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Tuesday 15 October 2013

Books, Barbed Wire and One of the Most Beautiful Towns in France

What has happened to the months since January? Despite trips to Chartres and Orleans, Paris and Compiegne, Biarritz and St Jean-de-Luz, and further afield, too, I have resisted the temptation to blog. I have, for once, turned off the Internet until dinnertime and put my expanding bottom firmly onto my chair at my desk, where I have written and rewritten 80,000 words of text for my book. Apart from a major hiccup with Dropbox, which left 20,000 of said, slightly different words, floating in cyberspace, I’m now on the downhill run towards my end of November deadline.

Nowadays, it takes a lot to get me away from my beloved Bardies. So when an email arrived from a friend in the Quercy telling me about a fledgling literary festival in the Tarn-et-Garonne, I thought for approximately five minutes before jumping at the chance to go and listen to other writers speak of their experiences and challenges. With a change in the weather, it provided just the ticket, metaphorically speaking because all the events were free. The lovely Occitan village of Parisot is home to a thriving community of readers and writers and a committee of five, French and English, put together a festival to compete with many a more illustrious rival. I gather that it is the only one south of Paris.

The festival opened on Friday evening with a musical and literary soiree, which, sadly, I missed. An absentee friend had kindly lent me her lovely house in Puylaroque for the weekend and I miscalculated the extent of Friday night’s traffic on the Toulouse Peripherique in a downpour. Saturday morning dawned even wetter, so I arrived at the salle des fetes in Parisot via a muddy and circuitous back route at 10.31 am, soggy, late and flustered. Straight away, my mood lifted with the warm and welcome atmosphere. Maree Gilles, an Australian survivor of the forced care system, kicked the day off with a harrowing account of her experiences as a sixteen-year old. A few years ago, Maree published a debut novel, a fictional account of the pain and trauma of her time in care. Its impact proved so devastating that it contributed to a class apology from the Australian government. We were off to a great start. Over the years, I’ve been to many literary festivals where I’ve squinted over the shoulders of someone a foot taller than me and wished I had better glasses and an electronic hearing aid. Oh, the pleasure in a small festival with no ubiquitous video screen!

After a splendid lunch with the invited authors, we continued with a session from Amanda Hodgkinson about her award winning bestseller, 22 Britannia Road. It was a privilege to hear her read in the three voices from her beautifully written book. I was minded of the great Edna O’Brien’s remonstrance that when writers have chosen their words so very carefully, the obligation is upon us, the reader, to absorb and savour them. Such it was with a true poet and wordsmith like Amanda. I am now the owner of two copies of her marvelous book, one for me, and one for my daughter who is following in the footsteps of our great Irish writers reading English at Trinity College, Dublin.

Afterwards, in complete contrast, the urbane, dapper and witty Guardian journalist, Martin Walker, spoke about his marvelous fictional creation, Bruno, Chief of Police. Also, dear to my heart, Martin talked about the riven history of France, as well as his passion for all things French, especially its food and wine. We await the forthcoming Bruno cookery book with relish. As someone who tends to avoid crime fiction, I am about to become a convert to Martin’s Gallic detective and his gentle portrayals of French village life. As this is France, his talk was followed by aperitifs and dinner at the l'Auberge de la Castille, to which everyone was invited. With Charlie, my Jack Russell champing at the bit in the car, it was with great regret that I had to wend a wet and weary way back to Puylaroque. Next time, I shall send him to the kennels.

Sunday brought a complete change of genre with a cookery demonstration by Anne Dyson of the Greedy Goose Cookery School in Ambeyrac, in the Aveyron. The delicious canapés and appetizers that Anne so effortlessly prepared were testament to her culinary talents. Her beautiful Green Goose cookery book has provided a fitting thank you present for my friend who so generously lent me her house to be here.

After lunch by the lake in Parisot, ex-pat, humour-writer, Victoria Corby delighted us with her de la coeur account of her literary family and how she managed to gain the confidence to become a professional writer, despite the little voice over her shoulder telling her that she wouldn't be good enough. With three books published over a decade ago, Victoria has now ventured into the burgeoning ebook market by republishing them on Kindle. As she gets a significantly higher percentage of the revenue this way, I’m happy to say that all three are now downloaded to my Kindle Homepage. I look forward to them with great pleasure.

