Bordeaux Baby

 

It was just over 25 years ago.  I was eighteen years old, almost nineteen, and due to spend an academic year abroad as part of my degree, studying French Literature at Bordeaux University.  I arrived in early September with my father and my uncle in tow.  I knew nobody, had never been there before, and my suitcase contained everything I had for the year. 

My mother had sent my father with me, and her brother with my father, to ensure that I found somewhere to live, and they had three days before they had to return to the UK.  My father referred to those three days in my wedding speech eight years later.  He said that they had been the worst of his life.  He did not speak French and had no idea how to go about finding me somewhere to live.  My uncle spoke more French, but could do very little to help me.

I came across an organisation called Catholiques entre Etudiants which operated a small accommodation service.  A noticeboard contained offers of accommodation, and I followed up two.  One came to nothing.  The other was an offer of a chambre de bonne, an attic room with a sloping roof and its own toilet, two floors above the apartment of its owners.  The room was offered rent free to a suitable student in exchange for light duties as an au pair.  I was lucky.  I nearly always am lucky.  The mother of the family liked me, and offered me the room in return for looking after her youngest son, Pierre, for two mornings a week whilst she taught catechism at the local Catholic school.  Pierre was just over a year old, and was the youngest of six children, the oldest of whom was only three years younger than me.  My father cried and returned to England, knowing that his daughter had somewhere to live.

Looking back on the whole experience, I am touched by many things, but nothing more than the enormous confidence placed in me by the mother of the family.  I had never looked after anything more than a guinea pig in my life.  I had no idea how to change a nappy or feed a toddler, and I had never - as far as I can remember - pushed a pushchair with a real child in it.

The attic room was my first experience of living alone, and I enjoyed making it comfortable.  I had no cooking facilities other than a bluet single camping gaz burner on which I learnt to cook quite a range of dishes, swopping saucepans to keep several things hot at once.  The room was extremely hot in the summer, but I was not to know that yet.  As far as I was concerned, it was mine and it was home.  It was very centrally situated on a very smart street full of beautiful shops and, at the foot of our building, a famous restaurant called Le Chapon Fin which had been immortalised in a novel by the French author, Mauriac.  At one end of the road was a covered market selling fruit and vegetables, and at the other end of the road was the green Place Gambetta crossed by endless buses and trams.  A short walk away was the public gardens through during the morning I would wander with Pierre in a pushchair, feeding the ducks and feeding Pierre a BN chocolate sandwich. 

I learnt, of course, to change nappies, though nappy wipes had not then been invented and cotton wool balls seemed utterly inadequate to clean up a little boy’s bottom.  I remember I used to sometimes stand him in the bath and shower him clean.  I learnt how to feed him and, in looking after the other children from time to time, I learnt how to administer cure-all suppositories, and how to clean burnt milk off enamel saucepans.  I taught my little charge a few words of English as his language grew, and I got to know his five siblings, each so different from the other.

The family was part of France’s ancient aristocracy and the parents bore the title of Count and Countess.  It is difficult to be well off with six children, and the family lived off an army salary - the Count was a Commandant in the French army - and the subsidies handed by the grateful French state to familles nombreuses.  Nonetheless there was no shortage of affection or good manners.  I was very fond of every member of the family from the Gitane smoking Count to the elegant Countess to each of the six children, and I always looked forward to the time I spent with them.  They were extremely kind to me, including me in many activities, particularly in their trips to the family home - a small chateau in the Pyrenees lived in by the elderly family matriach.  I loved this place: I loved the smell of the moldering wood, the tarnished mirrors on the chestnut armoires, and the huge family meals either side of the long rectangular table, always with a family nun and priest and with wine brought up from the damp cellar.  I loved the unkempt grounds with a stream and palm trees.

At Easter, the Count and Countess were invited to accompany an elderly uncle to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, in recognition of the family’s service to the Catholic Church.  I was asked to look after three of the children and to take them skiing for a week, staying in an apartment owned by an aunt.  I had never been skiing before, nor looked after children for any length of time by myself, but we all went and came back relatively unscathed.

I remember a magical party to which I was invited.  The family were part of a rallye.  Rallyes exist only in Paris and Bordeaux and are formal lists of suitable families amongst which all social activities take place.  The lists were drawn up from the aristocratic families whose family trees were set out in every detail in a large red book that never seemed to leave the elbow of the grandmother in the chateau.  Family and faith defined them in a way that most other French people would find foreign.  Each family comprised in the rallye was supposed to organise an event during the season for all the children, and this party was a grand affair in a chateau.  All the boys wore dark blue blazers with brass buttons, and a professional photographer snapped me in my home-made clothes.

I thought that the Countess was the epitome of elegance.  I loved the simple, unpatterned clothes she wore.  I even bought the same Christian Dior lipstick that she wore, hoping that some of her elegance might rub off.  She taught me never to arrive anywhere without a small gift for the hostess, and that chysanthemums were funeral flowers in France and never offered to the living.  She made afternoon tea a glorious affair with transparent porcelain cups and scented tea leaves.  She influenced me in the clothes I chose for my own children much later. 

The year was marked by momentous events back home.   I remember the Count announcing that my country was now at war.  We had gone to war over territory that I had never heard of - Les Malouines - and I remember being frightened that I might never be able to get back to my country again.  A ridiculous fear but indicative of the insecurity I felt in a foreign country.  Not everything else about my year in Bordeaux was a great success.  I had very little money, and a great deal of work as I had decided at the end of my first year to switch my degree subject from French Contemporary Studies to French Literature and I had to re-do all the first year courses alone.  Bordeaux University was a concrete, impersonal disappointment and I thought it a complete waste of time to read Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa in French.  I met no other French people whom I could call friends outside the members of this large Catholic family, and I spent too many hours in a very run-down house that smelt of bad drains and was occupied by five other students from a university in the North of England.  One evening we climbed into the same Jardin Public I frequented during the day, and wandered about in the dark.  We used to eat in a Chinese restaurant because it was cheaper than anywhere else, and my heart was broken by a tall, dark, pale, unobtainably depressive fellow student who shared my taste for existentialist literature and theatre and knew that hell was The Others.

This year in France shaped the unformed me, and many decisions I have since made have been influenced by that period:  we now have collected five armoires, although only two of them are chestnut…  I continued to exchange greetings with the family - I would write at Christmas, and they would respond at New Year.  Just after our marriage, the Intrepid Explorer and I played host to Pierre’s older brother for a few months when he came to work as an engineer in a short work experience job arranged for him by my father.  Pierre grew up and joined a Catholic seminary, training to become a Catholic priest.  I wondered and worried whether his formative experiences in my care had led him down this road.

A couple of months ago now, a large cream vellum envelope landed on our door mat.  It was an invitation to Pierre’s wedding, in Burgundy.  I cannot remember being more delighted by any piece of post I have ever received.   I made all the arrangements to ensure that Elder Daughter and Lola B were looked after by friends and on Friday the Intrepid Explorer and I travelled to Burgundy by train to see Pierre married.  He, of course, did not remember me at all.  But the rest of his siblings greeted me with such warmth that I felt overwhelmed.  It had all been twenty five years ago, but the eldest daughter wanted to tell me that, after all, she had passed her baccalaureat and was now married with four children, the eldest two of whom were the same age as mine.  All of the six children are married now and already have twelve children between them.  The elderly grandmother lived to be over a hundred, outliving even her son, and died only very recently.  Her daughter-in-law now lives in the chateau, welcoming the next generation to the same relaxed family gatherings.

I used to think that my life was like a book of fairytale, with this as one of the illustrated tableaux.