Danny takes some Time Out.
At about this time, Niel invited me over to spend a week with him in Paris. This sounded a good idea - except for the air fare ! As a general principle, we had a rooted aversion to paying good money to fly in any aircraft - it seemed to us an unnatural state of affairs. The cheapest BEA/Air France could offer was a £11 "Positioning Flight" (LHR-Orly) at 11 pm. This was a substantial sum (about a quarter of a month's pay for a Flt.Lt.), but there was no competition in the market in those days.
But for the money you were very well treated. I took the evening train to London, and reported to the Victoria Air Terminal about nine. There all the formalities were completed politely; they made sure I was taking no more than £10 (?) in currency out of the country; they weighed me and my luggage and loaded the passengers onto a coach. Next stop, aircraft steps! (Eat your heart out, Ryanair and Easyjet). Of course, there was no left/right business then: we were all "first class" and took our places in ample and comfortable seats in a BEA "Ambassador".
The flight was uneventful, I don't remember their offering us anything in the way of food or drink, but suppose they must have done. He thumped it down at Orly like a bag of coal, it was just like old times. Then, after customs and immigration there, a coach to the Aerogare des Invalides, where Niel picked me up, and onto the Metro.
Again, he'd been billeted at the apartment of a Mme Semionoff, another White Russian widow from the old regime, who lived alone in the top floor of a house in the Rue de Vaugirard. The two-person lift was an open Meccano kind of thing which squeaked, rattled and swayed up and down the centre of the stairwell: it frightened the life out of me.
He seemed to have been left to his own devices in his Russian studies, but chatted on in Russian well enough with Mme Seminonoff, whereas I had to do my best in schoolboy French. Apparently his only official duty was to attend a pay parade at the Embassy every week or so, apart from that he must have been working to some sort of a syllabus. He had to read a Russian language newspaper regularly, and I found that there were two different ones in Paris.
It seems that at the time of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had declared a number of letters in the old Cyrillic alphabet to be redundant, and abolished them by decree. The emigres, however,regarded any decisions of the Soviets as null and void, and continued to use the old orthography. This caused additional problems for the student, and meant that two different newspapers had to be printed (with widely differing editorial views !)
With the limited time I had out there (and the even more limited money), we had a look at Notre-Dame, the Sacre-Coeur and Napoleon's tomb. We got up the Eifel Tower, went to the Opera one night ("Tosca", I think). one afternoon to the Galerie des Glaces (ice rink), where I was able to demontstrate my skills to Niel (insofar as it is possible to demonstrate anything on hired boots/skates other than the ability to stand up and move about).
One evening, I recall, we found ourselves in the Salle Pleyel (wherever that was), listening to an erudite lecture (with slides) about "Les Moines d'Athos", who live on pinnacles of rock to be free of the temptations of this world, with which their only contact is a man-carrying basket on the end of a long dodgy rope (sounds like a case for Elf'nSafety). How Niel got hold of these tickets I don't know, most likely someone dumped them on Mme S., and she palmed them off on him.
The only two abiding memories I have of the visit are of a car showroom, with a gleaming new black Citroen Light Fifteen (Maigret's "Traction Avant") at (old) Fr615,000 (about £600) to anyone with the cash. (This at a time when you couldn't get a new car in UK for love or money).
And a clever little electrical plug/socket idea. At the time, Woolworths used to sell little 250V 5A two-pin plugs and sockets for 9d (4p) each. They were very useful for extending flexes, I must still have a dozen in the house. (Elf'nSafety, reach for the smelling salts). The French went one stage better with a combined one hardly bigger than a single. There was a side entry flex, one end was plug. the other socket. It was ideal, you plugged your first one into the wall for your lamp or whatever, and a socket appeared ready for another plug, and so ad infinitum, or until the fuses blew.
All too soon, the week was over, the return (Air France) the same as outbound, and back to Thornaby. Niel ended up in Habbaniya, I don't think I saw him again until '59.
Cheers,
Danny42C.
Last edited by Danny42C; 26th Apr 2013 at 22:07.
Reason: Add Material.