In the Moon Page 5

  Mother listened to this calmly and when Madame Lacoste finally wound down, replied that it was just as well since she didn’t want me under the influence of a person with so little sense of humor. And so, not quite four years old, I found myself expelled from school. For the rest of that school year I was tutored at home by Mother whenever she felt so inclined, which wasn’t very often.

  For the summer vacation of 1934, we spent the month of June at my grandparents’ summer house—“Villa Fancy”—in Westende, a seaside resort in Belgium. Their four-story villa had eight bedrooms, servants’ quarters, a large dining room and living room, as well as a family room, though it wasn’t called that. The house had been designed and built at the turn of the century by my grandfather, a trend-setting architect in Brussels.

  A miserable event that I recall from that visit to Westende, occurred during a Punch and Judy show not long before our scheduled departure. The show was presented only on rainy afternoons to entertain children who would normally be playing on the beach. During the performance, a little boy sitting next to me suddenly turned towards me, let out a strange cry and threw up all over me. Mother thought he had probably been fed too many pastries and candy, and after giving the child’s mother a ferocious tongue-lashing, she rushed me home and gave me a bath. I never found out what happened to Punch and Judy and was more upset about that than I was at being vomited upon.

  The following morning, Mother, Brenda, and I sailed for England where we went to visit my two maiden aunts who lived in a little village called Yateley, in Surrey. Bessie and Lottie were Father’s two older sisters, both in their late forties at the time. Lottie had been engaged to a young army officer who was killed in the war. She was so aggrieved by the loss that she never married. Nor did she ever go out with another man, but she wasn’t visibly sad or self-pitying. Quite the contrary, she had a good sense of humor and was easily brought to a chuckle. She was a kind, easy-going person and a good listener who took a deep interest in anyone with whom she spoke. I was extremely fond of Auntie Lottie, which is my British way of saying that I loved her dearly.

  Her older sister, Bessie, a small, leathery-looking and wizened woman, was completely different. She was extremely independent in the way she lived and thought. She had an abrupt way of addressing people that usually sounded taunting or challenging. She was not as easy to like, at least upon first meeting her. Nonetheless, I eventually became very fond of Aunt Bessie, too, and was fascinated by the way she coped with almost everything, which was usually different from everyone else’s. When I grew older, I also admired her considerable strength and independence.

  Early in World War I, Bessie had enlisted in a special army corps for women, which came to be known as the “The Lady Lorry Drivers.” Her uniform consisted of khaki coveralls and an army officer’s cap. Her job was to drive ammunition lorries right up to the front lines. On the way back, Red Cross flags were attached to both sides of her lorry, which then became an ambulance for carrying the wounded to a hospital behind the lines.

  After the war, Bessie returned to studying fine arts at the Royal Academy of Art in London, where she distinguished herself in the painting of miniatures, tiny portraits and landscapes painted on ivory or parchment.

  Father and Uncle Bob together had bought the cottage in Yateley in which their two sisters lived. The brothers had both done well in business in the early twenties and had purchased it as a place for their parents to retire. Both parents were in poor health and did not live in the house long before they died, whereupon the cottage and the three acres of land around it were deeded over to Bessie and Lottie.

  For all her skill in miniatures, Bessie was having trouble making a living from her art. As for Lottie, she had never left her parents’ home, remaining to care for them as they grew infirm, and had never earned a penny. Since the two sisters had no income to speak of, they decided to run a small farm on their newly acquired property, which happened to have a large orchard of pippin apple trees and a small pond. As a further source of income, Bessie decided to start an apiary, on the assumption that the bees would do most of the work while she continued her painting. Yateley was an excellent spot for bee keeping because nearby Yateley Common was a heath covered with heather, and heather honey was highly prized.

  Lottie later told me that she didn’t care to brave all those bees and steal their honey, so it was Bessie alone who took care of the hives. In the mean time, Lottie put the pond to good use, raising ducks and geese for their eggs. Lottie apparently chose to overlook the fact that she would be braving the ducks and geese when harvesting their eggs. For roughly ten years, the two sisters eked out a modest but adequate living in this fashion.

