paris
late teens (documentation goes back to 1964)
Pete. Guitars under bridges. Bohemian chance encounters. Left Bank bookshops. 'Underground' theatre play performed for us as the only members in the audience. Pete was going to translate it to English for them. (I still have their original script – 'Podpolie', by La Compagnie Michel Picard at the Kaleidoscope theatre). Meeting a couple of French guys (somewhere – a cafe?) drawing their portraits going to one of their parents' homes for a meal (the loo on the landing, shared with the inhabitants of the other flats, was the first time I'd encountered a squat toilet).
Hitch-hiking to Strasbourg (was it during this same trip to Paris?) - standing on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere hoping for a lift, meeting another couple of guys when there (in station cafe?) - they drove us to Germany for the day... memory so hazy... Then on the ferry back to England a young French couple talking with us (we thought they must think we looked cool) and then asking us to carry a carrier bag for them through customs – it was such a long time before I tumbled to the fact of what we were probably carrying... they obviously just thought we looked innocent.
How much of this was one visit? Cafes and cheap hotels, sardines, baguettes, Camembert, red wine, Les Halles... How many times did we go? Did we go again before Pete's breakdown 69/70? or had Amsterdam taken over?
Pete. Guitars under bridges. Bohemian chance encounters. Left Bank bookshops. 'Underground' theatre play performed for us as the only members in the audience. Pete was going to translate it to English for them. (I still have their original script – 'Podpolie', by La Compagnie Michel Picard at the Kaleidoscope theatre). Meeting a couple of French guys (somewhere – a cafe?) drawing their portraits going to one of their parents' homes for a meal (the loo on the landing, shared with the inhabitants of the other flats, was the first time I'd encountered a squat toilet).
Hitch-hiking to Strasbourg (was it during this same trip to Paris?) - standing on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere hoping for a lift, meeting another couple of guys when there (in station cafe?) - they drove us to Germany for the day... memory so hazy... Then on the ferry back to England a young French couple talking with us (we thought they must think we looked cool) and then asking us to carry a carrier bag for them through customs – it was such a long time before I tumbled to the fact of what we were probably carrying... they obviously just thought we looked innocent.
How much of this was one visit? Cafes and cheap hotels, sardines, baguettes, Camembert, red wine, Les Halles... How many times did we go? Did we go again before Pete's breakdown 69/70? or had Amsterdam taken over?
during my forties and later
There was the college trip (February 1989) - extreme heatwave. Nick and Pete came too a lot of drinking (Pete with Graham McK and 'the witches'), eating in Chartiers followed by late opened gallery, The Pompidou Centre. Next day the D'Orsay of course; where else that short trip?
I returned alone in the same year to write my final assignment on Picasso's etchings – sitting in the corner of the Musee Picasso, writing, sketching. Ma paid for me to go, writing it up from draft in the hotel in the evenings, pursued by a guy walking over a bridge over river (Graham had warned me) who took no notice of my protests until my fierce 'Allez-vous en!'. And I felt in control of my life, reveled in Paris freedom to follow...
Pete and I definitely went again in 1993 stayed in Hotel Perfect the old patron who shuffled out each morning to get bread for breakfast huge cups of tea or coffee, and then sardines, baguettes, Camembert, red wine again, but always having an evening meal, La Chaumier Pete's favourite... we did some of the exhibitions together Schiele, Picasso, Gustav Moreau, making drawings. I think I first really realised Pete's increasing dependency on drink on this visit the desperation he seemed to feel when walking to a bar or restaurant until he had a glass of beer or wine in his hand wanting me to stay up at night in the bedroom hotel with more wine, pulling in opposite directions re-capturing the past for Pete, art for me... (Pete of course had spent some time living in Paris for a while in his teens between leaving school and Cambridge, making ends meet writing poems on the pavement, living with a girl he met there called France, losing track of time day or night but that is his story...)
There was the college trip (February 1989) - extreme heatwave. Nick and Pete came too a lot of drinking (Pete with Graham McK and 'the witches'), eating in Chartiers followed by late opened gallery, The Pompidou Centre. Next day the D'Orsay of course; where else that short trip?
I returned alone in the same year to write my final assignment on Picasso's etchings – sitting in the corner of the Musee Picasso, writing, sketching. Ma paid for me to go, writing it up from draft in the hotel in the evenings, pursued by a guy walking over a bridge over river (Graham had warned me) who took no notice of my protests until my fierce 'Allez-vous en!'. And I felt in control of my life, reveled in Paris freedom to follow...
