63. Thoughts Over The New Year 2021.

Dearly Beloved*

During the feast of Christmas 2020 I wrote: "The great feast of Christmas will soon be over and we look forward to the battles to come, mostly trying to deal with the difficulties presented by our wonderful freedom from the EU. My wife's Grandfather was French born near the town Saumur on the great river, La Loire but he moved to London to set up a crammer school for diplomats, Scoone's immortalised in Terrance Rattigan's Play French Without Tears. A family joke is that he helped some of the Cambridge five, Philby, Burgess, Maclean get their jobs in the Foreign Office and SIS. Immediately upon the fall of France on 18th June 1940, his son, Pierre, (a contemporary of the Cambrdige five when at Trinity College) who was by that time a Psychiatrist working in London, volunteered and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and because he was bilingual, was recruited by SOE to help with recruiting and supporting agents in France. He considered issues such as what the best options would be when the Gestapo knocked on your door.“the quick and ready answer to the Gestapo might not always be to draw a gun or attempt to escape,” he wrote, but possible answers were difficult to test.

He also dealt with the consequences of war, including, with his colleagues, some of the first work on rehabilitating those who had been subject to arduous internment or torture. He instilled in his daughter a love of France and, in time, she passed that love on to me.. After Pierre's early death we inherited his house, by that time in south west France. That was just three years after the UK joined the European Union.

So, one hour before this New Year, we became aliens to France, nationals of a third country and are now confronted with complicated paper work applying for resident status to ensure that we can stay as and when we need to. Perhaps we were foolishly complacent that the union with the EU was forever and we did not foresee the rupture with reality that would overtake our country in 2016.

France is quite different to the UK in its way of governance. Napoleon was highly authoritarian and that has permeated down to the present day. Recently France decided it had to update its postal  administrative address system and give numbers to all the houses. That in turn required that many of the thousands of unnamed roads and tracks near villages had to be given names too. So we found the track on which our house was situated had become the Chemin de Calicoba ( Rainbow Perch Street) but our address and house number related to a Communal road more than two hundred meters away onto which our land and house had no exit or boundary. When my wife went to the see the local Mayor he was very sympathetic but said that it had been done and could not be undone, everyone knows 'that is it', so 'that is it'. The adjacent road and our new address is appropriately called the Impasse de L'Arrivage literally the The Arrival Dead End (it leads to an old river ferry crossing) but it also seems to us that the name is not only profoundly ambiguous but also profoundly, administratively and politically, appropriate.

Our neighbours there are under curfew and cannot leave the house after 20:00 hours in the evening despite being in a fairly low Covid 19 infection area, but the regime seems to be working as high infection rates in France have collapsed under these authoritarian rules. So, perhaps, authoritarianism does, sometimes, have its uses.

Peace,

Paul."

*This letter was published by St Clement's on 11 January 2021.

Photo: Paul Munton.
Poppies and a Walnut Orchard in Perigord, France.


More on Psychiatrists and Secret Agents can be found here:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32474-6/abstract


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