French Letter: Partygate in sun-kissed Locarn

My wife and I were invited to an impromptu drinks party this week. No lockdown rules were broken because there aren’t any, and, needless to say, we all went back to work immediately afterwards, or at any rate, home to have dinner and watch television. 

It was a hot day — we haven’t had rain for weeks — and the talk was of a desultory kind. When would the pub re-open after the owner put up the shutters the day his wife tested positive for Covid? Had anyone heard that that new restaurant down the road from the Mairie might be in line for a Michelin star? (No.) Did alcohol-free beer actually taste of anything? 

Hilke, our drinks party host, is a florist who grows her own blooms under glass (actually under plastic) and sells them in the market in Carhaix every Saturday morning. She had to disappear for an hour to attend to her carnations, which meant that we were left in the capable hands of Ian, from Saint Helen’s, a former submariner, whose stories of life at sea are legion. 

My favourite tells of how he once got into an altercation with an enormous US Marine sergeant during a visit to a naval base in Florida. Ian and his pals were enjoying a few drinks when the sergeant came up, obviously sozzled, and demanded that Ian get up and give him his seat.

This was not the way to ask a favour of a British matelot. “Why?” he demanded. “Got your name on it, has it?” 

Ian is a hefty bloke. He boxed for the Navy. But the American was bigger. Seconds later, after an exchange of blows, he found himself knocked off his feet and staring up at the back of the chair in which he had been sitting. Engraved into a metal plaque was — but you’ve guessed it — the name of his opponent. 

Ian’s wife, Florence, a Breton who teaches English at a local school, seemed to be unusually interested in her surroundings during the drinks party. She kept staring up at Hilke’s house, which, though set in wonderful open country, is not what Nikolaus Pevsner would have described as an architectural gem. 

What was it that had caught her attention? I asked. Well, it turned out that when she was a child, her father had lost his job and couldn’t find another in the area. So the family moved to Caen, in Normandy, where they remained for the next seven years. 

But every summer, during the long school holidays, Florence had been sent back to Brittany to stay with her aunt, then the owner of Hilke’s house. The coincidence had come as a total surprise. She could see the window of her old bedroom and knew every inch of the surrounding fields. It was a place filled with memories. 

These days, as well as English, she teaches Breton, increasingly a requirement in the departmental curriculum. She’d had to make up lost ground dating back to her time in Caen, where her parents only spoke their native language when they were talking together or when they didn’t want the children to know what was being said. She has also rediscovered Breton dancing and advised me, if I was serious about integration, to get stuck in. 

We’ll see about that. 

Ian is back at sea now. He does shifts, three weeks on, two weeks off, on a boat that sails around the coast of the British Isles checking on buoys and assisting with offshore construction projects, including, apparently, the largest wind turbine ever built. In the Channel, he says, dinghies filled with migrants are pretty well an everyday occurrence. He and his shipmates do their best to steer clear, reporting what they see to the UK Border Force, only intervening if there is an obvious emergency. 

We won’t see him again at any drinks parties until June, when he says he’ll be off for a month. That’s when I’ll ask him to repeat the tale of how he arm-wrestled a French submariner in Brest who clearly felt he was wrestling for France. 

“He was drunk and off his head and I let him win. Well, he might have won anyway, but I let him.”  

Ian and Florence have a cat, whose name I can’t remember, but is known as “The Menace”. It terrorises the local dogs but earns its keep as an accomplished ratter. Any time the neighbours have a problem with vermin in their basements, they call Ian and he brings The Menace round. “We just put him in and shut the door. After an hour, we open up again and look inside. Horrible. Bodies everywhere. But better than poison.” 

The cat is a local character. So is Ian. Let me know if you’d like to know the one about the sailor who sleepwalked into the captain’s cabin onboard a nuclear submarine wearing only his underpants.