Pete and I definitely went again in 1993 stayed in Hotel Perfect the old patron who shuffled out each morning to get bread for breakfast huge cups of tea or coffee, and then sardines, baguettes, Camembert, red wine again, but always having an evening meal, La Chaumier Pete's favourite... we did some of the exhibitions together Schiele, Picasso, Gustav Moreau, making drawings. I think I first really realised Pete's increasing dependency on drink on this visit the desperation he seemed to feel when walking to a bar or restaurant until he had a glass of beer or wine in his hand wanting me to stay up at night in the bedroom hotel with more wine, pulling in opposite directions re-capturing the past for Pete, art for me... (Pete of course had spent some time living in Paris for a while in his teens between leaving school and Cambridge, making ends meet writing poems on the pavement, living with a girl he met there called France, losing track of time day or night but that is his story...)
... and later
In 199? I took Cath and Mj loving the galleries, restaurants, life. Hotel Perfect again still seedy and dark, that washing facility behind the curtain, bidet on wheels! Cath returned to UK earlier because of Uni commitments, Mj and I stayed on and she shopped – such 'frisson' carrying the bags (including Diesel, not yet in UK)
Back to Paris again in 2000 with Nick - 25th wedding anniversary with champagne breakfast! Not Hotel Perfect, (we must have visited previously because Nick definitely been there) but a different hotel on the top floor with a balcony and rooftop view, lazy start to the anniversary day, the D'Orsay perhaps later, the Rodin? Early evening beers beside the Seine walking along the river's bank, so hot, slowly
Then once more with Pete in 200(4?) - Ma's treat she loved to think of us doing things together and appreciated the history Paris held for us. The Art Brut exhibition, the pain, the anxiety, Pete's need for wine, our relationship strained except for evenings over a meal, perhaps, cafes too. His desperate search for places of the past, and, of course, Hotel Perfect again more of a hostel now, the romantic seediness no longer evident.
And now I've been back – start of a new journey living in France, Paris 'my' capital city now, but visits forever informed by the (my) past. I called in Hotel Perfect on the anniversary of Pete's death and spoke to the proprietress who recognised me and remembered Pete!
* * *
In 199? I took Cath and Mj loving the galleries, restaurants, life. Hotel Perfect again still seedy and dark, that washing facility behind the curtain, bidet on wheels! Cath returned to UK earlier because of Uni commitments, Mj and I stayed on and she shopped – such 'frisson' carrying the bags (including Diesel, not yet in UK)
Back to Paris again in 2000 with Nick - 25th wedding anniversary with champagne breakfast! Not Hotel Perfect, (we must have visited previously because Nick definitely been there) but a different hotel on the top floor with a balcony and rooftop view, lazy start to the anniversary day, the D'Orsay perhaps later, the Rodin? Early evening beers beside the Seine walking along the river's bank, so hot, slowly
Then once more with Pete in 200(4?) - Ma's treat she loved to think of us doing things together and appreciated the history Paris held for us. The Art Brut exhibition, the pain, the anxiety, Pete's need for wine, our relationship strained except for evenings over a meal, perhaps, cafes too. His desperate search for places of the past, and, of course, Hotel Perfect again more of a hostel now, the romantic seediness no longer evident.
And now I've been back – start of a new journey living in France, Paris 'my' capital city now, but visits forever informed by the (my) past. I called in Hotel Perfect on the anniversary of Pete's death and spoke to the proprietress who recognised me and remembered Pete!
* * *
we will always have...
YSL Rive Gauche: a blue and silver cylindrical container, an oversweet smell. In my late teens, I thought it the epitome of cool, although the term came later. I can remember walking along the right bank of the Seine and looking with longing across the water, all those shadowy excitements and alternative pleasures waiting to be explored... Maybe you were there, Di, you and Pete, hearing a guitar, smoking, as I watched.
