snatches back a spade Theo has picked up from the sandpit and slaps him smartly across the wrist.
‘It’s not his. He needs to learn,’ she says to me decidedly as I turn open-mouthed to try and remonstrate. Words fail me: what I really want to say to her – touch my
child again and I’ll report you to the police, you
hag
– only comes hours later.
Sometimes after, or instead of, the playground, we go to the carousel, the
manège
, which has cars and lorries and fire engines and bright flashing fairground bulbs. On our first
few visits Theo is desperate to have a turn, but as soon as he is seated in a small car, rudimentary seatbelt fastened, he finds it terrifying and screams to be removed. This pantomime happens
several times before he works up the courage to stay on, face furiously concentrated, ticket clutched in his hand. The atmosphere around the
manège
is surprisingly serious, for
something that is supposed to be fun. The
manège
man doesn’t exactly exude bonhomie or job satisfaction and the children rarely smile: they are grave-faced, small hands tight
on steering wheels, or ready to press a button or anticipating the important handover of the ticket. Once the
manège
starts to move, they spin, stately slow, faces blurred, ignoring
the waves and encouragements of parents and nannies. Sometimes someone breaks down and cries, a red, crumpled face flashing past with the others. Depending on the degree of parental stoicism, this
might be met with a jolly exhortation, or in the last resort, the long legs of the
manège
man, striding over tiny cars and horses to whisk the wailing infant to safety. It has a
strange, U-rated sense of peril that attracts and frightens the children all at once.
Parisian parks and public spaces are supposed to be emblematic of French childhood: they are the theatre of its pivotal events. As a sickly child in
Du Côté de Chez Swann
,
Marcel’s outings are limited to trips to the yellowing, also sickly, lawns of the detested Champs-Elysées, but it is there, bored of playing next to the wooden horses and seeking
distraction, that he spots Gilberte for the first time, making each return trip an agony of anticipation. Will she be there? Will rain thwart him? The Champs are transformed by the intensity of his
longing and expectation into a shimmering wonderland of possibility.
In Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her very proper Parisian childhood,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, ‘le Luxembourg’ is so much part of the quotidian that it
doesn’t even merit its full name and becomes almost a character in its own right. It returns again and again as the arena of so much formative memory: it is the place where she experiences
her first crush on another girl, the place where she ‘marries’ her cousin and where they have their honeymoon on the carousel, where she takes twilight walks with her father, spies on
courting couples and spends her first solo outings reading near the Medici fountain. In the ‘perfectly domesticated’, orderly landscape of Catholic schoolgirl Paris, the park represents
a tiny taste of freedom. As I watch Theo clamber into Monceau’s fake grottos, collect leaves and run cars along the base of the statues, it seems a small kind of freedom compared to my
childhood in the empty expanses of the Yorkshire moors and dales, but when you’re as little as he is, perhaps even this is enough.
More often, though, I think about how much longer we need to stay for Theo to be tired enough for us to have a relatively calm evening or whether Louis is about to explode with furious hunger
and whether I have time for a crêpe on the way home. The crêpes are so good. They come scaldingly hot from the iron grid in the park kiosk, handed over by the unsmiling man behind the
counter. They are pale and a little floppy, but with a crunch of sugar crystals, the outside speckled with darker brown, wrapped in a tight fold of white waxed paper. This momentary
‘It’s not his. He needs to learn,’ she says to me decidedly as I turn open-mouthed to try and remonstrate. Words fail me: what I really want to say to her – touch my
child again and I’ll report you to the police, you
hag
– only comes hours later.
Sometimes after, or instead of, the playground, we go to the carousel, the
manège
, which has cars and lorries and fire engines and bright flashing fairground bulbs. On our first
few visits Theo is desperate to have a turn, but as soon as he is seated in a small car, rudimentary seatbelt fastened, he finds it terrifying and screams to be removed. This pantomime happens
several times before he works up the courage to stay on, face furiously concentrated, ticket clutched in his hand. The atmosphere around the
manège
is surprisingly serious, for
something that is supposed to be fun. The
manège
man doesn’t exactly exude bonhomie or job satisfaction and the children rarely smile: they are grave-faced, small hands tight
on steering wheels, or ready to press a button or anticipating the important handover of the ticket. Once the
manège
starts to move, they spin, stately slow, faces blurred, ignoring
the waves and encouragements of parents and nannies. Sometimes someone breaks down and cries, a red, crumpled face flashing past with the others. Depending on the degree of parental stoicism, this
might be met with a jolly exhortation, or in the last resort, the long legs of the
manège
man, striding over tiny cars and horses to whisk the wailing infant to safety. It has a
strange, U-rated sense of peril that attracts and frightens the children all at once.
Parisian parks and public spaces are supposed to be emblematic of French childhood: they are the theatre of its pivotal events. As a sickly child in
Du Côté de Chez Swann
,
Marcel’s outings are limited to trips to the yellowing, also sickly, lawns of the detested Champs-Elysées, but it is there, bored of playing next to the wooden horses and seeking
distraction, that he spots Gilberte for the first time, making each return trip an agony of anticipation. Will she be there? Will rain thwart him? The Champs are transformed by the intensity of his
longing and expectation into a shimmering wonderland of possibility.
In Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her very proper Parisian childhood,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, ‘le Luxembourg’ is so much part of the quotidian that it
doesn’t even merit its full name and becomes almost a character in its own right. It returns again and again as the arena of so much formative memory: it is the place where she experiences
her first crush on another girl, the place where she ‘marries’ her cousin and where they have their honeymoon on the carousel, where she takes twilight walks with her father, spies on
courting couples and spends her first solo outings reading near the Medici fountain. In the ‘perfectly domesticated’, orderly landscape of Catholic schoolgirl Paris, the park represents
a tiny taste of freedom. As I watch Theo clamber into Monceau’s fake grottos, collect leaves and run cars along the base of the statues, it seems a small kind of freedom compared to my
childhood in the empty expanses of the Yorkshire moors and dales, but when you’re as little as he is, perhaps even this is enough.
More often, though, I think about how much longer we need to stay for Theo to be tired enough for us to have a relatively calm evening or whether Louis is about to explode with furious hunger
and whether I have time for a crêpe on the way home. The crêpes are so good. They come scaldingly hot from the iron grid in the park kiosk, handed over by the unsmiling man behind the
counter. They are pale and a little floppy, but with a crunch of sugar crystals, the outside speckled with darker brown, wrapped in a tight fold of white waxed paper. This momentary
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