My final session at the festival was with the formidable Colette Barthes, a journalist with La Depeche du Midi and a committed human rights activist with Lutte pour la Justice, which fights for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. Colette is one of those rare women who change the air in the molecules around them, strong, vibrant, fiercely political and an inspiration to all women, young and old alike. She writes in many genres, including the novel, but she is most well known for her research into the plight of the Spanish refugees of the Retirada and the European Jews who were brutally interned in the camp of Septfonds, not far from Parisot. Her book, L’exil et les Barbeles, is a work of great historical importance. Hers was an inspiring session.

After two stimulating days of literature, it was with some sadness that I packed my car to drive southwards back to St Girons. They always say that a change is as good as a rest, and what a glorious change it's been. I am so full of admiration for the committee of the Festival Litteraire de Parisot. They have achieved something very special and I know that it can only go from strength to strength. Who knows, one day Parisot may be mentioned in the same breath as Hay? Actually, maybe no. Small is beautiful and I would hate it to become just another commercial event hijacked by publishers and PR professionals. It's perfect as it is - name me another literary festival where you get tea and home made cakes thrown in, and all for nothing? Name me another festival, too, where you get to have lunch and dinner with the writers, like members of one big happy family? With so many new found friends, I feel like I've become part of this warm, welcoming literary family of Parisot and it's a real joy. My warmest thanks go to everybody involved. Bravo tous!

I knew, though, that I couldn’t leave this lovely region of France without visiting Septfonds. I wanted to pay tribute to the eighty-one Spaniards who lie in the Spanish cemetery there and also to visit the memorial at the Camp de Judes, in the nearby hameau of La Lande. I was moved to tears. These were young men who did not deserve to die on this side of the Pyrenees, buried in lines in numbered graves, like sardines in a tin. They had lost everything fighting Franco and now France, to its shame, took the only thing that they had left.

Septfonds is not far from St Antonin, where Charlotte Gray was partly filmed. I have always wanted to see the ancient bridge over the Aveyron over which the tanks rolled in on 11 November 1942. There is something special about great movie moments, as if they fill the space in our heads where words once were.

Reading the plaque by the bridge, I discovered that St Antonin hailed from Pamiers, in Ariege. When he tried to convert the heathens of our disorderly part of France, they chopped his head off and threw him unceremoniously into the River Ariege, from whence he was borne by angels to the Tarn, before being deposited, miraculously reassembled, here in the Aveyron. The town that takes his name has indeed been blessed. St Antonin is the most beautiful intact medieval village I have seen since visiting Verona last year. I know that it’s a cliché but it really is as though time has stood still.

I scuttled around its tiny streets like a detective on the prowl. Some of them were so narrow, if I spread my arms wide, I could have touched the walls on either side. Around every corner, in tiny passages and courtyards as well as on the main streets, there were grand portals and corbels and carved coats of arms. I am sure that these fine architectural details were only added once the Catholic zealots of St Antonin had prized the vast Cathar and Protestant wealth from the heretics in their midst. The town was rewarded with the grand title of St Antonin Noble Val, which just goes to show that you only have to scratch the surface in even the most picturesque French town to find a history of bitter conflict.

And with that thought in mind, I climbed back into my car and headed back to my work on the Resistance. Enough of books, barbed wire and beautiful places, I’ve spent too much time on blogging. Again! I don't know what other bloggers think but this new format drives me nuts. Sorry for the whinge but editing a blog post is now more time consuming than writing one, so it may be a while before I'm back. It’s time to get back to the grindstone at Bardies before the autumn runs away with me and my deadline disappears. How many days is it to Christmas? A bientot.












