Brussels Two
Off again!
Jimmy and I were back in London Office before the end of February 1961. One or two senior people who knew absolutely nothing about what we’d been doing made complimentary noises, so we began developing and issuing a comprehensive and absurdly detailed report for distribution to all the relevant great and good in the company. Writing it - and repeatedly updating bits of it to reflect the rapidly changing scene in the Congo - initially occupied all our time. This conveniently enabled us to postpone the moment when we would actually engage with the work we’d been sent to Brussels to master and perform back in London. I’d been comforted in Brussels when Jimmy chose to work on the invoicing because it involved a good deal of thorough work with figures, and getting them right. I sensed that Jimmy had discovered this the hard way while we were there and was less than enthusiastic to get into it back in the office. My job, on the other hand, dealing with import licences, letters of credit and various other broader admin processes, suited my temperament much better.
When we couldn’t reasonably delay any longer, our Brussels friends began directing the relevant paperwork our way. As we settled into our new Congo job - in practical terms as the London branch of Brussels office - it soon became clear that the mere couple of weeks had been quite insufficient for us to grasp all the detailed ramifications for doing it properly. Misinterpretations and errors in the calculations were quickly and repeatedly spotted in Brussels and documents returned to us for correction. It soon became such a tedious business and wasted so much of our highly competent Brussels colleagues’ time that eventually Liesenborghs very firmly suggested to Bill Hunt that Jimmy and I should return to Brussels and work in his department for several months until we’d really got the hang of it. It would mean months of working in Brussels, living in a superior hotel, and on – to us - a generous daily expense allowance. When Bill put it to us, we considered the matter carefully and, decently restraining our bubbling enthusiasm, both agreed that our personal lives in England could allow for this with little difficulty.
I was single and had only myself to consider, but Jimmy’s arrangements were not as easily made as he’d implied. Less than a year earlier he’d married a French (very French) woman called Monique who now lived with him in his Shepherds Bush flat. Given her home background, Monique had come down somewhat in social terms. Her father was a member of the Légion d’Honneur, a very senior director of Philips Electrical, one of the largest companies on the continent. He was thoroughly wealthy, well advanced in a prominent career and not used to being messed about by people. He’d recently been responsible for managing a gigantic Son et Lumière presentation on the Pyramids. Monique and Jimmy had had a baby, now only a few months old when he announced that he was about to go and live in Brussels for a while, leaving them in London. Just a few months, she and the baby would be OK, wouldn’t they? Monique was less sure. She discussed it with her parents and the view emerged that Jimmy’s proposal wasn’t the happiest of ideas by any means. I got the feeling Jimmy’s eye was so firmly fixed on what our daily allowance would amount to after three or four months of careful budgeting that the significance of his role as husband and father was somewhat diluted by comparison. There were quite a few rows, some, as I learned later, of considerable gravity. The tension between them seemed to add fuel to Jimmy’s enthusiasm for spending a few months away.
Whatever the terms they eventually agreed, on the due date in April Jimmy and I took off for the continent again: Monique and the baby remained in London. As we were to be there for some months, Jimmy took his car. We flew over by a small airline, the Channel Air Bridge, leaving from a field somewhere in Kent, and hopped just over the English Channel to land in another field near Ostend. The chunky little aircraft accommodated a few cars in its belly and about eight people on very basic tubular-framed seats. It rattled like hell all the way across, and seemed to be flying only slightly higher than the highest of the waves beneath us. Then the drive up the autoroute to Brussels gave me my first proper sense of the amazing flatness of this piece of the European landscape. Whoever first named it The Low Countries got it absolutely right. Houses and other buildings all looked interestingly different from anything in England, and I experienced again the small private excitement of knowing I was abroad, now for the second time in my life. To confirm it, we were even driving on the other side of the road. To cap it all, we were installed again at the Hotel Albert Premier on the Place Rogier. I was back in Brussels, Bruxelles, Brussel.
Settling in
Coffee and croissants were delivered on a tray left outside my door each morning. From any of my several windows overlooking the Place below I could hear the cars squealing round on the cobbles, and watched the commuters criss-crossing the square. As the trains arrived at Gare du Nord, sudden bursts of fast-walking people would erupt across the square and take off in their different directions. Some stopped to buy cigarettes or newspapers from the kiosk opposite the hotel. Others slipped briefly into the huge brasserie on the corner of the boulevard for an espresso and something short and sharp. As people do, they auto-piloted their daily patterns in much the same way every day, occasionally tacking around a stranger on the square who didn’t belong on their habitual route. The everyday life of the buzzing city gradually became part of my landscape. I drank my coffee and watched, as the electronic news strip flicked hypnotically across the front face of the skyscraper. Jimmy and I went off to work at the office just like all the others, taking the tram up the hill or walking there as the good summer mornings came on.
