In the Moon Read online

  IN THE

  MOON

  Dans La Lune

  A Memoir of a 1930s Childhood in France

  ALAN HOLMES

  Second Edition, 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Alan Holmes.

  Second Edition, 2009

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2002096159

  ISBN:

  Hardcover

  978-1-4010-8431-8

  Softcover

  978-1-4010-8430-1

  Ebook

  978-1-4010-8431-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This book was printed in the United States of America.

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  Xlibris Corporation

  1-888-795-4274

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  17205

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1Family Background and a Russian Nanny

  CHAPTER 2 Wild Boars and a German Governess

  CHAPTER 3 Sand Yachts and Fine Tailoring

  CHAPTER 4 An English Governess and a Golfing Dog

  CHAPTER 5 Serious Smuggling and a Miraculous Catch

  CHAPTER 6 A Prison Term and a Saucy French Governess

  CHAPTER 7 An Airplane Crash and Some Bloodletting

  CHAPTER 8 The Great Rabbit Race and a Horse Named Lili

  CHAPTER 9 An Elf in the Drawing Room and Watery Dangers.

  CHAPTER 10 A Russian Paramour, then an Older Woman

  CHAPTER 11 Battles and the End of Fun

  CHAPTER 12 A Bomb, a Trap, Two Sea Mines and a Sunset

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to acknowledge those who helped me in creating this book. My late wife, Ruth Reitinger-Holmes, and my daughters, Joanna Holmes and Teresa Reitinger helped me with editing and proofreading. I am also indebted to Jeanne Angier, the leader of my writing group, who encouraged me to publish this book and who provided numerous suggestions and considerable proofreading and editing.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Second Edition is essentially same as the First Edition except for needed grammatical corrections and certain other improvements. Since an opportunity for changes was available, a few short sections have been rewritten to make them clearer and easier to read, and words have been replaced by others here and there for the same reason. Despite these changes, the story, incidents, and basic facts presented in the First Edition have not been changed, altered, or deleted.

  The events and situations described in this memoir are true, as best as the author is able to recollect, and the places mentioned are real. Most of the names of people who are not part of the author’s immediate family have been changed to maintain the privacy of those individuals and their relatives. The names of beloved family servants, Raimond and Françoise were not changed. (Raimond is usually spelled with a “y” in French, but he chose to spell his name with an “i”.)

  The dialogue presented is paraphrased, of course, but the author has made an effort to be faithful to the intent of the speakers and to capture the characteristics of an individual’s speaking style.

  The photograph on the front cover of the book was taken of an oil painting done by Suzy Holmes in 1924, shortly after she and Dan moved into the house pictured. The view is the back of the house at La Closerie (in Ville-d’Avray) which, after this painting was made, underwent considerable change and improvements. The old apple tree portrayed was reputed to be as old as the house, which was built during the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) for one of his courtiers.

  CHAPTER 1

  Family Background and a Russian Nanny

  “We don’t come naked into the world. We bring with us all kinds of baggage which has to do with family history and sometimes the accidents of the birth itself . . . it’s why the prehistory of the characters and the manner of their arrival seems always relevant to me.”

  Salman Rushdie, addressing City Arts and

  Lectures, San Francisco, May 1999

  Dan, my father, had never been forthcoming about his youth, and there had always been in my mind an element of mystery about him. How had such a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman come to embrace living in France and to manage a large and prosperous business in that country? For that matter, how did he happen to have a Belgian wife? I had heard that my father’s frequent bouts of melancholy stemmed from the sudden death of his first wife, Suzy. That subject had always been taboo in the family. Although my mother had made veiled references to Suzy, she was hardly an impartial observer. What exactly happened? Of all those to whom I talked about my father, it was Uncle Bob who seemed to have the most valuable and plausible details of Dan’s early life.

  Bob was close to ninety years old when I paid him a series of visits that were especially helpful in my quest, and I was grateful and happy to find him still alert and much interested in the world around him. He was by then a widower living alone at “Broad Beech,” his stately home high on a hill overlooking the town of Dorking, in Surrey. He had owned it for over sixty years and for the previous quarter century had, since his retirement, worked almost daily in its two-acre garden. The activity had helped him retain his large, sturdy frame and had left him tanned and healthy looking. It was summer, and the garden where we usually sat having afternoon tea as we chatted, was filled with the quiet hum of bees and the English countryside’s ubiquitous birdsong.

  Throughout his life, Bob had never been talkative. He seemed to prefer listening attentively, looking wise as he puffed on his pipe, only occasionally making discreet utterances of doubt or concurrence, or asking a brief question. However, during these last visits, Bob displayed an unexpected loquaciousness. It seemed as if he had finally collected enough knowledge and information, and it was time to dispense some of it before it was too late. I only had to mention a time or an event, and his words flowed. He was an articulate speaker and intelligently attentive to details that matter in a narrative.

