, always bettering himself, until he landed up in Birmingham as foreman at a lighting and power installations firm. He asked one of the typists to type a letter in French for him and bought her a box of chocolates. Then he took her to the pictures. One of the typists cousins soon reported to her parents that she had been seen at he pictures with ‘that Frenchman’. The typist’s name was Frances Helen Lewis, known as ‘Nell’.

  Nell’s was Birmingham born and bred. Her parents were of the ‘poor but honest’ school of upbringing. Nell recalled that, when she was young in Handsworth, the family kept two jars above the mantelpiece that a few coins went into each and every payday: one was for coal and the other for a holiday – always taken in Aberystwyth. They were the only family in their street to have a holiday every year.

  Eventually, Nell’s father, Percy John Lewis, obtained a small workshop in the Jewellery District of Birmingham, stamping locks and hinges for jewellery boxes. He employed half-a-dozen women until World War II, when most left for better paid work in munitions. He carried on until the 1960s and retired when he was eighty-five.

  Nell’s family were deeply religious: when Nell as a young girl was paying the piano her aunts, who had come to tea, discussed at length if she should be allowed such entertainment on a Sunday, but decided it was permissible as the child was playing hymns. Nell had a fondness for music and, just before she met Tom, had joined a local amateur singing group: ‘The Blackbirds’.

  Tom and Nell married on 31st May 1924.

  2. The Good Days

  Tom was a happy man. Back in England, during the depression of the late 1920s / early 1930s, he had answered an advertisement in the employment columns of an English newspaper. Staff were required for the new Courtaulds factory at Calais in northern France. As Tom was now a trained electrician and French was his mother tongue he was a natural choice for the position of Chief Electrical Engineer. He moved over to Calais early in 1927 to help get the new factory off the ground and Nell and his baby daughter Beatrice Marie followed close behind.

  The furthest Nell had ever been from home was for the yearly holiday to Aberystwyth in Wales. And now she had followed Tom to a foreign land not knowing a word of French. She felt quite apprehensive about the whole thing.

  A row of English-style houses was built for the foremen of the new factory and Tom and Nell moved into one of them. There, Irene Marguerite was born in 1928 and Jeanne Elisabeth in 1932. The family was now complete and the girls were brought up in relative luxury. Nell found herself with both a live-in maid and a cleaning lady. When they were old enough, Nell drove the girls to the Lycee every day, the College Sophie Berthelot in Calais. By 1939, Marie, aged thirteen, was already an accomplished pianist. An examiner had told her at the age of nine that she was gifted. She had not known what that meant; she thought she had done badly! Irene, aged eleven, loved her violin lessons, and there was talk of Jeanne joining a choir.

  Clothilde, the maid, would come into Jeanne’s bedroom every winter’s morning carrying a basket. As Jeanne watched, with bedclothes scratching her chin and Dick their dog lying on her feet, the maid crumpled up sheets of old newspaper and laid them in the fireplace. She next criss-crossed the sticks of wood over the paper and finally placed some chunks of coal over the top.

  Then she lit the paper with a match and Jeanne looked on fascinated as the wood spat and crackled. When the coal was glowing red and warm, she knew she could get up and dress in front of the fire, ready for school.

  Tom and Nell led an exciting social life. Jeanne used to think her Mummy looked every bit a princess in her beautiful long dresses when she came to kiss her goodnight. What she didn’t know was that Tom and Nell sang duets on one of the very first commercial stations, Radio Normandie, run by British enthusiasts and based in Fecamp, a little way down the coast. The station broadcast across to England, where commercial radio was illegal.

  When her parents held a dinner party, Tom would order two-dozen oysters and spend a frantic half hour before the guests arrived, prising the obstinate shells with a small, sharp knife. All his choicest Royal Flying Corps language came out during these sessions and Jeanne was sent out of the kitchen until he had finished. She was allowed downstairs later and, sitting on a guest’s knee at the dinner table, was allowed a sip or two from their glass of wine before being sent back to bed.

 
; The garden was Jeanne’s domain. With Leon, the boy next door, she was constantly busy on the swing, in the sandpit and in the field at the back of the houses. There was always so much to do and so much mischief to get up to.

  One particular time, she and Leon got drunk. The episode was evermore known in the family’s history as The Story of the Kummel Bottle. She and Leon were rummaging about on an old rubbish tip in the back field one sunny afternoon. They found an empty bottle of Kummel, the delicious damson liqueur from eastern France. Noticing there was some crystallised sugar left in the bottom of the bottle they smashed it on a rock and, with a sharp stone, prised the hardened, liqueur-soaked sugar from the pieces of glass and ate it. The more they ate the more unwell they felt. They came home swaying and complaining of headaches. After a stiff questioning by anxious parents, they were sent to bed to sleep it off, to everyone’s great amusement. In future, whenever someone wanted to embarrass her, they would say, ‘Remember the Kummel story, Jeanne?’ She would slink away, her face bright red, remembering something she needed to do urgently.

  As well as Dick the dog, there was Zezette, the beautiful black and white cat, and one day, to Jeanne’s delight, Tom brought home a dozen chicks. He built an incubator with a light burning night and day. He explained that it was to keep the chicks warm and to pretend it was the mother hen. The girls named every one of the chicks. There was Popov, an East European politician forever being mentioned on the radio; Daladier, the French prime minister; and the stripy one they called Zebraline.

  Tradesmen called at the house. ‘Grandpere Cresson’ sold freshly-gathered watercress door-to-door, and fishermen brought their catch to the front door. Jeanne liked Monsieur and Madame Matelas best of all. Well that’s what they called them; they never knew their real names. They came once a year and took over the garage, emptied for the purpose. They set up a large trestle table and spent the day bringing the mattresses down from the bedrooms, one by one, unpicking them down one side, and taking the wool out. Jeanne liked to watch them; it was an event to look forward to. The floor of the garage spread with large, clean sheets was completely covered with tight wads of wool, like an Australian sheepshearers’ shed. Monsieur and Madame took great armfuls of wool and fluffed it up, letting the air get at it. They then returned the wool to the mattress, adding more if it was needed, and stitched the side up. When the job was done to their satisfaction, they took the finished mattress upstairs, brought another one down and started all over again. It took up the whole day.

 

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