We worked Monday to Friday, had our lunches in the office canteen where two or three courses cost about two shillings, and where I discovered the hard way that steack tartare was uncooked minced steak with mayonnaise and herbs mixed in. I didn’t like it at all. We shook hands Belgian-style with at least two other colleagues before leaving in the evening, and had a glass or two of Gueuze on Fridays. Left to myself, I would have made the beer-drinking side of things a bit more adventurous. Militating against this, Jimmy was seriously committed to hoarding up as much of his unspent expenses as he could and, in any case, I don’t think he was all that keen on having a few. He engaged me sometimes in serious conversations about bank accounts, mortgages and savings, and would frequently chastise me for going out with the boys too much and just, as we said then, pissing it all up against the wall. ‘Save some up, and put down the deposit on a house.’ What, I thought, damp-behind-the-ears at 21, what could I, of all people, possibly do with a house, of all things? If only, if only. Working routines gave their predictable structure to our lives, contacts with colleagues developed and expanded, and we got on with learning the job. The typical office banter that you’d find pretty well anywhere was provided by experienced practitioners such as Jean Albrechts, Guy Vandersteenhuis and Joseph Beuys, mid-thirties, sharp and witty. They could take off Michiels and especially Liesenborghs brilliantly, ran a series of harmless practical jokes and had nicknames for everyone and for most things. In the background to all this, the irascible chain-smoking Jonquin growled gruffly at the world over his bills of lading.
An unusual character at work and at home
Before long, we were joined at our canteen lunch table by a strange figure. Monsieur Gilbert wanted to sit with us because he was always left on his own. Most other people had endured his company in the past and eventually had to make clear that they’d prefer not to have lunch with him any longer. We were to see and hear more of Gilbert. People gave us knowing and even sympathetic looks as he came in our direction: clearly he had a ‘history’. He was a short obese man with an unusually large head, probably in his late forties. He worked in a low-grade clerical capacity in van Landschoote’s licence department and wore his raincoat in both office and canteen most of the time. Regardless of his main course, Gilbert always began his lunch by peeling and eating a very big orange. He explained that this would enhance his stomach juices with useful additional acid and so help his digestion, which made a certain amount of sense. A good deal of everything else he said did not, and this squared with a phenomenon that occurred from time to time. Gilbert would stop speaking in mid-sentence, put one hand up to his forehead and say: ‘Ah, je viens de sentir . . . un petit battement.’ He was experiencing a small beating sensation inside his head. That was it: after such a sensation, he would say nothing further.
Later on, over a Gueuze round at Le Relais, M. Michel told us that Gilbert had had considerable psychological problems, leading to a major mental breakdown a few years before. It climaxed when he decided that the Brussels office was no longer the place for him. He simply left his desk one afternoon and made his way to the company’s Paris office, Compagnie du Niger Français. On arrival, he presented himself to someone in authority, announcing that he was M. Gilbert, a senior person from the Brussels office, who had come to do important work for them. Paris telephoned Brussels to be told that he was a few cents short of a franc, French or Belgian, and Paris sent him back home under friendly escort. The company gave him generous extended sick leave while he underwent appropriate treatment. What we were seeing now was Gilbert after all this had taken place. Doubtless he was on regular medication to keep him reasonably sedated but also capable of carrying out work in the department. (Fifteen years later I was to meet a rather similar case when I began work in a College of Further Education back home).
I could tell that Gilbert wasn’t living in quite the same world as the rest of us, but Jimmy, able to understand his every utterance, was much better placed to make a more accurate judgement. After a few lunches with him, Jimmy said: ‘The bloke’s a complete nutter. Perhaps we can re-arrange the time we go to lunch.’ This worked quite well but it didn’t remove us from Gilbert’s attention. One day he came up and told us that, to appreciate the full essence of what went on in the office, we really needed a thorough overview of all its systems. He was just the man to provide it and could put himself at our disposal at the Albert Premier at any time.
