Читать книгу Who Do I Think I Am? - Homan Potterton - Страница 13

CHAPTER 6

TIMES PAST

A few years ago, I was driving down through France, alone, and daydreaming behind the wheel as kilometre after kilometre of motorway rolled by. Suddenly I saw a sign indicating a road off to the right. ‘Janville’, it said. I swerved off without thinking.

‘This is where I was all those years ago,’ I said to myself, ‘my first time ever in France. How many years could it be?’

I calculated about forty.

I had kept up with the Chassines for a few years after my stay with them. I would write to them and I would go and visit, for a week or so, on my hitch-hiking holidays in France. I was always welcome but gradually contact was lost and it was decades since I had even sent them a Christmas card. But on this day, as I looked for the road to Semonville, I suddenly got cold feet. What was I doing? They might have forgotten me. They are probably dead. Pascal (the eldest boy) could be living there now, and with a horrid wife who would not welcome me. I tried to work out what age the parents would now be if they were still alive, and then I realised that I had no clue what age they had been when I had stayed with them. I drove cautiously, trying to remember the way, and then I recognised the exterior wall of the yard (with its postbox) running along the road. There was a car in front of me. It turned into the yard. Somewhat embarrassed, I hesitated and then followed. An attractive woman, in her fifties perhaps, neat and clean, had stepped out of the car and was holding a bag of shopping in each hand. ‘Too young to be Madame Chassine,’ I thought, ‘but too old to be Pascal’s wife either.’ I was puzzled as I got out of the car and went over to her.

‘Madame Chassine?’ I said, knowing that that would cover the possibility of her being either Madame Chassine or her daughter-in-law.

She too was puzzled.

‘‘Oui?’ she replied.

And then I saw that, young-looking though she was, it was indeed my Madame Chassine.

‘Do you recognise me?’ I asked.

She looked me up and down.

‘Non. Pas du tout.’

The French can only pronounce my name ‘o-MAN’, with no ‘H’ and the emphasis on the second syllable, and that was what the Chassines called me.

‘Je suis o-MAN,’ I said.

She let out a little shriek, dropped the shopping bags to the ground, and put her hands up to her mouth. We both stood there, silent, for a moment and then she ran over and hugged me. It was very emotional for us both and it took a few minutes for us to recover.

‘François will be thrilled to see you,’ she said. ‘Come in, come in. We have often talked about you over the years and the children have never forgotten you. None of them are here any more. They all have careers. It’s just François and me.’

I picked up the bags of shopping and went with her: through what had been the house when I was there and out to the garden. The house that Monsieur Chassine was planning in my time had been built but, of course, it was no longer new. We went into a lovely big kitchen. Madame Chassine was giddy with chatter, remembering those years long ago, as she put away the shopping.

‘François should be back soon,’ she said, glancing at the clock and looking at me again and again. When he arrived, he was puzzled by the stranger with his wife.

‘Do you not know who it is?’ she said to him.

And then we had the ‘o-MAN’ and the emotion all over again.

She quickly prepared a lovely lunch and we talked away. None of the boys had wanted to farm and all had other careers. Nor did any of them live nearby. Pascal was married here; Jean-Michel was working there; Veronique was someplace else; Marie-Silvie had three children; Françoise had four; Denis had never married. Thomas (who had been a delicate little toddler when I was there) had died young. There had been another baby after my time. It dawned on me that they were all now men and women of practically the same age as myself: I had only been six years older than Pascal. I asked what age the parents had been when I was there. Madame Chassine had been in her late twenties, he in his early thirties. I told them how the months I had spent with them had changed my life. They could not comprehend this.

‘How?’ they asked.

‘Everything,’ I said.

After lunch François took me on a tour. There was much that was the same but a great deal that had been changed. Trees that had been saplings when I was there, were huge. A swimming pool had been installed (it was now almost empty and green); a hard tennis court had been built (it was now overgrown with weeds); the paling round a paddock, where horses had obviously been galloped, had fallen into disrepair. But in the yard everything was pristine and the evidence was that Monsieur Chassine was still the efficient farmer he was when I was there. He explained to me that for years he had worked with the government in the scientific development of certain crops. We went into the old house, now abandoned, and I saw the corner of the room that had been my bedroom.

Back in the kitchen, Micheline (as I was now calling her) told me that, when François was seventy a year or so previously, the children had put together a video of old film clips for him. Would I like to see it? I recalled that François had always been filming with a cine-camera when I was there. She brought me into the sitting room, darkened the room, put on the video and left me there to watch it.

All the children were in the film. That was the day they were all going to the wedding, I recalled. There’s Mémère, the old granny, coming for Sunday lunch, Pascal showing off, Thomas in tears. And then . . . o-MAN. There I was, aged sixteen, pushing the children on the balançoire, loading them up on their bicycles, behind the wheel of the old 2CV, carrying a dead rabbit by its ears. I have hardly ever seen photographs of myself from those years, and never a film. I was overcome.

I left them late in the afternoon and continued on my journey. I had been very moved by the visit, haunted, almost traumatised, and I remained so for several days. It was the images of the empty swimming pool and the weed-covered tennis court that stayed with me. Neither the pool nor the court had been there in my time. They had been installed later, had been enjoyed for years by a young family growing up, and were now abandoned: a generation, a whole lifetime, had come and gone in the decades since I, as a sixteen-year-old, had been so happy there.

My life – well, about five decades of it – had come and gone too.

But what I saw on that video had been the beginning.