C'est Modnifique!: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France, page 20
'How did it go?' Madame LeBoeuf asked the ground beneath her the next time we saw her.
'Fine,' I replied, trying to bend down low enough to see if she was smirking or not.
The arthritis, which the doctor was now lecturing me on, was something of a blow. OK, gout is no prize in life's lottery, but at least it gives the appearance of a life well lived. It's known as the 'King's Disease' after Henry VIII and as such gives the impression that the sufferer has over-indulged his passion for wine, women and song, a larger-than-life character with stories to tell. Arthritis has the air of decrepitude and the withering of age. It's the bell just before the final lap in my overly dramatic mind.
Having dealt with us both, the doctor, as is his wont while writing out lengthy prescriptions, expounded on his latest theory of medicine, 'positive thinking'. Seriously, it's getting like a cult around here. 'Think yourself healthy,' he was saying and went off on a lecture about some nineteenth-century chemist who had originally formulated this theory. I should make clear that I'm not against positive thinking per se, but positive thinking is not, nor has it ever been, my forte to the extent that I have made a half decent career out of being a stage miserabilist and have no intention of getting all happy-clappy now, thank you very much. Besides which positivity is an extremely unlikely emotion while a doctor inspects your 'worrying' varicose veins and prescribes 'orthopaedic socks' for you to wear on planes.
The doctor blithely introduced the notion of 'medical legwear' like it was the most natural thing in the world, and not something that a 42-year-old man might find somewhat deflating. 'Yep, there you go, put these tights on – next stop rubber pants.' The ignominy didn't end there either. I thought I'd picked a quiet time at the chemist in which to collect my new undergarments. I was wrong. Not only was the place not quiet it was full of young, attractive, Romani women, all barefoot and outdoorsy but who stopped their chaotic buzzing around the chemist as the strangely dressed 'foreigner' was measured – MEASURED – for his socks. They gathered round as the female chemist rolled up my trousers and put a tape measure to my calves and ankles, and shook their heads as if this decadence was the main reason they decided to drop out of society altogether, what with its rules and too ordered underwear.
'Would you like them in black or beige?' asked the chemist, apparently oblivious to our audience.
'Do you have them in Argyle?' I asked, trying to claw back some dignity.
You can approach the onset of old age and decay in two ways: you can let it get to you and give up or you can come out fighting, ignore the ravages of time and face it down with haughty scorn. Frankly, I'm all for the first option, but having young children means that you can't let this show, not yet anyway, and following the chemist humiliation I decided to show I still had some physical strength left in me and went off to mend the goats' wooden stable wall. They'd kicked it down the night before, because they can, and it needed putting back together.
I drew the hammer back and attacked the thing with gusto, letting the frustrations of the day, if not life itself, come flying out in DIY violence. The hammer hit the wood mightily, so hard that the iron head parted ways with the wooden handle, flew back and smacked into my forehead, before pirouetting, in slow motion, and bouncing off my watch, smashing the glass face and coming to a noisy rest on the floor.
I stared at the thing for a full two minutes. The wall remained unattached, I had a bruise on my forehead and my watch was in pieces. My chakras had never been more bent.
Acting Up
If anyone was in need of straightened chakras it was Samuel. The end of the school year would also mean his theatrical debut and his nerves were beginning to show. If full-on melodramatic hissy fits are any gauge of acting talent, or a precursor to success in the trade, then I think he's probably on to a winner. The fact that he was also outstanding at the actual acting part will probably stand him in good stead too. I didn't know whether to be happy or not. His debut was such a resounding personal success that though I was immensely proud, secretly, I'd been hoping that he wouldn't enjoy it quite as much as he did and that the acting bug would become a passing fancy like so many others, and talk of drama school would be quietly dropped.
This wasn't out of jealousy or fear of competition but parental concern. I know actors; I know lots of them and very few are ever in work long enough to make ends meet and, even though he was only 12, that worried me. Maybe it would be a passing fad, like the tir (shooting) had been. I'm not sure why Samuel felt compelled to try the rifle range; I know some of his friends were doing it, some on the dubious pretext of mental health too. One of his friends had a slight concentration problem and it was suggested, by the school, that maybe joining the local rifle club would be a good way to get him more focused. I mean, is this new thinking or old thinking? I don't know. In the UK parents are quite rightly worried about childhood diagnoses that lead to early, unjustified labelling and months, sometimes years, on 'helpful' drugs. Here in France they give them guns. Samuel joined the club and immediately became something of a success, by far the best in his age group; the under-tens to be fair not being massively represented at the gun club, but after a few months he got bored, much to the chagrin of the gun club hierarchy who saw him as a future star, and packed it all in.
Then there were the guitar lessons, which I'll admit I badgered him into. I was in one of my more prolonged periods of procrastination and to avoid doing any work entirely I decided to learn the guitar instead; I also decided that Samuel should learn the guitar too, seeing as he'd now given up shooting and therefore needed a hobby. Being in the middle of nowhere, however, meant that guitar teachers were somewhat rare and we had to advertise, and put a card up on the message board of the local boulangerie, which like any boulangerie is the centre of local gossip and trade. We had a call a few days later which Natalie answered and arranged our first lesson for the following week.
