Nell and the Girls

by Jeanne Gask

  After Creil, they made their way slowly, oh, ever so slowly, into the capital. And then, just when Jeanne thought she would die of boredom, they were there. The girls picked up their bags, Nell her case and her handbag with her papers, and found their way out of the Gare du Nord. The people . . . the tall buildings . . . the noise . . . Jeanne stood transfixed. It was all so much bigger, brighter, and louder than she had expected. She stood open-mouthed. Irene shouted, ‘Come on, Jeanne, you’ll lose us!’ She ran to catch them up. Nell and Marie were planning their next move. As usual, Nell had very little money.

  Marie said, ‘I saw a woman with a Red Cross armband in the station. Maybe she can give us the address of a cheap hotel?’ They went back into the main hall, a turmoil of post-liberation chaos. People were returning home from far away, their only belongings in cardboard-boxes tied up with string. There were soldiers and airmen: British, French, American; British Redcaps (military police), US military police also – nicknamed ‘Snowdrops’ because they wore white helmets – French civilian police, smartly dressed commuters; all getting in each other’s way, pushing, shoving, jostling.

  Marie suggested, ‘Look, we’ll never find her in this crowd. Mum, you stay here with Irene and Jeannot, and I’ll go and find her.’ Marie disappeared and returned twenty minutes later. Nell and the others were waiting where she had left them, sitting on their bags.

  ‘It’s almost impossible,’ she said. ‘There’s hardly anything available at all. She’s given me an address, it’s down by the Seine. Come on, I’ve found the Metro entrance.’ They followed her, Jeanne trudging behind making sure she didn’t lose sight of them. She could get lost in this crowd for a week, she thought, and not be found.

  They came out of the Metro in a seedy area alongside the River Seine. They ate in a cheap cafe and, armed with directions, found the house the Red Cross worker had recommended.

  Nell’s heart, not for the first time in all their adventures, sank. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘it’s a dosshouse! It’s where the tramps come for a sleep and a warm up.’ She turned and faced her daughters. ‘Look, we’ve got no choice. It’s getting late and we’re tired out. We’ll stay here just for tonight. I promise you, just for one night. Tomorrow, we’ll think of something else. I’m sure we can think of something better than this.’ And that’s what they did. Nell, seeing the condition of the old mattresses on the iron bedsteads, made the girls roll themselves up in their coats, so they wouldn’t catch anything. Then she propped herself up against the wall. Half sitting and rolled up in her own coat she stood guard over her daughters all night. Jeanne fell exhaustedly asleep to a symphony of coughing, snoring and farting.

  The next morning found them back in the cafe, dirty, dishevelled, and dusty. They dipped hunks of jammy baguette in their bowls of coffee. Nell, Marie and Irene were arguing, trying to decide what they should do next.

  Irene said emphatically, ‘Well, we’re not going back there tonight. Phew . . . don’t those men whiff! I thought I’d be sick!’

  Marie chipped in, ‘Why don’t we go and see if Gaston and Jeanne are still there?’

  ‘Oh no, we couldn’t possibly,’ Nell remonstrated. ‘There’s four of us, it’d be too much of an imposition.’

  Bill Sarginson’s best friend throughout the Naughty Nineties and into the new century had been Gaston Baurain. Gaston was now an old man, living with his wife in retirement in Paris.

  Marie went on, ‘Oh, come on, they can only say no. Or they might at least know someone who could put us up.’

  Nell sighed. ‘Oh, all right then.’ There was no arguing with Marie. Once she had a bee in her bonnet about something she was unstoppable. Nell fished in the depths of her handbag and found a battered old address book. ‘There you are.’ She had found the right page. ‘Rue Cernuschi.’

  Marie and Irene got up from the table and looked at the map of Paris pinned on the wall with rusty drawing pins, among adverts for Pernod and football fixture notices.

  ‘Here we are!’ Irene found it. ‘Paris XVII, by Avenue Wagram.’

  The cafe owner, busy polishing glasses with a dirty cloth, was impressed. ‘Avenue Wagram? My goodness, you’re going to a posh area and no mistake!’

  ‘Come on then, let’s go!’ Marie, now she had the idea in mind, wanted it carried out instantly.

