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  In the guest room where Pia slept, Mother found some of her things, but her suitcase was gone, as were her more important belongings. It had the look of a hasty departure. Raimond and Françoise had not seen her leave and had assumed that she was upstairs with us. Pia did not return that day, nor ever after. Raimond and Françoise said that Pia had acted normally enough at lunch and insisted there had been no altercation between the three of them.

  Mother went to the village gendarmerie (police station) where she was told that National Police Headquarters would be notified. (In France, all local police are under the jurisdiction of a national organization.)

  Several days later, two very sinister-looking men came to the house to ask Mother a lot of questions. They were wearing trench coats, black, broad-rimmed fedoras and, to Mother’s utter disgust, they had cigarettes dangling from their mouths the whole time they were there. She hated the smell of Gauloises Bleues cigarettes. Afterwards, as the two men walked away from the house, I heard her mutter under her breath, “Crottes de chameau!” (“Camel dung!”)

  Raimond also smoked Gauloises Bleues, though never around Mother or in the house. Once, in the garage, where Raimond had been smoking as he worked, Mother and I had come upon the detested smoke. As we left the garage, she had used the same words. That time, though, there had been no anger or contempt in her voice, and I took her words literally, assuming, with some amazement, that she was describing the nature of the tobacco in the cigarettes.

  On the occasion involving the police detectives, however, her tone was quite different; it was contemptuous and angry. Having never heard her use such a tone, I was baffled and curious, so I asked her if she were describing the tobacco or perhaps, referring to the policemen. “Both!” she exclaimed scornfully. “Just because they are the police doesn’t give them the right to come into my house and keep smoking their foul cigarettes as if they were in a third-rate café!” Mother’s intense aversion and contempt for people in a position of authority stemmed from her years under the German occupation during World War I.

  Our two unwelcome visitors had questioned her about Father’s business and his frequent movements across the French border, and they seemed to have almost no interest in the matter of Pia. They returned to our house twice more, on Saturdays when Father was home. Both times, lighted cigarettes dangled from their mouths during their visit.

  Father told me years later that the men were from the French equivalent of the F.B.I. and that they had grilled him at length about the purpose of his frequent travel outside of France. Eventually, the agents were convinced that Father wasn’t some sort of an accomplice of Pia’s and that his international travel was of a legitimate nature.

  The agents had finally explained to Father that Pia had been under police surveillance for over a year and was suspected of being a German spy. They had, it seems, lost track of her about a month before she arrived in our household. The police report that Mother had submitted and the accompanying description of Pia had been the first clues they had of her whereabouts in over three months.

  Following the Second World War, Father surmised that Pia may have stumbled onto key information concerning the strategic materials (iron, copper, mercury) being mined by the various companies with which he was associated.

  I asked Father how he had found Pia. “I saw an ad in Le Figaro,” he said. Then he added, “She had good references from a family in Paris. I gave this family’s name to the two agents the first time they came by to interrogate me. We never heard anything more about the matter or about Pia.”

  The dislike Brenda and I had for Pia had grown from the moment of her arrival and neither of us shed any tears over her disappearance.

  Jenny, Brussels, 1925

  Jenny and Alain at Les Buissons, Condette, 1934

  Alain’s first car, Jock in center background, 1934

  Raimond and Françoise (date unknown)

  CHAPTER 3

  Sand Yachts and Fine Tailoring

  Mother had savored freedom, and after the disappearance of Pia, the search for a governess resumed in earnest. Quite soon, one appeared from an unexpected quarter. “Tweet” was a young, cosmopolitan woman who was fluent in both English and French. In fact, she spoke both languages flawlessly and elegantly, having gone to finishing schools in both England and Switzerland. She was the daughter of Leonard Aldridge (or just “Aldridge,” as everyone called him), the president of Anglo-French Ltd., Father’s boss and one if his close friends.

  Father had once lent Aldridge a considerable amount of money and, in so doing, had bailed him out of a very sticky situation. The loan was made at the time of the great stock market crash of 1929, which had left Aldridge penniless and in considerable debt. By 1935, Aldridge, with the help of Father, had recovered his financial aplomb but was drifting into a messy divorce. Both Aldridge and his wife, a good friend of Mother’s, wanted their daughter, Tweet, out of London and far from the fray. Our house in Ville-d’Avray seemed like the ideal refuge.

  Tweet was a sweet, refined, and charming young woman of about twenty, whose natural enthusiasm around Brenda and me clearly showed the pleasure she derived from our company. She was well informed about fashion, the arts, contemporary events and, as a good conversationalist, she was also a good companion for Mother. She was a great help to me with my homework for the Cours Boutet de Monvel and was able to substitute for Mother as the “parent-in-attendance” at the weekly sessions held at the school. Tweet also contributed substantially to the progress of my spoken English. Most importantly, she never went near the kitchen and, at Mother’s suggestion, gave Raimond a wide berth, thereby avoiding the arousal of Françoise’s uncontrollable jealousy.

