Disarming, eloquent and illuminating, this meditation on place, time and memory, could only have been written by a poet, or a novelist, or a professor. Happily, Patrick McGuinness is all three, and Other People’s Countries is a marvel: a stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character – full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we start to make sense of the world.
This book evolved out of stories the author told his children: stories about the Belgian border town of Bouillon, where his mother came from, and where he has been going three times a year since he was a child – first with his parents and now with his son and daughter. This town of eccentrics, of charm, menace and wonder, is re-created beautifully – ‘Most of my childhood,’ he says, ‘feels more real to me now than it did then’. For all its sharp specifics, though, this is a book about the common, universal concerns of childhood and the slowly developing deep sense of place that is the bedrock for our memories.
Alert and affectionate, full of great curiosity and humour, Other People’s Countries has all the depth and complexity of its own subject – memory – and is an unfashionably distilled, resonant book: unusual and exquisite.
Born in Tunisia in 1968, Patrick McGuinness is the author of The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award and won the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010). He is a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where he lectures in French.
POETRY
The Canals of Mars
Jilted City
FICTION
The Last Hundred Days
(The list does not include the living)
Lucie Lejeune, née Nicolas, dressmaker, couturière, grandmother (1920–99)
Eugène Lejeune, ‘Le Dènn’, ferronnier, metalworker, grandfather (1914–83)
Monique Lejeune, mother (1942–2002)
Kevin McGuinness, father (1938–2004),
Collette Lejeune, aunt, teacher in the école communale (1944–87)
Paul Nicolas, great-uncle (1916–82)
Marie Nicolas, née Pierson (1918–2001)
Albert Nicolas, great-uncle (1912–96)
Emile Nicolas, great-uncle died in the fire of Bouillon (1911–44)
Julia Bourland, née Nicolas, great-grandmother, hotel chambermaid (1890–1975)
Elie Nicolas, great-grandfather, forest warden, husband of Julia Bourland, father of Lucie Lejeune (1890–1958)
Eugénie Bourland, great-great-aunt, sister of Julia, mother of Victor Adam (1885–1971)
Lucie Bourland, great-great-aunt, seamstress (1889–1951)
Victor Adam (‘Pistache’), father of Guy and brother of Nanette, executed by the Gestapo (1913–44)
Emile Lejeune (‘Emile Picard’, ‘Emile la petite’), carter, great-grandfather, murdered in ‘Le Maroc’ (1882–1924)
Olga Lejeune, great aunt (1918–2000)
Léon Degrelle, Belgian fascist leader (1906–94)
Edouard Degrelle, brother of Léon Degrelle, died aged twenty months (1902–4)
Edouard Degrelle, pharmacist and Léon Degrelle’s brother, assassinated by unknown resistance members (1904–44)
Robert Hainaux, garagiste, bon-viveur and Fiat car salesman (1935–2007)
Marcel Hanus, ‘Le Cul’, ‘L’Queu’ (‘The Arse’), café owner (1924–83)
‘Mataba’, Gaston Maziers, café owner (1906–84)
Maurice Pirotte, Bouillonnais poet and centenarian (1913–2013)
Madelaine Ozeray, actor (1908–89)
Godefroid de Bouillon, Crusader, King of Jerusalem (c.1060–1100)
‘Trois gants’, ubiquitous but ineffectual gendarme, real name Jules Antoine (1918–2003)
Marie Bodard, sweetshop owner (1903–89)
‘Zizi’, or ‘Zizi Pan-Pan la Galette’ (Louis Albert), Bouillon’s most libidinous man and a Bourland on his mother’s side (1934–2011)
Rimbaud, French poet and Ardennais (1854–91)
Verlaine, French poet and Ardennais (1844–96)
Baudelaire, French poet and reluctant traveller through Belgium (1821–67)
Simone Signoret, actor (1921–85)
Gordon Jackson, actor (1923–90)
James Robertson Justice, actor (1905–70)
Jack Warner, actor (1895–1989)
Louis Jouvet, director (1887–1951)
Cardinal Mazarin (Giulio Mazzarino), Italian cardinal and French statesman (1602–61)
First there is memory, its sleights of mind;
then comes forgetting: the traitor betrayed.
BEFORE TELEVISION BACKLIT them with its haunted blues,
its gauze of voice over voice, dubbings of Dynasty and Dallas,
there were firesides filtered through net curtains, shadows
pulling free from shadows. The furniture didn’t furnish,
it loomed; heavy as cannon, it boomed darkness.
