I Went There On my Bike: Part 7 -
I arranged with the CCCS to go back to Belley for a final session as moniteur in a colonie de vacances.
I arranged with the CCCS to go back to Belley for a final session as moniteur in a colonie de vacances. I decided to hitch-hike there. I had only been to Germany once and I had never been to Belgium. So I devised a route through Belgium and Germany. There were few motorways at that time outside Germany and Italy, so my route took me along the national roads from Ostend, through Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Louvain, and Liège to Aachen in Germany. It was a hot July day, when I saw Brussels for the first time. Later on I went through the Neckar valley through Calw and on to Rottweil, where I spent the night and which I liked very much. Then on into Switzerland and eventually to Belley.
It was late July. Paulette and Robert were there with their two boys. Monique was also there. I immediately started pestering Monique, but without success.
The new director and his wife arrived a couple of days later along with the new team of moniteurs and monitrices. Among them was an eighteen year-old girl, called Anne-Marie. I immediately turned my attentions to her with rather more success. We got on well together. In particular, we hitch-hiked to Geneva on one of our days off. It was a hot August day and Anne-Marie wanted to bathe in Lake Geneva, which she did. She persuaded me to go in too. I did, but only stayed in a few seconds. The water, which had come down from the Alps was icy cold, even in August.
Me and my team, Belley, August 1962
Towards the end of our stay, the CCCS were asking for volunteers to do the washing-up at a centre somewhere in Switzerland. Anne-Marie and I volunteered, but her parents said “no”. It was probably a wise move on their part, and, as in those days she was still a minor, she had to comply.
We did, however, arrange to meet again in Besançon at the beginning of September. Claude Talon and Mady were married by this time. Mady’s parents had a large villa in Besançon which was unoccupied most of the time. Claude said I could stay there “provided that I didn’t bring any girls into the house”. Anne-Marie came to Besançon for a few days and stayed with her friend … Floriane! (Anne-Marie also knew Denise Tessier and Eliane who had been with me at Anglet two years’ before.)
After that I went to Darney in the Vosges and spent a few days with Paulette and Robert. At that time they lived in an old house in the village, in accommodation provided by virtue of Paulette’s employment as a school-mistress. Robert was a forest warden employed by the Government. He was responsible for the well-being of a section of the local beech forest. He took me out to the forest one day. Different parts of the forest were at different stages of development. At one end of the spectrum there was a clearing. All but one of the trees in this area had been felled. The one 150-year old tree, dating from the time of Napoleon, had been selected, because of its good health, to survive for another 150 years. The idea was that it would drop its seeds in the clearing and some of these would germinate and grow into new trees. Another section of the forest contained a large number of young trees, which had grown in an earlier clearing. Most of these would soon be thinned out so that the strongest-looking ones would have enough space to develop. Other sections of the forest were at further stages of development or maturity. The final section of forest consisted of trees that were ready for “harvesting” – the economic justification for the whole process! But one of these 150-year-old trees would be spared to survive for another 150 years. Robert had to decide which one!
Epilogue
Some sixty years later, I am still in touch with many of the people whom I met during this period. From Manchester, we see Godfrey Shaw and his wife, Beryl, regularly, mostly at their home in Great Missenden, where they have been kind hosts, before and after our stays in Antibes. They have also been out to stay with us in Antibes a few times and twice ventured into the wilds of Lincolnshire. I exchange Christmas greetings with Roy Reader, though I have only seen him once (in the 1980s) since our wedding in 1965. I have recently re-established contact with Bryn James, who was a teacher in Knutsford until his retirement. I met Cyril Woodberry and John Jordan at Beryl and Godfrey’s. John Jordan spent the whole of his working life as a teacher at Leeds Grammar School. He sadly passed away a few years ago. I was also in touch with Bob Davies and he came to our house in Birmingham in the sixties, but he died when he was about forty.
Cyril joined Barclays DCO. He lived in Coseley in the Black Country. In the course of 1963 I went to a dance in Wolverhampton and bumped into Cyril. He invited me to go to visit him at his house in Coseley. I arranged to go a few weeks later. I got a bus from Walsall, where I was living at the time, to Wednesbury. From there I needed to get a bus to Coseley. I was wandering around the bus station, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. Eventually I stopped a man and asked politely: “Can you tell me where I can get a bus to Coseley, please?” (I pronounced ‘bus’ with an ‘s’ and Coseley with a ‘z’.) The man looked puzzled for a moment. Then he said: “Oah, yer want a buzz to Coassly, do yer?”