  Tweet arrived in late April, and after a few remaining weeks of school, the family left on our annual summer migration to the north coast of France. That dreadful Easter sojourn in Condette had brought about one excellent result: my parents had rented a villa at the seaside resort of Hardelot for the summer.

  The villa was called “Le Green Cottage”, but by no stretch of the imagination could Le Green Cottage be viewed as a cottage. Like all villas in Hardelot, it was a spacious, three-story house with numerous bedrooms, a huge dining room suitable for expansive entertaining, a superbly equipped kitchen, and comfortable servants’ quarters. Rather amazingly, this house with comfortable bedrooms and enough beds for twelve people and two servants had only one cramped and barely adequate bathroom. No one dawdled there.

  Hardelot, an amorphous community of summer villas dispersed throughout roughly a square mile of sand dunes, had streets without names and villas without house numbers. Instead, each villa was clearly labeled with its name, and it was reputed that only the postman could tell you where each of the three hundred or so villas in the community was to be found. The flimsiest of pretexts served as a basis for naming a villa, and Le Green Cottage derived its name from the fact that it did indeed have green trim. Another villa also had green trim but had presumably been built before Le Green Cottage, for it bore the preemptive and wildly imaginative name of “La Villa Verte” (the Green Villa).

  This was Raimond and Françoise’s first summer at the seaside. They both loved the change of scene and the different pace. Since the house was rented completely furnished, one of Raimond’s first tasks upon arrival was a detailed inventory of the mobilier (movables). Mother assisted him in this major undertaking because it was his first inventory, and he wasn’t familiar with the values assigned to the items listed.

  All the items on the inventory (crockery, silverware, furniture, carpeting, wall paintings, bedding, towels, and such) were of the highest quality and would have to be paid for at the end of the season if anything were missing or damaged. The glassware was crystal, and the silverware was real silver. There were huge silver serving platters and such exotic items as a soup tureen and ladle created by the same silversmith. Every movable article in the house
appeared on the inventory list, which was organized by room. Mother and Raimond worked on this project for two days.

  Of all the houses in which we summered, Le Green Cottage was my favorite. Not only was it a pleasant house, but it was marvelously situated within Hardelot. The better houses of the resort were clustered around a vast rectangle of brick-red tennis courts, ingeniously sunken below street level and the surrounding terrain. The purpose of this design, according to Mother, was to shelter the courts from the wind, but the result was an unintentional amphitheater. With its sloping sides covered in colorful flower beds, shrubs, and well-kept lawns, this rectangle made a handsome focal point for the community.

  Le Green Cottage was located at midfield, and its veranda had a commanding view of the amphitheater. The house’s center-stage location especially suited me because it was the place where small boys my age congregated to decide on the day’s activities. We played all kinds of games together, and it was here that I first honed my skills in the engineering of game plans and rules. The villas were not cheek-by-jowl but had stretches of sand dunes between them, forming wonderful venues for all sorts of games. The vastness of the play area made it imperative that rules and boundaries be established, and of course, further constraints were placed on us by parents, governesses, or nannies who kept an eye on us from various nearby verandas. There was very little traffic in Hardelot, so it was an ideal place for us to play. But Tweet had to accompany me when one of my companions and I headed for the nearby beach, which was only a hundred yards from the house and off limits to me unless I was with a grownup.

  Like so many French coastal resorts, the beach at Hardelot had been planned and organized for maximum convenience and pleasure. A gently sloping granite seawall had been built to protect the houses from the ravages of the occasional storm. However, this dominant feature obliterated the natural aspect of the beach. Where the mile-long seawall ended, the original sand dunes and the beach’s natural character resumed. Father had little use for the “urban” aspect of Hardelot, and on the rare occasions when he joined us on the beach, we all had to traipse with him to a spot well beyond the protected beach. In the dunes out there, far from anything man-made, and away from the crowds that populated the main part of the beach, Father would set up his beach chair and read until he felt ready for a swim. While he read, Brenda and I resumed our usual sand castle building. I’m not sure whether it was the man-made aspect of the surroundings or the crowds that he disliked more. I suspect it was both—equally.

  The slope of the seawall was quite shallow, and this made it possible for beach cabins on wheels to be rolled down its smooth stone face onto the sand at the start of each summer season. These tiny wooden houses rolled on crude, concrete wheels and were neatly parked in a straight line on the beach, with three-foot spaces between them. All beach cabins were identical in construction and size but painted in colors which matched the color scheme of the villas to which they belonged.

  Le Green Cottage itself was plumb in the center of Hardelot, and since beach cabins were parked near their owner’s villa, our cabin occupied the centremost spot on the long row of cabins. This location didn’t please Father because, after changing into his bathing suit, he had to walk over half a mile to reach the deserted, natural beach.

  Along the top of the seawall was a mile-long, fifty-foot wide, tiled promenade which everyone called la digue (technically, this was just the seawall, but to the locals the word digue usually meant the promenade). It was where the older vacationers strolled in all their finery and, if it weren’t too windy, the ladies usually carried parasols. Older people believed that a tanned look was unattractive, and therefore stayed covered from the sun as much as possible. But people in their thirties and younger were part of the first generation that thought it fashionable, even healthy, to tan themselves, something they referred to as being très sportif (very sporty).