After closedown, after the trembling not-quite-stasis
of the RTB testcard, the blue glow lingered,
fizzed against mosquito nets, caught the flypaper garlands
with their incrustation of bluebottle and mouche à merde,
the banal shitfly with his coalface glitter.
That was the house’s pulse, a comatose cellar-beat
to which my grandmother, Bouillon’s only dressmaker,
pedalled kilometres of stitching, threaded her needles
seven to seven in daylight that took all day to die.
Her only books were swatches; she held them up
to the daughters and widows of Wallonia
fresh with their ideas from Brussels, of haute couture,
their cut-outs from Paris-Match: a small-town catwalk
of Deneuves along a corridor of Stockman mannequins
stuck with pins, stained with oil or grease, and for me then
(for me still) so oddly sexual with their tapered waists,
the perfection of their closedness. My face at the window, I’d watch
her busy sparrow-jerks inside the darkness that fleshed her out,
and smell the last-but-one all-day pot-au-feu that held its own
against the clashing scents of factory-owners’ wives.
But the body that stayed caught in the full-length looking-glass
is mine, my drowning childhood pulling down, and these days
nothing – least of all my whole life – flashes by. Only the empty
mirror gives me back that time, and the lace curtains,
more air than lace, are sieves for shadows to pass through light.
Each time I breathe I breathe it in, that sublimate of all that’s gone.
Essence of Indoors would be the perfume, if they made it.
THIS SMALL DARK monochrome shop on a thin cobblestoned street with a pavement the width of a dustbin in the Belgian border town of Bouillon has become a legend in my children’s bedtime. It feels more real to them than ever it felt to me, clouded over as it is in a mist of imperfect recollection and wishful thinking. Even at the time, when I was a child visiting it every day, I felt as if I was remembering it. Or that it was someone else’s memory I was hosting, incubating it like a kind of surrogate. And as with so much of that childhood, I seem to remember not the things themselves but the memories of the things, as if the present I experienced them in was already slowing up and treacling over, fixing itself in a sepia wash. My children don’t know that feeling yet, so telling them about Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, filling it in, is like colouring in a black-and-white picture. Actually, since there were never really enough sweets to call it a sweet shop – ‘magasin d’bonbons’ described, in truth, its function rather than its essence – I find myself putting in most of the sweets too.
Like most shops and workplaces in Bouillon, it was really just someone’s front room, where they sat, smoked and ate and watched TV, gliding around on fat felt slippers, and sold what they made or cooked, gutted, chopped or topped and tailed. The baker’s across the road had their oven in the back of the house, their shop at the front. In the evenings they’d roll their sofa and armchairs in front of the bread-oven and gather around what was left of the day’s heat. And it was a particular kind of heat you got in the baker’s in the evening: all residual, infiltrating the air rather than wrapping it in warmth, but always somehow enough.
The cafés and cigarette- and souvenir-shops were the same: a counter or a bar with the owner or landlord sitting on the customer side smoking, eating, reading the papers, until someone came in. At this point they would stop being a person living in their house and become a tradesperson or a shopkeeper – a commerçant – but only for the duration of the transaction. Even the butchers lived at the back of the shop, their immaculate living room flanked by a fridge room and a hoseable chopping room. (I always tried to pay the exact money, so as not to receive the bloody change, usually streaked with meaty pulp.) My grandmother, Lucie, also worked in the front room, using the corridor as a catwalk for her ‘clientes’ and a large cupboard built into the wall, whose door she had replaced with a thin curtain, as her dressing room. She overworked and undercharged, cooked and kept house, did her own accounts and looked after her ailing husband, Eugène, my grandfather, damaged by a life in the factory owned by the people for whom Lucie made dresses.
Eugène ailed. For most of my childhood that seemed to be his job, his second career: to ail emphysemically, peeling potatoes and playing cards in the kitchen on a red formica table. He had been a useful local footballer for Le Standard de Bouillon, a mean couyon-player and local pétanque champion, and in the days before the ailing began, it was my job to scour the cafés of Bouillon (about twenty for a population of two thousand) to bring him back for meals. Another habit of his, which runs in the family, was to piss outside wherever possible; indeed, to go out of his way to take a piss outdoors, even when he was comfortably settled indoors: even when watching television across the landing from the bathroom, he’d get off the sofa, go down the stairs, out into the ruelle and urinate against the outside wall. Sometimes he’d go up the small lane to the foot of the castle and piss against the rock, or down to the river, where he’d add a bladderful to the water he fished in. A piss was always a special occasion for men in the Lejeune household. Somewhere there is a photograph of three generations of Lejeunes – my uncle Jean-Pol, my son Osian and me – lined up at the water’s edge pissing into it. The blur, the haunting at our shoulders, is Eugène, joining his progeny in adding his golden arc to the moving water of Time. And we in turn are paying what Robert Frost, in his poem ‘West-Running Brook’, called ‘the tribute of the current to the source’. Eugène’s nickname was Le Dènn, a patois corruption of the Walloon Le Djenn which is itself a corruption of Le gène, which is also the French for gene, as in progeny, genetics, genes, Genesis and eugenics. Eugène may not be where it all began, but it’s his face we wear: my sister, my mother, my children and me.
