by Melvyn Bragg
In Holland he had been shepherded, every step. Here on the road which arrowed to Paris, he stood in the morning sun with his father’s old kitbag at his feet and the haversack from the boy scouts slung over his shoulder, shyly thumbing out at the right-lane traffic. He had just read The Outsider and he felt every inch the isolated self-absorbed anti-hero of Camus as he thumbed without success for more than an hour. It was as if isolation were a cloak which came out of the air and wrapped itself around him.
A small van stopped and he was picked up by a merry man whose French was pickled in an accent as unintelligible as Joe’s boyhood accent would have been to a French student. But the lack of communication amused the Frenchman and they passed the time wholly content in pointing out ‘hedge’, ‘road’, ‘farm’, ‘cow’, ‘field’ and laughing for no reason at all. Joe felt lapped in a warm bath and both of them were a touch sad when their journey ended. On the roadside he tried to smoke the yellow cigarette the man had given him and all but choked. But he had broken his duck and he waited for his next lift with some confidence, even though The Outsider still threatened him.
They had said it would be ‘truly international’. So it was. About two score idealistic young men from all over Western Europe had rallied to the call to help the Abbé Pierre in his mission to feed and care for the poor of Paris, those who slept unromantically under the bridges, those who dressed in rags, drank cheap, vile alcohol, were the beggars at the gate.
The young men lived in a compound, small rooms, four bunks in each. The compound was grassless and saved only by a ping-pong table. There was a shop which turned over the goods either given or politely scavenged from the richer districts by those who went out in the small trucks early in the morning. There were regular prayers in French, Roman Catholic, although other denominations were invited to join in. The intensity of the others re-ignited some of Joe’s former religious passion.
It was the clochards, the down-and-outs, who destabilised him. He could not cope with his inability to cope and his distress grew by the day. The young Christian men went under the bridges of Paris to feed the clochards and Joe could get through that. Then there were those who came to the compound. They had their prayers together and that was fine. He tried to talk to a couple of them, in the shade, sat on the porches to the bunk rooms. That was worthwhile though the smell was very ripe and the language was not easy.
It was the eating that finished him. They sat down to eat together, just as Christ had brought everyone of all degrees to the table, it was said. Joe could not eat. Not so much because the food often seemed raw. The bread was always good. It was the look of the clochards. In his prayers he castigated himself and tried again in the morning but it got no better. It was the ravaged, muck-streaked, often pocked, scarred faces, the matted hair, the multiple layers of tattered clothing; everything that a true Christian ought to embrace repelled him. The more he thought about them the more fiercely his re-inflamed Christianity burned. But what sort of a Christian was he if he could not fulfil the basic duty of embracing them?
Joe did not, perhaps could not, call into the account the disturbance still felt over Rachel in the last few weeks; or the deepening strangeness of the compound secluded in an inner suburb of Paris, isolated and bare in bounty. Or his further embarrassment at the curious flight of whatever French he had known. His conversations were brief, simple and meagre. He made no friend. Even when he took his turn at the ping-pong table he felt listless, unable to absorb himself in the game, a willing loser to get it over with. He wrote a very long letter home saturated in self-pity, asking for food and ending with the sentence, ‘You must not tell anybody this. I don’t want anybody to know about this.’ He held back from posting it, gave himself the next weekend; but it was a close run thing. He felt stranded, hoist on a religion which did not support him when he needed it. Yet it was his own fault.
He liked being with the men in the trucks in the early mornings. They went to a small café, stood at the bar, ordered a coffee and a cognac and smoked the fat, loosely filled, yellow-papered cigarettes which Joe was getting used to. He liked seeing Paris out of the window of the truck. Some of the objects they were given - chairs, ornaments, books, jewellery - seemed very fine to Joe. In those mornings he felt the beginnings of interest, inklings of an infatuation with the city. The foreignness became beguiling, the tables on the pavements, the bookstalls alongside the river, the high elegance of those who directed the handing over of their rubbish, even the funny lavatories. But his stomach would clench as they drove back for the midday meal and by the time he got into the eating room he was faced with what had become repellent.
It could not be forgiven. And he was such a disappointment to himself. Is this what years of singing and praying in St. Mary’s Wigton had turned him into? Was this the best he could do? Praying did not help. The more he concentrated on himself, the more acutely he thought about Rachel. He could not trust himself to post the daily letters - too big a wad to fit into a single envelope - scribbled in lengthy desperation. And what a thing to be desperate about! ‘Desperate’ should be reserved for much worse than this.
On the first free Sunday he walked into the middle of Paris and discovered the Jeu de Paumes. At first it was the coolness of the gallery which most struck him. The day was hot, the streets heavy with a heat he had not previously encountered, his route had been tentative, apprehensive, in such new, even alien, territory. The feeling of The Outsider had descended on him like a shroud. Who was this ‘he’ drifting along burning pavements among different-tongued people not one of whom he could say ‘hello’ to, not one of whom he knew, not one of whom knew him? If he vanished outside this pharmacie, who would notice? Who would care? Would he himself care?