Thursday 28 February 2013

Jean Moulin - A Hero's Hero

Seventy years ago, on 14 February 1943, Jean Moulin landed from France at RAF Tangmere, near Chichester, in a Lysander from 161 'Special Duties' Squadron. This was not his first visit. He had previously impressed the aloof and distant de Gaulle when he visited him during the general's darkest days, on 25 October 1941. As a man of some stature the ex-Prefet of Chartres not only provided information about resistance in France, he also offered him a means to exploit and rally these diverse and relatively isolated resistants to his cause. At that time, a small minority of French people, anti-Nazis, Jews, Communists and anti-Petainistes amongst others, were creating their own resistance but they had no leader on the ground in France. De Gaulle, tucked away in London's Carlton Gardens, was an ethereal voice on the radio with pre-determined views about invading France with his Free French army. Moulin single-handedly convinced him that he had tens of thousands of parachutistes sur place ready to serve him but that if he didn't take the leadership reins, then the communists would. He was successful in his mission and when he returned to France as the official 'Delegate of the French National Committee to the Unoccupied Zone' his real work began.

The second time he came to visit General de Gaulle, a great deal had changed. The Germans had invaded the southern zone, the so-called zone libre, on 11 November 1942 and the mountainous and wooded areas of the south, perfectly suited to guerilla warfare, were now firmly under German military control. Jean Moulin flew into RAF Tangmere with a strategy to unite the disparate elements of the newly emergent Resistance movement and rehabilitate the political parties around de Gaulle. This was no mean task after the attentisme that had followed the Armistice Agreement of July 1940 and the rewriting of the immediate past and the jockeying for position that was now, inevitably, taking place. De Gaulle's relationship with the Resistance was further compromised by the Allies' support for General Darlan in North Africa after the Allied landings in November 1942. With Petain in Vichy, Darlan in North Africa and a sulking de Gaulle in London, it was not at all clear who was to be crowned the sovereign leader of the French. When Darlan was assassinated, the USA and Roosevelt replaced him with General Giraud, a man untainted by even the slightest whiff of collaboration. De Gaulle's future depended on proving that Roosevelt's support for the newly appointed Giraud was misplaced and that only he, General de Gaulle, could speak for the whole of la belle France.

Fired up with the powerful notion of a united Resistance under the ex patriot general's leadership directed from London, Moulin and de Gaulle hammered out the idea of a single Resistance council. On 21 February Jean Moulin drafted the proposal for the new body, a Resistance council, which would encompass both zones and incorporate representatives from the different Resistance movements and the  estranged political parties. His first attempt to return to France with these precious instructions, took place on 24 February 1943. Due to fog, the Lysander, flown by Squadron Leader Hugh Verity, had to return to Tangmere, where it crash landed spectacularly. Miraculously, neither man was hurt despite the severity of the impact in a pea soup of a fog. A second attempt on 26 February also failed. It was not until 20 March that Moulin was finally set down near Roanne by 161 Squadron's Flight Lieutenant Bridger. Within weeks Moulin established the Conseil National de la Resistance.

It was a thankless task amongst the rivalries, vanities and hostilities of the different competing groups but it is a credit to Moulin that he was able to exploit all of these things to achieve his, and de Gaulle's, primary objective. The first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance [CNR] was held on 27 May 1943. His personal success was to be short lived. Less than a month later, Jean Moulin was arrested and brutally tortured by the notorious Klaus Barbie, dying shortly afterwards in a deportation car. The power struggles between the competing groups did not end with Moulin's death but de Gaulle's determination to shape France in his own image was given great credence by his sacrifice. When Andre Malraux spoke of him as being le chef d'un peuple de la nuit at the consecration ceremony for him at the Pantheon in December 1964, Moulin's legend, like the wily general's himself, was indelibly etched in the minds of all patriotic French men and women. On that bitterly cold winter's morning in Paris, he became a hero's hero. Vested in his bodily sacrifice was the resurrection of a nation. Despite Marcel Orphul's seminal film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitie', which showed the ugly underbelly of Resistance mythology, France has not looked back since and Moulin's legend lives on.


I was privileged last weekend, on the seventieth anniversary of Moulin's first attempt to return to France, to be invited to a commemoration of Jean Moulin's secret flights to and from RAF Tangmere,  by the Friends of Chartres, Les Amis des Jumelages de Chartres and Tangmere Military Aviation Museum. A moving Service of Remembrance was led by the Rev Canon Tim Schofield in the Museum Memorial Garden, attended by many with connections to SOE, the Resistance and 161 Squadron, as well as the Deputy Mayor of Chartres and the Mayor of Chichester. It was followed by a tour of the museum and later, an RAF Operations Room Re-enactment at the Bishop Otter Campus at the University of Chichester, where the actual centre of operations for RAF Tangmere had taken place during the war.