'Well?' Samuel and I asked. 'What's he like?'
'He's very nice, I think,' was Natalie's response. 'Strange French accent though, I think he might be from the south.'
Peter, it turned out, was from South Shields and lived locally. He had been a session guitarist in the 1960s, had worked with loads of bands from that era and was an exceptional player. This was an early foray into teaching, however, and we were exacting pupils. Samuel may have some talent in this regard though he wasn't that interested, but I have absolutely no talent whatsoever musically and so after a few testing months we decided to call it a day, much to the relief of Peter I suspect.
I'm firmly of the W.C. Fields school of thinking, 'If at first you don't succeed, give up… There's no use being a damn fool about it.' And though obviously I would not advocate this attitude to my children I could, even at this early stage, see that it wouldn't be an issue where Samuel's acting was concerned.
He had been attending the local théâtre group since the previous September, something which had been noted sarcastically by his teachers, who now had him marked down as something of a drama queen. This debut performance was the culmination of months of rehearsals, tantrum throwing, ego clashing and some quite astonishing flouncing about. The build up to the two shows, one evening and one matinee, had been fraught, as Samuel, holding down two major roles, one the comic centrepiece as a futuristic, intergalactic Charlie Chaplin, struggled with learning his lines and then started getting nervous a few days before.
'How do you learn your lines, Daddy?' he asked when I picked him up from a particularly tense rehearsal. I have a simple rule about learning lines; I've written my own material, so if I can remember it, it means it's worth remembering, if I can't then it isn't. Simple as that. Of course, what I should be doing is rewriting it, so that it is actually worth remembering, but this was no time to be highlighting my own indolence. My history on learning lines for actual plays is patchy. I played the leading role in Alan Ayckbourn's Gosforth's Fête in a production that was being 'marked' for our drama O level. The play revolves around Gosforth, there isn't a scene without him, every other character's line is fed by him, but I didn't learn my lines sufficiently and just began improvising. It was chaos as every other participant was left floundering by my lack of team ethic. I told Samuel he had to write his lines out and keep writing them out until he knew them. Once again I was making it up as I went along.
'So how do you cope with nerves before you go on stage then, Daddy?' he asked later that evening at the dinner table.
Natalie gave me a stern look along the lines of 'make something up for God's sake, don't tell the truth' and I gave it some thought. I could be honest and list the early days of chain-smoking, alcohol addiction and little pills, or the latter method of outwardly not giving a toss, while inside my stomach ulcer does a roaring trade in acid production, very much the 'swan' approach. I gave him some management speak about 'visualisation' and preparation which is at least partly true, but which also I don't think was much help to him as the nerves continued to bite.
We had seats reserved right at the front, which if I were Samuel I would have hated – I don't like having anybody I even know in the audience let alone on the front row. A couple of years ago a group of old girlfriends came to see me perform in Birmingham, I'd known them since I was a teenager and some of them I'd known very well indeed, and their presence was making me a gibbering wreck backstage.
'What's up with you?' a colleague asked. 'What difference does it make them being here?'
'There's a woman out there who I lost my virginity to…' I said, practically hyperventilating. 'I'm not sure she could handle another bad performance.'
The other problem with me being on the front row was that I was seated right next to the standing video camera operator who, to put it mildly, had something of a flatulence problem and which I hoped wouldn't prove to be a metaphor for the show that was to follow. The lights went down, the 'sshhing' started and faded away, and the play began.
I'm not sure I understood everything that went on. The play was written by the leader of the théâtre group and was an intergalactic Romeo and Juliet parody taking in such diverse additions as Rihanna, Snow White, local Berrichon 'peasantry' (Berry being the old word for this area of France) and the aforementioned Charlie Chaplin. It rambled on a bit in truth and wasn't helped by the fact that some of the cast were far too young and simply hadn't learned their lines, or at least were not yet capable of doing so, meaning that there were uncomfortable silences, some almost Pinteresque in length, but without the gravity.
The democracy of the exercise was admirable: every child, ageing from about five years old to 15 or 16, had some role to play in the performance, but it also meant that the limited theatre space which had been created in the local salle des fêtes had a rolling 'non-performing cast' issue with those currently not needed sitting in the 'well' in front of the stage. The irony here being that those who couldn't remember what to say on stage a few minutes earlier were now busy chatting away to their friends and disturbing others. The prompter, who by now was becoming a leading figure in the performance, was trying to shush these unemployed cast members, which confused some of the more nervy actors on stage who thought, confusingly, that they were being asked to pipe down.
But the older members of the cast, and in particular those who had learnt their lines, were stunning. The knowledge that they knew what they were saying and when they had to say it, meant they had had time to actually learn to do some acting as well and Samuel, and yes I know 'I would say that wouldn't I?', was very good indeed. The truth is, I wouldn't just say that anyway. If he'd stunk the place out like my video operating neighbour I simply wouldn't have written about the event at all, but Samuel, as Charlie Chaplin/the Mad Hatter, had wonderful comic timing and there were whispers of approval all around us whenever he was on stage, making me ridiculously proud and the opening night a triumph.
