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CHAPTER 2

ESCAPE

I do not know where I got the idea, when I was at Mountjoy, that I would go to France for the summer. My father had died two years previously, when I was fourteen, and life at home was no longer the same for me and I wanted to take flight (which my father would never have allowed). I could only go to France if I could find a family who would host me. Some Irish Catholic schools had links (mainly through the religious orders) with schools abroad and, in that way, pupil exchanges could be arranged, but Protestant schools – and certainly not Mountjoy – had none of those contacts. Some girls went as au pairs to foreign families (although this was still fairly novel at the time) but boys did not have that option, as child minding was the principal requirement and, at that time, boys did not do that. I got the name (probably from the French embassy) of some exchange agency and, sifting through the many opportunities advertised, came up with a fairly short list of families who would accept a boy without wanting to send a French boy back in return. I wrote off, in my best French, to several and eventually arranged to go to a family with seven children under the age of thirteen who lived and farmed in the region known as Beauce, between Paris and Orleans. I had in previous years been to summer camps in Scotland and Wales but had never been to London or indeed anywhere else, nor had I ever travelled alone (except on the train from Dublin to Kilkenny). Nevertheless, I took the mailboat to Holyhead, the overnight train (without a ‘couchette’) to Euston, the Tube to Victoria, a train to Newhaven, the ferry to Dieppe, and a final train to St Lazare in Paris: a twenty-four-hour journey. Monsieur Chassine met me there with his car, whisked me up and down the Champs Elysées and then the journey of an hour or more to ‘Semonville, par Janville, Eure et Loir’. I was fairly exhausted when I arrived, and all the more so as I found that – in spite of Mr McElligott’s teaching – I could neither speak nor understand a word of French. A meal was produced which I could not eat – the peas, in the French way, were floating in water and the lettuce was covered in oil – and then to bed.

I had not arrived at a château. Nor, indeed, had I even arrived at a house. There was none. There was a large square yard encircled by old stone farm buildings, one group of which – all at ground level – had been made into a dwelling. It was temporary, as Monsieur Chassine was later to explain: he had plans for building a house in an area to the back, which had already been arranged as a garden. My bedroom was just a corner of the large room where the two older boys slept: it had been screened off with a wardrobe and other furniture.

The farm, which was large, was entirely arable, as is Beauce in its entirety. There was not an animal in sight. Nor were there any hedges, just flat acres of wheat, barley and maize as far as the eye could see. County Meath it was not. It had been Madame Chassine’s childhood home. Monsieur Chassine, as I was to notice over the summer, was a very efficient farmer with a keen interest in being up to date, and his ambition in marrying Madame Chassine was matched by his ambition in all other aspects of his existence as well. It was that ambition which had brought me into their lives.

Although the children were all very young, Monsieur Chassine thought that they should be exposed to different worlds and experiences. As a means of achieving this, he came up with the idea of having a foreigner come and live with them. Madame Chassine (as I was to discover much later) was opposed to this and only eventually agreed, on condition that ‘the foreigner’ would not be a girl. A door, thereby, was opened for me. I suffered a bout of homesickness after about ten days – it was all so very unfamiliar – but I soon got over that. There were no plans as to what I was expected to do except, in a general way, to keep an eye on the children. (I was neither paying nor being paid for my stay.) Every afternoon, I cycled with four or five of the older ones to the public swimming pool two miles away in Janville. There the children were safe, as there was a lifeguard on duty, but in the case of any minor mishaps or fallings-out, I would intervene and attempt to make things better. In the mornings, I might dead-head the geraniums or the roses, prune the vines in the garden (having been shown how to do so), feed the rabbits which were kept in a hutch in the yard, pick the vegetables and the fruit (Madame Chassine preserved both), collect the eggs and do other simple chores, but I never had any sense that I was being made to work, because I was not. Soon, on my own initiative, I might help in the house as well – setting and clearing the table, perhaps hanging out the washing or emptying the dishwasher, a novelty in itself as I had never seen one before. As the youngest of eight myself, used to helping out and mucking in at home, none of this was any bother to me, and I enjoyed it. They spoke no English, so I was obliged to speak French as best I could from the moment I arrived. The children soon learned, amidst their laughter, to understand me and imitate me. Madame Chassine, it seemed, found that she enjoyed trying to chat to me as she went about preparing meals (as it turned out, she was a fabulous cook) and after dinner in the evenings, Monsieur Chassine would invite me into his study to listen to a record of some classical music (he was educating himself as well as his children), talk to him as best I could and, on occasion, share a glass of whisky. When I wrote and told my mother about this, she replied very promptly and very severely: ‘On no account should you ever touch whisky. It has been the ruination of many a good man before now and it could be your ruin too if you are not careful.’

Monsieur Chassine had a hobby: he had an aeroplane and was skilled also at gliding (vol à voile). I remember him returning one Sunday evening flushed with excitement: he had managed to glide all the way from Orléans (where he kept his plane) to Lyon, a distance of about 500 kilometres. He never took me up in his glider (thank goodness) but he did fly me in his two-seater plane, and we circled over Beauce and swept low over the farm, from where Madame Chassine and the children waved at us. I had never been in an aeroplane before, not even a commercial one, so the flight was very thrilling, but my insides jangled about a bit too much for my liking and I was relieved when we came back to earth.

