By April 1971, mankind had put men on the Moon. Three times.
T.Rex was singing "Hot Love" in the UK charts.
We'd had the inaugural flight of French and British Concordes.
The Open University had started broadcasting TV programmes on BBC 2 at ungodly hours.
And yet.
In a suburb of Lyon, in the enclosed courtyard behind the up-market pâtisserie which was owned by my penpal's father, in the relative calm of an April city night, a fourteen year-old English visitor was squatting in a building the size of The Tardis.
Because, even then, as Les Trente Glorieuses, those Thirty Glorious Years of France leading the world in student riots, fast trains and nuclear technology, had brought the country to the height of "Le Progrès et La Modernité", there were still houses in its second-largest city which had squat-down bogs.
These were referred to as "Les Chiottes Turques" , amongst other salacious sobriquets.
It was midnight. My host family-Maman, Papa and only Son-, were fast asleep on the upper floor of another building which formed one side of the courtyard. Its ground floor was occupied by Monsieur's "Laboratoire". This was where he performed miracles with crème pâtissière and other ingredients, turning everyday products such as flour, butter, almond paste and -especially- sugar, into "objets du désir". These works of art: gâteaux à la poire Belle-Hélène; petits fours; even le cake anglais, were guaranteed to make local ladies of "un certain âge" hot-flush, then, with trembling fingers, hand over a fifty-franc banknote...
My own sleeping quarters were in the shop itself: a camp bed set up in the "bureau" behind the sparkling counter and the ever-chiming cash register. Madame, always immaculate in gleaming white blouson, black hair pinned back in a seventies bun, didn't actually say that I should help myself to any delicacies (ice cream, Ferrero Rocher, coulis de framboise...) which may lurk in my makeshift sleeping quarters, in the kitchen behind, or indeed between lowered blinds within the shop itself. But she didn't actually say that I should not.
Resultingly, after a few nights of reconnaissance gastronomique, the midnight wander to Les Toilettes Turques had become something of a ritual.
That particular night was memorable. Not because of the bats, which buzzed the budding limeflower tree at the other end of the courtyard. And not because of the rat, which scudded under the green and peeling painted louvered door, then scuttled out again having noted the cubicle as being "occupé", thus foregoing his romantic foray into the égouts of Lyon...
No, it was because that evening, as the rattle of the re-filling earthernware cistern receded, and as I walked towards the light of the kitchen, I saw the outline of someone in a lilac nightgown. It was a female figure, and she was filling a glass coffee container at the sink. Even from the courtyard side of the door, it was clear that she was manipulating the cold water taps with delicate fingers, trying hard not to allow the ancestral plumbing to send signals to any other parts of the property.
As I opened the door, the yellow formica kitchen clock clicked to midnight.
Anna, the family housemaid who would turn eighteen on Friday, turned her head. Her plaited hair hung serenely over her left shoulder. She smiled a freckled smile and said:
"Tu veux pas un petit café?".
A suivre....
(Now click on the petits fours pic above for a musical treat. Yum...)
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