When I think of Paris, I think of this wide winding line, wandering, unresolved, with unknown and untold delights beckoning, out of reach. Last visit: we drove into and across the city – well, I drove, Gordon navigating, Jack in the back. I remember familiar names on overhead signs, an hour or so of being lost, and then there at the Ibis, somewhere on the northern edge, near the canal. We have photographs: of the canal itself in the sunshine, stalls, cafes, a kids playground. Maggi has since told me it’s a dangerous area, she wouldn’t walk there. We found it friendly, interesting, a bit down at heel. Other photos record our progress: underneath the Eiffel tower (all too terrified to go higher), outside the Louvre, strolling by the river. Jack is determinedly cheerful; Gordon remote. If the camera told it true, it would have shown him crying in a corner or sobbing upward into the air. Was it madness to insist on going ahead with the holiday as a family, when days before Gordon had announced he was leaving to live with someone else? Probably. In fact, our small unit had been fractured years before, and Gordon’s new life also crumpled before we left, his next partner going back to her husband – hence the tears. This holiday, with another (whole) family in two different locations in mid-France, was sandwiched between two slices of the capital, if you can call EuroDisney Paris. It was cold. It rained. Even Jack’s good humour was wearing thin. I remember bad food, a gigantic Mickey Mouse face, and that little boat ride, to the tune of ‘It’s a small, small world’; shrill, a tortured key change, never-ending, the stuff of nightmares.
A year or two previously, on the way to Blois with the school dance band, we drove straight through the city centre in the quiet of an early Sunday evening. The coach spilled us all out for a leg stretch on that big open square which looks down across – well, now I’m not sure what. In that way that memory has of both blurring and fixing, I recall the dark dark skin of the sellers of beads and trinkets, evening sun, the gaggle of band members in our careless care, the thrum of the illicit affair which made everything – jobs, marriages, the trip – that bit more precarious, and a view. I thought we saw the Eiffel Tower. I felt sure, if I checked the map, I would be able to locate the spot. Now, nothing looks right. We were there for minutes only, before moving on.
A similar uncertainty colours my first and most substantial Paris memory, absolutely the stuff of dreams. Richard was in a way my first – maybe my only – grown-up love. He followed the doting bank clerk of my early to mid teens, the fantasy crushes, the irresistible lure of snatched and secret misdemeanours. He was older, cleverer, more interesting, rebellious in a different way from me. Unpredictable, unreliable, he introduced me to Cambridge, modern jazz, a family home with three – three! – pianos, the odd lure of a solo cello practised in an upstairs room. He called me Lovely Lady and sometimes Fag-Ash Lil. I never found him physically quite as attractive as I wished then, betrayed him ruthlessly and repeatedly, but adored him in an erratic, naive manner. We fought often, separated frequently. The tipping point came in a beachside hotel in East London towards the end of my visit to South Africa. He’d been working there for a year, whilst I made a miserable effort, and then no effort at all, at fidelity back home. He had become more wedded to philanthropic effort – as a doctor, he had a lot to offer. In a way my instincts were similar, although they led me down a more alternative, less conservative path: ‘you and your fucking revolutionary friends’, he sneered in an alcohol-fuelled fury over dinner, before I staggered off to throw up and had to be taxied back to the hotel.
Paris was early days still, though the rows had already begun. He was off to France for a medical conference, and we’d half-arranged that I would join him for the weekend before we quarrelled and he left without making up. Bloody-minded or romantic or both, I decided I would go anyway, sure that he would be there to meet me. A strike by French ferry workers, though, meant that I had to travel twelve hours later than planned. I had a map of the metro, the name of his nearest station, and an address. My courage drained away in the hubbub of the Gare du Nord. An unidentified hand felt my bum in a crowded carriage. By the time I pushed my way out onto the platform at Jasmin, I was panicky and tearful. What would I have done if Richard had not, at that moment, been walking down the steps towards me, with his colleague Faisal, heading out for an evening in the capital?
We collected his bag and took the metro, its terrors banished, to the Luxembourg Gardens. I remember a narrow doorway, a daunting entrance hall, our nerves as we handed over our passports consigning us to separate rooms. How different I imagine from your confident rule-breaking, Di! Richard and I laughed over our innocence when we met again a year or two ago. He remembered the hotel as a modest Hotel des Balcons, although over the years it seems to have become Le Grand Hotel des Balcons, and now has 4 stars. When I look at photographs of the front, though, all those balconies, it must always have been large. Inside, I recall only a staircase, a banister rail, and a room, and a tray of breakfast in bed.
