by Rosemary Say
My only real friend was Simone, the Manguins’ maid. She was a tall girl with curly, black hair and a prominent forehead. She was a little younger than me and came from Aix-en-Provence. She was very lively and loved teaching me the local slang, the more obscene the better. We would laugh and giggle as I practised new words in make-believe conversations around the house. She claimed to have a boyfriend living in Marseille who was involved in the criminal underworld. I don’t know how much of this I believed but it was good fun to listen to.
I was given a massive, old-fashioned bicycle known in the family as La Reine Marie (Queen Mary), on which I would attempt to cycle round town. One of my favourite mental pictures of that time is of Jean-Pierre desperately hanging on to my back as I struggled against the attempts of the ferocious mistral wind to blow us into the river.
The bicycle was also to be the cause of my brush with the Avignon underworld. This was not quite in the Marseille league but to me it was still terrifying. One particularly cold, snowy day I went into Avignon to run some errands for Madame Manguin. I lost control of my bicycle in one of the narrow, winding streets of the centre. As I struggled to keep it upright I knocked over an old woman. I was alarmed and ran back to see how she was. Instead of a feeble, gentle, old lady who needed reassurance and help, I was faced with an angry virago demanding money or she would report me to the police for reckless behaviour.
I was in a dilemma. I had very little French and no wish to confront a policeman who might ban me from the roads and thereby make it impossible for me to take Biquet to and from school. I felt like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, blackmailed over her terrible past. I gave in. For several weeks I would meet this old woman on a Friday morning and pay her to keep quiet.
Reason eventually returned to me and I simply stopped going to meet her. For the first few days I waited for her to denounce me, hardly daring to go out and certainly not on my easily recognizable bicycle. But nothing happened. She obviously realized that the worm had turned and was off looking for some other mug.
My main problem during the first few months in Avignon was that of language. Reading was not the issue. I was near enough to the discipline of my own schooldays to find it easy to sit down and do exercise after exercise. I would spend hours with both English and French versions of books such as Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, translating one language into the other and back again. I read French literature voraciously and indiscriminately.
But speaking was another matter. I had to get rid of my hesitant schoolgirl French and start speaking if I wanted to belong in the country. It seemed to take me about ten minutes to think of something to say at the meal table and then I would often come out with double entendres that would make people howl with laughter. ‘Merci, je suis tres excitée de venir avec vous’ (‘I am very aroused to be coming with you’), was a classic that left me red in the face at one Sunday lunch.
As for Avignon itself, I had not expected it to be exotic and I was certainly right about that. It was a beautiful, medieval, walled city with lots of cafes and squares. The old Palais des Papes dominated the northern end with the famous Pont d’Avignon beside it. But it was still a very small, provincial place. For a London girl such as myself who was used to a big city, it was like Canterbury perhaps. And even then I wasn’t living in the centre but in a pleasant, quiet suburb. It was all slightly dull and tranquil.
I suppose I might have become bored with this somewhat uninspiring town and quiet routine had it not been for our long holiday visits to stay with Monsieur Claude’s father on the Mediterranean coast.
Père Manguin, as he was affectionately known, had a large house on the outskirts of St-Tropez. He was a painter of the Fauve school. This was a post-impressionist movement from the beginning of the twentieth century that emphasized vibrant colours and bold brushstrokes. Matisse, Marquet, and Derain had been among his Fauvist contemporaries and friends.
After the great experimental days of his youth, however, he seemed to have had no desire to explore the world further. Perhaps this was a result of his being more comfortably off than his fellow artists. Consequently, his later reputation would not measure up to those who went on to other discoveries. Today he is largely forgotten. Nevertheless, when I got to know him his work was still being shown all over the world and he seemed to receive colossal sums for it.
Père Manguin was a wizened man with a shock of white hair. He accepted me into his household seemingly without much enthusiasm. Perhaps he just thought of me as a rather ungainly, prissy English girl with little charm or wit. Or maybe it had something to do with my second day at the villa, when I had gone to the lavatory during the sacred post-lunch siesta and had dared to pull the chain. Roaring out from his room as the pipes rattled and thundered round the house, he told me what he thought of idiotic English girls. I took the children down to the beach for the rest of the afternoon.
In those days St-Tropez was not really much more than a fishing village. After the war it was to be made famous by Brigitte Bardot but at that time it was dominated by the widow of Paul Signac, the Pointillist painter. Around her was grouped the cultural set. The poet Léon-Paul Fargue had a sharp, bitchy wit – ‘the evening was agitated by Paul Poiret’s hand,’ as he once described a party at the house of the great dressmaker who had Parkinson’s disease. Ambroise Vollard was there, the art dealer who had made plenty of money by snapping up early Cézannes, much to the disgust of Gertrude Stein. The artist Édouard Vuillard (of the complicated pattern paintings) would often be around with his elderly friend and fellow painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, who would rather reluctantly join us all for a swim in the sea in a laughably tight rubber bathing cap. And the writer Colette would slump in, I don’t know from where, with her perpetual query to me: ‘Tu as vu mes chats, petite anglaise?’ (‘Have you seen my cats, little English girl?’)
