had been when I was there. Madame Chassine had been in her late twenties, he in his early thirties. I told them how the months I had spent with them had changed my life. They could not comprehend this.
‘How?’ they asked.
‘Everything,’ I said.
After lunch François took me on a tour. There was much that was the same but a great deal that had been changed. Trees that had been saplings when I was there, were huge. A swimming pool had been installed (it was now almost empty and green); a hard tennis court had been built (it was now overgrown with weeds); the paling round a paddock, where horses had obviously been galloped, had fallen into disrepair. But in the yard everything was pristine and the evidence was that Monsieur Chassine was still the efficient farmer he was when I was there. He explained to me that for years he had worked with the government in the scientific development of certain crops. We went into the old house, now abandoned, and I saw the corner of the room that had been my bedroom.
Back in the kitchen, Micheline (as I was now calling her) told me that, when François was seventy a year or so previously, the children had put together a video of old film clips for him. Would I like to see it? I recalled that François had always been filming with a cine-camera when I was there. She brought me into the sitting room, darkened the room, put on the video and left me there to watch it.
All the children were in the film. That was the day they were all going to the wedding, I recalled. There’s Mémère, the old granny, coming for Sunday lunch, Pascal showing off, Thomas in tears. And then . . . o-MAN. There I was, aged sixteen, pushing the children on the balançoire, loading them up on their bicycles, behind the wheel of the old 2CV, carrying a dead rabbit by its ears. I have hardly ever seen photographs of myself from those years, and never a film. I was overcome.
I left them late in the afternoon and continued on my journey. I had been very moved by the visit, haunted, almost traumatised, and I remained so for several days. It was the images of the empty swimming pool and the weed-covered tennis court that stayed with me. Neither the pool nor the court had been there in my time. They had been installed later, had been enjoyed for years by a young family growing up, and were now abandoned: a generation, a whole lifetime, had come and gone in the decades since I, as a sixteen-year-old, had been so happy there.
My life – well, about five decades of it – had come and gone too.
But what I saw on that video had been the beginning.
CHAPTER 7
A PROPER JOB
I have a recurring dream in which I am about to sit university finals. In the dream, I have not revised and am convinced that I am going to fail, and I haven’t a clue what I want to do in life or where to go. As a result, I decide to stay on at university. On the assumption that this must be a dream that other people have as well, and wondering what it can mean, I looked it up.
Oh dear! It’s all to do with my realising through my experience of later life that, basically, I made a mess of my university years. ‘Most dreams taking us back to earlier school experiences have to do with a nagging recollection of not having done all that we might have at that time.’ Sadly, I cannot argue with that. For one reason or another, I did not take advantage of all that Trinity had to offer. I did not enjoy my time there; I do not have nice memories of the place; I did not make many friends; in fact, the only saving grace was my introduction to the world of art history by means of the stupendous teaching of Anne Crookshank.
When I did graduate, although I knew I wanted more than Anne had managed to impart in two years, I was not at all sure about a future career. It was by no means clear in those days – at least it was not clear to me – that one could make a career in art history, and so I considered other options. The Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank (which was not then the HSBC that it is today) was a popular choice for graduates wanting to work abroad (and that included me); the world of advertising attracted arts graduates who sought something creative and I did apply to a firm called Benton & Bowles in Knightsbridge but the experience of the interview convinced me that advertising was not for me. Because of my working in Claridge’s, hotel management strayed into my mind, although it soon strayed out again. I felt I was too Irish to even think of Sotheby’s or Christie’s. But if I really wanted to learn more than Anne had taught me, then I could: there was the Courtauld Institute in London, and I could do another art history degree there.
It was all too confusing and, to solve my dilemma, I decided I needed a year abroad to think. I would go to Germany. I had never been there, and did not know a word of German; it would be a new experience. I enrolled in a language school in Cologne for three months in the autumn and found accommodation (through the school) with a widow and her unpleasant adult son. I wrote to my mother (on 6 October 1968):
I have meals with the family. She is very rough, and a war widow. The son, who is about thirty, speaks good English and thinks he knows just about everything. All the time it is how great the Germans are, etc, etc. I just told him the other night what everyone thought about the Germans, and that shut him up.
When I came home in December (for my Trinity Commencements), I went to see Anne Crookshank and asked her about the Courtauld.
‘By all means apply,’ she said, ‘and I’ll give you a good reference. It’s fiercely competitive but my pupil Margaret Mitchell got in last year.’
But although Anne and I were still very much teacher and pupil at this stage, she had observed something of my character over the two years of my sitting at the back of her seminar room.
‘But there are other options,’ she said. ‘Have you thought of Edinburgh, which has a very good reputation under David Talbot Rice? Or the University of East Anglia: that’s a new department? They might suit you better than the more hothouse atmosphere of the Courtauld.’
The way she said ‘hothouse’ alerted me.
‘And Edinburgh would be a friendlier environment than London can be,’ she added.
After Christmas, I returned to Germany but this time I went to Munich. There was a reason for my choice: Penny was there. But our nine months in the city is a story that must – in the interests of discretion – wait to be told in full another day. Sufficient to say that we had a fabulous time. I taught English at the Berlitz School and we travelled a lot, to Salzburg, to Prague, and we drove to Greece. Penny was very musical and had a beautiful singing voice. Her rendering to her own accompaniment on the piano of Schubert’s Die Forelle with beautiful German diction could and did (on one occasion) bring tears to the eyes of even a German. We went very often – gaining a substantial discount on last-minute tickets with our student-cards – to the best of opera and to wonderful concerts. Afterwards, walking through the night streets in the snow, Penny would burst into loud song, paraphrasing musically much of what we had just heard. My pocket diary from the time records that we heard Daniel Barenboim, Hans Hotter, David and Igor Oistrakh, Michelangelo Benedetti (drunk at the keyboard, as I recall), Rita Streich, Birgit Nilsson, Otto Klemperer, Herman Prey and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the concert hall, and, at the opera, a complete Ring Cycle, Arabella, The Sicilian Vespers, Tristan, Rosenkavalier, Faust, Orpheo, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly and Die Freischütz. Penny remembers a conductor dropping dead on the podium during a performance at the opera but I have no recollection of that.
I bought an ancient Volkswagen Beetle convertible, and we toured the castles of King Ludwig, and learned a lot about Bavarian Rococo. We lived in the student quarter of Schwabing, near the English Garden. I learned very little German. My only regret is that I did not learn to ski. The snow lasts in Munich until well into March, and skiing is possible almost on one’s doorstep; but, foolishly, I did not take it up.
I soon found employment. ‘Now I have got all sorts of good news for you,’ I wrote to my mother (1 February 1969).
‘The most important thing is that I have landed the most marvellous job. I got it through one of the schools I applied to teach in. It is giving an intensive course in English to two ladies. The director of the school, who is awfully nice and has given me all sorts of help,