The gallery was a refuge. Not very crowded, people drifting around in that underwater mode he had noticed when he had been to the Tate Gallery and the British Museum on the London Trip. The slightest burr of low appreciative sound; a sense of congregation, piety, even worship.
When he had returned to school after getting into Oxford, Joe had put himself through a crash course in Modern Art with a much amused Art teacher, whose own work, sculptures in the manner of Henry Moore, were gaining her a reputation in the county. She had been highly entertained - though she had kept it to herself - by the boy’s blunt bafflements, especially with Picasso, Braque and Matisse. The Surrealists were stared at without comment and she could almost see the boy trying to fit together things which to his mind did not fit together. He laid out the reproductions on a large trestle table as if they were pieces in a jigsaw.
But these paintings, here in this stylish, cool French gallery in the middle of Paris, these were real, the real thing, the paintings themselves. He planted himself in front of the Van Goghs for so long he could have put down roots. They seized his mind. He not only saw the paintings, he had the novel and thrilling sensation of believing that he saw what the paintings were about. He had been told what paintings represented: a battle, a monarch, a landscape, a scene in the bible. But this was an insight of a wholly different nature and his own. He saw the pain of it: he understood the distortion: he thought he understood the strain in those thick raw daubs and strokes of colour, the overemphasis of everything, everything being both what it was and also what it hinted at. Fallings away. The meaning of it, to Joe, was as clear is if he were reading it. He was mesmerised.
He drifted past Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne. The Impressionists once so derided were now the study of so many whose recent forebears had scorned them. There was that, too, he knew, and it gave him a sense, unearned but pleasing, that this generation, his generation, understood more than previous generations, had more insight, more art, more knowledge.
At first, Joe looked as intently at the names and the titles as he did at the paintings themselves. It was like a little dance: in towards the wall, rather myopically staring at the name and the description, a few steps back to see if the painting fitted, forward once more to the wall to check h
e had got it right, back again to look, a final and, he hoped, profound, penetrating look. He looked at dozens of paintings but it was Van Gogh who rooted him.
Towards the end he tried to go round without looking at the labels, attempting to remember who was who just by the paintings. He stayed until they said it was time to go.
At the entrance he found a free leaflet which described all the principal museums and galleries of Paris. He felt he had picked up a string of pearls. He stopped in a café on the way back and ordered steak and chips which he gobbled down and, hoping no one would notice, ordered the same again. He drank light beer which was cheap and refreshing. Mostly he studied the leaflet. He had to get to all of these. He just had to.
He saw the entrance prices. Sunday was free. He could not wait another week. Nor was it just the prices. Although there was not a contract with the Abbé Pierre’s organisation (he was never to see the Abbé Pierre himself) he knew that it was understood he worked six days a week, most afternoons. That gave him Sundays and only rare afternoons.
When he got back, worn out but with some stability inside him for the first time, he tore up all his previous letters to Rachel and told her about Van Gogh. He decided against sending the unhappy letter to his mother: in its place he wrote a cheerful note on a postcard - of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers - which he had bought in the Jeu de Paumes. He would go to the Jeu de Paumes every Sunday he was in Paris.
He told them he needed to go to the British Embassy and they let him off the following afternoon.
It was very grand. It was even grander than the halls Joe had seen when he was at Oxford. And it was hushed, hushed in such a way, Joe thought, that you felt you had to hold up your hand if you wanted to speak. Those in charge seemed uninterruptibly busy, though only among themselves, mostly smart men very smartly turned out, his mother would have said. Joe regretted his sports jacket but he had thought that to bring a suit to work for the Abbé Pierre would be a waste of space.
Another rather lanky, long-haired English boy sat on the bench beside him, reading To Have and Have Not Joe wanted to ask him what he thought about it, but he observed the pervasive reticence. He had brought Seize the Day.
After a while, when no one official had paid any attention to them, Joe was offered a cigarette.
‘I haven’t tried one of these.’ It was a Disque Bleu.
‘The tip keeps some of the filthy French tobacco at bay.’
He snapped on a lighter. Joe had begun to acquire a taste for the filthy French tobacco but he kept mum. It was not a place to rush things.
‘What brings you here?’
‘I want to see if they’ve got a free pass for museums and galleries,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve read that they’ve got them for French students so I wondered if we had them as well.’
‘I shouldn’t think so. Not our lot.’
‘I’ll ask anyway. These are good.’ He waved the cigarette. ‘What brings you here?’
‘I’m just hanging about for a friend who works in the place. Do you work in Paris?’
‘I’m with the Abbé Pierre,’ Joe said, feeling a cheat.
‘Very worthy.’
‘It is.’
‘Bloody hard work, I imagine.’
‘Not really.’ Joe defended the Abbé Pierre with some spirit. ‘And as you say it’s worthwhile, that helps.’ So why the sudden pit in his stomach?
‘I had a nerdy number making hundreds of beds in one of those immense French schools they turn over for thousands of holiday students. It was quite larky. We made the beds in the morning. Got all our meals free and some sort of stipend. Day’s yours after lunch.’
Joe wanted that job. The want of it went through him like a stake. That job would save him. The possibility X-rayed his misery. He stubbed out the cigarette: it took several attempts.
