Remembering the flower power plot

So I picked out a rather pleasant autumny heather-mixture composition, headed for the till and was shaken up a bit when the lady asked if I was going to put it on the tomb right away.

Then the eurocent dropped. That’s what the soaring banks of many-headed chrysanths were all about – the All Saints Day bank holiday on 1 November when the French, wherever they may live now, return home to their roots and to the local cemetery to give the family plot its annual wash and brush-up.

Yes, it might not be the Battle of Flowers, but it’s certainly a sight to see on a crisp autumn morning.

Mind you, many a family reunion was shaken, too, because the financial crisis is hitting us as hard as it is you, and for the first time ever it seems that some rotten souls have been, well, pinching the flowers off one grave to put them on their own final resting place. Whatever next, eh?

Anyway, they’re tricky stuff for expats, these floral codes of practice, as Mme M discovered when she came home the other day all excited about this painting she’d picked up for a song in the vide-grenier, the ‘attic-emptier’ or car-boot, just down the hill in Léhon village on the banks of the Rance.

A poppy field, it was, in the style of Monet. Or is it Manet? I can never remember. But for a Brit, poppies can only mean one thing in early November, can’t they, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted it looming over me from the chimney-breast.

La Patronne did listen sympathetically to my views, then set to with the hammer and nail, our house being a democracy run on Thatcherian lines. Quite a frying-pan-and-fire job for me really, because it was as a political refugee fleeing Madame Tatchair that I got off the St Malo-Paris Montparnasse express in 1980, speaking less French than you can glean from a Vache Qui Rit label.

And I had another bit of explaining to do at school the other day because one of the kids wanted to know what on earth Mr Cameron thought he looked like, wearing a poppy on the main evening journal télévisé at 8 o’clock the night before, for goodness sake.

So I rooted through my desk and dug out the poppies my parents had brought over a good few years ago now and gave them a final airing in the other classes, too. Well, I’ll be handing in my board-duster at Christmas, you see, after 55 years on one side of the desk or the other, the first of them being in Miss Stephens’ class at St James, behind the church, up Le Breton Lane, if memory serves, which it increasingly doesn’t these days.

NO, the French don’t do poppies, but 11 November is a bank holiday, and Marc Jean, head of the Archives Municipales in St Malo, made an interesting discovery when revising the town’s roll of honour listing those mort pour la France.

Yes, he realised that ten Ruellan brothers went off to fight in the First World War, but six of them lost their lives there, and a seventh died from his wounds a few years later. And after carefully checking and cross-checking, he is fairly sure now that no one sibling group in the whole of the country has ever been hit harder.

It seems the Ruellans were an old distinguished St Malo family. The father was a ship-owner and his 13 children were brought up to believe in Dieu et la Patrie,

so when war broke out, all his sons signed up without hesitating.

And yet it would have been ever so easy for Julius, the priest, to get a cushy billet away from the front. Stanislas came back from America. where he had been seeking his fortune, André from Uruguay, and Bernard arrived from Algeria in the oriental uniform of the Zouaves, the French light infantry there.

Sad to say, Bernard died in 1915 and Henri, Julius, Berchmans, André and Louis also lost their lives before Armistice Day. Xavier was gassed at Verdun and only survived for a few years more before following them.

On 11 November 1938 the Education Ministry exhorted the nation’s school-children to remember the example set by the ten brothers, but their memory

got swept away in the Second World War.

So should it be revived again today? The head archivist in the Cité Corsaire certainly thinks so. The notions of duty, sacrifice and patriotism may have less resonance now than they did a hundred years ago, he feels, but the humanity of such heroes is still relevant.

JEAN Gaubert served the celebrated Norman town of Camembert with great distinction for many years, too, though first as a town councillor and then as mayor, and one cheese-maker recently commissioned a portrait of him to feature on a special tribute label.

Yes, there he was on the familiar wooden box in all his municipal glory, wearing his tricolour sash of office. The only problem was that the sash should be worn diagonally from right shoulder to left hip, and his was on the other way round, with the blue band uppermost and the red one on the bottom. Well, they got that bit right, anyway.

Reminds me of the time I was invigilating some public exam in the English room of a Dinan school and the resident teacher had gone to all the trouble of pinning up a real cloth Union Jack above the blackboard, bless her. Only … yup! It was upside-down, very few French people being aware, or even caring come to that, that our dear old flag does indeed have a right way up, never mind how we can tell. Maybe I should have sent her an email gunship up the Rance.

ANOTHER local politician, François Goulard, president of the county council in the Morbihan in southern Brittany and an ex-government minister, has also just earned himself great national distinction by being awarded the Prix Humour et Politique 2012.

Now I don’t want you to get too excited about this, because humour in French politics always reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s 18th-century jibe about a woman preaching being like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well but you are surprised to see it done at all. Or describing a Johnny Halliday album as good: you do have to make allowances, n’est-ce pas?

Actually, President Hollande is quite witty on the side, apparently, a regular little quipster in fact, but his PR men have told him to cut it out in public because nobody will take him seriously otherwise. I know my own common or garden British sense of humour has occasionally dropped me in it here, the French too easily mistaking it for flippancy.

So what did Monsieur Goulard say that had them all rolling in the aisles? Well, it was this: ‘Being an ex-minister means getting into the back seat of a car and expecting it to start.’ Don’t say I didn’t warn you, eh?

Then there was the socialist quip back in March that ‘the good thing about the clocks going forward is that we’ll have one hour less of Monsieur Sarkozy.’

But I’ll spare you the other also-rans.

Kenavo!