  Bob’s amusing description of a six-week cycling trip that he and Dan had taken in 1906 was probably the most revealing of Dan’s character as a boy. The journey from their home in Walthamstow (thirty miles north of London) to Paris and back had been Dan’s idea.

  Dan had a special reason for wanting to go on the trip. After five years of patient work, he had become a serious collector of butterflies and moths. In 1905, at the age of twelve, he had added to his superb collection an extremely rare moth that he was determined to show at the next international lepidopterist’s convention being held in Paris the following year. Since the family could ill afford to pay for the trip, cycling all the way seemed like the only possible means of attaining his goal.

  Dan knew he had enough money saved for the steamer fare across the Channel. Then, by camping in farmers’ fields and living on bread and a little cheese, he could cover the two land segments of the journey for little additional cost. However, Dan’s mother strongly objected to the plan, insisting that a thirteen year old had no business setting off alone on such a long trip—most of it in a foreign country.

&nb
sp; Dan then turned to his brother, Bob, and tried to talk him into joining him on his proposed adventure. “I was nineteen, a little wiser than Dan, and an experienced cyclist,” Bob acknowledged, “so I had good reason to seriously doubt that Dan had the needed stamina. He was a skinny little runt and I didn’t think he could pedal a heavily loaded bike six hundred miles, which is what the round trip would be. I’d just end up having to pay our train fare home from somewhere in France and I couldn’t afford that. But Dan had a gift for persuasion, even at that age, so I reluctantly agreed. To my surprise and somewhat to my dismay, our very strict mother approved.”

  Bob went on to describe the trip to me in detail: “We set off on our heavy, dilapidated bikes, heading for Dover where we boarded the Channel steamer. Most touring bikes nowadays have gears to make it easier going up hills. Our old bikes had no gears and we had to walk them up any sizable hill. We could afford neither hotels nor restaurants, so we were heavily loaded down with food provisions and crude, cumbersome camping equipment. Our rain gear consisted of fishermens’ oilskin capes, which we had bought in a second-hand shop near the docks in London. They were stiff and heavy, leaked at the seams, and reeked of fish.

  “We now take for granted such things as good road maps and sign posts, but in 1906, they didn’t exist. We relied solely on directions from local farmers along the way. They often knew less than we did and gave us incorrect information, so we frequently went astray. We probably cycled about twice as far as we should have to reach Paris.

  “Dan’s butterflies and moths were stored and displayed in a beautifully made cedar case with a glass lid. Before the trip, we had taken great pains to pack the case and protect it from the rain and from being bumped around on rough roads, of which we knew there would be many. The jouncing ride could damage the moths and butterflies, each of which was held in place by a single straight pin. We’d been warned about the notoriously large cobblestones in the towns along the way, and the often unpaved roads linking the towns.

  “Cars were still a rare sight in those days, and what traffic there was consisted chiefly of horse-drawn carriages, farmers’ carts, and riders on horseback. The dusty road surface was littered with worn horseshoe nails, and we seldom traveled more than five miles without having to patch a tire. It rained a great deal, so the roads were often soft muddy tracks, but that didn’t keep the blacksmiths’ nails from puncturing our tires.

  “To patch an inner tube, its surface had to be dry, so that if the puncture happened when it was raining, we had to pitch our tent as a shelter for the repair. If we were lucky, we’d find a barn nearby to use for this purpose. I counted that we made a hundred and forty patches by the time we reached Paris. Luckily, Dan had thought of bringing some spare inner tubes because we couldn’t put more than two patches at the same place on an inner tube!

  “It took us three weeks of dawn-to-dusk cycling and tire patching to reach Paris. When we arrived at the Grand Rallye International des Mites et des Papillons, we had a few anxious minutes as we unpacked the display case. We might well have come all that way for nothing. It had taken us so much time to pack the display case that we had been reluctant to undo it along the way to see how the moths were faring. We even worried that the case might have split or become crushed. But thank God, the case, the butterflies, and moths were intact.

  “Dan, who was the only entrant under eighteen, won second prize in the ‘best collection’ category, as well as a three-hundred franc special prize for his rare moth, the only one of its kind found in all of Europe during the preceding three years. Thanks to the prize money, our meals improved considerably on the return trip, as Dan was especially keen on treating us to meals in good restaurants. The weather was much improved, and we continued to camp in farmers’ fields every night. He was more interested in spending his hard-earned cash on good meals than on hotel rooms.”

  In his recounting of the trip, Bob made it sound like the greatest ordeal of his life, and commented, “I had grossly underestimated Dan’s determination and hadn’t expected him to last even as far as Dover. But he was always full of vigor and eager to keep pushing on. If it hadn’t been for his enthusiasm, I would have packed it up a few miles from Calais where the steamer landed us in France—that’s where the tire patching started in earnest.” Then, after a reflective pause and another puff on his pipe, Bob added, “There’s no doubt that Dan’s great love affair with France was kindled on that trip.”

