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Monday 23 November 2009

A Whiter Shade of Pale

As the howling gales thrash the last of the autumn leaves off the trees, leaving them scattered in huge piles like confetti from a giant's wedding, my muscle memory kicks into action again. The nerves around my sternum still concentrate like tightly stretched elastic bands whenever I allow my mind to wander back. For, since the autumn of 2003, this time of year lurches me back to a dark, bleak place where even the turning on of the sparkling Christmas lights in Regent Street or Bond Street could do nothing to dispel the gloom of the hard winter looming ahead of us.

That year our eleven year old son, Freddie, had been diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a form of bone cancer. With only thirty or so cases a year, we were suddenly thrown from the security of a comfortable, complacent, cosy family life into the maelstrom that is the world of childhood cancer. Nothing prepares a parent for either the shock of diagnosis or the advent of night sweats as one anxiously contemplates the terror of possible outcomes. To say that one's life is turned upside down would be an understatement. Like the mythical Persephone, you find yourself cast into an alien underworld, a complete sub-culture of chemotherapy drugs, blood counts and antibiotics.

Freddie had commenced his gruelling pre-surgery chemo in the June of 2003 on Carousel Ward in the old Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street. Ironically, it was not a depressing place despite the fact that a children's cancer ward functions with its own language and points of reference, where a raised eyebrow or hesitant response can yield up a dozen nightmare scenarios. His surgery, to remove a sizeable tumour on his tibia just below his left knee, was scheduled for the 4th November, two weeks after his 6th session of chemo.

We knew that Freddie, now bald as a coot, had a small window of time where his blood counts would be stable. In a moment of madness, we decided to give him a a special treat and take him and his poor, neglected little sister to Eurodisney for a Halloween treat. Even though I secretly disapprove, I have to admit that the Americans do Halloween so well. The upside of the trip was that with his wheelchair and blue disabled badge, we were officially allowed to queue jump every ride. The downside was that poor Freddie got so tired out in the cold and damp, we needed to go back to the hotel to let him sleep at periodic intervals.

He was a trooper throughout and it gave him a much needed lift in advance of the prospect of losing almost half his tibia. Afterwards, with a week to spare, we decided to fly down to Bardies from Paris on the new Easyjet service. More than a trip to Eurodisney, Freddie wanted to get back to our beloved Bardies. For him, it represented a life before cancer and a life that he was determined to go back to once he was well again. As for me, I had never thought that we would get back at all, so it was with some joy and a great deal of trepidation that we arrived 'chez nous'.

No sooner had we lit the fire and put a casserole into the oven than Freddie began to complain that his chest hurt at the point where his intravenous 'Hickman line' was inserted. There was some residual blood around it so, as a precaution, I telephoned the hospital in St Girons and they said to bring him in immediately. Whilst Peter drove him down, I frantically called the Middlesex in London, where, fortunately, Krissie, his regular nurse, was on duty. "No worries", she said, in her best Aussie accent, "I expect that a bit of blood escaped due to pressure on the plane. Just get them to wash out the line with some saline, as per normal."

By the time I got back to Peter on his mobile, it had been done. We breathed a sigh of relief and thought that our troubles were over. We all went off to bed happy to be home, but to be on the safe side I put Freddie in the bed next to me. As I leant over during the night to check his temperature, as I always did throughout his treatment, I knew that something serious was brewing. He was like a furnace. When I checked his temperature properly with the thermometer it was pushing 40 degrees and therefore critical. I dressed rapidly, scooped him up and put him into the car for a mercy dash back to the hospital.

After a very brief 'triage', we were shown to our room. It was private, spotlessly clean and with a view up to St Lizier worthy of a tourist brochure. In the half light of the very early morn, the city towered, twinkling, above us. If I hadn't been so panic stricken, because by then Freddie was almost comatose, I might have appreciated it rather more. A succession of people, all dressed in white, came and went. They were so uniform in their uniforms that I had no idea if I was discussing the finer points of cancer treatment with the cleaner or the consultant.