  They came out of the Metro in an exclusive part of Paris, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. They were in an avenue typical of central Paris, lined with elegant old apartment buildings stretching skywards.

  Nell felt unkempt and wondered how their old friends would receive them. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they could have telephoned first, but all the telephones were still out of action since the liberation.

  She need not have worried.

  They entered through the large front door of number seventeen and, on the first floor, rang the bell. An elderly maid answered the door, and there, behind her, was an old couple.

  ‘Nellie! Nellie, my dear . . . and your lovely girls! What a wonderful surprise! Come in, come in! Why, you poor things, you do look as though you’ve had a rough journey. And Tommy, have you heard from him?’ Gaston and his wife Jeanne both spoke at the same time. Turning to the maid hovering in the doorway, Gaston called, ‘Hortense, coffee please for the ladies,’ then to Nell, ‘Now, Nellie, come and sit down, we want to hear all your news. . .’ Seeing Jeanne by the door, he said, ‘Yes, go on in! Now, which one are you? Yes, Jeanne, that’s right, I remember. Go on, Dear, you may explore the flat.’

  Jeanne wandered down the hall of the large flat, attracted by the tantalising cooking smells. She found the kitchen, pristine-clean, with rows of graduated shiny pans hanging on the wall. Hortense was sitting with a coffee mill on her lap, grinding the coffee grains. She looked up and smiled and Jeanne watched her. Hortense, satisfied she had enough, pulled out the full drawer beneath the grinder, measured the scented coffee into the coffee pot and poured boiling water over it. The combined aroma of freshly ground coffee and Boeuf Bourguignon was almost unbearable. It smelled so good!

  Jeanne carried on with her tour of inspection, looking around bedroom doors into rooms full of old-fashioned, highly polished furniture. There were carved wardrobes with matching dressing tables, and high beds you had to climb into.

  At the end of the hall, she found what she was looking for – the bathroom. This was a real, genuine bathroom: deep pink, the sort dreams are made of – straight out of a film! There was a deep bath, she would lose her footing if she should overfill it, and a matching washbasin. She ran her fingers along the bath almost afraid to touch, then gingerly turned on the hot tap, trying not to make a noise. A stream of hot water gushed out. When had she last had a bath, a proper bath? She couldn’t remember. It was so long ago. She dimly recalled playing for hours with the suds. She used to form a triangle, with thumbs and forefingers joined, trying to blow the biggest bubble in the world.

  Beyond the bath was a pink WC, with a chain hanging from the high cistern. Not a smelly, squatting Turkish lavatory, the sort that soaked her feet if she didn’t jump out of the way quickly when she pushed the flushing handle on the wall, nor an earth closet with the wind swirling round from underneath, chilling her nether-regions, nor the lever-type stinking lavatory in the back yard in Cambrai. No, this was a proper WC, with a warm, wooden seat and a proper roll of toilet paper close at hand; the sort she would like to sit on comfortably and have a quiet read for twenty minutes or so.

  Irene caught up with her, brimming with excitement. ‘Looks as though we’re staying here!’

  Jeanne said, quick as a flash, ‘Me first with the bathroom!’

  The British Embassy in the Avenue Friedland was besieged with crowds of people laying claim to British citizenship and clamouring to be given priority for repatriation to Britain. It was total confusion and mayhem.

  Nell, after a wait of several hours, finally took her turn at the desk in front of the harassed official, clutching her allimportant dark blue British passport and
the letter she had received from the Embassy.

  ‘Ah yes.’ The official looked up from a mound of papers after spending several minutes selecting the appropriate ones. ‘Mrs Sarginson, you and your children have top priority. You will be on the first repatriation plane, as soon as it can be organised.’ He added with a sigh, ‘Your husband and a Miss Lewis have been in touch with the Foreign Office in London several times on your behalf.’

  Nell smiled. Good old Tom and Rikkie, they had been busy!

  The tired official went on, ‘Please present yourselves here each morning, and we’ll do our utmost.’

  Nell asked anxiously, ‘Do you think we’ll be home for Christmas?’

  The official smiled wanly. ‘We’re doing our utmost . . .’ He called out, ‘Next please!’