  Several times a week, a little green van arrived displaying the word “Harrods” in gold leaf lettering. It was there to pick up several dozen goose and duck eggs and some neat little wooden boxes containing unrefined combs of honey. In autumn, the consignment also included several crates of pippin apples. Although the weekly shipments were small, all of these foodstuffs were delicacies and commanded high prices in London’s West End.

  The day after Mother, Brenda and I arrived in Yateley, I came down with whooping cough, obviously bequeathed to me at that Punch and Judy show in Belgium. I had a very bad case of it and, about a week later, when the worst was over for me, Brenda fell ill, also with a severe case. At the time, whooping cough was one of the most serious of childhood diseases, and there was no question of going back to France while Brenda and I were still in the phase of severe whooping. For two weeks, both of us were throwing up about twice an hour all day long, and since the disease is extremely contagious, we could not be out in public.

  When I was over the fever and allowed out of bed, I started exploring the farm. One morning, I managed to open the latch on the gate to the “goose meadow,” which was actually the orchard. I can still picture those geese, standing as tall as I was. For some reason, upon my arrival in the orchard, the whole flock of about forty of them began waddling slowly in my direction. They gradually gathered around me and eyed me hungrily. I faced them bravely, but slowly retreated backwards in the direction of the gate. To my horror, the flock followed me and bunched up even closer. In fact, it seemed that for every step I took, the geese narrowed the distance between us. Panicking, I started wailing for help, yelling at the top of my lungs that the geese were about to eat me. My frightened cries only seemed to whet their appetite, for the huge birds grew even bolder and moved ever closer and now surrounded me completely. They were so close that I could have reached out and touched their white feathers.

  Then miraculously, Auntie Lottie appeared on the scene, walking in her usual calm, deliberate pace and quietly muttering, “Now! Now! You have got yourself in a fine mess, haven’t you?” She shooed the geese away gently, took my hand and led me out through the gate.

  When we were safely out of the orchard, Auntie Lottie enjoined me in a solemn pact: I was never again to visit the geese without a grown-up. For her part, she promised not to tell Mother, who would be extremely upset about the incident if she knew of it. She was right about Mother, who was quite excitable and prone to over-react, at least at that time in my life. Though she didn’t say so, I now believe Lottie was more worried about the hazards of the pond in the orchard than about the geese devouring me.

  I also enjoyed lessons in bee keeping while watching “Auntie Bee.” The family had always called Bessie just Bea—and now that she was keeping bees, it had become “Bee.” Almost daily, it was time to open one of her sixty hives. She could then pull out the racks to which the honeycombs were attached. A rack for honeycombs was a wooden rectangle supporting four smaller, wooden “picture frames,” each about a ten-inch square and, when ready for harvesting, neatly and completely filled with a honeycomb and its honey.

  Once Bessie had lifted a rack out of the hive, she carried it to a garden shed where, working at a special table, she gently pushe
d each comb out of its frame directly into a lightweight wooden box. The elegant boxes were made of clean, seasoned wood and were slightly larger than the honeycomb so that the latter could fit inside without breakage. Auntie Bee then carried the rack and its now-empty picture frames back to the hive, where the bees dutifully began rebuilding new combs and filling them with honey all over again. In a couple of months, the full rack would be ready for another harvesting. In exchange for all their work, the bees received a pile of plain granulated sugar to see them through the winter.

  I wasn’t there to witness this generous reimbursement, so I don’t know how it was executed. It seemed to me that the taste of honey was infinitely nicer than that of plain sugar, and I asked my aunt if they didn’t mind this exchange. She insisted the bees were quite happy with the arrangement, but I had my doubts.

  As Auntie Bee went through the honey collecting procedure, she moved slowly so as not to attract the attention of the bees or excite them. She wore a beekeeper’s bonnet with an extremely wide brim, over which was draped protective netting. She also shrouded herself in a cloud of blue smoke. Some of this smoke came from the ever-present cigarette that she held between her lips and somehow managed to smoke without setting the netting on fire. To maintain a generous cloud of smoke close to her at all times, Auntie Bee also carried a special tinder burner which had a handle like the one on a watering can.