‘Can anybody just go and sign on?’
‘Welcome you with open arms. Especially English. University?’
‘Going to Oxford.’
Open Sesame. Which college?’
‘Wadham.’
‘I don’t think,’ he put back his head and obviously thought, ‘no, I don’t know anyone at Wadham.’
Joe took the address of the school. He got a plausible student card without any of the anticipated fuss. He caught the metro to the nearest station to Abbé Pierre, packed, said he had to go, and set off in the early evening for the school, which was in the Bois de Vincennes. He had to get in. He could not go back to the Abbé Pierre.
After a fraught hour of waiting, suddenly, without formalities, the school took him on. He felt free - wanted to weep, weak as he was, wanted to sing but dare not try his luck, carefully followed directions in the balmy, late Parisian twilight. He went into a long dormitory, gratefully flopped on his bed, unpacked, then slept, fighting off the truth that threatened to overpower him: that he was a coward and had run away from what was difficult, and failed a test of faith. But he had done it. And he felt safe. His father would have stuck it out, his grandfather too.
‘English!’
He woke up immediately. Above him a very large boy, a giant teddy bear figure, black wavy hair, bright smile. There was a buzz of foreign voices.
‘English! It is time to arise for le petit déjeuner’.
He dressed quickly and tagged along with the dozen or so other boys. They were all German.
‘My name is Reiner,’ said the beaming teddy bear over coffee and bread, this time with honey. ‘You and I, we are working mates.’
‘Work mates.’
‘You will teach me English. The other boys said me that so I will be a work mate.’
‘I’m Joe,’ he said and put out his hand.
Reiner stood up and made a small bow.
‘Joe is?’ he said, lowering himself onto the bench with care.
‘Joseph.’
‘I will call you Joseph. Or English. Both. Joe is American.’
They were in a corner of a vast refectory. There were half a dozen girls at a nearby table. At yet another table was the residue of the regular school staff. Joe was to discover an enormous school, taking more than sixteen hundred pupils, on the very edge of the Bois de Vincennes itself. Classrooms had been stripped of partitions and turned into mass dormitories for visiting schools and Joe’s job was not just to make the beds but to sweep out, generally clean the place and help with the preparation of the déjeuner.
‘We have our rooms,’ said Reiner, ‘and we do it so. First we take all the clothes from the bed. We carry them away. Now we take the new clothes for the bed. I will demonstrate you. Is this English correct?’
Joe struggled. It would be better and certainly easier to say nothing. Was it duty or vanity or a desire to please? ‘We call them sheets,’ he said, ‘not clothes.’
‘Sheets?’
‘Sheets.’
‘Clothes are this?’ Reiner pointed to his shirt, his shorts. ‘Yes. And we don’t say “I will demonstrate to you.” We say “I will show you.”’
‘I will show you.’
‘And we don’t say “We do it so”, we say “We do it like this.”’
‘We do it like this. This is very good for me. Danke. Sprechen sie Deutsch?'
‘Nein. And that’s it except for Danke sein.’
‘Danke will be correct also alone. Parlez-vous frangais?'
‘Unpeu.’
‘That is good also. But we will speak in English.’
Joe enjoyed it. The relief after the clochards made him feel giddy. Soon he was running down the narrow lanes between the drilled rows of single beds ripping off the single blanket and the two sheets with a sense of looting. The sleeve for the pillow was fussier but even that had the exhilarating feeling of off with the old on with the new.
Reiner talked relentlessly. He talked about the Opera House in Munich where he worked as a ‘ticket collector’ as often as possible so that he could see the performances. He talked about the youth orchestra in which he played percussion, which he illustrated. He talked
about his plan to be the music director of a theatre, of the magnificent scenery around Munich, of the wonders of Paris, especially the Opera House. Later, when they had finished stirring the potato puree in the vats and laid the long tables for several hundred, they went into the Bois de Vincennes itself and he talked on. Joe was disappointed at the meagre number of trees.
‘At English schools I am told you are talking against the Professor.’
‘The teacher. Talking back. Yes. Asking questions usually but arguing sometimes.’
‘That is very good. At German schools we do not talking back at all. You are more democratic.’
‘Oh.’ Joe was pleased. ‘I suppose we are. I suppose your method is authoritarian.’ Should he have said that?
‘It is not good for democracy. But it will change,’ said Reiner. ‘The French are the most democratic’
‘Are they?’ Joe was stung, but his ignorance made him unable to do anything about it. ‘How do you know that?’
‘The French are all an individual,’ said Reiner. ‘Lïberté, égalité, fraternité - that is the French.’
‘We have all that.’
‘Not as the French.’
‘Like the French. To be honest, Reiner, I think we do but we just don’t boast about it as much.’
They came back to the dormitory less animated.
Reiner introduced him to the others as ‘Joseph, the Englishman’, and every one of them shook his hand, gave a little bow and said ‘welcome’ or ‘very pleased’ or ‘good day’. Hardly any of them looked like Germans, Joe thought.
There was one, two beds away, chunky, blond, freckled, thick-lipped, guttural, just like in the films. The others were all shades and shapes and sizes. Maybe, Joe thought, they were rejects.
