In the Moon Page 2

  It was in Mons that Dan first met my mother at an officers’ mess dance. Jenny, the most adventurous of three sisters, had traveled alone to Mons, ostensibly to visit a former school friend who lived there. But as she later freely admitted, she knew that the British had an important army base in that town. Jenny was twenty, had spent four drab and dreadful years under the German occupation, and was looking for a little excitement.

  Of my parents’ first meeting, I can only conclude that it was not love at first sight. In fact, when next they met, at Jenny’s home in Brussels, it became clear that Dan fancied Suzy, Jenny’s older sister rather more. It was Suzy he married about two years later, in 1921. Jenny’s comment about this was that marriage was not yet on her agenda; she was having the time of her life on the debutante circuit of Brussels.

  Dan mustered out of the army shortly after his marriage to Suzy, and they settled in Wimereux, a small seaside village near Boulogne on the north coast of France. There, Dan and an old army chum and fellow officer, Captain Pickett, went into business together. They bid on the right to acquire and dispose of military materiel still stockpiled in the northern coastal sector of France.

  There were few bidders. Most British soldiers were tired of the war and anxious to return to England. Dan had spent nearly all his spare time working on special mechanical problems related to the design of tanks, and hadn’t had time to spend much of his army pay. Over the four years of the war, he had managed to save several thousand pounds. He and Pickett scraped up enough to submit a half plausible bid. They weren’t the highest bidders, but two higher bidders never showed up with the money. And so it was that for a few thousand pounds, Dan and his partner acquired well over a million pounds worth of matériel. They called their venture Franco Liquidations Ltd., and started work immediately.

  Some forty years later, a few days before he died, Father talked to me about his years at Wimereux. He confided to me that it had been the happiest time of his life. He and Suzy lived in a charming country cottage, and his job was both challenging and profitable. After the devastating years of the war, it was a time of recovery and hope. And, as Jenny intimated to me on another occasion, Dan and Suzy were deeply in love.

  Jenny had always been close to Suzy and visited the newlyweds often. She described to me how Dan and Suzy explored the many small villages, seaside resorts and fishing harbors in this beautiful corner of France. They rode around on an old army motorcycle, which had a sidecar so that Suzy could take along her easel and paint box. When they found a place with a suitable view, she would set up her easel and paint while Dan read aloud to her.

  Suzy had studied to be a professional painter and had developed an impressionist brush style well suited to portraying the local landscapes and the luminous light of this area. She sold quite a few of her paintings, and it was evident that painting was the passion of her life. Of her sister, Jenny said, “She had painting in her veins and to the ends of her fingers.”

  As the senior partner of Franco Liquidations, Dan’s job was primarily administrative. He was the one who found buyers for the salvaged materials, negotiated with customers, and took care of the bookkeeping. Pickett was out in the field supervising the actual work, which was done by a crew of local workmen. The bulk of this work involved the dismantling of artillery shells in order to salvage the brass casings.

  The extracted explosives had to be detonated in large lots far from any habitation or farmland. Pickett had found an area that was especially suitable for this dangerous task. Some twelve miles south of Boulogne, the coastal plain consisted of a mile-wide strip of completely deserted sand dunes. In those days, the dunes stretched for some twenty miles down the coast. Inland, the dunes eventually gave way to a ridge of low, sandy hills covered in pine forests. A few miles farther inland, the forest ended and the landscape became the softly undulating hills of the Pas-de-Calais, some of the best and most beautiful farmland in France.

  The ideal time to set off dumps of salvaged explosives piled on this wide, desolate, sandy beach was on certain days when a gentle breeze blew off the dunes and out to sea. The beach site was undeveloped public land and Franco Liquidations obtained permission to set off explosions there.

  By 1924, the salvaging operation was completed and Dan’s business ended. Pickett was an alcoholic whose drinking had caused major problems during their work together, and Dan was not keen on continuing the partnership. He and Pickett divided the profits and went their separate ways, both quite prosperous.