If all of this sounds like a wonderful experience for a sixteen-year-old, that is because it was wonderful. And then there was the icing on the cake. Many Sundays, Monsieur Chassine would load all the family and me into the car and we would go off visiting sights: I remember Chartres Cathedral, the châteaux at Blois, Chambord and Cheverny in particular, but there were several more. These visits, organised for my benefit I am sure – as Monsieur Chassine could see that I loved everything I saw – must have been an agony for the children, who were all so very young. But they were being brought up very strictly and they had to behave. The climax came in August with a full day at the Château of Versailles, culminating in a magnificent son et lumière as night descended. This was out of this world for someone who had never even seen a firework before: the fountains – illuminated and playing to the music of the court of Louis XIV, the sound effects of horses and carriages clip-clopping through the woods, ballerinas as swans appearing to rise out of the Bassin de Neptune, regiments of seventeenth-century soldiers marching, the commentary spoken in beautiful French, and then the fireworks themselves. I was knocked sideways by the magnificence and beauty of it all. It was a day and evening that I have never forgotten: Sunday 5 August 1962.

How can I be so specific about the date? As we sat in our seats waiting for the spectacle to begin, there was a definite murmur among the audience. People seemed troubled by something; strangers leaned over to talk to one other; anyone with a newspaper was persuaded to share it. And in all those newspapers were photographs of Marilyn Monroe: she had killed herself (apparently) at her home in Los Angeles just hours previously.

Further excitement (as far as I was concerned) was occasioned by where we were seated. There was nothing special about our seats (except that they were good), and that made it all the more remarkable that seated two rows directly in front of us were Ike and Mamie Eisenhower. He had ended his term as president of the United States only the previous year and yet here he was – the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, the man who had liberated France from the Nazis less than twenty years previously – quietly seated with his wife as members of the public at a very public spectacle, and without any entourage while the French audience, instead of applauding him or acknowledging him in any way, simply ignored him.

I have distant (very distant) French relations through my paternal great-great-grandfather. This was Sigismund Rentzsch (1776–1843), a German watchmaker who in about 1809 settled in London, where, based in St James’s, he became quite well known. He invented and patented a number of novel movements for clocks and watches and was patronised by the Court: a receipt (dated 1840) survives in the sum of nine pounds, four shillings and sixpence for repairs to the clocks and watches of Her Late Royal Highness Princess Augusta (daughter of George III). Sigismund Rentzsch had five children by his first (German) wife and eleven by his second, Mary Ransom, whom he married in London. One of these eleven, Rosina (1835–1909), somehow found her way to Ireland (possibly as a governess), where she met, in the area of Edenderry, an Edward Homan (1825–1909). They subsequently married, and their daughter, Charlotte (1866–1955) – my grandmother – married Thomas Potterton of Ardkill, Carbury in 1892. Rosina’s eldest sister, Augusta, married a Frenchman, Dr Scipion Gas of Lyon, and it is from this marriage that my French relations – at least the ones I have met – are descended. They are called ‘Allibert’.

When my Aunt Polly¹ – Charlotte’s daughter – who was frantically keen on the family tree, heard that I was going to France, she became insistent that I would look up ‘the cousins’. She immediately wrote off to an elderly Nelly Allibert, who lived in a suburb of Paris, and said that I would be coming to stay. It would have been a great inconvenience I am sure for Nelly to have a strange sixteen-year-old boy in her house, but she was the soul of kindness and arranged, after a few days, that I would go to her daughter, Nane, who lived on the rue d’Amsterdam with her husband. It was from there that I had the experience of a lifetime. After a good Sunday lunch, when other cousins were invited, one of them – Odette de Lestanville – who was about thirty and had done a course at the Louvre, took me to the museum. Looking at the pictures, she explained the different periods, told me about the artists, uncovered the stories in the pictures, and pointed to comparisons with other paintings and sculptures. She was a gentle guide who made everything fascinating and nothing in any way forbidding. By the end of the visit, I was hooked and, since that day, whenever I enter the Louvre I think of that afternoon. Forty years on, a few years ago, I looked up Odette and wrote to her. I told her how magic her company had been for me all those decades ago. She wrote back, but seemed to have no clear recollection of me²; but I have never forgotten her.

During those few days in Paris, assiduously sightseeing on my own, I had further opportunities to extend my education. As I was taking in the wonderful view from the esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot, a man came along and engaged me in conversation. After a few preliminaries, he offered to take me to the Folies Bergère and suggested a rendezvous the following day. But even though I was only sixteen, I had the sense to realise that he probably had ‘folies’ of an entirely different order in mind, and that the Louvre with Odette had been a much safer option. And so, intrigued though I was, I politely said, ‘Merci beaucoup, monsieur, mais non.’

I managed to stay with the Chassines for almost three months, from the day school broke up in June to when term started in early September. On my way back from France, I stopped in London where Aunt Polly had arranged for me to stay with another Rentzsch cousin, Laurie Rentzsch and his wife, Phyl, a very stylish (to me) couple who lived at Harrow-on-the-Hill. Their children Terry and Pamela were adults by this time and had left home. As a young man, Laurie had spent holidays in Ireland with his Irish cousins (my uncles and aunts) and he made me very welcome. Eventually, I got home, but although my French was fluent, it was very poor grammatically and my accent was atrociously anglophone. But my sensibilities had been opened to so much more than the French language during those three months and, within me, I was changed.

As a child, I had always felt ‘like a fish out of water’ at Rathcormick. Appropriately, on account of my name, I had inherited the Homan genes of my father and his mother, my grandmother, Charlotte Homan, whereas my five older brothers all took after our mother. As a result, although we all got on well together, I had little in common with them. But the experience of France, of seeing Blois, Chartres, Versailles and much more, led me to see that I had not been ‘out of water’ at all. I had merely been swimming in the wrong pond. And from that time on, as far as I was concerned, it was: County Meath . . . goodbye.

Endnotes

1.My father’s sister Polly (also Mary or Mollie) Campion.

2.However, following Odette’s death in December 2016, her son Henri wrote to me to say that his mother had remembered me.