We thought we’d try this in case it did actually help us, and invited him round early one evening. Apart from anything else, he was extremely keen to see inside the hotel and experience the quality of its accommodation. He walked through our rooms, admiring the furniture, the drapes and the bathrooms, declaring something like ‘C’est du luxe exceptionelle, c’est vraiment un palace.’ Eventually we sat down together round a large table, he pulled sheets of paper out of his raincoat pocket and began to tell us the whole story. In big, clear letters, he wrote down each stage of the different documentary procedures with arrows linking them to other procedures that affected them, or were affected by them. He was doing extremely well. I certainly began to understand several things that had previously confused or escaped me completely. Often when you’re learning to do something new, they show you how but they don’t tell you why. Gilbert seemed to be doing both. He told us very useful things and clearly understood our questions, and answered them competently. We were approaching a particularly valuable stage when he suddenly wrote, right across the paper in block capitals: PETIT BATTEMENT!!! and drew a very thick double line beneath it. He placed his pen firmly down on the table, put his hand up to feel the beating inside his head, and that was the end of that. Nothing more was forthcoming. Eventually we took him down in the lift, saw him off, and he went home.
Although we saw Gilbert and spoke to him most days, he never mentioned that evening’s work again. It was as though it had been completely wiped from his mind. Perhaps it had been. We even wondered whether his true objective all along had been simply to see the inside of our grand hotel. There was no question of his tuition session being resumed. However, one day he invited us to visit his home for a meal after work, to see his collection of books and to meet his mother with whom he lived. Once again, interested to see what this experience might produce, we accepted. Jimmy drove us into the suburbs to Gilbert’s home. His mother was pretty old and frail, and Gilbert introduced us, telling her how we were extremely important personnel from le bureau de Londres, who had requested his valued assistance in our work. It was never very clear whether she understood what he was saying, if indeed she even heard it. We shook her hand and she smiled kindly.
Then he took us upstairs to see his books. There were shelves and shelves of them, including many complete collections of individual authors’ works. He took us through them, waving his arms around expansively, announcing names and titles, taking a book down to show us the writer’s name, the title and all the other books by the same author. At one point he left us to go to the toilet and Jimmy took a few books down at random to look at them more closely. None of them had had their pages cut, which meant that they’d never been read. Perhaps Gilbert had inherited them, or simply collected them as objects, but there would obviously be no point in attempting to talk to him about any of their contents. (My most recent other book-based experience had been at the huge Brussels branch of WH Smith to see if I could get a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Georges van Landschoote took me down there one lunchtime and was slightly bemused to find that the book I wanted was on the Index of books banned by the Catholic Church, and therefore not available.)
Then Gilbert announced ‘Allons, manger’, and we went downstairs to eat. We’d wrongly assumed he would provide something resembling a reasonable meal. Not quite. Gilbert said he had his main meal of the day in the office canteen at lunchtime, thought we probably did the same, and that all we’d need now was a little snack of some kind. He brought out some bread and a lump of cheese and gave us each a knife, a small wooden board to eat off and a glass of water. There was no ‘petit battement’ while we were there but, as soon as he thought we’d eaten enough cheese, he took us to shake hands with mother again, shook hands with us himself and showed us the door. There was only one thing to do. We shot back to the city centre fast and dived straight into the Duc de Brabant for a demi or two of Stella with steak frites from the menu fixe.
The expenses claim
If Monsieur Gilbert thought our accommodation was rather palatial, so did the company. They’d told us when we arrived that two weeks at the Albert Premier should give us enough time to find ourselves a good but less expensive place to stay. We did nothing about this, hoping they would forget about it. At the end of our first month, we had to present the claim for our daily allowances to Monsieur Walschaerts, Head of the Finance Department. He was a tall, kindly Dutchman who observed that we seemed to have made no progress in finding other accommodation. Jimmy spun him a line about having looked at a few places that, for various reasons, we hadn’t thought suitable. He was lying through his teeth and Walschaerts probably didn’t believe a word of it. He very reasonably told us that we’d been at the Albert now for a full month, and the company could not continue paying for us at this level. He would arrange for us to move at the end of the following week to the Hotel Richmond, a somewhat smaller, slightly more modern hotel situated closer to the office, run by an Englishman called Freddie Meanwell. He was sure we would find this suitable. If we played cricket, he added, that would be even better because Monsieur Meanwell was Chairman of the Brussels British Cricket Club. As became clear later, Freddie was also a good friend of the company’s senior expatriates, and having company personnel to stay at his hotel was a natural back-scratching aspect of that relationship. When we went to view the Richmond, Jimmy was most reluctant to take it, probably because the new accommodation would be less grand than the old. There was no genuine reason for turning it down and, as Jimmy couldn’t manage to think of a plausible excuse, we accepted the move.