Everyone, but everyone, was dressed from head to toe in white, with white leather clogs to accessorise their dazzling ensembles. There was not a dirty mark to be seen on one of them. No wonder the French health service is so costly - the laundry bills alone must take up a serious chunk of the annual budget! All around were hand disinfectant dispenser gels and, without fail, everyone washed their hands the moment they came into the room. I would find it hard to believe that a single MRSI bug could survive a second in that scrupulously clean environment. If you are going to be ill with a life threatening condition, you would want to be somewhere like this. You might miss the creature comforts of a British hospital, the pictures of Jemima Puddleduck and Winnie the Pooh, the ubiquitous mobiles and half-dead pot plants, or the general clutter and chaos, but you would know that no flesh eating bug would dare to stray within a kilometer of your bed.

I have to say, though, that the Middlesex was brilliant. The care standards were extremely high and the nurses and doctors dedicated, and never more so than when we were stuck, stranded and terrified, for a week in the hospital in St Girons. They directed operations from London through a bi-lingual Registrar, no mean feat as St Girons is a local hospital and has no expertise in the field of paediatric cancer care. After a succession of different intravenous antibiotics, Freddie began to revive and the panic abated. His temperature slowly reverted back to normal and we were given, albeit reluctantly, permission to travel.

After a week sleeping in a cot beside Freddie, with the best view imaginable, I was glad that we would be on our way back to Carousel and the next stage of Freddie's cancer journey. For, with all its faults, it had become our sanctuary and the place where we felt safe. Freddie remained a whiter shade of pale until his Hickman line was replaced but his surgery was successful. We had many more roller coaster rides through his treatment, a further eight gruelling chemo sessions followed his surgery, but none was as memorable as our week in the ward in St Girons. I missed the view, but most of all I missed the glass of wine with lunch and dinner. It could only happen in a French hospital!

Wednesday 11 November 2009

We Will Remember Them

As I sat down to write this, at two minutes past the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, with the BBC's live broadcast from Westminster Abbey in the background, I felt terribly sad. Here we are, in November 2009, with photographs on our newspaper front pages of a cortege of dead young men being driven from RAF Lyneham, through the Wiltshire village of Wootton Bassett, on their way to their temporary resting place at a hospital in Oxford. Where once we watched these moving services of remembrance thinking "lest we forget", now we look at them afresh, as we vow "we will remember".

When I was growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, no one talked about the war. Looking back, I can see that it was because its horrors were best left buried deep in the recesses of far distant memory. There were only three things about it that my mother, who nursed at Charing Cross hospital through much of it, ever told me. One was that she lost a favourite green leather shoe scrambling into an air raid shelter during one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Another was that her wedding ring [my parents married in 1942, when my father was on leave] was made from gold pooled by friends, otherwise they would have had no ring. The third was that she and her fellow nurses had had to cut down a poor dead airman who had parachuted out of his aircraft and somehow landed on the parapet outside their ward.

How many hundreds of other anecdotes had she hidden, I wonder? My father, who was in the RAF, never spoke about any of it although, to be fair, he had long died by the time my interest in history had manifested itself. My mother-in-law, who was a motorbike dispatch rider charging around the Chatham dockyards in the thick of it, has recounted very little. Rather like the reluctant tourist's return from an exotic holiday, laden with tales and photographs, they must have realised pretty quickly that no one wanted to know. A new dawn had begun and war was best forgotten. Remembrance Sunday came and went once a year, and that was that.

On my flight from Toulouse to Bristol last Saturday, I scavenged a free copy of 'The Daily Telegraph' from the British Airways newspaper rack as I boarded my Easyjet flight [it did say 'please take your complimentary copy', even if they had probably only intended them for their own customers!]. Inside, on the eve of Remembrance Sunday, was an illuminating article by Peter Parker, the biographer of the last British Great War veteran, Harry Patch, who died on 25th July this year at the ripe old age of 111. I had known that Patch had been called 'the reluctant hero' after his return, disillusioned, from the horrors of Passchendaele but beyond that I knew very little else about him.

It transpires that he had lost his Anglican faith when he left the army but later joined a choir hoping to revive it. "In the end, I went because I enjoyed the music and had friends there. But the belief? It didn't come. I felt shattered, absolutely, and didn't discuss the war with anyone from then on, and nobody brought it up if they could help it." In addition, according to Parker, he refused to join veterans' associations, had no wish to visit battlefields, never attended a regimental reunion and avoided all war films. It was only when the BBC wanted to film a documentary entitled 'The Last Tommy' in 2004 that he was persuaded to revisit Flanders. "What a waste. What a terrible waste," he memorably said.

