A French Childhood during the 1950s: Alain

The 1950s in France, as in the rest of Europe, were a time of optimism and shortages. The affect of World War II was still evident. I was the yougest of a large and noisy brood of five boys. We lived in a huge apartment in the best area of Paris, the 7th, both my parents worked, and we owned two cars, a definite rarity in those days. We summered in a house we owned in Brittany and in my granparents’ large estate in Normandy. Although we were evidently well off, not to say very priviledged, there was very little cash around, and our entire family and most of my parents’ friends and relatives were equally disinclined to flash money.

My Clothes

I was brought up with a very meagre allowance. (French kids do not work like North Americans do.) I often wore the hand-me-down clothes of my older brothers. We were extremely destructive of clothes, as most boys are, and the family budget obviously did not allow for much leeway. I do remember the very few times that my mother bought me new clothes. I was not in any way involved in the purchase, as in these days we would not have dreamed of questioning our parent’s choices of clothes for us. I was to be happy I had new clothes, and that was it. My brother’s hand-me-downs were usually quite worn out, although the reason for the change of ownership generally was that they had outgrown them or had, much later, graduated to long pants.

School Wear

There were no school uniforms in the public Lycées. The standard attire was a formal shirt (nobody had ever seen this American invention, the T-shirt, and Lacoste of crocodile fame was still playing tennis) sweater or jacket or both. The schools were of course boys only, and there was very little peer pressure to wear expensive or fancy clothes, as this was considered very bad form and a kid who would have done that would have stuck out as different. Not a good thing to do in any group of children.Some of the clothes we did wear included:

Short pants

Of course, we wore short pants year round to go to school, rain or shine, until puberty or the class of «seconde», a grade typically reached at the age of 15 years. They were often grey flannel shorts similar to those worn by British kids, although generally much shorter. The other things we wore were often grey or brown corduroy shorts which doubled up as our scouts uniforms. All of those were quite formal, with creases and pockets, but in no time assumed the shapeless form of all things worn by boys. For sports, we wore running shoes, short sleeved shirts, and blue shorts with a white stripe on the side, this being distinctive of our Lycée.

Kneesocks

We usually wore woollen knee socks that always fell down to our ankles and that boyish affectation required that we wear bunched up around our ankles when our parents were not watching, or rolled up in the scout fashion.

Smocks

We did wear smock in the primary school in the early 1950s. My memory of that are dim, however I remember an extremely brutal and sadistic teacher in primary school who absolutely terrorized us.

Galoches

We also wore the most incredibly ugly "galoches" (this is the French word), rathervlike Enhlish wellies. Those were heavy ankle-high boots that never wore out.

Berets

A few kids wore berets, again in primary school, but not in the Lycées. There were, as usual, exceptions, and I will never forget this tiny, extremely bright, jewish kid who showed up on "rentrée" day (that's commencement day) of my lycée with such a beret. He got extremely ribbed, but became my friend.

Sandals

We did wear sandals, and hated them. We longed for sports shoes which made us look more like American kids. I was brought up in the States as a very young child before we came to France and the natural, supple, groovy (although the word did not exist then) elegance of American kids was a subject of envy in France even back then

Hand-me-downs

As my brothers crossed one after the other the rubicon of puberty, I accumulated a large collection of semi-wornout clothes, with my inventory dominated by shorts of all vintages, size, and style. The other things my brothers tended to wear out rather than hand down. I was evidently envious of my brothers, who to me looked like men, and actually now owned several pairs of long pants, where I owned only one, which I was allowed to wear on very special occasions where my parents wanted us to look grown up.

Church

Sundays involved bringing the whole family to church, and bourgeois propriety required that the children wore formal clothes. For me, it meant a blue suit with short pants or a blazer with my grey flannel shorts, as well as hated white knee socks wich we made a point of rolling down as soon as we could. This was the standard unform of choirboys at that time, over which they wore a white cassock for serving Mass. None of us ever served, as my parents didn't like the priest. I'm not sure why.

