Seaford in the sixties

07/07/2009 04:23

I can tell heaps of stories about my 1/12th youth in England.
My dad was formerly a sailor in the Navy. He had spent a great part of the World War 2 on a frigate, La Decouverte, that was leased to General de Gaulle's navy, the Free French Forces Fleet by the generous British government.
Well after the war, in the sixties, my dad went back to Britain and took me with him for holidays. In August 1966, we drove to Dieppe with our Renault 4, boarded the Falaise and after a four hours journey of delight, disembarked at Newhaven. I had a great time, with a big storm pending and lots of people sick. I remember having a steak and French fried potatoes in the ferry's restaurant. My dad was a great sailor: I never saw him vomit.

Since this first time I crossed the Channel, from the age of eleven till I was sixteen, my parents took a subscription to Seaford for me. Seaford was a charming seaside resort that looked pretty much like my own place: same chalk cliffs, same green lavish sea, same bloody pebbles, same bloody wind in the face, same bloody rain accompanying the wind. Everything was the same, and everything was different, and one month a year, I lived in a parallel world. One month a year was thus 1/12th of my life, it was 6 months all put together, and believe me or not, 6 months in a parallel world is a lot for a teenager.

This was the time of Victorian style worm-eaten threatening hung windows, of Victorian style tuppence, quids and guineas, of Victorian style old ladies with clinking bracelets, purple hair and powdered faces. My teacher, Mrs Protheroe was born with the century. Whenever I came for my daily lesson, she breathed out a strange smell of perfume. From my personal experience, I discovered later – well, not that much later in fact – that what I had thought was perfume was actually gin (*). She was a wonderful teacher. She asked me to read whole chapters of Penguin Books. I still keep some of them, like Doctor Doolittle, Pygmalion or Macbeth, and I still love the penguins on the jackets.

Stepping from Doctor Doolittle to Lady Macbeth took me six years. So did my transformation from a tiny little boy into a wild and soft bearded teen-ager obsessed with sex and popular music. I did very well with music, because my host, a middle aged woman with eccentric glasses (actually everyone had actually eccentric glasses in the late sixties in Britain) worked in a record shop. She used to give me unsold records and thus I became a specialist of not-so-pop music. But the most popular tunes, those I could not afford to buy, were on the radios and I was also a Radio One and Radio Caroline fan.

Regarding my second centre of interest, may be I would have been more successful with girls if I had had lessons with Mrs Protheroe on how to keep my compulsive teenage sex obsession hidden.

So, very rapidly, I had decided to play tennis instead.

(*) Gordon bien sûr - NDT

Thanks to the Impromptus for giving me the opportunity to write in English.
The Falaise
Seaford