I was reminded of a scene in the film version of Alan Bennett's superbly scripted 'The History Boys', almost as good as the stage play and with the same National Theatre cast. When Irwin, the new history supply teacher who aspires to a career in television, takes the boys to a war memorial, he asks them why they think has has brought them there. "To remember, Sir," they say. "No", he replies, "it is so that we can forget." And we did, didn't we?

Almost fifty years after the end of the Second World War came Bosnia, and Srebenica, and our attitude to war began to change. A sense of failure was seared into our complacent brains. Then, twenty one months into this new century, on 9/11, everything changed irrevocably. The poppies of Flanders' fields have now been replaced with the poppies of Afghanistan. Jonathan Friedland, writing in today's 'Guardian' headlines with "The coffins will keep coming until we conquer our amnesia on Afghanistan". It is a mess, a horrible, bloody mess, not least because we have forgotten why we went in there in the first place. A war whose aims have long been lost in the quagmire of international politics is taking young lives once again.

Harry Patch was conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry in October 1916. Many of his friends had volunteered earlier for the Somerset Light Infantry. "We were the PBI - the Poor Bloody Infantry- and we were expendable," he said. I think of the fallen from Bardies today, too. Like the south west of England, the south west of France provided the infantry divisions in the Great War, the cannon fodder. The effects on the economy of both were devestating.

The Barthet family, who had owned the Chateau de Bardies since 1822, was decimated. Louis Barthet, the eldest son of Joseph and Marie Lesparda Barthet, survived but returned from the war wounded. His younger brother, Etienne was killed in 1916. Amelie, one of their sisters, married Captain Ambroise Henry, who was killed not long after the commencement of war. Suzanne, another sister, married Ambroise's younger brother, Lieutenant Auguste Henry, who was himself killed three weeks later.

There were many more from our little part of France who were sacrificed; the husbands and fiances of the maids, whose uniforms were still tucked away in 'armoires' upstairs when we bought the house, the gardeners who had left hidden traces under overgrown laurel trees, rather like at the lost gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, the farmers who had tended and husbanded the land, the 'voisins' from the nearby 'hameaux'. They are commemorated in St Girons and will be remembered today.

The Second World War took a heavy toll too. George Crinon, who had married the daughter of Auguste and Simone Henry, professor of mathematics and principal of the college, was killed in June 1940 fighting for France. Many others, ununiformed, lost their lives as members of the 'maquis', the resistance, who were very strong in our area. The nearby village of Rimont on the main St Girons/ Foix road was the scene of a Nazi reprisal on 21st August 1944, when forty four trucks filled with soldiers newly back from the eastern front rampaged through the sleepy, innocent village. On that day, 11 Rimontais were executed, many women brutally raped and 236 buildings torched. We must not forget the price that civilians also pay in war.

The town of St Girons was also the starting point of 'Le Chemin de la Liberte', the final stage of the escape route over the Pyrenees organised by the O'Leary network. More than a hundred brave local men and women, called 'passeurs', lost their lives or their liberty taking the evaders over the high mountain passes to safety. They had a choice, and they chose to help people that they did not know at huge personal risk to themselves and their families. They are the unsung heroes and we remember them today, with deep gratitude, too.


They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Wednesday 4 November 2009

Toussaint

'Toussaint' is a time of reflection here, as well as being a special time of year for family and friends - a bit like Thanksgiving in the States, only a bit more sombre and minus the turkey and pumpkin pie. At this, the very start of winter, families get together from all over the country to remember their departed and count their blessings. I am constantly amazed to see people that I haven't seen all year arrive from Paris, Marseille, or wherever, for their annual get-together whatever the weather. It is always a weekend 'en fete' and, I suspect, a uniquely French celebration.