Sometimes they all sat around the large table in the garden looking down at the beach and the sea across to St Raphael, the sunlight playing on the big white tablecloth. The conversation (as much as I could catch of it) was animated, violent and voluble. I was terribly impressed by them. As I wrote to my father, ‘They are serious and cultured people … Their friends are gay enough but they make a clique of Paris life which can only be joined after real hard work and success.’
One day Père Manguin’s model failed to turn up. His wife, Madame Jeanne, was not available to sit for him. She had some business to attend to in town.
‘Et pourquoi pas, Patoun?’ she suggested to her husband.
He looked at me, snorted in disgust and muttered some comments about Englishwomen. Picking up a bowl of fruit from the table he went off to his studio to do a still-life painting.
A few days later, however, I was sitting on the beach with the children when the old man’s voice came from behind ordering me not to move. After being frozen for what seemed like hours, I was at last allowed to get up.
‘There,’ he said, handing me the picture to look at. ‘That is an English back.’
He stomped away without another word. I wasn’t sure if he meant this as a compliment but I was pleased to have made the grade as a model.
It was early in my second visit to his house in August 1939 that I finally broke the ice with this daunting figure and his family. I remember the moment precisely. We were seated at the dinner table on the large verandah overlooking the bay. The darkness had come down and the evening air was gentle and cool. The last train had rattled beneath us, taking the workmen home from the torpedo factory near by. As the conversation continued around me I had my perpetual concern: what could I say to amuse or even interest them?
‘Tell us about your family,’ said Madame Jeanne, turning to me with a smile. ‘Étonne-nous, Patoun.’
I gulped in desperation.
To me there was nothing exciting to say about my family that would surprise her, as she wanted. As I saw it, we were a rather staid, middle-class lot. There was an elder brother who had been at Cambridge and who was
now an ambitious cleric; an elder sister in a secretarial job; my mother at home; my father, a reserve naval commander who worked in the City …
‘Ton père,’ said Monsieur Claude. ‘Que pense-t-il de Monsieur Churchill?’
‘Beaucoup,’ I said lamely. There was bemused silence at the table. ‘Mon père porte un monocle de temps en temps,’ I volunteered in despair.
In truth, it was only on very rare occasions that I had seen my father using a monocle. Nevertheless, I mimicked him putting it to his eye and looked around the table rather fiercely. Everyone laughed, much to my surprise. Biquet began to copy me. ‘Je suis Monsieur Say,’ he said as he went around the table, peering at the members of his family rather pompously through his imaginary monocle.
I suddenly realized that with this small and innocuous gesture I had at last opened the door to the Manguins’ affection and interest. From now on I was to be accepted as part of the family. I was drôle, a character. Farewell the gauche English girl who always seemed at a loss for words. No longer would Père Manguin threaten me with his gun when he was ‘fishing’ with bullets from the window of his studio. And now conversations at the dining table would often end with ‘N’est-ce pas, petite anglaise?’ To be happy was to sit on the right hand of French approval. ‘N’est-ce pas, petite anglaise …?’
This small episode proved to be the turning point of my life in France. Having struggled for over half a year with speaking the language and adapting to the culture, I suddenly achieved self-confidence in both. From then on I began to love every minute of my new life. It seemed to me that this relaxed, undaunted lifestyle was truly living. The long meals where everyone was relaxed and witty were attractive and fun. It was so different from the carefully planned and tense entertaining of the English middle classes, with my mother frantic from having got up at six in the morning to start preparing the house and food for guests. I had no desire to shine in these French meals, just to be accepted. I was very happy.
As I wrote to my parents, ‘French life suits your daughter exceedingly well … this enterprise is turning out completely successfully.’ I was now fearless even with the language. One evening towards the end of that second holiday I organized a small play with the children based on the French subjunctive. For some reason (inexplicable at this far remove) I found the conjugation both fascinating and hilarious. I assumed that the audience would as well. Much of the play was based on stilted sentences starting with phrases such as ‘Il faut que je fasse.’ I don’t know how Père Manguin and the family reacted to this. With polite bemusement, I suspect.
A boyfriend was still the one thing I lacked for most of my time in Avignon and St-Tropez. There was, of course, the devoted Bobby in London who sent me gramophone records and news from home. Somewhat unfairly, I kept him going all the time without any promise for the future. He came over to see me at Easter, not long after my arrival, and we met in Paris. But it was terribly boring, walking the streets of the city without much to say to one another.
It was not until I had been in Avignon for over a year that I had a boyfriend. He was a serious-minded teacher of maths called Patrice. Tall and with a very angular face, he would hold my hand nervously, trying to tell me how much I meant to him. I suppose that he was part of the reason why I was reluctant to leave Avignon when the war began in earnest for us that spring.
I have often been asked over the years why I didn’t leave earlier. After all, I was in Avignon from January 1939 until June 1940 and France was at war for over half that time. Why did I leave it until absolutely the last minute to get out, indeed just days before France collapsed?1
One reason is that virtually none of my acquaintances talked of the possibility of war during my early months in Avignon. Perhaps such problems were not taken seriously in the Midi of France, traditionally so detached from Paris both emotionally and psychologically. ‘Let the Parisians get themselves worked up,’ seemed to be their attitude; the Midi did not concern itself with such affairs of state. Of all the people I knew, Monsieur Claude was alone in growling his prophecy that we should all be saved by Monsieur Churchill when the time came.