  And so a routine was established. Nell and the girls would leave the comfort of Gaston and Jeanne’s flat each morning to join the daily chaos at the British Embassy. They sat all day long, the girls bored stiff, in a long corridor full of anxious people, and at the end of the day were sent away and told to return the following morning. This routine went on for several days.

  On the Sunday, they visited Suzanne.

  Bill Sarginson’s wife Jeanne had a sister, Marie, who was married to an artist, Henri d’Estienne, and Suzanne was their only daughter. In 1944, Suzanne was in her midforties, a strikingly handsome Spanish-looking woman. She had wanted to become an artist, but had been married off to a count by her father, who feared a rival. The marriage was an unhappy one, and Suzanne and her husband were barely civil to one another.

  She lived in an apartment overlooking the little square at St. Germain-des-Pres, the centre of left-bank intellectualism. She was an avid theatre and concert goer and her nearest neighbour was Jean-Paul Sartre, the leftwing writer. She opposed his philosophies and it was all she could do to exchange greetings when she met him on the stairs with his long-time mistress, the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir.

  In her sitting room overlooking the square, that Sunday afternoon in December 1944, the walls covered with her father’s exquisite paintings and pastels, Suzanne entertained Nell and the girls by playing Bach on the piano. Marie was in her element, chatting to Suzanne about various composers, following the music and turning the pages for her, but Irene and Jeanne were bored to tears and starving hungry.

  In the late afternoon, still without food, Suzanne suggested they should go to a soiree friends of hers were holding that evening. They went by taxi, an unheard-of luxury to the girls, and stopped outside a porte-cochere, one of those wide, anonymous doorways that are prevalent in French towns. The door opened, and on the doorstep was the most extraordinary sight they had ever encountered.

  Smiling benignly, an old man welcomed them in. He was dressed in a white, flowing Roman toga, leather sandals on his bare feet, and his long grey hair hung down in two thin plaits, resting on his shoulders.

  Suzanne kissed him warmly and introduced him as Raymond Duncan, an American. Nell knew at once this was the Raymond Duncan, brother of the famed dancer, Isadora.

  Isadora Duncan was known as ‘the Mother of Modern Dance’. At the turn of the century, she evolved a free style, taking dance back to its beginnings. In 1903, she travelled to Greece in her search for a perfect dance form. She believed she would find her answer within the ruins of Ancient Greece. Her family followed her and, deciding to build an Art Commune, they bought a hill site at Kopanos. Raymond drew up plans to include a house, a small temple, a Greek theatre and a library. But the project ran out of money and was abandoned. It was clear that Isadora was not made for the simple life. She left Kopanos and went to find fame and fortune throughout the theatres and concert halls of Europe. She died when the long scarf she was wearing became entangled in the wheel of the car driven by her latest lover. She had been enormously influential, forcing dancers to re-appraise the techniques of the time.

  Raymond was the only Duncan to remain true to the family’s ideal of an aesthetic life.

  Next to Raymond were two uniformed GIs, one of whom he introduced as his nephew. Nell wondered whether this could be Isadora’s son, or maybe Isadora’s sister Laura’s.

  A tall man in a long black tailed coat and shirt with starched wing collar, gushed forward. ‘Cherie Anglaise!’ He took hold of Nell’s hand and kissed it.

  Nell blushed delightedly. She felt the years of hardship rolling away. This was more like it, she thought.

  They were led through into a small concert hall within the house. A grand piano stood on the stage and facing it were twenty-five to thirty chairs arranged in a semi-circle.

  The gusher in the tailed coat stepped onto the stage and, bowing and acknowledging the applause of the small, select audience, took his shoes off. Suzanne whispered to Nell that he was a pupil of the great Alfred Cortot and he always played in his stocking feet!

  He started to play a Chopin etude. Marie sat, bending forward, enraptured. Waves of boredom and hunger swept over Jeanne once more, and she slumped into her chair.

  Much later in the 1960s, the O.A.S group that opposed Algerian independence from France, placed a plastic bomb in the stairwell of the block of flats where Jean-Paul Sartre lived. He was away, but Suzanne’s apartment on the floor below received the full force of the explosion. Luckily she was in the kitchen at the back of the building, or she would have been killed. In a frantic letter to Cousin Tom telling him about the incident, she told how she had to use the service stairs for months, during the repairs to the building.

