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Return to Rennes

Paul Williams

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Rennes, France

Recently, I walked from Winchester through France to a small village near Condom in the south-west. The journey took me back to Rennes and stirred memories of my first visit to the Breton capital as a student in the 1960s. I was assistant d’anglais at a highly regarded boarding school run by priests. It had been requisitioned during the war as a hospital for the treatment of venereal disease and a notice to this effect was pinned in German above the entrance. It was only a few months before I arrived in the spring of 1964 that the German teacher had managed to get it removed but it was still the source of many amusing anecdotes.

My friends at the time were primarily among the pions, students employed by boarding schools to supervise pupils. One poor fellow lived in a glass box at the end of an enormous dormitory and used to get dressed and undressed in the boys’ bathroom, to which he kept a key. Another lived in a tiny room under the stairs which he called his sarcophage, much to the disapproval of the priests who discouraged speaking about death so flippantly. The pions were paid very little and were always very hard up. As assistant d’anglais, I earned more but the main benefit was that we all got free board and lodging. Prim ladies in black dresses with little white pinnies waited on us in the staff dining-room and we never went short of food.

Our main enemies were les corbeaux (‘the crows’, our slang for the priests because of their black cassocks) who raked in a full teacher’s salary of which they could (and did) save every cent. They were an arrogant bunch and lived in separate rooms along an echoing corridor with a wooden floor polished daily by a cleaner who gave it its final buff by sliding effortlessly from one end to the other in a pair of polishing slippers. One priest was an accomplished writer with a string of books, and royalties, to his name; another wrote sacred music (regularly performed in the chapel), including one piece with a particularly catchy tune which I still sing zestfully in the shower. One priest, though, has fallen from grace and is now married with children.

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