We only had one more brush with the Finance Department. During our second month we were invited one evening to the flat of the resident British director, HD ‘Don’ Barlow, a real colonial veteran in his late fifties, who consumed whisky like a professional and spoke in a gravelly voice that reflected his chain-smoking as accurately as his drooping, once blond, nicotine-stained moustache did. We had dinner with him and his wife, after which she immediately disappeared, not to be seen again. Barlow brought in a tray holding a simple bottle of Scotch, three glasses, a jug of water and more cigarettes, and proceeded to fascinate us with tales of old Africa. It was enthralling stuff because he’d first been on the Coast during the two or more decades before independence, possibly even before the War as a young man. We might have been a couple of Conrad’s men before the mast, listening to Marlowe recounting his shipboard stories late into the night. I gathered that Barlow, along with several other Brussels office people who had that kind of money going spare, had invested in land in the Belgian Congo years before, never imagining that independence would come on with such a rush and in such a devastating manner. Now they were just hanging on, hoping they might salvage some value from their investments. Congo history post-1961 suggests that they must have lost the lot. When the whisky was finished and the last tale told, the evening was over and we went back to the Richmond.
Presenting ourselves with our second monthly claim for allowances, we encountered M. Walschaerts’s deputy, a much less kindly figure, clearly – and correctly - a stickler for detail where the company’s money was involved. Without giving it a thought, we had claimed for all our evening meals, including the occasion when we’d been entertained by Don Barlow. The accountant spotted this because, although it had never crossed our minds, Barlow had also made a claim for entertaining us, seeing it as an official gesture, so the company would be coughing up twice for the same meals. Jimmy promptly began arguing the toss with the man, asserting that we’d never been told anything about this kind of thing. Indeed we hadn’t, but anyone with half a mind could see that we didn’t really have a leg to stand on. Reaching a deadlock, Jimmy announced that we would be seeing Mr Barlow immediately to seek his ruling.
Don Barlow sat languidly behind his enormous desk, one smoking cigarette lying in his ashtray, another between his fingers. On hearing Jimmy’s account, he simply picked up the telephone. ‘Walschaerts? These two boys from London – I know I gave them a dinner that I’ve claimed for, but I think you can let their claim go through in full.’ M. Walschaerts obviously made some kind of objection but Barlow said ‘According to the book you’re quite right, Walschaerts, but, you know, perks of the job, old boy. On my authority.’ And back we went to the Finance Office where we silently, and with more than slight embarrassment on my part, collected our authorised pay slips. That was Jimmy, terrier-like where money was concerned. He had the neck for that sort of thing. Left to myself, I would have accepted the justice of the situation without a word, perfectly pleased to be living there free of all charge, on a handsome allowance with no questions asked.
Marriage on the rocks
Meanwhile, things between Jimmy and Monique were deteriorating fast. She abandoned the London flat and went over to stay with her parents in Paris. This seemed a reasonable thing to do, but Jimmy hit the roof. Slow to detect all the emotional undercurrents, it did dawn on me that his eagerness to get away to Brussels in the first place was based on more than just the thought of an attractive financial outcome. It was also a heaven-sent means of putting distance between himself and his new wife. Her move to Paris rather subverted that aspect of it since he could now hardly avoid seeing Monique much more frequently. So it turned out. He would take off for Paris every other Friday evening in a black frame of mind, returning on Sunday night even blacker. I could easily have done without the details of their persistent and savage rows, but I got them anyway. I mostly let them wash over me without making any comment, just so that Jimmy could get them off his chest. The only one that really registered with me was his account of an incident back in London, shortly following the baby’s birth. Jimmy was so enraged about something trivial that he opened up his Swiss Army knife – one of his most valued possessions - and slashed through the bottom of the brand new plastic baby’s bath, from end to end. I never knew the deeper origins of their complete failure to function together, but the whole thing was clearly doomed, and it hadn’t taken them very long.