Matinees are tricky at the best of times, but I'd really hoped that after a good night's sleep and the butterflies of the premier had subsided, things would have tightened up a bit. I think I was expecting a bit too much, and those that hadn't known their lines the night before still didn't know them the next day, but the audience didn't help. There's a reason why I am on stage as a comedian and not in the audience, and that is that I can legitimately and, ahem, forcefully tell people to shut up and bloody well behave themselves. The Sunday afternoon crowd, while still appreciative, were restless and at times downright rude, which meant that I couldn't relax. I've only been to the cinema three times in 20 years and that is because of my rank intolerance of other people's discourtesy and I was glad that, in the interval, I had to dash off and pick up Maurice from a dance spectacular that he'd insisted on seeing, as it meant I didn't have to hang around the salle des fêtes and upbraid people about their manners.
I had 15 minutes to pick up Maurice from a different town and bring him back before Samuel opened the second half doing his comic turn. I dashed into the dance spectacular looking for Maurice, only to go crashing clumsily into a line-dancing finale, all a-whoopin' and a-hollerin' and not at all keen on a one-man-mod invasion. A heavily made-up old lady linked arms with me and for an awful moment I thought I might miss the rest of Samuel's performance as I was virtually kidnapped in an endless violin-enthused, shiny-shirted farrago from which I'd never escape. I unhooked arms with the old dear, apologised, grabbed a toe-tapping Maurice and left hastily like they'd run me out of town, making it back just as the lights dimmed and the elderly video man let rip with another cloud of poison gas.
Once again Samuel was excellent and I'm not ashamed to admit it brought tears to my eyes (I lay some of the blame on the video operator for this) as I realised that this was a hobby, pastime, a calling, however you want to put it that he wasn't going to give up on. He has genuine talent and wants to be an actor, and as such a lifetime of showbiz disappointment, frustration, crushing lows and short-lived highs await him, and all Natalie and I can probably do is be there to catch him when we're needed.
It was a very emotional day for everyone. Thérence was so moved that midway through the second half he went to the makeshift bar at the back of the salles des fêtes and informed the barman that that was his brother on stage and he, Thérence, would like a beer and a slice of cake please. I fear it's the start of a Redgrave or Baldwin-style acting dynasty and I've given you fair warning.
It wasn't just the day that was emotional, though, it was the end of the school year – les grandes vacances – a combination of, 'Thank Christ for that!' and 'le big relief!'.
It's not just the kids and teachers who are knackered, though both are worked pretty hard, and nor is it the drama of school report season that brings an itchy nervousness to the time of year, and Samuel was desperate to see improvement on his report from Christmas. There were no issues academically, but comportement wise he had been described variously as 'cheeky', 'moody' and 'melodramatic'. It's difficult for me to lecture or criticise on such obviously appalling traits but Samuel wanted to show that he'd made an effort in this regard so that his end-of-year reward would be more grandiose. His report was better – if sucking the individuality out of someone is an improvement – but seeing as last year's reward was goats his reward was far more mundane, and was a healthy and improving set of books.
Maurice's end of year I deliberately missed. He had built up such an affection for his teacher that even though I was sent to collect him at the end of his last day, I refused to on the grounds that I couldn't deal with the emotional breakdown that would inevitably occur. I know this sounds, at the very least, like remiss parenting, but seriously, every minor setback for all three of them to be honest was being greeted like a collection of widows standing in front of the rubble of their earthquake-flattened village, and though I love the fact that my children aren't buttoned up, that they can, and are willing to, express their emotions, there are limits. Natalie collected him instead, 'How was it?' I asked, genuinely concerned.
'You'd have hated it,' she replied.
Thérence's end of term had the potential to be equally traumatic, as assorted three to six-year-olds were to perform an end of year spectacle of their own to parents and guests. Now, I had seen the teachers of this group try and fail to get them to line up in a morning – try watching French passengers board a plane: chaos – I just couldn't see the necessary discipline being instilled with enough success for public performance.
It was to take place in the playground behind the school, but with the stage itself under a concrete pavilion while the audience sat in the open air. I try not to take a professional eye to these things but sometimes the errors are so glaring that you just can't help it and I could see that the sound set-up was doomed to failure.
There were microphones attached to the front of the makeshift stage but the speakers themselves had been placed behind the stage, meaning that, at best, the audience would hear a muffled rumble from the deeper recesses of the pavilion and not anything of the spectacle at all. As the audience began to take their seats I feared for the clarity of the production. I also feared for my own mood. I know it's a school, I know it's an end of year knees-up, as it were, but keep your bloody kids in check will you? As one child, who Maurice has constant issues with, trod on my toe (i.e. suede Chelsea boot) again playing an inappropriate game of 'it', I nearly lost it.