This was followed by an enlightening film made by Martyn Cox, who interviewed Jean Moulin's first pilot, the redoubtable Squadron Leader, Hugh Verity, in 2001, not long before his death. Martyn, who lives in France near Saint-Antonin, where Charlotte Gray was filmed, has interviewed many SOE agents, including the women who were the real 'Charlotte Grays'. Afterwards we had an extremely entertaining and enjoyable illustrated talk by Pete Pitman of the Tangmere Military Aviation Museum entitled 'A Day in the Life of a Pick-Up Pilot'. Remarkably, out of 410 Lysander sorties and 218 Hudson ones, they lost only six pilots and thirteen aircraft. Two of the pilots died trying to land in severe fog at Tangmere, which makes Hugh Verity's crash landing with Jean Moulin on the 24 February 1943 even more significant. Who knows what the history of the Resistance might have been had Verity not got his plane down eventually?


The afternoon finished with a superb panel of experts discussing both Moulin and the Resistance: Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary's College, University of London, and the author of 'France, The Dark Years'; Pete Pitman of RAF Tangmere; Harry Roderick "Rod" Kedward, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of 'Resistance in France' and 'In Search of the Maquis' amongst many others, and Mathew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester and the author of 'Resistance'. The day finished with a showing of that great Resistance film from 1969, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, 'L'Armee des Ombres', starring the phenomenal Simone Signoret as the compromised resistant, Mathilde. The choice of film, which included a Lysander drop-off and pick-up, was a fitting tribute to a great Resistance hero and the men of the RAF who aided them. 


Wednesday 13 February 2013

There Is Never Any End To Paris


.......with apologies to Ernest Hemmingway. I've just realised that it is two years since I posted 'I Love Paris Anytime', and four months since I posted a blog at all [but that's another story]. While I love the Paris of the Belle Epoque, and that of Hemmingway and his literary cohort, I am, as ever, always drawn back to the Marais. The Deux Magots, the Closerie des Lilas and the Cafe Flore of St Germain-des-Pres are full of tourists with loud voices, many of them wishing simply to relive a little bit of Paris's romantic past. There is nothing wrong with that, especially since Woody Allen did such a great job on 'Midnight in Paris', but there are better and cheaper watering holes in the 4th and 11th Arrondisements.

No matter how hard I try, I still find it difficult to forgive Jean-Paul Sartre for his ambivalence during the early years of the Occupation, not least because he was desperate to have his plays performed. Whoah! I hear you say. What else could he do?  I know it's a difficult one but it wasn't true of Andre Malreux, Albert Camus, Lisa Triolet, Jean Bruller [Vercors], Jean Cassou, Louis Aragon and many others. He finally justified his position, writing 'La Republique du Silence' in 1944. Camus defended him by saying that Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote, but methinks it was too little, too late.

The Left Bank is not that far from the Marais but during those dark years, it was a different world. Whilst Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were warming their hands on the pot bellied stoves of their favourite cafes and drinking ersatz coffees, their fellow citizens a short walk across the river were in fear for their lives. Jews had flocked to the Marais since the pogroms of the 19th century, taking up residence in the narrow streets of rue des Rosiers, rue Ferdinand-Duval and rue des Ecouffes. The Pletzl, as this vibrant, noisy and cramped part of the Marais was called, was decimated on 16th July 1942 when everything changed forever in the round-ups. Only a fraction of those deported returned, leaving appartments and shops there for the taking.


These days the Marais is once again a trendy part of town but the vestiges of its Jewish history remain in many of the food shops, many with a menora in the window or a star of David on the shop sign. There are patisseries, boulangeries, chocolatiers, butchers, cafes and restaurants mixed in with newer, trendy boutiques and the whole area, even on a cold, February Wednesday evening, is abuzz with local residents and adventurous tourists alike. I like to think that Paris has not forgotten this area's history.