What did we do? I think we walked in the gardens, ate in cafés. I spent some time alone while Richard was working, struggling at counters with inadequate school French. I think I wore a much-loved fine wool knitted suit, most of a term’s grant, a calf-length jacket, a dull grey-blue – teal, perhaps – over grey diamond-patterned trousers, snakeskin we called them, and matching stub-heeled Mini Mouse shoes, whilst Richard – well, the inevitable donkey jacket, and gold-framed thick-lensed specs. And I do remember the toyshop near the hotel, though not the wooden toy which he bought and which, apparently, has ‘done duty down the years’. He describes it in an email as ‘one of three souvenirs of deep time’. The others, ‘a sheep's skull from a Welsh mountain side and a velvet ribbon pinned inside a cello case as a fix for a broken strap to hold the cello neck in – brown and now faded and stringy from lots of tying’. I had forgotten the ribbon.
One of Richard’s last cards, after a gap of more than a year, is formally, neutrally written with the now-familiar distancer ‘From Felicity and...’ The picture is of the Japanese garden at Norwich Cathedral, three big boulders in the foreground, bordered by concentric circles in the surrounding gravel. I think about resonances, ripples in a pool. I imagine another trip to Paris, a night or two in the hotel, wondering if memories would worm out through cracks in the floorboards, or if I would see that couple, the dreamy girl with her long jacket and the brown ribbon that doesn’t quite match, the man at her side or rather a step or two ahead, head up like a terrier, peering, searching. I search Youtube for that clip from Casablanca and snivel at the words we all have by heart. And I wonder if it is true, how it works: is it merely a hankering after something we desired, or held for an instant before it slipped away, or invented merely, hoping that the invention might somehow make it real? Or does the fact that we were there, once, together, mean that the moment endures; that we always have Paris? Wedged between books on the shelf by my desk there is a postcard of Victoria Falls, all boiling waters and unearthly light. It is postmarked 21 September 1974, after the disastrous meal in East London and all the broken promises and bruised hearts. It reads: ‘Simply, I wish you were here. All my love. Dick.’
YSL Rive Gauche: a blue and silver cylindrical container, an oversweet smell. In my late teens, I thought it the epitome of cool, although the term came later. I can remember walking along the right bank of the Seine and looking with longing across the water, all those shadowy excitements and alternative pleasures waiting to be explored... Maybe you were there, Di, you and Pete, hearing a guitar, smoking, as I watched.
When I think of Paris, I think of this wide winding line, wandering, unresolved, with unknown and untold delights beckoning, out of reach. Last visit: we drove into and across the city – well, I drove, Gordon navigating, Jack in the back. I remember familiar names on overhead signs, an hour or so of being lost, and then there at the Ibis, somewhere on the northern edge, near the canal. We have photographs: of the canal itself in the sunshine, stalls, cafes, a kids playground. Maggi has since told me it’s a dangerous area, she wouldn’t walk there. We found it friendly, interesting, a bit down at heel. Other photos record our progress: underneath the Eiffel tower (all too terrified to go higher), outside the Louvre, strolling by the river. Jack is determinedly cheerful; Gordon remote. If the camera told it true, it would have shown him crying in a corner or sobbing upward into the air. Was it madness to insist on going ahead with the holiday as a family, when days before Gordon had announced he was leaving to live with someone else? Probably. In fact, our small unit had been fractured years before, and Gordon’s new life also crumpled before we left, his next partner going back to her husband – hence the tears. This holiday, with another (whole) family in two different locations in mid-France, was sandwiched between two slices of the capital, if you can call EuroDisney Paris. It was cold. It rained. Even Jack’s good humour was wearing thin. I remember bad food, a gigantic Mickey Mouse face, and that little boat ride, to the tune of ‘It’s a small, small world’; shrill, a tortured key change, never-ending, the stuff of nightmares.
A year or two previously, on the way to Blois with the school dance band, we drove straight through the city centre in the quiet of an early Sunday evening. The coach spilled us all out for a leg stretch on that big open square which looks down across – well, now I’m not sure what. In that way that memory has of both blurring and fixing, I recall the dark dark skin of the sellers of beads and trinkets, evening sun, the gaggle of band members in our careless care, the thrum of the illicit affair which made everything – jobs, marriages, the trip – that bit more precarious, and a view. I thought we saw the Eiffel Tower. I felt sure, if I checked the map, I would be able to locate the spot. Now, nothing looks right. We were there for minutes only, before moving on.
