Before the War

On top, a copy of the marriage certificate between my grandparents, in 1921. Yes, that's how they still did it!  By hand, with a lot of seals!

So that's my sweet mother and her brother top left and the wedding of her Aunt Claire in 1929, top right. My mother has a few stories about the 20s and 30s that stand out.

Her father was not very demonstrative, affection-wise, so when he was, my mother remembers it vividly. Once she was playing with a doll as he listened to the radio on a relaxing Sunday, and he leaned over and playfully tugged at her ears: "Mon petit kikiyu avec les oreilles pointues!" ('My little kikiyu [a bird] with the pointy ears!') 

My mother remembers vividly her disappointment at discovering, around 7, that her parents had lied about Pere Noel.  She never told us there was a Santa Claus for this reason, and I am glad she didn't.  I know some people who'd be horrified by this, but it certainly didn't stop me or my brothers or sisters from enjoying the holiday.

She adored her mother, and her maternal aunts, above all. They all lived quite close to each other in Avignon, and though mostly shopkeeper or teachers, they clearly had strong personalities and (as evidenced above with that wedding dress) a certain "chic."

So did, it seems, my mother. Her friends in high school recounted to me how her trademark was a glove on one hand, clutching the other glove. It was her "thing." My mother scoffed at hearing these memories, suppressing a smile at the same time.

She had a best friend, Josette. If they played together it was on weekends at "Passe-Temps," the country house my grandfather had on the other side of the Rhone.

 In Avignon my mother would come home from school, do her homework, and help her mother cook, set the table and clean up.  Her "TV," she recalls, was the window from her bedroom overlooking rue Rappe, behind the store. She found that if you watched long enough, you would discover little dramas going on. (Years later, when I had my first closet-size apartment on W. 10th Street in New York, I discovered the same thing. Good training for a writer.)
The miracle of the internet coughs up this photo (credit: Joe Foster) of rue Rapp. One of these could actually be the window she stared out of.

In 1936, when my mother was 11, the first of three life-changing events occurred. Her sister Francoise was born -- pictured on the bottom left of those 6 photos above,  cradled by Jeanne.  I paired it with a later picture (taken during the war) of my mother, probably in the same park, with her little sister. That's because in 1938 (event number #2) my grandmother contracted tuberculosis.  For the next 8 years she was often resting or sent to a sanitarium outside of the city.  That meant that from around 13 on, my mother gradually took over most of her own mother's role in the household.  

She never complained.  My mother learned from her own mother that if you do things out of love, it is always a joyful effort. If there is any spiritual lesson she passed on to us, it was this.  (In fact, I would say she shared this philosophy with my father and it was the glue to their marriage.  They modeled it beautifully for us.)

In 1939, of course, came the war.  There were 9 months of la Drole de Guerre, aka "The Phony War." At the time my mother was still going to a private Catholic girl's school, "Le Pensionnat Sancta Maria" - where Avignon's petite and grande bourgeoisie children rubbed elbows.

The picture below, on the left, was clearly her first communion (and looks so much like my sister Sandra at that age it's scary) and on the right,  I think this might have been a costume in a school play she performed at the school just before the war. In any case the two certainly capture the innocence and beauty of a relatively privileged and in retrospect, blessedly idyllic childhood.

Certainly, no one who lived through the next 5 years in Europe would use adjectives like "innocent" or "idyllic" to describe them.

MCO 2015