Castles and Railway Stations

The castle in the picture at the top of the page is called Neuvicq-le-chateau and it sits on top of a low bluff along the high road from Angouleme to La Rochelle in western France.  A fairy-tale castle, a Sleeping Beauty castle, it is a magical place with mystical powers in my own personal mythology.  For decades it has served to remind me that I am approaching, or leaving , a place and people that I love.

When I was a little girl my mother, brothers and I used to make the seven-hour train journey from Paris to Angouleme every two years to spend the summer with my French grandparents.  An only child, my mother had left France and her parents to marry my father, an American.  Although my grandparents loved and admired my father, they missed their daughter and grandchildren terribly, so the reunions at Angouleme train station were often fraught with anxiety and feeling.  I remember the tightness in my chest as the train pulled into the station and the mad scramble to get our luggage down the steps or through the window in the allotted three minutes.  My grandmother, a strict and stern French schoolteacher, would be sobbing on the platform, joyful to see us again and already dreading the separation at the end of the summer.  My grandfather, mild-mannered and suffering terribly from the angina that would claim him, would beam at his beautiful, elegant daughter and try to speak to my brothers and me in a few words of English.  From time to time he would clutch his chest and murmur, "Du calme, du calme" as if reminding himself that he was not supposed to get excited, it was bad for his heart.  My great-aunt Madeleine, whom I adored, would stroke my long hair and tell me I was "grande et belle."  My poor brothers, both them painfully shy, would look miserable.

In due course we would pile into the cars and drive through the steep, narrow streets of the town, over the bridge crossing the Charente River to the high road leading to our house, forty-five kilometers away.  With the lovely steeples and fortified walls of Angouleme behind us, the road would climb up onto the limestone plateau, dipping and curving and weaving through fields, pastures and vineyards.  Stately plane trees lined the road and small villages marked our progress to the house:  Saint-Genis-d'Hiersac, Saint-Cybardeaux, Rouillac, their creamy stone houses glowing in the golden summer sun.

As the plateau flattened out and the vineyards stretched farther to the horizon, our eyes were drawn to the left, to the south.  Would it still be there?  Who would see it first?  And then it was there, the slate roof glinting in the late afternoon light, the massive towers strong and comforting, the little houses of the hamlet nestled around it like chicks around a hen.  Neuvicq-le-chateau... eleven more kilometers 'til home....

If those are cows this must be France

In early July of 1964 my parents, brothers and I sailed from New York to France on the SS United States.  As exciting and glamorous as it was, it was also the least expensive way in those days for my father to get his family across the North Atlantic for a visit with my maternal grandparents.  We travelled Cabin Class, the middle of three classes on the ship, and because we had booked very late, our cabin was way below decks with five bunk beds and no window.  But who cared?  My parents spent the five days at sea wrapped in blankets on deck chairs sipping bouillon and tea while we children had the run of the ship.  Many adventures were to be had, one involving my little brother Owen being swept along an upper deck, where we had no business to be, by a blast of air from an enormous exhaust vent on one of the ship's massive chimneys.  A diving save by his older sister (that would be moi) prevented total disaster.  Of course we never told our parents....

On the morning of the last day, my father awakened me before sunrise to go up and watch the arrival in Le Havre.  The eldest child, I was most like my father and had already a soupcon of an interest in his favorite passions, history and geography.  But as dawn broke, I was met with a scene that shocked me.  Instead of the green fields and graceful trees I knew to expect in France, or even the elegant but noisy boulevards of Paris, I saw a vast wasteland of an industrial port, one of the busiest in Europe at the time.  The leaden sky over the English Channel, as grey as grey could be, was ominous and gloomy.  "This isn't France!" I cried, as my father liked to tell the story.  "This cannot be France, there are no cows!!"  Although my experience of the French landscape was limited to Sunday lunches in country restaurants where we would meet my great aunts and uncles, I knew that it required large numbers of the placid beasts, swishing their tails and complacently munching on fresh, green French grass.  This was not to be seen in Le Havre.  Sensing my disappointment, my father assured me that once the ship had reached its berth and we had walked down the gangway with our luggage and gotten into the rented car (or were my grandparents meeting us and driving us to Paris?  no, their car was too small), we would drive out of Le Havre and into Normandy and there we would see more cows than man had ever known.

I do not remember if all of this came to pass as he described.  All I know is that to me on that deck, my father was was the tallest, most handsome man in the world, a repository of all knowledge and experience, the person who would teach me everything I needed, wanted to know in life.  Although gone these five years, when I think of those moments on deck, it is as if he is in the next room, saying "Come here Ali, I have a good map of Normandy, let's look at it together."

The Garden of France

I first saw the landscape pictured above in July of 1964, when I was nine years old.  My French grandparents had retired from the suburbs of Paris to a little house on the edge of a small market town in the ancient province of Saintonge.  My parents, brothers and I lived in Westchester County, New York and although it was my fourth trip to France, I had never experienced the countryside, la France profonde, before.  It was to become part of a lifelong awakening to beauty, to meaning and to love.

We had driven down from Paris through the cool damp night to Saint Herie.  My bed that first summer was the comfy sofa in the large country-style living room.  I slept late, as I usually did in those days, and no one disturbed me until around eleven o'clock.  As I raised my sleepy head to the window above the sofa, I saw three or four children standing along the hedge by the road.  Apparently word of the arrival of les enfants americains had preceded us.  I went outside but I was too shy, too tongue-tied in French to speak.  One of the children was a girl with a pixie haircut, enormous brown eyes and a wide impish grin.  Her name was Catherine and her arm was stretched out to me.  In her palm were three shiny plums, just picked from the tree in her garden.  "Tu veux des prunes, Alienor?" she asked.  I had never tasted a plum before and I wasn't sure I would like it.  But I must have accepted the plums, and the friendship Catherine was offering with them, because 47 years on we are still friends.  In France, food is often a conduit to the most important things in life.