11 AUGUST 1967, Page 15

Over the water

DAVID WILLIAMS

Sourly commenting in 1594 on the Englishman's passion for living abroad, Thomas Nashe asks: 'What is there in Fraunce to bee learned more than in England, but perfect slovenrie. . . . have knowen some that have continued there by the space of half a dozzen yeares, and when they come home, they have laid a little weerish leane face under a broad French hat . . . and spoke English strangely . .

I wonder how many of Simona Pakenham's expatriate sojourners in Dieppe came home with little weerish leane faces? Perhaps the Rev T. H. Harding, chaplain to the English colony for a brief while in the 1850s, who beat his wife and frequented brothels; or Charles Parker Rhodes, vice-consul and scatty, rapacious busybody, who, before they got rid of him in 1869, wrote home to the Foreign Secretary: 'I have conceived a plan for con- necting the coasts of England and France by means of a railway. The execution of this plan will not exceed in cash a few thousand francs or in time a few months . .

This hoc* is really a distillation of a hundred years of small-town gossip. Fanor, Henry of Navarre's lapdog, was the first notable to go bathing at Dieppe. But it wasn't till 1824, when the sprightly, widowed Duchesse de Berri, mother of the four-year-old Dauphin, decided she liked the place, that Dieppe really began its career as a resort. The English as well as the French followed the Duchess's lead. Lord Salisbury built a place for his numerous family =a cross between an Alpine chalet and a Rhineland castle'—but left it in a fury after a new douanier (from the Midi) had resolutely fined him for never having paid duty on the whisky he imported direct from England.

Oscar Wilde, once clear of the horrors of the Scrubs, settled briefly with his acolytes, but, after a riotous party at the Café des Tribuneaux, began to feel himself watched, followed and disapproved of, and retreated to Berneval, six miles to the east. Walter Sickert— the hero of this book if it can be said to hme one—was more of an htdigMe than a visitor. For him, as for many other artists, Dieppe was primarily a place with a good painting light. But he was always very secretive about his work there, renting studios in obscure back alleys ('Nobody ever saw him paint').

After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 Anglican in-fighting, between Ritualists on the one hand and subterranean Protestants on the other, grew fierce. There had to be two chap- lains and when an English sailor, mate of the 'Eliza Cook,' died in Dieppe harbour, tempers rose over who should bury him. Ladies ran their finishing schools according to tempera- ment. Miss Cunnick kept academic work to a minimum but her girls" were Honourable with- out exception. The unprudish Miss Shackleton sent hers to the Protestant temple for the sake of their French, and accompanied the metrical psalms on the organ there whilst longing all the time for Hymns A and M and a rollicking tune or two.

As the 1914 war draws nearer Dieppe hotels and restaurants get crowded with notables, and Simona Pakenham's narrative, occasionally wooden and inert when dealing with the earlier years, benefits accordingly. Her stories improve, her style quickens. Asked by someone whilst having luncheon at the Hotel Royat.: 'What do you consider your most important part?,' Marie Tempest has no doubts about her reply: 'The one I'm sitting on.'

On 3 August 1914 Monteux conducted at the theatre, and suddenly, at the end, the sirens howled out their announcement of war. 'I wonder when we will play together again?' he asked his orchestra. Perhaps he knew that for Dieppe the hundred years of foreign colonisa- tion, with its frivolities, its cosy bickerings, and its nurturing of creative artists of stature, were over and done with.