Air Force Brat (5 page)

Chapter Five

French Village Life in 1964

The house my father moved us into “on the
economy” was comfortable but very French. It had a bright orange
Mediterranean tile roof and a wrap-around balcony that my mother
would have filled with flowers if it hadn’t been for the fact that
we were heading into winter. It had mercurial plumbing, a very,
very small kitchen, and dangerously steep stone steps leading to
the large, very dark, very creepy basement carved out of solid rock
and separated into several, doorless rooms.

Along the side of our house was a large
ravine, covered with hanging vines and trees that leaned over as if
to get a good look inside. The ravine would prove to be very
important to us children, as it was the wet and boggy entrance to
the village sewer, a labyrinth of slimy underground pathways that
led throughout the village.

From the first day we discovered it, my
brothers and I lived in the sewer. Fifteen feet in depth, we would
climb down into it using ivy or tree branches that happened to have
either fallen in from the last storm or were growing through the
cracks in the sides of the cement walls. Later, we would create
ladders and carve out hand and foot holds for more reliable
entrance and exit.

The sewer was, essentially, a long
underground tunnel which became an important conduit and playground
for us because it allowed us to drop from sight instantly from
almost any spot in the village and travel unseen its full width and
breadth (something most children find very useful.) I can think of
at least one time when I was out in the evening, presumed by my
parents to be soundly and sweetly asleep in my little bed, when I
espied a teacher in the street who would know I shouldn’t be there.
I vanished into the sewer, reappearing within minutes in my own
front yard.

When we weren’t using the sewer for travel,
we used it to plot and scheme and to have meetings with the other
American kids in the next neighborhood over. (Oddly, the French
kids wouldn’t go into the sewer. Clearly they saw our fascination
with it as a singularly American thing.) In any event, we spent
hours at a time down there, the grotty sides slowly oozing down in
a constant, malodorous process of erosion and decomposition. If our
parents were aware of the sewer’s existence and its proximity, (as
surely they must’ve been?), they were absolutely unaware that it
was the main conduit and playground for their children for the
whole of the time that we lived in the village.

I’m sure what looked like a doable,
picturesque commute in July, when my father put down the deposit on
the house, gave no telltale sign of the reality once our first
French winter hit. Situated at the top of a steep hill, our house
was the only house on our side of the street, physically separate
from the rest of the houses, which were all attached to one
another. The back of our house backed up to a small tangle of
untended garden belonging to a large stonewalled brick home facing,
inexplicably, away from road or walkway. This house rarely showed
signs of habitation. Sometimes there was a shadow moving against a
window curtain or a light that hadn’t been on the day before. For
the most part, the house was vacant and intensely mysterious.

Lorraine, where we now lived, was the origin
of the wonderful peasant dish Quiche Lorraine that gained such
popularity at American restaurants in the seventies and eighties.
Interestingly, I don’t remember eating even a slice the whole time
I lived there. Yet when I came back to the States three years later
it felt like I’d practically invented the stuff, because nobody had
heard of it in the midsixties.

The food we children ate while we lived in
the village was completely American. My mother shopped at the
Commissary on base for our groceries. So even though we lived in
the heart of the French countryside among people who had never seen
an American before, we woke up to Trix breakfast cereal and ate
Chef Boyardee ravioli and drank Fizzies and Seven-Up.

The village, of course,
had a
boulangerie
and a
charcuterie,
although I don’t remember ever seeing a fresh
market there. Many of the larger towns set up an outdoor market
once a week or twice a month but the backwater villages were lucky
to have their own bakery. Some of the villages didn’t even have
that. Thionville, the little neighboring village that was pummeled
so thoroughly during the last skirmish between the Allies and the
Germans was merely on the bread route of a traveling bakery van.
This may seem like no biggie to most Americans, but to a Frenchman,
not having access to constant loaves of French bread was almost
tragic.

While my mother rarely
shopped in the village for anything she needed, it was my happy
responsibility to stop by the village
boulangerie
every afternoon after
school to pick up the dinner
baguette.
Madame
would singsong greet me as I
entered: “
Bonjour,
Suzanne
!” as if I were going to spend more
than half a franc or buy more than one baton of bread. For a kid,
being so genuinely welcomed every day by an adult was quite a
rush.

Ars even had a
patisserie
and the boys
and I loved to look at all the beautifully formed confections in
the window. Once, Tommy dug deep in his Levi’s pockets to purchase
an incredible bright green frog with bulging silver
dragees
for eyes.
Unfortunately, one bite revealed that the delectable
craupaud
was filled with
brandy. The sharp disappointment (not to mention discomfort) in my
brother’s face remains an indelible memory for me.

Other foods indigenous to the area, but ones
that never made it across the Atlantic, were the many dishes made
from the truly ubiquitous Mirabelle plum. These plums grew
everywhere in the area and the villagers used them in tarts,
sauces, puddings, breads and the awful Mirabelle dessert wine. My
mother loathed the wine, but my father didn’t mind it a bit.

I might mention here that the effect on my
mother of moving with four children across the Atlantic to rural
France. An elegant woman, not given to “roughing it” in any sense,
my mother was a gifted painter. She was sensitive to beauty and had
an easy smile and a wonderful sense of humor. The last served her
well during our tenure in Ars-sur-Moselle.

Since my brothers and I spent most of our
days at school, and my father was on base, the day to day of
village life fell to my mother. She was the one who spoke to the
coal man, arranged pick up with the garbage collector, planned and
cooked meals in a village where she spoke almost no French.