  La digue was also used by people of all ages for bicycling or riding on strange contraptions called “cuisse-taxes”, a uniquely complicated French invention on which two people sat side by side, both pedaling in a recumbent position. A cuisse-taxe was really a large tricycle, with two canvas seats side by side and placed between the two rear wheels. Two sets of pedals were located high above the single front wheel, and a very long bicycle chain (in a housing) somehow passed between the two seats on its way to the rear axle. The name “cuisse-taxe” combines elements of the words “thigh” and “taxi.”

  A cuisse-taxe could be rented by the hour and was very popular with young couples, who thought of riding them as an ideal way to acquire a good tan on their legs, and after a few days, to show off the results of their tanning efforts. They pedaled with their feet at eye-level, so their legs were well positioned to receive the sun or display whatever tan they had acquired.

  The cuisse-taxe struck me as an ingenious and thoroughly delightful vehicle. Sadly, I was never able to talk Mother (by then in her mid-thirties) into renting one. She said it was downright vulgar to be pedaling like that, “with your bare thighs high in the air for all to see.”

  For smaller children and teenagers, there were two beach activity clubs. Brenda and I belonged to Le Club des Pingouins, (the Penguin Club) and the competing club was Le Club des Mouettes (the Seagull Club). Every morning, the regulars of the respective clubs gathered at opposite ends of the beach for two hours of gymnastics and beach activities. After a half hour of fairly strenuous exercise, we played various games or competed in races.

  Daily competitions were usually held within each club, and we were grouped by size (not age) so that kids within any one group could compete fairly. In addition to ordinary races over various distances, there were also relay races, egg-and-spoon races, sack races, pirouette races (cartwheeling all the way to the finish line), somersault races, and races on all fours. Paired contestants also competed in three-legged races and wheelbarrow races. The winner of every race won an inexpensive beach toy.

  About once a week, our Penguin Club competed in joint races against the Seagull Club. After such a contest, the club that won the most events had the honor of having its club flag flying beneath the Tricolor on the flagpole at the center of the beach, and it remained there until the next joint competition, a week later. I remember feeling extremely proud after winning two of the events that had helped put our flag on the pole. I went around accosting strangers at random, pointing out the Penguin Club’s pennant fluttering in the breeze and explaining how I had been an important contributor to this triumph.

  Late in the morning, the parents of the young participants in these morning activities returned from a round of golf or a game of tennis, and both beach clubs ran a late-morning gymnastic session for the adults. I liked to stand around and watch the adults groaning and straining as they exercised, and I remember that there was also a lot of laughing and merriment. The instructor must have been something of a comedian as well as an athlete, for he seemed to keep the participants in stitches. I didn’t understand the jokes, which I’m sure were “unsuitable for my young ears,” as Mother used to say when adults told jokes I didn’t understand and which she didn’t want to explain.

  The Penguin and Seagull clubs jointly held sand castle contests, which took place every other week when low tide occurred in mid-afternoon. The contests were sponsored by the newspaper Le Paris Soir and were vast enterprises which accommodated each of the numerous age groups separately and even included a division for adults. Not only were there prizes awarded for each age group but also for “best over-all.”

  The contests were not limited to sand castle building. Sometimes the contest was for the most artistic panneau décoratif. In this type of contest, we built a raised, rectangular panel of compacted sand, usually about a yard square (there were no restrictions as to size). We then decorated our panel with designs or patterns in the sand or with bas-relief sculpture. The works were further adorned with seashells, seaweed, dried-out crabs, cu
ttlefish bones, driftwood, or any other beach debris which we had gathered before the contest. Anything was allowed as decoration, as long as it was “of the beach.” We also had to provide an appropriate title for our work of art. Adult endeavors usually had humorous or pompous-sounding titles. These titles were written in the sand at the base of each work of art.

  By late afternoon, a crowd of spectators in a carnival mood showed up to see the completed efforts of the contestants. After the judging and announcement of the winners, each artist stood by his or her work of art and accepted kudos or kibitzing from parading onlookers. By sundown, the entire collection of masterpieces had been expunged by the rising tide, but the disappearance of the artwork caused no great grief, for everyone had other things in mind as they sat down to superb dinners.

  On the day of a contest, the beach club staff was out on the beach by two o’clock in the afternoon, laying down a plaid of lines that they traced in the sand. The lines were created by dragging a spade on its edge along the wet sand. This grid consisted of squares about ten feet to a side, with six-foot aisles for spectators between each square. These well-defined boundaries bordered the “canvas” or working area allowed each contestant, and it was understood that no one should step on or destroy these important markers. Everything was well organized and laid out for easy comparison among contestants of the same age group. For all their well-deserved reputation for eccentric independence, the French like to have their communal activities well ordered and organized.