My lack of concern during those early months about any future war may also have been due to the fact that I led quite an isolated life. I knew few people of my own generation and no one who was called up to serve in the armed forces. I knew no English people in Avignon or St-Tropez; if I had I might have seen them preparing to go home. So I was not in an atmosphere of panic or worry. When I discussed the war and speculated along with everyone else about what was going to happen, it was as a young French girl from the Midi that I was thinking. However, there was more to it than this. In my dreamy way I was refusing to face the truth until the last possible moment. I simply wanted everything to turn out all right.
There was also the matter of losing face with my family. I didn’t want to be proved wrong in my decision to go and work in France as an au pair instead of choosing a more traditional pre-marital path for a middle-class girl. I was always conscious of the fact that my very conventional parents compared me unfavourably to my older sister Joan, who was ensconced in a good job in London and soon to marry an ambitious naval officer. I certainly did not want to return to London having seemingly failed in my French adventure. As I wrote to my parents in August 1939:
I understand that you must be wanting to see me safely installed – and if one can look into the future with any certainty – Hitler and God permitting – I’ll arrive somewhere in the end even if by a slower and more irregular route than Joan and in a different line.
CHAPTER THREE
France at War
It was only when France was merely days away from war that the seriousness of my situation finally dawned on me.
The family spent what was in many ways a very normal holiday in August 1939 at Père Manguin’s. I was looking forward to seeing my brother David, who was planning a visit at the very end of the month. One evening before dinner I wandered down to the beach and saw warships in the bay. An old man stood there watching them.
‘La guerre arrive,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘La guerre arrive.’
I watched him staring fixedly out to sea. The sight of the warships in that beautiful bay – their sheer size and dull colour menacing the bright little sailing yachts and fishing boats – made the prospect of war very real and immediate. I looked at the old man and thought of my father. His generation had already survived the Great War. It must have seemed unbelievable to them that war was about to engulf Europe again.
Monsieur Claude called me aside a couple of days later. He looked ashen-faced. It had just been announced on the radio that Germany and the Soviet Union were about to sign a non-aggression pact. I slowly began to understand that this meant war for France and Britain. As he explained, Hitler could now turn his attention to attacking the West without having to look over his shoulder at the Soviet Union.
Certainly the pact seemed to shake everyone in the Midi out of their lethargy. Two days later I wrote to my parents: ‘The situation internationally is now the first subject of everyone’s conversation.’ I began to hear that lots of foreigners in St-Tropez were making hasty plans for departure.
Monsieur Claude, who was a captain in a reserve regiment, received a telegram ordering him to report to his unit the following week. He sped back home to Avignon that very afternoon, returning to St-Tropez a few days later at 3 a.m. (he didn’t have permission to leave his barracks) to pick us all up. The children grumbled sleepily in the back of the car about this abrupt change in plans. Their father explained to them that he had work to do. The parents tried to appear cheerful but I could detect real concern under the surface.
We arrived back to a very different Avignon from the one we had left less than a month before. The town was already teeming with soldiers on the move. We saw off Monsieur Claude the next evening at the station; his unit was being dispatched north. The scene was like the photographs of Victoria Station in 1914, with every carriage o
f the train packed with troops and military equipment.
What was I to do now? I wrote to my parents of the need to be realistic: ‘To gaze at the proverbial blue Mediterranean only means watching perpetual manoeuvres in the bay with bombers roaring overhead.’ But what was realistic or advisable at this point? I didn’t know where I would be safer if the German bombers started their campaign – London or Avignon. Or even if I could reach England if I decided to go home.
I discussed what to do with Madame Manguin but before we could reach any firm conclusions the decision was taken out of my hands by the fast-moving events of the following days. By Sunday, 3 September 1939, Britain and France were at war with Germany.
There was a real sense of panic during those days. There were rumours of mass evacuation away from the dangers of the nearby armaments factory. Housewives were already beginning to hoard food, as whispers of rationing spread. Just two days before the war started, I dropped a quick note to my parents, written hastily at the post office:
Working hard as house in dreadful state – all Avignon to be evacuated because of nearness of powder factory …The telephone for private calls is cut and a telegram takes three days unless official! …Trying to buy sugar – impossible to find anywhere.
I could not have returned to England in September 1939 even if I had wanted to. With the armed forces being mobilized, the travel situation in France during those first few weeks of war was chaotic. I explained in a letter home to my distraught parents:
There are no seats on the trains now, and no regular times, nothing but troops moving all the time … travelling conditions are not really possible for me alone, whatever the English authorities say.
The German invasion of Poland lasted only a matter of weeks. This surprisingly swift victory added to my confusion over whether I should stay or go. Everyone I talked to in Avignon fully expected England to be invaded at any moment. This was surely no time to return? My letters home were now more concerned with my family’s safety back in England than with my own in France: ‘You should get out before the inevitable aerial onslaught,’ I pleaded.
