Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory

by Patrick McGuinness

  Ozeray’s house was a peculiar place: some rooms were in perfect condition, while others were dilapidated and looked beyond repair. It was open all the time, always unlocked, and since it shared an unfenced boundary with Claude and Collette’s house, my sister and cousins and I used to play inside it. Some rooms you could move into there and then, others were derelict. One floor had carpeted stairs and pictures along the stairwell, the other had no stairs at all, or a staircase that just stopped as if it had suddenly changed its mind. It was plumbed in and the electrics worked and we used to mow the lawn on Ozeray’s electricity. My memory of moving through the house was of rooms so freshly decorated and so, in spite of it all, lived-in, that you thought there was someone there, and of other rooms so wrecked and mouldering that they radiated death and distance. It was there that I first had the thought of the mind as a house, and of memories as rooms: some so fresh you could move into them, others gone and rotten and empty.

  There was a large loft where Claude and Collette planned on making me a garçonnière, a bachelor pad, where I could impress Bouillon’s young ladies with my cosmopolitanism. I did invest this fantasy with a great deal of thought, not to say detailed aspiration, especially in my early teens, before the darkness came and people started dying, becoming depressed, old, broke or ill, and before I myself started to think, wrongly but for a while strongly – a facet of my schooling, my craving to break away, my Anglification as well as my Anglicisation – that Bouillon was an anchor-drag, a slow, shingly backwater of mind as well as place. In my head I furnished the loft with a black hi-fi, an expensive colour TV, some flashy abstract art, and a drinks cabinet and bar. There was certainly a bed, and there may have been a pool table and jukebox too, because the whole place was straight out of adolescent central casting. The décor was Miami Vice by way of Cardinal Mazarin. When I last saw the place, in 2009, just before Claude moved out, the loft was exactly the same as it was when, thirty years before, he and Collette were laughing and joking about turning it into my first home.

  Now Claude has left Bouillon, Collette is dead, the house has been split into two lots and sold to two lots of strangers, and for all I know that loft is still as it was. I think of some parallel universe – it’s hard not to in Bouillon, sometimes I think the whole place is parallel universe – where that adolescent got his garçonnière and did it up just so, played his music and shot his pool and brought back the most delicate flowers of Bouillon’s damselhood, but saved his best form for the rougher ones. He’d be forty-four now.

  NATURALISATION

  SIMENON, A LIÉGEOIS (my parents met in Liège: my mother a student of Classics and my father an English language assistant) of prodigious writing speed (seventy words a minute, eight novels a year, two hundred books over a lifetime) and prodigious womanising (four thousand he claimed, though his wife cut him down to size on that boast: ‘more like three thousand,’ she corrected) was asked why he had not changed his nationality the way successful francophone Belgians often did. ‘There was no reason for me to be born Belgian’, he replied, ‘so there’s no reason for me to stop being Belgian.’ Nationalism by indifference: it’s a refreshing antidote to the usual stridencies of belonging. The Belgian writer William Cliff has a poem about boarding a ship at Antwerp to take him to South America. Asked his nationality, he does not say ‘Belgian’, but instead ‘from Belgium’ – a small but important distinction, whereby, even if you can be sure the place exists, something holds you back from saying that you’re actually part of it.

  My mother, born in Bouillon in 1942, became a naturalised British citizen in the sixties, after a stint in the Belgian Congo where she had seen that, yes, there was one place in the world where being Belgian was not a matter of indifference, and where, on the contrary, it brought with it a whiff of danger. My father had been posted there with the British Council. It was their first tour abroad together, in 1960, and they saw Patrice Lumumba in the flesh, the first legally elected post-independence Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, assassinated by the CIA with help from the Belgians in January 1961.

  fn1 In their three years there, my parents slept with a gun and their passports under their pillows. It gave them an obsession with identity documents, passes and certificates that would only become more consuming as they lived in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and other unrest-blighted or sclerotically corrupt places. Even at the end, in their muffled retirement in Raynes Park, SW20, they carried their passports with them to Tesco and the local Co-op. Their days were spent smoking roll-ups, drinking red wine and watching television with the kind of transfixed inattention you find in hospital wards and old people’s homes.