A similar uncertainty colours my first and most substantial Paris memory, absolutely the stuff of dreams. Richard was in a way my first – maybe my only – grown-up love. He followed the doting bank clerk of my early to mid teens, the fantasy crushes, the irresistible lure of snatched and secret misdemeanours. He was older, cleverer, more interesting, rebellious in a different way from me. Unpredictable, unreliable, he introduced me to Cambridge, modern jazz, a family home with three – three! – pianos, the odd lure of a solo cello practised in an upstairs room. He called me Lovely Lady and sometimes Fag-Ash Lil. I never found him physically quite as attractive as I wished then, betrayed him ruthlessly and repeatedly, but adored him in an erratic, naive manner. We fought often, separated frequently. The tipping point came in a beachside hotel in East London towards the end of my visit to South Africa. He’d been working there for a year, whilst I made a miserable effort, and then no effort at all, at fidelity back home. He had become more wedded to philanthropic effort – as a doctor, he had a lot to offer. In a way my instincts were similar, although they led me down a more alternative, less conservative path: ‘you and your fucking revolutionary friends’, he sneered in an alcohol-fuelled fury over dinner, before I staggered off to throw up and had to be taxied back to the hotel.
Paris was early days still, though the rows had already begun. He was off to France for a medical conference, and we’d half-arranged that I would join him for the weekend before we quarrelled and he left without making up. Bloody-minded or romantic or both, I decided I would go anyway, sure that he would be there to meet me. A strike by French ferry workers, though, meant that I had to travel twelve hours later than planned. I had a map of the metro, the name of his nearest station, and an address. My courage drained away in the hubbub of the Gare du Nord. An unidentified hand felt my bum in a crowded carriage. By the time I pushed my way out onto the platform at Jasmin, I was panicky and tearful. What would I have done if Richard had not, at that moment, been walking down the steps towards me, with his colleague Faisal, heading out for an evening in the capital?
We collected his bag and took the metro, its terrors banished, to the Luxembourg Gardens. I remember a narrow doorway, a daunting entrance hall, our nerves as we handed over our passports consigning us to separate rooms. How different I imagine from your confident rule-breaking, Di! Richard and I laughed over our innocence when we met again a year or two ago. He remembered the hotel as a modest Hotel des Balcons, although over the years it seems to have become Le Grand Hotel des Balcons, and now has 4 stars. When I look at photographs of the front, though, all those balconies, it must always have been large. Inside, I recall only a staircase, a banister rail, and a room, and a tray of breakfast in bed.
What did we do? I think we walked in the gardens, ate in cafés. I spent some time alone while Richard was working, struggling at counters with inadequate school French. I think I wore a much-loved fine wool knitted suit, most of a term’s grant, a calf-length jacket, a dull grey-blue – teal, perhaps – over grey diamond-patterned trousers, snakeskin we called them, and matching stub-heeled Mini Mouse shoes, whilst Richard – well, the inevitable donkey jacket, and gold-framed thick-lensed specs. And I do remember the toyshop near the hotel, though not the wooden toy which he bought and which, apparently, has ‘done duty down the years’. He describes it in an email as ‘one of three souvenirs of deep time’. The others, ‘a sheep's skull from a Welsh mountain side and a velvet ribbon pinned inside a cello case as a fix for a broken strap to hold the cello neck in – brown and now faded and stringy from lots of tying’. I had forgotten the ribbon.
One of Richard’s last cards, after a gap of more than a year, is formally, neutrally written with the now-familiar distancer ‘From Felicity and...’ The picture is of the Japanese garden at Norwich Cathedral, three big boulders in the foreground, bordered by concentric circles in the surrounding gravel. I think about resonances, ripples in a pool. I imagine another trip to Paris, a night or two in the hotel, wondering if memories would worm out through cracks in the floorboards, or if I would see that couple, the dreamy girl with her long jacket and the brown ribbon that doesn’t quite match, the man at her side or rather a step or two ahead, head up like a terrier, peering, searching. I search Youtube for that clip from Casablanca and snivel at the words we all have by heart. And I wonder if it is true, how it works: is it merely a hankering after something we desired, or held for an instant before it slipped away, or invented merely, hoping that the invention might somehow make it real? Or does the fact that we were there, once, together, mean that the moment endures; that we always have Paris? Wedged between books on the shelf by my desk there is a postcard of Victoria Falls, all boiling waters and unearthly light. It is postmarked 21 September 1974, after the disastrous meal in East London and all the broken promises and bruised hearts. It reads: ‘Simply, I wish you were here. All my love. Dick.’