a few brave drops

A little bit of history

ancestors

Andrew posted some stuff a while ago about the late lamented Snottingham Suburban Railway, and how you can still find evidence of its existence in some parts of town, like a palimpsest on the local landscape.

(He was talking a while ago, around the time of the VE Day anniversary I think, about a family diary he had, and he was going to post something up about it. He's been too feckless to do so, and when he wakes from his latest smack-induced coma, I'll remind him about it.)

It's interesting to think about, and my own particular take on history and change is to wonder what it means to grow up now, and how people will work out, in the future, how to be a man, and how to be a woman. I work surrounded by people who are mostly around 10 years younger than me, and it's interesting to note how they cling, some of them, to their youth, because getting older is a black hole, isn't it? You don't know what's in there, and it's scary. And you don't know how to act, so you go on acting the way you always did.

Older generations had wars to concentrate their minds: wars with conscription, or wars you felt you had to fight. Faced with the possibility of sudden death, I suppose people didn't worry so much about meaningless milestones such as birthdays ticking by. Just being glad to be alive on another birthday was enough.

Over the past few years, on our visits to my wife's family in France, we've become fascinated with the collection of old photos, and other aspects of family and local history. There are a number of reasons why it interests me. For a start, there seems to be more history running loose round there, in Plancher Bas, because change hasn't been quite so rapid and catastrophic as it was, say, in my home town of Dumpstable.

Take a look here to see a sequence of old photos of Dumpstable, and note how often you'll see phrases like "The town hall built in 1880 was demolished in 1966", or words to the effect of "taken on the day before it was demolished". Almost the whole of the historic heart of Dumpstable market town was demolished to make way for crazy road widening schemes in the 1960s.

Plancher Bas is not immune from the effects of change, but as I said, it has worked more slowly there, and it's still possible for my own children to play in places and ways that my wife and her brother played, for example. Whereas I can't imagine any modern caring parent allowing, say, an 8 year old child to run off alone around the Dumpstable Downs, as I did when I was a kid. Or sending a pre-schooler to the corner shop for a Wonderloaf.


Café de la Gare

So little has Plancher Bas changed, in fact, that you can look through the family album and recognise locations quite easily. The trees have grown, though. This summer, for fun, I reproduced a couple, with my kids substituting for my wife and her brother when young - or I just tried to stand in more or less the same place and take a photo of the same object.

Above, you can see the family home, which my in-laws have lived in for over 40 years. Before it was a house, it was a road-house, or café, known as the Café de la Gare. La Gare was a station for a small railway that ran from the next village up the road, Plancher Les Mines, which is now a faded backwater, but was once a relatively prosperous mining village. Café de la Gare had a dancefloor, and was one of two local bars, the other being Le Cheval Blanc, opposite where the local Casino mini-market now stands.

We started looking at the photos because my wife was working on a family tree. There are two distinct sets, both with their own distinct feel. The Algerian set features my father in law's family in French Algeria before the war of independence and their evacuation. The other set features my mother-in-law's family, around Auxelles Bas (up the hill from Plancher Bas) and Plancher itself.


Plancher Bas

On our recent summer visit, my wife's parents told us about some Americans who had visited the village in May, specifically to make a pilgrimage to the Café de la Gare. The mayor was showing them around, and it was all very difficult because hardly anybody in Plancher speaks English, and the Americans didn't have much French. The mayor actually asked if my wife was there, though he could have asked for Munz, by brother-in-law, who speaks English passing fair.


Anyway, these Americans had a postcard with them, showing the Café de la Gare in its glorious youth, and I wish we'd been there with my scanner, so we could have had a copy. The reason for their visit was garbled in translation, but we now think they may have been researching a book on the World War I American poet Alan Seeger, who was a very interesting character indeed.

A friend and contemporary of John Reed (who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World about the Russian Revolution, as portrayed by Warren Beatty in the film Reds), Seeger was living the Bohemian life in gay Paris in 1914, and enlisted in the Foreign Legion to fight for France. His diaries and letters therefore cover quite a long period of the war, right up to his death in battle on Independence Day, 1916. He "is reported to have sung a patriotic song to urge on his comrades as he bled to death."

I love that.

In a brief but happy period of the War, he was stationed in the arriere away from the worst of the fighting, waiting to be mobilised into Alsace. He was staying, so it goes, near the Cheval Blanc in Plancher Bas, and drinking frequently in the Café de la Gare, because he fancied the bar maid:

Pleasant days here in the rear. Morning and afternoon we generally have exercises, marches militaires, and reviews. But there is always plenty of time on each side of the morning and evening meal to rest, read, or loaf. This we do---King and I usually---in the cafés of the village. There is the "Cheval Blanc" across the street, but pleasantest of all is the Café de la Gare, on account of the pretty gosse that serves one there.

There's more to say, but I'll finish for now with this, from one of his poems:

The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers:---
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops;
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.