  Naturalised . . . What, I have always wondered, was that ‘ised’ doing tacked onto the word ‘natural’? This ‘-isation’, as in ‘pasteurisation’, is a suffix that denotes process, an interference with nature if not denaturing itself, so that when we say ‘naturalised’ we actually mean ‘denaturalised’. But only if we assume that it was natural to have any sort of nationality in the first place. Perhaps Belgians are more attuned to the artifice of naturalisation than anyone else, though I know that the only times my mother ever insisted on being taken for Belgian were when she was mistaken for being French. As Beckett said, when asked if he was English: ‘Au contraire.’

  * * *

  fn1 ‘Mais tout ça ne nous rendra pas the Congo’, is a sarcastic phrase that was popular a few years ago: ‘That’s all very well, but it won’t get us back the Congo’. It was used to denote something effortful and well-intended but essentially pointless, and brought the Belgians into comic confrontation with the unparalleled grossness and brutality of their country’s colonial exploits. Even here, in Bouillon, the ramifications of Belgian colonialism can be seen in a carved ivory tusk and several ivory figurines brought back over the years by my parents and by other relatives from their travels. They used to stand on the mantelpiece in the dining-room, but some years ago the shame of all that sparkling whiteness made my mother take them away and hide them in the understairs cupboard. I open it sometimes as I forage for forgotten trinkets – for trinkets that I know are not there but which I remember with a vividness that trumps their absence and for a moment obscures it – and the ivory blinds me with the darkness of its light.

  THE FACTORY FOR SAD THOUGHTS

  SOME DAYS I become a factory for sad thoughts: the night shift starts not when I go to bed, but when I decide to go to bed. As I turn the lights out, the factory lights come on. I used to make them by hand, the sad thoughts, but lately it’s become more of an assembly line, the machines doing all the work: I sleep, and in the morning I have another consignment ready for distribution; for export, for import.

  The last time my mother died, the final time – as she would have said, ‘une fois pour toute’, once and for all – I was in Tenerife. She didn’t speak much even when she was alive, so was certainly not going to waste the little she had to say on last words. So I had to make them up, not the words so much as the movement of the lips. Because even alive she was hard to read, as abrupt and closed as her father, but more tortured. She was an ocean’s worth of storm clamped inside an oyster.

  One of the sad thoughts I manufacture is that I am trying to hear her speak but, like in a bad film, the words and the movements of the mouth are out of synch. In the scenario I’ve constructed – her trying to say her last things to me – it causes me terrible anxiety, and I try to align her lips with the words she’s speaking. It takes so much effort that I forget to hear the words themselves, and I’m not even sure they are words and in what language. I’ve had this often with dreams of dead people: they are saying something and I can’t make it out, and so I get closer and closer, only to find it’s a dark and ashy language, all muffled, and so low it’s almost a growl. If those are the last words, I think to myself (my dream self thinks to itself), I’m not sure I want to hear them.

  I could perhaps trace this dream to the fact that she spoke French and was always ill at ease with
English. But even that doesn’t explain it, because we spoke to each other in French always. Really the dream is about distance. In my dream she speaks, and the words overlap with the lips and then the lips outpace the words. There’s the feeling of something lost in the crevasse, and it’s all to do with time, with aligning two sets of moments, and I know that if I don’t align them I will never hear, let alone understand. But maybe that is all she has to say anyway, all she wants me to understand: the crevasse. What she has to say she will show, not tell.

  That anxiety, a tiny trace of it, remains whenever I watch dubbed programmes. Bathos, I know, but today I saw an episode of Columbo in Flemish, and had that same feeling of a narrow but deep chasm between the mouth and the words, the after-twitch of lips which have outstayed the words they spoke.

  My mother needed subtitles more than she needed dubbing.

  Of all the poems I’ve ever written, this is the one I didn’t.

