A Spanish Girl and Her English Soldier – A Love Beyond Boundaries

The imminent independence of the Gold Coast, the fact that I was reaching school age and that my father had found useful and tax free employment with P&O (the cruise liners employed a ship’s surgeon on all their ships) meant that we were moving to England. Up until then England had been a Christmas in the Tudor hotel on Cromwell Road in Kensington with a visit to Santa’s grotto in Harrods.  Now it was to be more permanent. After a short stay in a temporary flat which I remember guarding dressed in a Grenadier outfit complete with Bearskin, we moved into Garden House in Cornwall Gardens, Kensington.

While my father was a distant being, rarely at home and rather frightening, he was an extraordinarily intelligent man.  He had won a Classics scholarship to Cambridge, was well read and very much up to speed with what was going on in the world. He took a decision about my education which in 1956 was indeed perceptive.  He believed that Europe was the future, that languages would be of real benefit and enrolled me into the Lycée Français de Londres, where only French was spoken in classrooms and where the education system was French. Perhaps just as critically, as one walked into the gate, one entered France.  The food was French, the plates were that French almost see through glass china, the table cloths that plastic with its distinctly French smell, even the notebook pages were the little square ones.

Although I was only five and a half, which should have meant the first year, my height convinced them that I was older and I was placed in year 2, where by now everyone spoke French and no English conversation was permitted in class.  The teacher who was hardly the warmest refused to listen to my plea in English to go to the lavatory until eventually another child took pity on me and told me how to ask in French.  It was not the most encouraging of starts.  But children are resilient and while I was still in my heart Mogli, I learned to play with others and go to parties and have fun with the amazingly international mix of children, many from embassies, others there because of their parents’ work in London or from marriages with both a French and English parent. Soon we were all fluent in French and it would even continue in the playground. It was natural. We spoke, we wrote and we read in French – and then the real test, we dreamed in French. Even the Church services were in French.  Sport was given much less time, but I learned to fence and we occasionally played football.

As a young boy, I managed to have a mad crush on one of my teachers who was very French in style and looks as well as girls of a similar age, almost always the French ones. The old adage of Roman Catholic Priests “give me a child by seven and he will be a Catholic for life” was subtly adopted in the Lycée, but in this instance it was in relation to Frenchness. Somehow, imperceptibly France stole the heart of many of its English Lycée’s pupils – it did mine. It meant that I would always feel at home with French people and it was the start of a long lasting relationship with all things French from literature and philosophy to food and architecture, art and Paris.

Now the mix starts to intrigue me as I hope it may you. I have never really stopped to think about it before. Mogli somehow taking on a Frenchness – perhaps Mogli smoking a Gauloise and sipping a petit rouge…… discussing Camus and Sartre and de Beauvoir in the cafes of St Germain before descending on the Moulin Rouge for an evening of Can Can. But I think in the way that Africa opened my heart to the nature of being, so France opened my heart to not just a French way of being but also to a wider Latin, Mediterranean and European perspective with which I was entirely at home.  Outside of school, my best friend was a Pole but I did have some English friends. I read lots of English books as well as French ones.I read everything that I could about boats and sailing. I so wanted to sail and I would save my pocket money in the hope of making enough to buy a boat. I did a milk round on a milk float pulled by horse, but was usually paid with a free chocolate milk drink which I loved but did not really help the boat fund.  In non boat reading, William was a favourite as were the adventures of Biggles and his chums. And I read stories of English boarding schools that made me begin to think that they could be fun with their adventurous tales, midnight feasts and pillow fights. And sure enough that was where I was bound.

It was during those years when I was about 8 that I nearly died of a burst appendix. A brilliant surgeon saved my life.  I remember my father driving me through London in the car as the ambulance would not have been quick enough; I remember telling my mother not to worry just before entering the theatre and I remember the aneasthetist asking if I could count backwards from 10. I proudly told him that of course I could and got as far as 8 before being knocked stone cold by the general anaesthetic. I was in hospital for some time with lots of tubes to drain me and I still carry the scar today.