  The resentful bees remained in her vicinity as she worked, but would not go near her. The few bees that might enter the little cloud that hovered around her would become dizzy and be rendered harmless because, as she put it, “Once in the smoke, they’re drugged into a stupor and no longer know who or what to sting.”

  I watched all this with great interest, but not having a little cloud of my own, I did so from twelve feet away. I not only had to avoid the indignant bees, but I was supposedly still contagious and had to stay well clear of the honey.

  The honey gathered and sold this way, still in the comb, was eaten wax and all. People who could afford the premium price that this “honey-in-the-comb” commanded, insisted that the texture of the wax comb added to the eating pleasure. Some also believed that this form of honey possessed special curative powers, though I forget for what ailments. The honey did little to help my whooping cough, but I enjoyed it on my toast every morning for breakfast, as I did a daily soft-boiled egg—a soft-boiled duck egg, of course.

  Though by no means cured—Brenda and I now only whooped about once every two hours—and we were eventually deemed well enough to travel. Father came to get us with the car so we would not be traveling on crowded public conveyances. On the ferryboat leg of the journey, the two of us stayed out on deck, well away from other passengers, or sat in the car to be out of the wind. The boat authorities made Brenda and me wear black arm bands on which the word CONTAGIOUS was embroidered in large yellow letters, so we could not have come near any of the other passengers, even if we had wanted to.

  The family spent the remaining three weeks of the summer at “Les Buissons” in Condette, a summer house not far from Villa la Bècque. All I remember of that sojourn is how bitter I was that we couldn’t ride the pale yellow trolley to Hardelot because we were still considered contagious.

  Not long after our return to Ville-d’Avray in September, Sabine was caught stealing some bauble from Mother’s jewel box. She was reprimanded and given a second chance. A month later, a valuable ring of Mother’s disappeared. Under questioning, Sabine denied that she had stolen it. Mother promptly visited the closest pawnshop, which was in the nearby town of Sèvres, barely within walking distance of Ville-d’Avray, and sure enough, there was her ring. The pawnbroker told Mother that a middle-aged woman, who had been with her teenage daughter, had brought it in. Other details in his description confirmed Mother’s suspicions as to the thieves. Eglantine and Sabine were packing their bags the same day.

  That autumn, Mother enrolled me in my second school, which went by the strange name of Le Cours Boutet de Monvel. Technically, it wasn’t even called a school, since cours has roughly the meaning of course; Mother, it seems, had a knack for finding odd schools in strange places.

  My classes were held in a spacious attic studio, up five long flights of stairs in a building directly behind the American Embassy in Paris. The school’s single room had large, south-facing windows which extended from floor to ceiling, and an oversized potbellied stove in one corner of the room to keep us warm on winter days. The walls and ceiling had once been white but were now an uneven gray. A mass of sooty cobwebs floated slowly up and down in the air currents above the potbellied stove and were so thick and numerous that they appeared to attach the ceiling to the walls.

  While sitting in the classroom, I could look out across the flat roof of the embassy and beyond to the Place de la Concorde, where communist rallies frequently took place. Unruly crowds stopped cars, sometimes turning them over on their sides and setting them ablaze. If it wasn’t the riots distracting me, it was the pigeons on the roof of the embassy doing strange little dances, something that I found quite puzzling. Why did those fatter pigeons, with their feathers all puffed up, insist on climbing on top of much smaller pigeons, which didn’t seem to mind at all?

  We did most of our schoolwork at home. The school had a strange arrangement by which the class met only once a week for two hours. The parent who brought the child was expected to attend the class for the full two hours and sit at the back of the room taking notes. The notes would help the parent in tutoring the student during the week that followed. Before returning home, each pupil received a mimeographed sheet listing, in neat, purple cursive handwriting, the work we had to do at home before the next class.

  Mother had her hands full on days when I didn’t attend the school, for she literally stood over me two or three hours each day coaxing me to do my homework assignments. Since we were tested on what we had done at home each time we returned to the school, her reputation as a dedicated mother was as much on the line as mine was as a hardworking student.