  AGAINST THE WIND

  ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON at school, when I was about thirteen, we were in the TV room watching, or half-watching, since someone had a bottle of vodka and we were drinking it with the lights out and the curtains drawn, a black-and-white war film whose title I didn’t pay attention to. I paid some attention to Simone Signoret, and noticed that one of the British actors in the film looked like that old bloke from The Professionals, the granite-faced Scottish one with ginger hair. (I know it’s Gordon Jackson, but I’m retelling this as it was felt, in that hybrid long-finished but real-time-unfolding present tense that reflects the inside of our lives far better than those three stooges, the past, present and future.) Something in the film’s background caught my eye first, and made me look again, the way your finger along a smooth surface feels a snag and returns to circle it. The setting looked a bit like Bouillon. There were people milling around a square that resembled Place Saint-Arnould, though many of the buildings were destroyed and the bridge was built out of wood. There was a classy-looking façade with one of those slate-clad domes you see a lot of in the Ardennes that looked like the Hôtel de la Poste, and a small quayside with terrace houses overlooking a thick-flowing river.

  I stopped what I was doing and started watching. A car crossed the bridge, and then another, into the camera rather than away from it. It was a car chase, and once they crossed the wooden bridge I knew as the stone Pont de Liège, they turned left and headed along the Ramparts. It’s Bouillon; I can recognise it, it makes me weak and shaky; I’m choking with a kind of anguish and I try to tell someone but no one is interested. ‘That’s Bouillon!’ I say, ‘where I live’; then, realising it isn’t really true that I live there, I add lamely ‘where I was a child’ (I don’t say when I was a child, which would be more normal, because right now place matters more than time), and besides it’s only partly true, since I was a child in plenty of other places too, and really I’m still a child, and I’m here in a Bristol basement watching a war film on a dark autumn Sunday with the taste of dead leaves filling my mouth. The cars speed past the buildings I know, though they aren’t what I know them as, then swerve up past the back of our house and Guy’s, past the Ruelle du Passage and the Hôtel Du Château Fort, which is still the Hôtel Du Château Fort. From here they can go in three directions: down towards the war memorial which isn’t yet there, up to the esplanade and the castle, or down the Poulie and past the bosses’ houses. This is what they do: swoop down that steep and narrow little street, and it’s my stomach I feel thrown up into my throat as they hurtle down towards the river and Cordemois bridge (also now made of wood) where I swim and smoke Belga and loiter, and where I’ve fished wordlessly with Eugène.

  Why do I feel this way at seeing Bouillon on film? It’s one of the strongest feelings in my archive of disorientation. But why? For one thing, I want them to stop so I can look around, it’s the shock of the speed. For another, I don’t want them there, on this screen, here in Bristol now; it mixes places in ways that disturb me, throw me off balance. Why do I feel so desolate and sick? It’s the familiarity first: Bouillon looks exactly the same, the town and streets and buildings, the cars sweeping metres away from my mother and aunt, my grandparents, Lucie possibly even then at her window sewing as they filmed, and the whole of Bouillon flaunting its pre-existence, its endless and ongoing pre-existence. It was familiarity of the worst kind, emotional matter out of place. After Cordemois bridge, Gordon Jackson, Signoret and the prisoner they’ve sprung hurtle down the road to the Epine, and down what I knew to be an eventual dead-end marked with a water-mill but which the film presented as the open road to freedom. I used to swim there with my father and Eugène, and after my grandmother’s funeral I went there to skim stones with Yann, my cousin, Johnny and Marie-Paule’s adopted Vietnamese son. As this chase unfolds, the Germans are caught up in Bouillon, first by a herd of cows strategically led across the bridge to block them, and then by the film’s set-piece: the carnival parade, which takes place on our street, outside our house. The Germans drive up the Rue du Brutz, past the Café Polydanias which back then is still the Polydanias (how can something in the past ‘still’ be something it is today?), past the church where Degrelle was refused communion by his own parish priest, and by the time it passes 8 Rue du Brutz I feel nauseous and weak, my heart pounds and I think I’m going to faint as they pass my door, then Guy’s door, then Georges Dasnoy’s front steps at number 12 (it was Luc, his son, who ended up going out with Murielle). In the corner of the picture I can see 11 Rue du Brutz too, Claude and Collette’s. There’s a mêlée of Bouillonnais faces, child extras carrying candles and an effigy of the Virgin Mary, indignant crones and folklorically faced old men gesticulating angrily at the occupying troops in ways they probably didn’t in real life, not if they knew what was good for them. After that sequence the film switched elsewhere, and there was nothing more. A few minutes later, the film finishes and the credits roll.