My parents’ rows had already led to a separation, but for whatever reason they got back together and tried again. It is quite hard for me to remember what was what as my father was away so much on long cruises in any case – and those cruises put further temptation in his way to which it appears he succumbed without too much of a fight. So just after my 11th birthday life changed fairly drastically. My parents separated finally heading toward divorce and my mother decided to move out of London to West Mersea.  At the same time, I had to get into the English school system to prepare for the Common Entrance exam needed to get into Harrow.  My Uncle designed a house; my mother somehow got it built, albeit that we lived first with a lovely old couple (who sadly died a little later, with her going first and he following some 3 weeks later with a broken heart) and then in the new but uncompleted house with a ladder until it was finished and the stairs were finally put in.

My Godmother, Boo Palumbo, was wealthy and lived in Park Lane. She bought me a little folding rowing dinghy knowing that I had through my reading about boats and sailing developed a real passion for sailing – and probably knowing that my meagre savings would not even buy a model boat.  It was a delightful little boat but it had no sails and so I did a deal with a local chandlery. It is the only time in my life that I have done a deal which resulted in a net gain. They got my rowing boat and I got a brand new sailing boat. It looked like a grown up match box and it had a gunter lug sail slightly bigger than a handkerchief. For those who are not sailors, a gunter lug is an incredibly old fashioned rig which really had no place on my matchbox. But I loved it.  Next to sail her.  I had a friend by then who had a similar boat and the two of us set off joyously and obliviously. There was nothing that I needed to learn as I had read every book that I could find on how to sail from some really great sailors.  That self confidence that came out of Africa was about to take a bit of a knock in the tidal waters of the Blackwater Estuary that leads directly into the North Sea.

We set off out of the harbour and all was just as the books said it should be. I was in dreamland.  The wind was behind us and the tide was also helping carry us out to sea.  We sailed between the two islands that mark the entrance to the harbour and into the open estuary. At this stage my friend reminded me that we were going beyond the limits set by his father, who unfortunately was a sailor unlike my mother.  We turned around, now trying to sail into the wind and against the tide.  I am proud to say that we managed the turn and had the boats facing the right way.  Unfortunately they were still travelling in the wrong direction, just backwards (for those who have read Arthur Ransome’s “We didn’t mean to go to sea”, this should sound familiar).  Thinking back on it our speed going backwards was quite impressive, albeit not very encouraging. At this point, a bit like the US cavalry, Snowy appeared driving the club launch. He pretended to be cross but we could see he saw the funny side (he had been keeping a discreet eye on us all the time).  My mother was gloriously unaware of the danger we had been in but my friend’s father was furious and gave us a severe dressing down stood on the jetty in front of quite an audience.

The only impact on me was to make me determined to become a better sailor and get the boat to do what I wanted, which given its very unboatlike shape was a real test but taught me so much. I was hooked on sailing and would be for a very long time. It was a natural extension of that love I had and have for the sea. And I had made friends with other sailing children that would last through to University.

So Mogli had become French Mogli with a passion for sailing, for the freedom it offered, for its closeness to nature and its use of wind to power it – and amazingly for the first time I see the link to Africa and its closeness to nature. He had learned to be with people but still retained a need for solitude whether sailing alone or reading in his room – hardly surprising after 5 years of solitude, but a solitude that he had been able to enjoy and make the most of. His sense of adventure had spread its wings and he had without choice become the man of the house and the protector of his mother at the age of 11. He had survived the transition from Africa into London with its tarmac roads and big red buses – this new jungle. And he had developed a love for the noise and the bustle of the City. But he had without realising it become a European and a European out of Africa.

And it is only as I write this that I start to understand certain things a little better. My Englishness or Britishness really so far has only come from my parents, mainly my mother and she was half Dutch – and my father was half Irish and half Scottish. The cut glass accent that might have made me appear English was nothing other than a light disguise. My first 11 years had been shaped by two major influences: Africa and France, but both of those had provided something truly special and that was the freedom to develop largely by myself.  In Africa that is, I think, obvious: I was by myself. But at the Lycee, with its multi national society there was huge freedom to be yourself: there was no one role model, no single style, no national standard to which to conform. And so the boy who emerged from those 11 years was already somebody who could not be easily shoe horned into any category, a boy without a clearly identifiable national identity, albeit with a certain loyalty towards England, and in many ways an Outsider, a non conformist and still perhaps a bit of a loner and rebel – he certainly never ran with the crowd and he never would.