I loved Paris in my springtime by Mary Kenny

Sixty years ago, the winter of 1962-63 was the coldest since the notoriously chilly winter of 1947.

It is Juliet Nicolson’s theme, in her book Frostquake, that Britain went into that exceptionally cold spell in the sober and repressive spirit of the 1950s, and emerged, in the thaw of spring 1963, into the swinging Sixties.

And it was during this ‘frostquake’ that I made my way, in January 1963, from Dublin to Holyhead, thence to London Euston and across town to Victoria, from Victoria to Dover for the ferry to Calais – and then on to Paris.

Reports describe frozen train lines, broken communications and people dying from hypothermia, but I didn’t register very much about all that. I just thought it was immensely exciting to be getting to Paris – to be on a journey where at the destination everything would be so different.

And it was. Cafés really did smell of aromatic Gauloises cigarettes and workmen in blue overalls really did start their early morning with a tot of spirits. I was met at the Gare St Lazare by my new employer, Madame Chevalier, mother of seven children.

Having been a giggling waitress and a terrible secretary in Ireland, I was now in for a period of being a useless au pair, constantly unfavourably compared with my German predecessor, Gisela, who had been a home maker of perfection. Gisela hovered like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in my early independent life: never encountered, but ever present.

As for the difference between Ireland and France in 1963 – what a culture shock! And while Ireland of this time is often described as repressive, backward and overly religious, the paradox is that, in an everyday sense, for me Ireland was a freer, more relaxed and more easy-going society.

Though I loved France, it was a much more socially controlled and formalised culture. There were – and still are, to some degree – hierarchical practices about whom you should address as ‘vous’ or ‘tu’.

Although the Chevalier family lived in a suburb – I had chosen them because they were near Versailles – there were no casual neighbourly relationships. Nobody was invited into the family home who wasn’t part of the family. Social relations were conducted elsewhere, in restaurants, or other meeting-places outside the home.

In my mother’s rambling old Victorian house, in Dublin’s Sandymount, the relaxed Irish way of life was one long bout of hospitality. The side door was forever open, and visitors would just lift the latch and walk in – and come straight into the kitchen. Family friends often invited themselves, sometimes at mealtimes, and no one ever objected.

Meals chez nous tended to be simple (except for Sunday dinner): you had a boiled egg for your tea, or a fried sausage or two. French cuisine was of course superb – but the cost, in women’s labour! Every meal had to be cooked from scratch; every vegetable peeled and sliced; every sauce prepared. I thought it drudgery. Frenchwomen were free to read Françoise Sagan, but they were still tied to the kitchen sink.

In the afternoon, it was seamstress time. I unwisely took up a novel after the post-lunch washing-up and clearing-up had been completed, only to be reprimanded with the words ‘Mademoiselle, one does not read novels in the afternoon.’ The practice was considered idle.

It wasn’t long before my au-pair posting came to an end. The shadow of Gisela marked my total inadequacy.

My host family arranged for me to leave their employ. Still, they very responsibly also arranged for me to be lodged in a convent, near the Place d’Alma.

I had felt perfectly free wandering around Dublin at any hour of day and night, but it was borne in on me that I must be very prudent in Paris and its suburbs. I am not conscious of ever having heard the word ‘rape’ in Ireland, but I was constantly warned about it in France.

‘Mademoiselle, vous serez violée!’ was the repeated threat. This warning sometimes carried a racist subtext: be careful of ‘les Arabes’, especially. Avoid ‘les Algériens’.

There was a gaggle of English girls there, sent to Paris for Easter, and the ambience was high-spirited and lively.

If 1963 was the real beginning of the social (and sexual) revolution of our time, my next posting furthered my own ‘éducation sentimentale’. Through the convent network, I heard of an elderly lady who was looking for a part-time au pair and companion – mornings only, but accommodation and meals provided, besides the usual modest remuneration.

Madame le Docteur Miller lived in the 17th arrondissement, just off the Avenue Wagram. She was a spirited old bird – a widow who had been, for a time, a diplomat in her own right to some rather obscure Francophone country.

She belonged to a social group to which she was much devoted, the International Allied Circle of Intellectuals. I was taken along to her various soirées: usually composed of other old dears, male and female; occasionally composed of former monarchs – ‘Let me present you to the ex-King of Georgia.’ My main anxiety was that I couldn’t afford any decent clothes.

Rather like the worldly old dowagers in Gigi, Madame le Docteur sought to introduce me to the ways of society. As it turned out, many of the values of such a world were about to become redundant.

Madame le Docteur took some care in instructing me on the proper etiquette when the wife encounters the mistress in public. ‘If they are of the same class,’ she said, ‘they kiss each other. If the mistress is of a lower ranking – let’s say, a little ballet dancer from the corps de ballet, the wife does not acknowledge.’ It was a question of status, or milieu.

Many of her illustrative anecdotes centred around marriage. ‘The chains of marriage are so onerous that it may take three to carry them.’

In 1963, as I was listening to Madame le Docteur’s tutorials on how the mistress greets the wife in polite society, subversive revolutionary movements were gathering momentum against all such social boundaries and definitions.

I soon quit the employ of Madame le Docteur – on quite good terms – and was now occupying a sixth-floor chambre de bonne in the Boulevard Raspail.

A maid’s room in a servant’s quarter was in the gift of a delightful Irish-American family, for whom I did childcare and school-run duties. Heating was sparse, washing conditions were primitive, and the loo was a hole in the ground over which one would squat. A doctor assured me this was excellent for the intestines.

It was near Montparnasse, and this, I soon discovered, was my natural home – a bohemian neighbourhood, adjacent to old cinemas and bookshops, and replete with café-wine bars. I soon developed a favourite tipple of un ballon de rosé.

I had made a tentative start in journalism, sending articles back to the Dublin Evening Press – and I duly received the welcome sum of three guineas per publication.

In the wake of the Algerian troubles, Paris seemed to be in a continual state of rebellion. It was the crucible of what was to become mainstream political and social change – encompassing feminism, post-colonialism, sexual liberation and the dismantling of traditional education which would eventually lead to the dominant intellectual force of our time: post-modernism.

It’s probable that everything we regard as ‘woke’ today really derives from Paris in 1962-63. Aged 19, I lapped it up!

This is an extract from Mary Kenny’s The Way We Were: Centenary Essays on Catholic Ireland (Columba Books)