On Jimmy’s weekends away I pottered around the centre of Brussels, slipping into the odd bar here and there to perfect my foreign beer-ordering technique, finding my way to places of interest, and having economical dinners at the Duc de Brabant, Le Relais or other small, dark, welcoming restaurants that I found by chance along the city’s streets. In the evenings I would read and do little bits of writing, including letters home to my parents telling them about my discoveries and the many curiosities of living in a foreign capital. All of this suited me very well. I was left to myself, no longer ‘supervised’ by Jimmy or harassed by his increasing psychological tension. I gradually got to know the place at my own pace and in my own way. I rummaged around the streets and squares, as I used to do in London, I got lost, I frequented the bits I enjoyed and where I was comfortable, and began to feel that I slightly belonged here. This condition makes you remarkably smug when you pass a coach-load of English tourists being disgorged at a hotel, milling around on the pavement, wondering where they are. The best of all is when one of them, assuming you’re a local, comes up and asks you a question in faltering broken French – to which you reply in faultless English, with no trace of a continental accent.
Before long, Jimmy and Monique decided between them - no doubt with her parents’ participation as well - that their marriage just might stand a better chance of survival if they lived together. Accordingly one Sunday evening, she, the baby and all the baby clobber arrived at the Hotel Richmond and moved into Jimmy’s room, next door to mine. Having heard so much about her, this was the first time I’d actually met Monique. She was a big person, tall, broad, strongly built and larger than the average in all main physical departments, including her nose. Typically of many southern continentals, her complexion was swarthy and I realised very soon from her personal style how she and Jimmy would be constantly clashing. Both were strong-willed, single-minded and relative strangers to the arts of compromise.
I don’t know whether they left the hotel to have their rows, or whether the walls were dense enough to prevent me from hearing them next door. Certainly the baby didn’t trouble me – except indirectly in one respect. Monique had signed up with Poupon Linge, a laundry service that went round Brussels collecting babies’ nappies and bed clothes and returning them later clean and fresh. You paid for the service when the goods were returned. More often than not, the Poupon Linge van called with the clean nappies after Jimmy and I had returned from the office, and he and Monique had gone out for a walk with the baby. The hotel reception man would call me on the internal telephone: ‘C’est la Poupon Linge qui arrive, Monsieur Brown.’ Whatever I might be doing had to be dropped while I grabbed my money, went downstairs to see the P.L. man and received a vast consignment of clean baby things in exchange for a vast consignment of Belgian francs. Reimbursement was never straightforward. Jimmy never said anything like ‘Thanks for taking in the Poupon Linge. How much do I owe you?’ I always had to ask for the money and sometimes repeatedly.
One weekend, Monique’s parents came over from Brussels to see how things were going. The Saturday was a beautiful warm day and her father had identified Le Restaurant de la Forêt for lunch in a splendid woodland location somewhere outside the city. He invited me to go with them and I readily accepted. As we arrived at the place, it was clear that we were going to eat in the manner to which he was accustomed, with standards of food, wine and service beyond anything I had yet experienced or even dreamed of. I probably had one of the most succulent steaks I’ve ever eaten in my life, and some of the finest wine, but the only dish I can be sure about was Monique’s écrévisses, a plate of medium sized crayfish. She sat opposite me and devoured these things in an almost feral way, savagely ripping off the claws and feelers and tearing the whole thing apart. The worst part was at the end of each one when she fell upon the crayfish’s head. Many people don’t bother with the head but, for Monique, this appeared to be the most enticing part of all. Put brutally, she bit off the front of its face and sucked its brains out. Revolting to watch, but, sitting where I was, impossible not to.
I must have glimpsed the prices on the menu as we were ordering, thinking it was as well that Monique’s father would be paying. But when the bill came I was to discover that he was paying for everyone - except me. He told me he would naturally pay for Monique and Jimmy as they were family, but hoped I wouldn’t mind paying for myself. After all, the subtext said, although I’m absolutely loaded, you’re a complete stranger whom I’ve only just met, and I’m not buying lunch for you. Stunned, I nodded calmly and felt for my wallet. This would certainly have been the most expensive meal I’d yet eaten anywhere, and probably remains one of the most expensive to this day. On my lap, beneath the tablecloth, I leafed quickly through my larger denomination franc notes to find that this lunch would just about clean me out. I’d always seen our monthly dinner at Le Vieux Strasbourg as a major spending indulgence, but this was in a very different league. I’d never imagined a meal could cost this much. At least, I didn’t have to add to my discomfort by asking Jimmy to lend me some, though, reflecting now, that’s exactly what I should have done. Instead, I casually dropped a huge wad of precious paper onto the plate as though I habitually lunched in this style and thought nothing of disposing of such vast amounts of my cash for the privilege.
