Return to Rennes
Paul Williams
Recently, I walked from Winchester through France to a small village near Condom in the south-west. The journey took me back to Rennes and stirred memories of my first visit to the Breton capital as a student in the 1960s. I was assistant d’anglais at a highly regarded boarding school run by priests. It had been requisitioned during the war as a hospital for the treatment of venereal disease and a notice to this effect was pinned in German above the entrance. It was only a few months before I arrived in the spring of 1964 that the German teacher had managed to get it removed but it was still the source of many amusing anecdotes.
My friends at the time were primarily among the pions, students employed by boarding schools to supervise pupils. One poor fellow lived in a glass box at the end of an enormous dormitory and used to get dressed and undressed in the boys’ bathroom, to which he kept a key. Another lived in a tiny room under the stairs which he called his sarcophage, much to the disapproval of the priests who discouraged speaking about death so flippantly. The pions were paid very little and were always very hard up. As assistant d’anglais, I earned more but the main benefit was that we all got free board and lodging. Prim ladies in black dresses with little white pinnies waited on us in the staff dining-room and we never went short of food.
Our main enemies were les corbeaux (‘the crows’, our slang for the priests because of their black cassocks) who raked in a full teacher’s salary of which they could (and did) save every cent. They were an arrogant bunch and lived in separate rooms along an echoing corridor with a wooden floor polished daily by a cleaner who gave it its final buff by sliding effortlessly from one end to the other in a pair of polishing slippers. One priest was an accomplished writer with a string of books, and royalties, to his name; another wrote sacred music (regularly performed in the chapel), including one piece with a particularly catchy tune which I still sing zestfully in the shower. One priest, though, has fallen from grace and is now married with children.
Paol Le Menn (a fine Breton name) was our great chum among the lay staff. Of all the oldies he was always on our side and found our antics hilarious. Unmarried, he qualified for one of the highly prized rooms along the polished corridor and was for ever subduing our raucous behaviour lest we disturb his neighbours’ priestly meditations. He taught Latin and Greek with distinction, but had no real interests apart from music (he played a portable organ very quietly in his room with one eye on the thin partition wall), and hi-fi equipment. His room was a mass of cables and speaker wires linking the various systems. We were merciless, making childish puns about his ‘instruments of reproduction’ and his beloved set of boules with which he played pétanque every day with style and considerable aggression. We hated it if any of the corbeaux joined us because that meant an end to any ribaldry. I shrink now to think how puerile all this was, but it was a wonderful opportunity to get to grips with French. I learned French rugby songs and sang them lustily late at night in the Café de la Paix, a local bar which I was relieved to discover was still the same place. Knowing he had Alzheimer’s, I was prepared to find Le Menn changed. I telephoned him from the car park and as soon as he leaned out of his sixth-floor window I recognised him: the alert eyes, the long austere face and a shock of now grey hair combed back from his forehead. All his mannerisms were unchanged: the imperceptible bow, the ready smile, the constant movement of his fingers with those immaculately clean, polished fingernails. He looked me straight in the eye and the twinkle was still there. I mentioned our games of boules and he replied, ‘So we played pétanque?...That’s all ancient history.’ He played some Breton ditties on the organ and memories of late evenings in his room returned as he touched the keys. ‘I am very pleased to see you again.’ And yet he didn’t really know who I was.
Musing on ancient history, I continued on my way south. The rest of my walk revealed some surprising differences in the France I remembered from my youth. Bizarrely, I rarely ate well, being served a lot of microwaved fast food in village restaurants, and I found the bread virtually inedible. But, perhaps most oddly, in the 500 miles from St Malo to Condom I did not pass a single person walking their dog.
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