  Shortly after Eglantine and Sabine’s sudden departure from our household, my parents hired Raimond and Françoise. This couple stayed with us for six years, until the onset of the German invasion of France in 1940, but they will remain in my heart forever. Raimond and Françoise were from Perpignan, a town in the south of France, near the Pyrenees. They had a son, André (two years older than I), who lived in Perpignan with Raimond’s parents. Raimond and Françoise visited André for three weeks every February.

  They were the ideal servant couple: hard-working, devoted, honest, caring, and both extremely likable. Although Françoise was given to fiery temper tantrums, this happened only rarely.

  As the butler, Raimond served the meals wearing a white apron over which he wore a yellow- and black-striped waistcoat. He polished the silver, the furniture, the wood floors and even our two cars. He was Father’s valet, seeing to it that Father’s suits were brushed and pressed, for there was no dry cleaning to be had in Ville-d’Avray. Along with this, Raimond somehow managed to be a first-rate gardener in a huge garden that was a mass of flowers and provided us with a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables almost the year round. Raimond also helped Françoise in the kitchen, doing such chores as peeling vegetables, plucking all manner of fowl, and eviscerating fish and poultry. He also did the heavier jobs like keeping the coal-fired cook stove burning and hauling the stove’s ashes.

  Françoise did the cooking, housecleaning, and bed making, and generally kept the house spotless. She also did the mending and, almost every day, she walked a mile to the village to shop for our daily provisions. I marvel at how the two of them managed to do it all and always remain in good cheer.

  They were on duty long before breakfast, with Raimond waking Father by presenting him with a cup of tea; for Mother, it was a cup of coffee. Meanwhile, Françoise was serving freshly pressed grape juice to Brenda and me and coaxing us to get dressed.
They did not retire at night until well after dinner, when all the washing up was done. The meal was usually served at eight o’clock in the evening and even later whenever guests were invited.

  Raimond and Françoise were given Sunday and Thursday afternoons off, but often there wasn’t much left of their Sunday afternoon. When this happened, they had Monday afternoon off instead. Occasionally, if they wanted to see a show in Paris, they also took Thursday evening off. On those occasions, Mother stepped in and prepared dinner, which she always did very well and with enthusiasm. Mother had learned to cook while still a child, something she did surreptitiously in her parents’ kitchen, a place she was not supposed to go.

  Raimond and Françoise were not experienced servants when they first arrived. But after interviewing them, Mother liked the two of them so much that she agreed to hire them if they would be receptive to instruction in the refinements of an elegant home. They gladly accepted the offer and made rapid progress under her tutelage.

  Father told me years later that Raimond and Françoise were frequently offered positions in other households. Obviously, they never accepted them. “Once it was clear to me how good they were, I paid them a salary which no one else was willing to match,” Father explained.

  After World War II, my parents no longer lived in France, so Raimond and Françoise found a similar position in Triel, a village near Ville-d’Avray. When I visited them there, Raimond mentioned to me that Father had paid them at least twice as much as they would have earned anywhere else, plus a generous bonus when they went off to visit their son. Then Raimond added, “Those were the happiest years of our lives. We had nothing to worry about. We were respected and treated kindly. We loved our work and our surroundings. Most of all, we loved you two kids as if you were our own.”

  Raimond had one unfortunate trait that drove Father crazy. He was always bursting to talk as he served the meal and would find the slightest pretext to do so. If addressed, he was unable to keep his reply brief and to the point, and once he started talking there was no stopping him. He had an opinion or information about any subject under the sun. An avid reader who daily managed to read almost every page of Le Paris Soir, Raimond was a walking encyclopedia for the sort of information one finds in newspapers. Of course, I found this trait very entertaining, not to mention informative, but Father thought it was inappropriate to have the butler telling him all the latest Paris gossip during meals. Fortunately, Raimond had the good sense not to do this when we had company. The whole problem was easily avoided by not talking to him in the first place. Raimond knew full well that he must not speak if he had not first been addressed.