Pierre

Sunday was also a time where local families would visit after Mass and share a lunch and a leisurely afternoon. One such Sunday, we received the visit of some local major landowner, his wife, and 15-year old son Pierre. He was a tall, lanky pubescent boy who filed in demurely behind his parents and seemed to be ill at ease, especially since he was wearing a suit with short pants. Evidently, the suit had been bought some time before, and he had almost outgrown it: this tight boyish outfit on an adolescent certainly attracted the eye. He looked embarrassed by his attire, and my brothers and I looked at him with the appropriate mix of contempt, hatred, and compassion, as only 14-year olds can feel when one of their kind is dressed like a doll for display.

My mother, with this unerring instinct of all mothers of adolescent boys, said : «Oh, look at this nice looking boy in shorts! Is’nt he cute! Such a sweet looking little boy!» The sweet-looking little boy in question was almost as tall as her and he was beet-red at the insult.

My older brother Chris, who was 15 at the time, rightly anticipated that this whole scene was very bad news, and saw himself put back in shorts in a very near future as a way to keep things even with our neighbors. He left us in disgust muttering under his breath, and so I ended up taking care of our guest. He was pleased that a younger kid took care of him, as this somehow reduced his acute embarassment with his attire. We were after all both in short pants, and this put our relationship on the level, although I was two years younger than him. He was quite at ease with me, asked me all kinds of questions about me, my school, and the things I liked to do. We had a great time all afternoon playing in the forest, looking for snakes, making little fires, and of course smoking a variety of disgusting things that made us sick. He fell easily into a big brother type of role, and I was happy to oblige. When we parted, I had a new friend, and, the way we shook hands and our exchange of looks told me that this was, for him and for me, an important friendship. It was to last for many years after we had outgrown our short pants and some of our boyish games.

Next Sunday, the edict came down from my Mom : «Chris, you will wear some decent short pants so you are dressed like this delightful boy who came last Sunday : we are going to visit his parents». I was laughing under my breath, and my brother, cursing under his, made the case that this outfit was no longer his, that I had already destroyed it, that it was too small for him etc. He had to try it on and unfortunately for him, it fit. My brother was back in shorts, and not any shorts : very short blue shorts with a jacket and tie which made him look like a choirboy from a group of Little Singers in civvies. Touching. He was livid with fury, I was chuckling.

So there we went to this austere gentleman farmer’s mansion in Normandy, proper, musty, cold, and full of family heirlooms. A mausoleum. The parents and their poor kid were on the steps to greet us, and they were evidently pleased that both my brother and I had been cowed into little boy’s clothes. This vindicated their own views and I believe my parents understood all too well what was going on, at least at some level. My brother was not a happy boy. Our young host was quite gracious about the situation and never let it on that he had noticed my brother’s return to short pants suits. Boys just instinctively know these things. So the three of us, all naked legs and bare arms (we had dropped our jackets, it was a nice spring day) went playing in the darker recesses of this huge mansion. We found all kinds of things, visited our young friend’s room and did all the things boys in short pants do when there are no grownups around to spoil their fun. In fact, we had a royal good time, and I could see, with a pang of jaleousy, that my brother and him were getting along famously. I also noticed that the way my friend related to him was different : There was more jostling, carousing, dirty talk, and generally a show of latent testosterone. With me, he was more like a gentle big brother, and almost treated me like if I was fragile, or like a girl, with a mixture of tenderness and shyness. I was young and naïve, but boys, without ever being told, understand these situations instinctively.

My Lycée

Back in secondary school, which the French call the Lycée, I eventually moved from the junior Lycée to the senior one. Both were famous Paris schools, attended by the scions of the best families on the Left Bank. The change happened while going from third grade to second (the grades are reversed in the French system, so that you started in 12th and ended up in 1st at about 16 to 17 years of age).

In the junior Lycée, most boys wore short pants, summer or winter. Around the «troisième», the last grade of the junior Lycée, the fights would start with the parents to switch to longs as we all succumbed to the assaults of puberty and the terrible self-consciousness that comes with it. This is a time where most boys want to look grown up, dream of growing a moustache with the thin down that appears on their upper lip, and certainly hate the idea of wearing short pants for anything but sports, and even then, they are terribly self-counscious of the bareness of their legs.

In the senior Lycée, short pants were a rarity, and the boys that wore them were either very young (which probably meant they were ahead in their studies) or very late in blooming into puberty. In my « seconde » class, there were two or three kids who still wore shorts, and one of them actually went on to wear short pants all the way to «mathématiques élémentaires», the very final grade (equivalent to a grade 13 if it existed) of high school. This kid was very young for his grade and did not hit puberty until he was 16 years old.