  Dan and Suzy decided to move closer to Paris and soon found a house in the small village of Ville-d’Avray. They immediately liked a property called “La Closerie” and took out a fifty-year lease on it. The main reason for their choice was the region’s history as a locale favored by the Impressionist painters, who liked the prevailing light and, some forty years before, had portrayed scenes of this still rural countryside west of Paris. For Suzy, this was an ideal place to do her landscape painting, which she always did outdoors no matter what the weather. In the meantime, Dan was casting about for a new business venture and found it convenient to be only fifteen kilometers from central Paris.

  During one of their weekend motorcycle excursions along the Normandy coast, Dan discovered something that would launch him into his next business venture. At Dielette, a tiny fishing village set in a picturesque cove just south of the tip of Normandy, he came upon a masonry dome barely protruding from the rocky beach at low tide. The dome had a large manhole cover at its center. Equally mysterious was a high concrete tower with its base at beach level and at the foot of a nearby cliff. Baffled as to their purpose, he set about investigating the origin of the dome and tower, and found that as early as 1800, iron ore had been mined through the manhole on the beach. The tower had been built almost a century later and was the site of another mineshaft. Both mineshafts led to seams of magnetite which angled downward towards (and under) the sea. Mining had been extremely challenging because of the high rate at which water leaked into the mine. A further problem for the mine was that magnetite was very heavy, and no easy or inexpensive overland route for its transportation was available.

  Several efforts to transport the ore by ship had been made. A rudimentary pier had been built close to the mine, and shipments by small boats to nearby Cherbourg continued at a slow pace throughout the late 1800s. In 1907, a German company bought the mine and built a small steel caisson (artificial island) half a mile from shore. An aerial tramway was used to connect the caisson to the mainland, and special cars on the tramway carried ore from the mine head to larger ships moored to the caisson. Production started in late July 1914, but was stopped a week later when the war started, and the mine was immediately sequestered. Two years later, in what must have been a fit of patriotic (and irrational) frenzy, the caisson and aerial tramway were destroyed by the local authorities. They feared the Germans might somehow seize the mine and use it to their advantage in the war. The mine had remained inactive since then.

  Dan knew that magnetite commanded high prices on world markets because of its high iron content and purity. It was much sought after for adjusting the composition of steel during its manufacture. He immediately recognized the tremendous commercial potential of a new, modern mine facility at this site.

  Dan envisioned starting a company that would purchase the rights to the mine, build a new, larger and more efficient caisson, and sink new mine shafts to expand the mine’s output. His new company adopted the name used by the former German mining company—Société Anomyme des Mines de Dielette. A holding company in Britain invested in a large number of the shares, and Dan invested a substantial part of his own money in the venture. In organizing the financing for the new company, Dan had the help of his brother, Bob, who was by now a successful stockbroker in London.

  The next four years were a period of intense activity for Dan, who personally undertook the design of the larger caisson, oversaw its constructio
n, its launching and placement, as well as the acquisition of new machinery for the mine and aerial tramway. Although not schooled as a civil engineer, his caisson design was recognized as a significant and novel contribution to marine structural engineering, and as a result, he was awarded an honorary membership in the Institute of Civil Engineers (in Britain).

  The mine was operational by 1929, and the British holding company (Anglo-French Ltd.) now bought a controlling interest in Mines de Dielette. Dan became a director of Anglo-French Ltd. and remained as administrator and president of his mining company, which had its offices in Paris.

  In the midst of this busy period in Dan’s life, Suzy, awaiting the arrival of their first child, had gone to Brussels to be with her parents where she could be under the care of her Uncle William, the much revered family doctor. Her parents had insisted—after all, her uncle had successfully delivered Suzy and her two sisters, Jenny and Mary. I met Uncle William only twice when I was child. He was a big, gruff man with an imposing black beard, not the sort of person one soon forgot. He was arrogant, full of bluster and of his own self-importance.