Since American film makers hijacked 'All Hallow's Eve' and turned it into a beanfeast of witch's hats and orange and black-iced cupcakes, most of us have forgotten the ritual significance of this time of year. 'All Soul's Day', the day after 'All Hallow's Eve' was a big event in my childhood. It was the day the dead returned to earth to make their presence known to us again, and we needed to acknowledge them big-time if they were to leave us be for the rest of the year. Pre- Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video with his brilliant coterie of ghoulish dancers, it was a terrifying time for a child. Very sadly, and somewhat ironically, he has now become one of the departed himself.

I see that Sting has written a song called 'Soul Cake' for his latest album celebrating both winter and north- eastern folklore. According to him, the soul cakes were made to give to the dead when they returned on 'All Soul's Day'. The poor, though, being both very hungry and very canny, offered to exchange the cakes for prayers for the dead instead. According to him, it is a tradition that goes back five hundred years and was the precedent for 'trick or treat'. Amazing! We can't blame Hollywood then for all the ghastly commercial spin-offs that make today's Halloween a largely unpleasant experience, especially for terrified pensioners too frightened to open their doors.

All Saint's Day' [Toussaint], in complete contrast, was a time of light. We still had to go to Mass, but to give thanks rather than out of fear for peripatetic malevolent souls. The priest wore a white surplice, I recall. I don't remember it being anything particularly special, other than having to take flowers to my father's grave in Epsom cemetery afterwards. By then, as kids, we were much more excited at the prospect of fireworks on November 5th. Collecting old socks and scraps of fabric to make a 'guy', and firewood and kindling to make a huge bonfire to put it on, was much more of an adventure. Thankfully, my Irish mother had no real grasp of the nuances of English history, so it was party-time in our garden.

This year, I spent 'Toussaint' in the Lauragais, with my good friends Caroline de Roquette and Christian and Inez Sarramon. Christian and Inez come down from Paris every year to visit the family grave and spend time 'en famille'. This year, like last, was particularly poignant because Louis-Charles de Roquette, Caroline's husband and Inez's brother, and my darling friend, was killed in a tragic car accident in May 2008. Caroline's lovely farmhouse was filled with seasonal crysanthemums, in glorious, autumnal, deep red hues, in his memory. They had taken many more to the cemetery in St Felix Lauragais after a special mass for him. The pain of loss never really goes away.

I met them for a delicious dinner at Inez's house, where she had prepared her signature dish of 'blanquette de veau', one of my favourite traditional French dishes and one that she makes brilliantly. We talked and laughed, reminiscing over the old times but also looking forward to new ones. It made me think how sad it is that none of my siblings meets up to remember our mother, and that I am as guilty as they are for not organising it. The great thing about 'Toussaint' is that the date is always fixed in the calendar so there are never any excuses for putting it off. It is a great institution and it is such a shame that in the UK there is no real equivalent.

Christian had two new books, hot off the press and still wrapped in plastic, to show us. One is called 'Delices', full of fabulous photographs and history of the patissiers of Paris, and the other is called 'Linge', with stunning pictures of old linens from all over France. He is a genius! I had just bought 'France, A Sense of Place' and 'Gourmet Bistros and Restaurants of Paris', new, on Amazon's secondhand site for a knockdown price, which I just happened to have in my car. He kindly inscribed them for me for the biblioteque at Bardies.

Tellingly, he wrote in 'France', "quelques morceaux de France d'avant les e'oliennes". At Merveille, they have been invaded by enormous, triffid-like wind turbines because the Lauragais has a huge number of windy days each year. There is a price to be paid for everything and France has not shirked difficult environmental decisions. The 'e'oliennes' can look very striking when seen from a distance, but if you live in their shadow they are an ominous and noisy presence. Would we want them here? No, I don't think so!

'Toussaint' is a special time, and I am so pleased that they allowed me to share it with them. Without Peter and 'les enfants', I have time to reflect on the summer just gone and think of the year to come. We need this time to take stock, to batten down the hatches, especially when the wind is as strong as it is here right now, and to give thanks for what we have. Our need for preparing ourselves for the hardship of winter seems to me to be celebrated in so many ways at this time of year - Bonfire Night, Harvest Festival, Michaelmas, Thanksgiving, Advent and, the ultimate winter festival, Christmas. After that, sadly, unless you're a skier, it's downhill all the way!