These three of course stuck out like sore thumbs, and the contrast was great between their childish look, both in dress and face, and that of the coarse but serious adolescents all the others had become. The older boys generally dismissed them and would have died rather than associate with them in any way. It would have been a bit like going around with your little brother. Not done.

I remember vividly the way we dealt with two of those boys. The younger one was a tall, lanky 14-year old called Patrick, black haired, with a very high-pitched little-boy voice, and long brown legs uncovered by this pair of very proper, very formal, (although a little short, as he had grown into them) grey flannel shorts. His friend was an older boy whom nobody liked very much and showed no particular talent for anything (although he became later a fairly well known journalist and writer). Nevertheless, catcalls were de rigueur when either of them spoke and we miaowed the name of the ofhe kid. When the younger one went to the board, there were more catcalls such as «nice legs, kid», high-pitched whines, and other such nasty adolescent games. How he could take this I do not know, and I remember going to him discretely to try and console him after a particularly hard session. I suppose that his parents were very strict and had taken the view that, as long as he looked like a little boy (although he was very tall), he was going to dress like a little boy. He in fact was always very smartly dressed and was a cotrast to the scruffy way te rest of us dressed.

When we reached MathElem, Patrick was the lone survivor of the battle of the short pants, and at that point our class had become used to the idea that he would continue wearing shorts into University : He still had his high voice, was tall and lanky, and still had this little boy face and these smooth brown legs. Later that year, his voice broke and the juices of adolescence took full control of him as they had of us some time before. He switched to longs and overnight the miracle ceased. I do not know what became of him, but I assume he grew up to be a middle aged, prosperous bourgeois with a bored wife, a mortgage, a BMW, a summer house, and three rebellious kids. His friend became a writer.

Summer

Summers were a time of great freedom and high adventure. Our house was on a small island off the coast of Brittany on which cars were forbidden, as well as any motorized contraption. It was litterally a children’s paradise : There, we were let loose with no limits other than stay on the island or on the boats. We hired ourselves as «mousses», or sailor ‘s apprentices on the little ferries that crossed to the «continent» (as islanders call the mainland), and every now and then we would proudly steer the boat under the admiring (or so we liked to think) glances of the adult passengers, who for us seasoned sailors were mere «tourists», a word that was meant to carry great contempt. We also sailed on the local «canots», which were gaff-rigged wooden boats in the 12 to 16 feet range. They had an engine but could also sail reasonably well. There, we met two bothers who were vacationing like us. The older one, Thierry, was my age. The younger one, Gilles, was a year younger. They came from a divorced family and lived with their mother, a person of evidently limited means. Both wore the same clothes pretty well every day, consisting of a shirt, a blue sweater (Brittany is often cool, like Maine, even in the dead of the summer), and short pants, which were either thick sea-scout blue flannels or grey corduroys. Myself, I much preferred to wear shorts in the summer, and liked the feel the wind and sun. We spent our days biking, swimming (although the sea was very cold), fishing (all adolescent boys love fishing, why?) playing on the beach or in the mud flats, exploring every corner of our little paradise, and of course playing tricks on tourists. One of our favorites was to tie a wallet with a piece of transparent fishing line, drop it on the road, hide in the bushes, and wait for somebody to pick it up, at which time we would rudely yank it out of their hands and run away laughing to tears. Those were the more innocent games we played. We also played hide and seek in the massive boulders of the seashore, and they had many a dark corner where we could hide, either alone, or with a friend.

Into that island of happiness and mysteries, of unasked and unaswered questions, of discoveries and secrets kept, at the most unexpected time, death barged in like an armed gangster crashing a child’s birthday party: my older brother, who was twenty one years old, a gifted writer, a loving and much loved young man was killed in a car accident, and my childhood was over. When I revisited that same island with my wife and own grand-children during a cruise on my sailboat many years later, the memories of these happy and sad and exciting times overwhelmed me. The ghosts of our childhoods will haunt this place forever.

Alain Merrien, December 1999








Christopher Wagner

histclo@lycosmail.com


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Created: December 15, 1999
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