  I had once heard my father briefly mention this journey, but all I had been able to elicit from him on the subject was the comment that, for the first time in his life, he discovered that eating could be an enjoyable experience. “A slab of some local cheese on a chunk of freshly baked baguette was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted in my life.”

  In Walthamstow, Bob and Dan’s family lived on the threshold of poverty. Their father, Peter-Christie Holmes, was a hardworking, self-effacing man. His humble position as a bank clerk meant that his four children and his wife had a roof over their heads, basic clothing, plain, monotonous meals, and very little else. All aspects of life in their household were austere.

  Peter-Christie had been born nearly deaf and his speech was limited and distorted. At the time, little was being done to help the deaf. Peter-Christie’s wife, Eliza, was of Scottish descent and a dour soul who viewed most conversation as superfluous. If her four offspring are to be believed, she seldom cracked a smile. However, she must have had an exceptionally charitable nature, for I have heard that before she married Peter-Christie, she had been one of the key figures in the founding of Dr. Bernado’s Homes, a nation-wide charity for the housing and care of orphaned children.

  Bob was also able to elaborate on the only story Father himself told me about this period of his life. Not long after their trip to France, Dan and an older friend, named A.V. Roe, worked together to build something they called “the flyer.” The flyer somewhat resembled the Wright brothers’ first plane which had flown a few years earlier. Dan and Roe’s craft was smaller and, unlike the Wrights’ first plane, it had wheels. Three bicycle wheels allowed the craft to roll down a hill for launching. Just a glider, it had no engine. When Father was about seventy, he described to me, after a lot of coaxing, the flyer’s maiden flight:

  “We knew of a fairly smooth meadow with a long, gentle slope. With considerable effort, we pushed the flyer to the top of the hill. Roe climbed into the pilot’s cradle and I helped push the flyer down the hill to get it started. The thing rolled easily and was soon going faster than I could run,” said Father. “When it was doing about thirty miles an hour, Roe pulled back on the joy stick. The flyer leapt briefly into the air, only to lurch suddenly downward. As it hit the ground something snapped, causing it to go out of control. The beastly thing careened on, veering off to one side, and only came to a stop when it hit a hapless cow. It couldn’t have been airborne more than thirty feet. I’m not even sure that it didn’t just bounce upward after hitting a large tussock—if you can call that flying!” Father was never inclined to boast.

  Roe emerged from the wreckage badly shaken but unscathed. He eventually went on to found Avro Aircraft, which produced a string of well-known aircraft, including the famous Lancaster bomber of World War II.

  Of the three parties involved in this experiment, the cow was the least fortunate. She was impaled through an artery in her neck by one of the broken struts and died from loss of blood, despite Father’s efforts to stanch the wound. “I spent the next two years paying the farmer for that wretched cow out of my own pocket money,” he added ruefully. Roe’s close call, the sight of the dying cow, and two years of weekly installments to repay the farmer apparently dampened Dan’s enthusiasm for further aeronautical experiments.

  Dan attended the village school and managed to win a scholarship to London University, where he studied mechanical engineering. After getting his bachelor’s degree, he went to work for the firm of Daimler, al
ready famous for its superb motorcars. The following year, at the outbreak of World War I, Dan immediately enlisted and was assigned to an armored car battalion. Because of his training and experience at Daimler, he was soon commissioned to the rank of lieutenant and commanded a vehicle maintenance and repair depot near the front in northern France.

  Bob mentioned how it was on this first assignment that Dan soon found an opportunity to show his talent. In 1915, Winston Churchill proposed the concept of “an armored vehicle that would roll right over enemy trenches.” The result of this proposal took shape a year and a half later in the form of the army tank. The first tanks clanked and rattled their way into combat at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was Dan’s unit that secretly assembled and readied the first tanks ever to go into battle. His unit was also responsible for making repairs out on the battlefield, when feasible, or salvaging disabled tanks by towing them back to Allied lines. In 1917, Dan’s outfit helped launch 400 tanks into the battle of Cambrai, which proved to be the most successful use of the tank in that war. Although Dan never fought inside a tank, his unit was never far from the front lines, and he often found himself in the thick of the fighting.

  In his spare time, Dan studied and sketched design improvements for army tanks, which he sent back to the War Office in London. Quite a few of his design details were incorporated into later models of the 2,300 British tanks that made it into battle during the First World War. By the end of the war, Dan had attained the rank of major and was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

  Grim as those war years must have been, Dan’s earlier love of France had been rekindled, and he resolved to remain there after the war. Instead of mustering out, he chose to stay in the army, whose chief mission in France immediately after the war was a monumental tidying up operation. All over northern France, near the Belgian border, lay the debris and devastation of four years of fierce fighting that had engaged over five million men and killed over two million in that sector alone. Dan’s new army unit had to dispose of ammunition stores, weapons, vehicles, and all the other detritus of an army. During this cleanup effort, Dan was stationed at Mons, in Belgium, close to the French border.