I have met and stayed with many of the friends I met in France during this period, both on my own and with my family. In particular, we have stayed with Paulette and Robert. They moved soon after I knew them to a new modern villa on the outskirts of Darney. Their address was still very short: Cuny, 88 Darney, France! In the summer of 1978, we stayed with them on the way back from camping in Germany. We had had to put our tent away wet, so we erected it again in their garden to dry. This was not, however, a very happy stay, as they were mourning the death of their nineteen year-old niece, who had been murdered recently, while hitch-hiking. One day in the eighties, I went (on my own from Strasbourg) to see them. There had been a hurricane a few weeks before: vast swathes of the forest had been completely flattened. Paulette said she had been in the house on her own and she had been terrified: there had been hailstones the size of golf balls; she showed me the dents they had made in the ornamental zinc sheet on the front of the house. In his early days, Robert drove a Panhard car, which was one of a number of slightly eccentric French cars that were around at that time. The last time we went to stay with them, they had a Mercedes. They arranged for us all to meet Robert’s sister and her husband at a restaurant. There was some confusion about the arrangements and the other couple were late. When they arrived the brother-in-law said that he had been asking if anyone had seen some peasants in a Mercedes! They came to stay with us in Brussels in the nineties. One evening we took them to a very popular restaurant in the centre of Brussels, called Chez Léon. It was a large restaurant, which had been created by joining together a number of old houses. It was a rabbit-warren of corridors, steps, crooked staircases and uneven floors. The restaurant specialised in beef steak and moules. We had one of two tables, in an alcove at the top of a short flight of three or four steps. The youngish couple at the other table, who were also French, ordered moules. When the waiter arrived with the large bowl of steaming hot moules in a very liquid marinière sauce, he tripped on the stairs and threw the contents of his bowl all over the back of Robert and the front of the younger couple. Fortunately, no-one was hurt, but it didn’t do their clothes, or Robert’s temper, much good. I kept in touch with them until they were both in their nineties. I never knew their full postal address. Unfortunately a couple of years ago, my New Year’s card was returned to me ‘Address unknown’.
We visited the Queneys on many occasions. In particular, we went to stay with them at Péage de Roussillon on the banks of the Rhône in May 1973 and were there for our son Jon’s third birthday. They had both obtained teaching posts there. Thursday was still the traditional day off. They asked where we wanted to go. We said “not too far”. So we got in their Peugeot 504 and set off southwards. We stopped at Avignon and danced on the bridge (or not, as the case may be – Jon refused). I was put in charge of navigation and we took a wrong turning. Eventually we had a picnic on the banks of the Rhône, somewhere south of Arles. Eventually, at about four o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at Saintes Maries de la Mer on the Mediterranean, some 300 kilometres from where we started out. I had just sat down in a café with a drink – a Perrier citron – when Andrée said, it was time to start our journey back. We called in at Nimes and visited the Roman amphitheatre. Then we went to the Alpilles and visited the windmill made famous by Alphonse Daudet. I took a photo in the golden evening sunlight. I had it framed and I still have it on my office wall, which I can see – somewhat faded – when I look up from my computer, as I am typing this. On the Saturday, Marcel took us to a small vineyard at Tavel. He took some jerry cans with him. These were filled up by means of the same sort of device as is used for putting petrol in the car. I noted that a litre of wine was cheaper than a litre of petrol.
They both managed to get transferred back to Besançon and had a new house built on a hill just outside the city at Montfaucon. It had a large picture window with a magnificent panoramic view over the undulating countryside. When I first met him, Marcel was an old man at forty years of age. The war had left its mark. One time when we went to visit them in Besançon, having not seen them for several years and Marcel would have been nearly sixty, I said to Jennifer: “Marcel will not have changed”. He hadn’t.
Nor had he changed the last time we saw him – in 1993. By that time he would have been in his mid-seventies, but he still had the same boyish grin. We stayed in a discrete apartment in one of their properties at Malbuisson. Unfortunately by this time their son, Jean-François had died, but we met their three granddaughters, including the delightful and appropriately named Mélusine, who was about five years old at that time.