The area is only a short walk from the serene and stately Place des Vosges, built by Henri IV in 1605, one of the most beautiful squares in Paris. Far too cold to sit and soak up the atmosphere, I couldn't resist the temptation to pop into the warmth and opulence of Victor Hugo's sumptuous appartment tucked into a corner here. It's about as far from the Paris of the barricades as it's possible to imagine but it's always uplifting to visit the residence of a successful writer, poet, musician or artist. It gives us lesser mortals hope. An unexpected bonus is that entrance is free.




Another free museum not far from here and well worth a look is the Musee Carnavalet, which houses an enormous collection dating from the Renaissance to the present day. It was opened to the public in 1880 and contains 2,600 paintings, 20,000 drawings, 300,000 engravings, 150,000 photographs, 2,000 sculptures, 800 pieces of furniture, as well as thousands of ceramics, street signs, coins and other artefacts from five hundred years of Parisian history. It was bulging so much at the seams that the Municipalite of Paris purchased the neighbouring Hotel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau, to which it is now linked by a corridor of 20th century paintings. It is an enormous, elegant warren of a place where you never seem to know where you are. I constantly found myself gazing in awe at the unexpected, not least the complete reconstruction of the room in which Marcel Proust lay on his bed and wrote 'A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu', a stunning Mucha designed Art Nouveau boutique and everything you ever wanted to know about the demise of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat, Danton, Robespierre and St Juste. For anyone with kids studying the French Revolution, I cannot recommend it highly enough - the sheer physicality of the exhibits makes the hairs on the back of one's neck tingle. If you like French antiques, this is better than any book or catalogue.




Close to the metro, the mighty Jesuit church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis, whose first mass was celebrated on 9th May 1641 by the most powerful Jesuit of them all, Cardinal Richelieu, is testament to the great power of the mighty educational order that educated both my brothers. Inevitably, their power waned with that of their benefactors and in 1762, the order was suppressed by the Parlement. On 2nd September 1792, five priests were hacked to death in the September massacres and on one pillar, there is a faded inscription from the 1871 Commune, Republique francaise ou la mort. Victor Hugo's daughter, Leopoldine, was secretly married here on 18th February 1843 and Victor Hugo donated the two lovely marble clam shell holy water fonts in commemoration. Also to be seen is Dalacroix's stunning painting, probably from 1824, of 'Christ in Agony on the Mount of Olives'. Sadly, it was the only Delacroix I got to see this trip because, the following day, the young 'jobs-worth' in charge of the Musee Delacroix [in St Germain-des-Pres] wouldn't let me in at half past four! Merde! Merde! Merde!


My hotel was close to Pere Lachaise cemetery, named after another famous Jesuit, Pere Francois de la Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV. After my trip to the Musee Carnavalet, I wanted to see the 'Mur des Federes', the Communard's Wall. There, 147 defenders of the working class district of Belleville were put up against the wall and shot on the last day of the Semaine Sanglante, the bitter end of a week's bloodshed that ended the 1871 Commune. I walked the length of the perimeter wall in freezing temperatures to find this monument, simply a stele with the date in front of a much repaired wall and not a bullet hole in sight. 

En route, though, I discovered the magnificent sculptured monuments to the victims of the various concentration camps and the graves of most of the significant communists of recent French history. It's amazing what you find when you are not looking, I always think. And, of course, I had to go and see what they'd done to Oscar and Jacob Epstein's sculptured tombstone since they banned the lipstick kisses. I was dreading the over-reaction that we've seen so often with other works of art [my pet hate is the glass case around Michaelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, where you can no longer walk around it]. I have to say that it's not too bad - just enough to protect the lower part of the mellow stone [and the missing bits of the angel's vital parts] but not completely covering the whole monument. 



By now, I really did feel the urge to head for somewhere warm so a quick scoot on the Metro to the Left Bank, to the cafe les editeurs, my ideal cafe, full of comfortable seats, real tea and books galore.




There is nothing more stimulating than reading a good book or newspaper, writing a diary, a letter or five hundred words of a possible story with a good cup of coffee or hot chocolate on the table and the buzz of other like minded people around. Why do I have to come to Paris to do this, I wonder? Ah, well, any excuse. There is never any end to Paris............