When I’m asked about events in my childhood, about my childhood at all, I think mostly of rooms. I think of times as places, with walls and windows and doors. To remake that childhood (to remake myself) I’d need to build a house made of all the rooms in which the things and the nothings that went into me happened. And plenty of nothing happened too: it’s The Great Indoors for me every time. This house of mine, this house of mind, would be like a sort of Rubik’s cube, but without any single correct alignment or order: the rooms would be continuous, contiguous, they could be shuffled and moved about, so that its groundplan would be always changing. Just as they build for earthquakes or hurricanes, creating buildings that have some give in them, that can sway with the wind or sit on stilts in water and marshland, that can shake to their foundations but still absorb the movement, so the rooms in the house of a remembered childhood take on the shocks and aftershocks of adult life, those amnesiac ripples that spread their blankness along the past. Trying to remember is itself a shock, a kind of detonation in the shadows, like dropping a stone into the silt at the bottom of a pond: the water that had seemed clear is now turbid (that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word) and enswirled.
One evening, my children asked for a picture of Marie Bodard’s, so we set about recreating it. Remembering makes things real – it’s the only guarantee that they’ve actually happened. Events owe their existence to memories more than memories owe their existence to events. Most of my childhood feels more real to me now than it did then. There’s been a filtering out of overall meaning or point (half the time now I can’t remember, if I ever knew, who most of the people in my mind’s eye’s memories are – they’re like the forgotten cast of a lost film), and a heightening of detail: smell, taste, sight, touch. Textures and moods and states of mind or body (comfort, safety, warmth, or nausea, cold, sadness) push out the big things, the ‘significance’, the ‘meaning’ of the event. No, they don’t push them out; rather, they become the means by which you get access once again to the big things. Death becomes concrete once more not because this or that loved family member or friend occupies your heart any more than they once did, but because the timbre of your sorrow comes back to you through your senses, through the feeling you had then, that day, which has stood suspended, has lived in its room unchanged, long after the house itself, the house that gave it context, has crumbled or been demolished. So the house of memory becomes a house in which all the rooms that have survived demolition have been arranged. The house has been flattened but somehow the rooms are all intact. I think that’s what I mean.
MY MOTHER’S FAMILY have lived in Bouillon for generations. Until the early twentieth century, many of the men worked as miquelets, small-scale loggers, cutting down trees in the forest that surrounds the town, chopping the wood and tying it up into rafts, and then floating them into Bouillon to be dried and sold. The attics and cellars of hundreds of Bouillon houses still store the old miquelet tools, and some gîtes display them on their walls to give their visitors that ‘Ardenne profonde’ feel. Later, like my grandfather’s family, the men worked in one of the two factories, or, like my grandmother’s, as domestic servants or hotel chambermaids, waiters, handymen or kitchen staff. As with many such families joined together by marriage, they all finished up living in the same place: 8 Rue du Brutz, a three-storeyed house made up of two houses knocked through. At the back of the house you can still see the outline of the badly filled-in front door of the second house beneath the oak beam that was its lintel. The steps that led to it are long-gone. On the other side of that infilling, the cavity that was once the doorway is now a cupboard full of sheets and bedding in the first-floor bedroom. As the closest bedroom to the bathroom and stairs, it was traditionally reserved for whoever was oldest or most infirm. In my time it was my great-grandmother’s, then my grandfather’s, and finally Lucie’s, my grandmother’s. I had it for a week myself when, aged about ten, I twisted my ankle by jumping from a high wall near the castle. Lucie, a dressmaker and seamstress, had made me a Spiderman costume after I had seen the film at René Lemaire’s cinema. She must have forgotten to explain that the costume did not in itself confer the matching superpowers, because I embarked on a series of high-risk spider-stunts which finished with me being bandaged up and stuck upstairs for days, still wearing blue tights and red underpants, and watching Zorro, for which Lucie also made me a costume.