  Dan was continually traveling on mine business during this time, but knew that he could be in Brussels on a few hours notice as soon as he received word that Suzy was in labor. The family could reach him by telegram, and he wired them promptly every time he changed his address. In those days, express train service between major European cities was already fast, frequent, and dependable. Trunk calling (as long distance phone service was called at the time) was difficult and unreliable, especially across international borders, but telegrams were fast and delivered immediately, any time of day or night.

  When Suzy went into labor, the highly trusted Uncle William allowed her to remain in labor for three and a half days, right in her parents’ home. During this time, he kept telling the anxious family that Suzy’s condition was under control and that it was too early to wire Dan—he would advise them when they should do so.

  On the third day of Suzy’s labor, Jenny wired Dan without Uncle William’s knowledge, and Dan arrived on the scene six hours later. As soon as he learned how long Suzy had been in labor, he immediately summoned an ambulance to take her to a hospital. It was late in the evening, and the ambulance’s horses had to be hitched up, delaying its arrival by an hour. Then it was discovered that the ambulance crew had forgotten to bring their stretcher. Suzy, in extreme pain and nearly unconscious, had to be carried down three long flights of stairs. She died not long after reaching the hospital, without giving birth.

  Suzy’s birth canal was apparently too small for a normal delivery; the mystery remains why Uncle William did not perform a cesarean section early in the labor, as soon as the problem was evident, if indeed he was astute enough to recognize that something was wrong. The operation might well have saved Suzy’s life and that of the baby.

  Dan never spoke of this incident. What I know of it comes from Suzy’s two sisters who were both there at the time, and their accounts do not differ. Dan never mentioned Suzy’s name again. He bristled if any questions about her were addressed to him, or even if she were mentioned in passing during a family conversation.

  He remained in a deep depression for over a year. He refused to have anything to do with Suzy’s family. Some suspected that Dan felt that the family in Brussels had abetted Uncle William in his incompetent handling of the crisis. Others thought Dan couldn’t forgive himself for not being at her side during the last days of her pregnancy.

  An old army friend of Dan’s visited him about a year after Suzy’s death and then contacted Suzy’s family in Brussels. Major Hill, or just “Hill” as they called him, was by now an old friend of the family. He was one of the British officers who had accompanied Dan on his first visit to Jenny (and her sister Suzy) and had been best man at Dan’s wedding. In fact, Hill had been an on-again, off-again suitor to Jenny. “But he was much too shy to ever make any headway in his courting of me,” was Jenny’s comment on this matter.

  Hill reported to the family that Dan was drowning his grief in work. He labored late into the night and through the weekend. He seldom ate a decent meal and had lost a lot of weight. His conversation was unfocused, and he couldn’t be raised from his despondency by any of his friends. The live-in housekeeper and cook, Eglantine, had given up in despair and left his home in Ville-d’Avray. Auguste, the gardener, who came daily to tend the large garden, had also quit. Nothing in the house at Ville-d’Avray had been moved or touched since Suzy’s death. The house was in a state of total neglect, and the garden was overgrown with weeds.

  It was Jenny who “took the bull by the horns” (her own words) by writing to Dan’s sister, Bessie, in England. She proposed that the two of them meet in Ville-d’Avray, ostensibly to sort out Suzy’s belongings and affairs, but in fact for the purpose of helping Dan out of his depression. “I would have gone to him alone,” Jenny said, “but in those days, a single woman didn’t march into a widower’s home without confronting raised eyebrows. I needed a chaperon, but I had a hard time convincing Bessie to join me. She said she was afraid I would fall in love with Dan, and ‘that simply would not do.’ Bessie insisted that if I married him, it would be an incestuous marriage.”