  My first act when the film ended was to ransack my stash of coins so I could phone home and tell them I’d seen Bouillon on TV. I rang Lucie as the phonebox wolfed down my two 50ps, then my tens, and lastly my 2ps. Yes, Lucie said, of course, everyone in Bouillon remembered, it had been filmed in 1946, when Bouillon was still half-wrecked from land and air battles. There was still rationing, the bridges were still destroyed and temporary ones had been cobbled together out of wood, many of the houses were still in ruins. The cast and crew lodged in the Hôtel de la Poste and the Panorama and a few other places around town, and the cafés were full of movie stars. Eugène would be playing couyon in the Estaminet or the Polydanias and in would walk Simone Signoret – there’s a meeting, well, a non-meeting, that sets me dreaming. Other actors in the film were Jack Warner (of Dixon of Dock Green) and James Robertson Justice, the go-to man of the period for gravitas and girth. Lucie had seen Simone Signoret, here playing in her first English-language role, many times, though hadn’t made a dress for her, more was the pity, and had even been in one of the shots herself, of the carnival parade, as had Collette (then aged four), and my mother (six).

  When I watched the film right through, impatiently, fast-forwarding in my head and with the video remote control, to the bits I wanted to see, I discovered that Simone Signoret’s cover was as a dressmaker, and that her transmitter was underneath the same sewing machine that Lucie had in her workroom. Simone the secret agent would sit at her table with her tailor’s dummies, lift the sewing machine off its base and send her clandestine messages. Lucie’s Singer sewing machines could flip under the table to make space for other kinds of work, so she could write bills or pencil her designs onto tracing paper, and that too was part of the secret lining effect of Lucie’s workroom, of that life, of that childhood. The idea that you could be a dressmaker and secret agent too . . . well, that was too good. All those linings, those doublures.

  ‘We’ll be all right once we’ve passed Bouillon’, says one of the resistance fighters. Bouillon stars as itself, I suppose, as does the SNCB, another of my childhood’s reference-points, the Belgia
n rail system, which comes in for a good thanking in the film’s closing credits.

  Against the Wind was directed by Charles Crichton and released by Ealing Studios in 1948. They didn’t need a set – they had Bouillon, which for years after the war looked like it did during the war. It’s not a great film, it has to be said, but the plot is like a crude parody of the reality of Bouillon in wartime, which was I suspect far less glamorous but far subtler. Here it is, the plot I mean: a group of special agents, including a Scottish explosives expert and a Belgian resistance fighter (Signoret) have a dual mission to destroy Nazi files in Brussels and then spring an allied agent from German custody. There is however a double agent among them, a lining inside the lining. There’s a standard fare of romance (the deep lack of chemistry between Gordon Jackson and Simone Signoret is worth seeing in itself), betrayal, suspicion and fast-moving armoured-car chases. There are also some fine scenes of Brussels as well as Bouillon. What strikes me is how soon after the war the people of Bouillon would have had to watch the fictionalisation of their own reality. How did they feel, so soon after being invaded, shot at, hostaged, imprisoned, deported or killed, about having their experience turned into fantasy?

  The answer is, so far as I can tell from talking to people over the years who remembered it, and from the accounts in the twice-yearly publication Le Cercle d’Histoire de Bouillon, that they loved it: the filming, the reminiscences of the filming, and the special free showing which all of Bouillon was invited to when the film was released. The film itself they aren’t that bothered about, and it is only of interest to them as a repository of people and places they know, or know are gone. It’s a bit like the trempinette principle: the leftovers – in this case memory, anecdote, orientation in time and community – are superior to what they are left over from, namely a factitious rush of celluloid. No one seems to remember the story or any of the actors apart from Signoret, and occasionally someone unearths an old photograph of her smoking on the Pont de Liège being ogled by locals or sitting at the Estaminet, found among their parents’ or grandparents’ things, and sends it in to Le Cercle d’Histoire de Bouillon to publish in their letters pages.