At one time there would have been more than a dozen people living in this house, spread across four generations, and since these were the days before retirement homes, many of the rooms lodged great-grandparents and grandparents from different branches of the family. Old ladies in colourful dresses could be found in the recesses of rooms you’d forgotten were there, like bright bobbins left in drawers. The house is now empty most of the year, and sits marinading in its past for nine months out of twelve. The people who lived and died there also marinaded in their pasts, and spent a great deal of time telling me their stories, or using me as an intermediary to tell themselves their stories. All of them had one thing in common: they thought they were the last of the vieux Bouillonnais.
WATCHING AN OLD police procedural, probably a Maigret, sometime in the early eighties while convalescing from glandular fever (an illness I experienced more as convalescence than as actual illness: I felt as if I was simply recovering from something, rather than actually having the something to recover from in the first place), it came to me: a thief pushing a key into putty so that its outline would be caught in the relief and he could copy it, then burgle the house.
That was memory, I realised: a putty with which you could make another key, which would open the same door, but never quite as well. In no time, you’d be burgling your own past with the slightly off-key key that always got you in though there was less and less to take.
COLLETTE WAS DIABETIC from the age of five or six. Her life was blighted by it. It made her erratic at work, ruined her diet, made her ill and undependable and depressed. It ruined her relationships and then her marriage. She was my aunt: tender, childish, loving, delicate and suicidal, my sister and I loved her, and loved the time we had with her so much it still hurts to call it back to mind. Besides, the more I think of her, the less there is, blanking over like a photograph left in the sun, so I have to be careful, ration out what is left of her because soon there will only be a whiteness in my memory, shaped to the outline of her going.
The only time Collette wasn’t suicidal was when she had finally decided to commit suicide. I’ve seen it since, and I know now why so many people are surprised when someone kills themselves just when they seemed to have stopped being depressed, to have climbed out of the gulf and started once more to touch others.
It’s the cliché of the left-behind. It always starts ‘We all thought she had . . .’ and ‘he seemed himself again for the first time in X months or years’, then peters out into the unsaid, the unsayable. Well, the reason he and she seemed, or looked or sounded well, good, better, was that they’d decided. That normality you thought you saw – the smiling again, the answering the phone, the coming to the door and waving you off like they used to – that was them making a last lap of the circuit.
I still have Collette’s chess set, though the board is lost. As a child she wrote her name on everything, including the little box of chess pieces I am teaching my son to play with. So her name is everywhere, her old toys and books all signed, her school exercise books; even the wallpaper in her old room from when she was a child. And her suicide note. For years, and specifically from 1988 to 2004, it was kept in a drawer in the living-room cupboard with things like glue and scissors and Blu-tack, old spectacles, unpaid bills, stamps, sweets and loose change. It was the most visited drawer in the house – God knows why my grandmother put it there, where you would have to see it twice or three times a day. Perhaps it was her way of keeping it present, refusing to let go, but also trying to embed the terrible thing into routine, to dull it and wear it away with the quotidian, the way the sea works rocks into sand, so that it was no longer present as the catastrophe it was. Either way, it didn’t work. ‘A vous tous’ said the envelope. I threw it out one day, suddenly angry at having spent so many years pushing it aside in my quest for this or that moment’s object and never thinking to move it somewhere that was subject to less finger-traffic. Somewhere you’d actually have to want to see it before you did. But who would actually want to read a suicide note?
Actually, I did, sometimes, when I was drunk or depressed or feeling especially strong (in which case I might take it out and test myself, like a weight-lifter adding the extra weight-plates), I’d open it and take it in: its crisp practicality (allocation of objects, mainly), its blunt refusal to be in any way memorable, either in terms of phrasing or in terms of the quality or extremity of emotion it laid claim to. In the upstairs living room my grandmother had left Collette’s hospital bag, her last hospital bag, because she had been to many hospitals, and that too had stayed for years, pitifully wedged between the arm and cushion of the sofa where it was dropped the day she died and they brought back her things. I threw that out too.
I did something similar when my grandmother died, and then my mother and then my father. Same house, different clearances.
MY LAST SUMMER before going to boarding school – I was nine – my parents decided to save money on school uniforms by getting them all made by my grandmother. Like all home-made clothes, they were both better and worse: better cut, better material, but worse because it was being better that was the problem: my grey suit fitted me too well and looked too good. The last thing you want is to stand out sartorially, especially as a child, and especially in England.