While we were staying there, we decided to drive to Montreux, which, as I have already said, my grandmother described as the most beautiful place in the world. When I worked at the UK Representation in Brussels, I became quite friendly with an Italian Diplomat, whose name was Francesco di Medici. He had previously been Italian Consul in the east of Switzerland. He did not like the Swiss, whom he described as “a nation of policemen”. We were driving along the main street of Montreux, which had tram lines running along one side of it. I had gone further than I should have, before I saw the underground carpark that I was looking for. I turned sharp right across the tram lines to go into the carpark, conscious of the fact that I may well have performed an illegal manoeuvre. I parked the car at midday and Jennifer and I walked along the side of the lake. It was a beautiful day and we had lunch outside at a restaurant by the lake. After a lazy afternoon, we arrived back at the carpark at six p.m. We paid for our car parking ticket and returned to the car, only to find that it had been … clamped! There was a notice on the car telling us to report to the local police station. I was furious. I jumped to the conclusion that this had something to do with my illegal manoeuvre and vowed never to go to Switzerland again. Jennifer, on the other hand, was quietly amused. We eventually found the police station and were kept waiting for twenty minutes or so. Then two policemen came out and looked at us. Without addressing us directly, one said to the other: “It’s not them, they’re too old!” Jennifer was 49 at the time! Finally we were taken into the inner office. Some questions were put to us as a formality, but they weren’t really interested in us anymore. I asked why our car had been clamped and they said they were looking for some drug dealers who had a red car with a Belgian registration plate. I was greatly relieved that I was not going to be charged with an offence and by then mildly amused at the whole incident. Jennifer, on the other hand, was furious at the incompetence and waste of our time.
Both Marcel and Andrée died some years later. Other people that I kept in touch with until they died were Charles Baudard, André Proudhon and Louis Garret.
Charles’ and André’s colleague, Maurice Moyse, is 98 years old and still going strong at the time of writing (2020). We went to see him at his apartment in Besançon in 2012, just after his ninetieth birthday and, we learned, shortly after his wife had died. We made the arrangements for the visit by email. He invited us for lunch en toute simplicité. We had his phone number, but he told me not to ring, as he was very deaf. He greeted us and ushered us into a large living/dining room. He was as alert and charming as ever. He picked up a notepad and pencil and handed it to me explaining that he could talk, but I would need to write my answers down on the notepad. It worked! He opened a bottle of champagne and invited us to partake of an aperitif, with appropriate nibbles. His daughter joined us. A little later we sat down for a three- (or four-) course meal, including roast lamb. He had prepared everything, apart from the dessert, which his daughter had brought.
After lunch we were invited to go back to our hotel for a rest. I think the rest lasted about a quarter of an hour. Then he offered to take us for a walk round the city, which I had hardly visited for 50 years. He reminded me of things that I had once known and showed me things that I had never seen before. He had some business to attend to (bank or Post Office) so he left us to rest in a café while he attended to his business.
After all this time, we got on very well together. On the spur of the moment his daughter invited us to her house for an evening aperitif. Accordingly, we spent a very pleasant early evening chatting in her garden.
I kept in touch with Louis Garret for many years. He eventually obtained his CAPES and got a teaching post in Vesoul, where I visited him and his wife on a number of occasions. Before he was married, he came to stay with us in Walsall. It was July 1966. England played West Germany in the football World Cup Final on the Saturday, while he was there. We didn’t have a television, but I had asked the owner of our flat, who lived on the ground floor, if we could watch the match on her television – the only time I ever made such a request. She agreed. I asked Louis if he wanted to watch the match. He said that he was not interested in football. To my credit – and utter amazement ever since – I said no more about it. We got on a bus and went to a local beauty spot, Barr Beacon. Normally on a sunny July Saturday the place would be crowded. That day it was practically deserted. I took Jennifer’s little red transistor radio with me, but refrained from switching it on until we got to the bus stop to return to Walsall. It was just coming up to full time and England were winning 2-1. As I got on the bus, Germany scored, so the match was going into extra time. It would take about 20 minutes for us to get back to our flat in Walsall, so I thought we would get back in time for me to watch the last ten minutes. As we were hurrying to get back to the flat, we passed a flower shop – about three minutes from home. Louis decided that he wanted to buy Jennifer some flowers to thank her for her hospitality. After some considerable time-consuming deliberation he bought her some roses. Jennifer says it is the only time a young man ever bought her a bunch of red roses. The match was over by the time we got back into the flat. At least England won!
I have already mentioned that we have met Paulette Boissard, Gérard Althuser, Jean-Claude Boutonnet and Claude Talon on many occasions, so I will not repeat myself. I have recently had Skype conversations with Paulette and my U3A French group!
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This was meant to be the story of my bike. In fact the significance of the bike fizzled out after I left Besançon and has not been mentioned since the early autumn of 1961. Nevertheless my sons will tell you that when we were travelling in parts of the East Midlands in England, in eastern France or Switzerland I would say to them: “I went there on my bike!”
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jon first of all for persuading me to write this book and then for all his work in preparing it for publication.
The full book can be purchased on Amazon
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