  The next day, they visited Suzanne’s parents: their Great Aunt Marie and her artist husband, Henri d’Estienne, who had gained some success in his youth. At the turn of the century, he had won the Prix de Rome and had had a triptych, Noces Bretonne, (Breton Wedding) hung over the staircase of the Louvre. With his prize money he had travelled to Algeria and had painted exquisite portraits of Algerian women in all their finery. He had said laughing, that their husbands would sit in the corner of the room with a gun between their legs, ready to pounce should Henri misbehave.

  As they climbed up the stairs to the old couple’s apartment, Nell said wearily, ‘Oh well, let’s visit the old womaniser.’

  Jeanne wondered what a womaniser looked like. Would he be wearing a silk dressing gown and holding a long cigarette holder? In fact, all she saw was an old man with a plaid shawl round his shoulders to keep out the cold. Tante Marie was welcoming and sweet as usual.

  Jeanne asked to see Oncle Henri’s paintings, but he said they were up in the studio and it was too cold to go up there. If she came back in the summer he would take her up there to see them. It never came about. He died soon afterwards.

  19. The Reunion

  Back at the British Embassy, the official had news at last. ‘Mrs Sarginson, please present yourselves here tomorrow morning early, with your luggage. We may be able to transport you to England.’

  That afternoon, Nell, making enquiries at the Post Office, found it was now possible to send telegrams to England. She sent one to Tom, saying, ‘With Gaston. Our reunion 20 Kisses.’ A telegram arrived from Tom by return: ‘Overjoyed with your telegram. We understand you are arriving 20 December. Love.’ The lack of punctuation in Nell’s telegram had caused him to question whether she was sending him 20 kisses, or whether they were in fact arriving on the 20th!

  But they had reckoned without the fog. Each morning, Gaston and Hortense waved goodbye from the windows of their flat and Nell and the girls, carrying all they possessed, went by Metro to the British Embassy and sat around all day. Then an announcement would be made: ‘We regret, ladies and gentlemen, we are unable to repatriate you today, due to foggy conditions prevailing over the Channel. Please present yourselves early tomorrow . . .’ etc. Nell and the girls would return to the flat to be welcomed back by the old couple. This performance went on for several days, and Christmas drew ever nearer.

  On December 23rd, the official had good news. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the fog has thinned somewhat over the Cha
nnel, and we are hoping for a takeoff. We shall transport you to the airport, but nevertheless, may still be unable to fly you to England today. It depends on the weather report.’

  Excited, they boarded an RAF lorry, together with the other lucky repatriates and were driven to Le Bourget airport. While they waited, they were handed RAF identification tags, which they had to tie on to their clothes and each item in their possession. Marie grinned. ‘It doesn’t make you feel too confident about the flight, does it?’

  As they walked out onto the tarmac towards the Royal Canadian Air Force Dakota, standing with its engine revving, Marie couldn’t resist saying out of the corner of her month, ‘Well, I hope the elastic doesn’t break!’

  They stepped up a rickety gangway and climbed aboard. Used for paratroopers, it had long wooden benches down each side facing each other. Jeanne sat down gingerly and noticed an old French lady opposite, dressed entirely in black. She sat erect with her back straight and held a cake box in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. She didn’t flinch once during the entire journey.

  An RAF officer came aboard, checking the passengers.

  ‘We may yet have to turn back if the fog thickens. Anyway, we’ll take off and see how we go. Wizard show!’ he said and disappeared.

  As the plane taxied and took off, Jeanne, who had never flown before and hadn’t known quite what to expect, thought the plane felt quite unsafe. Outside, the thin fog swirled around giving off an eerie glow. She wondered just how old the plane was. As they took to the air, the flight was noisy, draughty, shaky and turbulent. Midway across the Channel, the plane lurched suddenly and dropped about ten feet before righting itself and regaining its composure. But Jeanne felt as though she had left her stomach behind. This happened two or three times and she felt sick.

  As a distraction she looked out of the window and, far below, saw the angry, uninviting, wintry sea with ‘white horses’ riding the waves.