  Knowing Bessie, I’d say she was quite capable of making such an outrageous statement, but it was probably a misrepresentation of her true agenda. I have heard that Dan’s family in England had originally disapproved of Dan marrying a foreigner. Bessie was probably reluctant to do anything that might lead Dan to repeat his considerable misdeed. But she eventually and reluctantly agreed to go.

  The two women stayed at Ville-d’Avray for six months. They rehired Eglantine, who saw to it that Dan ate good meals. They obliged Dan to come home at a reasonable hour to be with them in the evenings, and to spend his weekends at home rather than at the office. Dan slowly came out of his depression.

  After Jenny’s first visit in the company of Bessie, and following Dan’s recovery from his depression, she revisited Dan by herself and was with him a good deal. In November 1929, three years after Suzy’s death, Jenny married Dan in a quiet ceremony in Ville-d’Avray. I was born the following April.

  So far, several references to my mother have been in situations where other people predominate the narrative. I now bring her into sharper focus.

  My mother, Jenny, born in 1899, was christened with the ponderous name of Jeanne Adele Françoise Josephine. She was the daughter of Maurice, a successful Brussels architect who was a well known specialist in art nouveau, and was also an authority on Gothic restoration. Maurice’s father, Jules, was a famous Belgian sculptor whose statues still adorned various Brussels monuments in the thirties. Maurice’s grandfather, Antoine, was painter to the Royal Court of Belgium and renowned for his portraiture. Jenny’s mother, Laure Loutermans, came from a prosperous Dutch family who had made their fortune in shipping.

  Until she married at the age of thirty, Jenny lived almost entirely in her parents’ luxurious home in Brussels, and the family spent summers at their villa in the Belgian seaside resort of Westende. Jenny and her two sisters not only led an active social life, but also traveled frequently, visiting relatives living in Belgium, England and Holland.

  Like Dan, Jenny had a lot of initiative and a strong inner drive to get things done. At the age of thirteen, she took on the paid position of “companion” for the young daughters of her Aunt Marguerite, who had married a wealthy Englishman and lived in England. Marguerite wanted someone who could be with her three daughters full time and teach them French. It was here that Jenny became quite proficient in speaking English and discovered that she loved the British and their way of life. This may explain how she happened to be at a British Army officers’ dance in Mons in 1919.

  The first major upheaval in Jenny’s well-ordered life was the German occupation of Belgium in 1914. For the next four years, Belgians were heavily restricted in all their movements, ev
en within the city of Brussels. Commerce and most businesses were severely curtailed, or came to a complete stand-still except when the nature of their activity could be diverted (under duress) to the German war effort.

  The end of the war in 1918 was like warm sunshine after a bad storm. Now nineteen years old, Jenny worked for the Red Cross in rural communities of Belgium that had been devastated by the war. When not working, she enjoyed life on the debutante circuit of Brussels. And there were also those handsome British officers of the liberating army. For the next ten years, Jenny, like most well to do young women of the time, enjoyed a life of leisure, dabbling in painting like her sister Suzy, and taking singing lessons.

  Two years after the war, Jenny’s father decided he might need a car in order to visit his various construction sites. In those days, the architect working on any building was, by Belgian law, the general contractor. Because of the war, her father had numerous contracts for the rebuilding of damaged or destroyed houses and public buildings, and his work extended to several other Belgian cities such as Louvain and Liège.

  Listening to Jenny tell about the proposed car, it was obvious that she was the one who put the flea to her father’s ear. Jenny could see the advantage he would have in owning and driving a car, but knew her father would find excuses for not venturing into something so radically new. More importantly, she was eager to drive a car herself.

  Cars were still an oddity and extremely temperamental contraptions. Just getting them started and keeping them running smoothly was quite an art, each car being a law unto itself. People who could afford the luxury of a car usually acquired a chauffeur to master the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. As an alternative to hiring a chauffeur, car buyers attended a school where they learned how cars worked, how to drive, and how to deal with the frequent tantrums of the engine.