Adapting quickly to her primitive
surroundings in France, my mother set up her canvases and oils to
capture the little village streets and, once winter came, the snowy
hilltops visible from our home’s balcony. Even so, the jolt of
leaving the States with all its comforts and conveniences (not to
mention the cocktail dresses and parties) to the dark, cold and
barebones little spot on the map in France was formidable.

My mother and I were
toured Europe together in the late eighties. One day we had lunch
at a charming hotel across from the
Bahnhoff
in Zurich. Over a lovely
salmon and glass of wine, she mentioned that she'd been to
Switzerland once before, many years earlier. Seems she and my
father had made a middle-of-the-night run to Basel from
Kaiserslautern when a visiting American friend they were
entertaining realized she had missed her return flight to where
ever she was supposed to be and would need to catch up with her
party in Switzerland. I think, as the story goes, that it was my
father who encouraged her to stay (this was at the point when the
wine hadn't yet begun to flow into a nonstop river.) He came up
with the idea that he'd drive her to Basel (about four hours each
way) in another couple hours. (
God! Don't
stop the party, for heaven's sake!)
The
idea seemed a solid one until it came time to go and it became
clear that my mother, as usual, was the only one still fit to
drive. My father, ever gallant, couldn't allow my mom to drive to
Switzerland alone (after all, the whole idea had been his), so,
they quietly left the apartment (and four sleeping dependents), and
drove all night, round trip, to Switzerland. They were back before
we woke the next morning (a school day) and the Rice Krispies were
popping and crackling in our bowls as per usual. 

I have several vivid memories of my
beautiful, ivory-skinned mother, her thick auburn hair pushed back
in a silk scarf, the sleeves of her cashmere pullover pushed up as
she shoveled coal in the basement of our French house to keep us
warm during the treacherous French winters. My father, often
trapped at the base by bad weather and the twenty twenty miles of
now impassable French roads, or sometimes just the demands of his
command, was frequently absent from our experience “on the
economy.”

This particular memory also includes Tommy
perched nearby on the first stone step of the basement stairs
leading to the kitchen, with a pile of rocks in his lap to fire off
at the rats if they scurried too near my mother. I wasn’t allowed
in the basement during these operations but an occasional squeal
from my mother would send me and my younger brothers flying halfway
down the stairs, usually in time to see the back end of one or two
large rats with tails as long as shoe strings whipping behind them
as they disappeared into the dark corners of the basement.

Chapter Six

Military Schools and Education

We settled quickly into
village life. Since the school year was about to begin, my father
divided us children up among three schools. None of them was
convenient, least of all the one he chose for me in the heart of
the village. My older brother Tommy rode the bus to the air base
every morning. (It was driven by an insane, personable, older
airman who’d been busted down
twice
to airman first class for God knows what crimes).
Tommy’s round trip to Chambley and Ars took two hours a day.
Longer, once winter came, and sometimes he could not come home at
all due to impassable roads in villages without snowplows. Then he
stayed with my father at the BOQ, grateful to have “the Old Man”
all to himself.

Kevin and Terry took a smaller, much older
bus to the American Army School in Metz. From what I can remember
and was later told, most overseas base schools were ill-equipped
and lacked in quality teachers. My own gigantic gaps in education
can be traced to this second-rate schooling for dependents
overseas. I missed, for example, learning to tell time,
embarrassing myself literally hundreds of times before I finally
sat down at thirteen with a book and figured it out on my own. I
missed the part where long division and fractions were supposed to
be taught. I missed anything have to do with American History; it
was, oddly, never covered in any class in any grade during my
entire tenure at military base schools.

The teachers were college graduates who had
a desire to travel. Many of them were loners, offbeat or just plain
weird, in addition to being unqualified to actually teach anyone.
In the seventh grade in Kaiserslautern, Germany, for example, I
remember taking a test while my young, attractive teacher tapped
her pencil and stared at the clock, the picture of impatience. Her
weekend travel bag was packed and parked at the foot of her desk.
It was Friday and she was ready to bolt to parts unknown, maybe
Berlin or Wiesbaden or Paris. I recall she neglected to collect the
test papers when the bell finally rang. She just wished us a
hurried “happy weekend” and was gone.

For my schooling in
France, my father decided that I was to attend the all girls’
convent school in the village,
L’Ecole des
Filles.
The school was situated in a very
old stone building surrounded by a large cement yard enclosed by
tall cement walls topped with barbwire fencing. It was separated
from the French boys’ school by a narrow alley used only by service
trucks. The boys were noisy and rowdy. We could see bits of them in
their own enclosed yard from our courtyard. They were patrolled by
solemn, gruff-looking monks.

I know very little of the
order of nuns who ran my school. I remember sitting in the office
of the Mother Superior with my father when he enrolled me, but I
didn’t speak enough French at the time to understand what they
said. I only ever caught glimpses of this woman afterwards. My
world at the school was ruled by a Granny-Clampett sized woman
known simply as “
Ma
Soeur.
” The sound of her name soon came to
remind me of the warning hiss of a striking adder.

Ma Soeur
wasn’t nice and
Ma
Soeur
wasn’t happy. Her eyes spoke the
truth that her smiling lips and sing-songy voice belied: she hated
children. She was completely and totally feared by all my
classmates—even the “good” ones.

While I was at the school,
I saw
Ma Soeur
repeatedly demand that little sobbing girls
“
removez les lunettes
” in order that she might more effectively strike them across
the cheeks with her ruler. I once saw her rip out months of
embroidering in front of the whole class—while she berated and
humiliated the poor girl whose gift was, evidently, not
needlepoint.

My own relationship
with
Ma Soeur
was
somewhat complicated. Clearly, she was not allowed to strike
“
l’Amercaine
” and
yet I may have given her more cause for frustration and fury than
any of her obedient, cowering pupils.