The struggling marriage continued to struggle until one Friday when Jimmy told me that Monique and the baby would be returning to Paris. Her parents were coming over to Brussels that very day and would take her back with them the same evening. No drinks, no dinners, just pack everything into the car and away. Jimmy said he would follow them in his car as far as the border, say goodbye there and return to Brussels. Did I want to go along for the ride? Yes, please. In fact, I was invited to ride in the parents’ car while Jimmy and Monique went in Jimmy’s car, perhaps thinking that they could repair things slightly as they drove along. I was certainly glad not to be in the car with them. It was summer now, warm sunny weather and all I had were the light clothes I stood up in and my wallet. When we reached the border, I expected us all to stop for the goodbyes, and that I would transfer to Jimmy’s car and head back to base. ‘Oh, no,’ said Monique’s mother, ‘that’s not the idea at all. We’re going to our out-of-town cottage at Fontainbleau for the weekend, so that Jimmy and Monique can sort out their affairs once and for all. You are most welcome to be our guest.’ My only anxiety was how to cross the border without a passport. No problem. Even in those very early days of the European Common Market you could travel between countries without any formality. The frontier post was a sentry box with a striped bar across the road, permanently in the ‘up’ position, and one uniformed man. Monique’s father simply declared to him a small proportion of the hoard of Dutch cigars he’d bought and we were through.
The Fontainbleau ‘cottage’ was a large, single-storied house standing at the end of a long rough track, deep among wild brambles, trees and bushes, the whole vast domain bounded by a high wire fence with typical French double gates at the entrance to the track. It seemed to be miles from any road or village, completely private and secluded. Here they spent many of their weekends throughout the year, replacing the grime of Paris (where they doubtless had a magnificent apartment) with the natural dust of the countryside. On Saturday morning the sun shone hot, and I had breakfast on my own. Jimmy and Monique had already gone off together in his car. The parents told me that they’d be out for the day discussing their future, and would be back in time for dinner. I was at liberty to do whatever I wished, walk around the countryside, sit in the sun, read their magazines or a book, and have a light lunch and a glass with them.
My French conversational skills were better with the Belgians than with these real French people who tended to speak much too fast for me. However, I made the effort and we managed, though we did spend most of the day not talking. The mother was around periodically, kindly checking that I had everything I needed, but her husband was inside the cottage, probably working – or not - in his study, smoking his way through his contraband cigars. When the three of us met at lunchtime, the radio news was on in the background and that’s when I heard the announcement that marked the date forever in my memory. It was July 2nd, 1961. Ernest Hemingway, many of whose novels I’d already read and admired, had been killed in what was described then as a shooting accident. Much later, it was disclosed that he’d blown his head off with one of his own hunting guns.
Jimmy and Monique returned before dinner that evening. They had settled their affairs. The short-lived marriage was over. Jimmy was all for leaving that very moment, but Monique’s mother insisted that we have dinner first. How like a proper French person. I agreed with this, and, having now settled in and succeeded in making friendly contact with the Parisians, privately favoured staying another night and spending the next day there, relaxing in their rural idyll. But that would have imposed too much strain on the irrecoverably damaged situation. Jimmy and Monique had their dinner in a separate room to ease the general tension and we took off afterwards. We drove back to Brussels through the night, passing non-stop over the now deserted Franco-Belgian border. Jimmy asked me to do some occasional singing or talking to help keep him awake. And so, only a few weeks before our return to London, it was Jimmy and me again, on our own, at the Hotel Richmond.
Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp
Jimmy’s frequent trips to Paris and Monique’s later installation in Brussels had rather restricted out-of-Brussels movements. Our remaining time was short now so, before leaving for home, we wanted to visit one or two places while we still had the opportunity. At least we had already spent a day each in three of Belgium’s main northern towns or cities, though I recall hardly anything of what we did when we were there. I guess we wandered about the place, looking at attractive old buildings with little idea of what we were looking at. Understanding and appreciation of this sort of thing came later in life for me.
Bruges attracts people back time after time, as a compact, congenial and very charming place to be. I’ve returned several times since that first visit and, in an ideal world, would be content to spend a few days there every year or so for the rest of time. We visited on a warm, early summer day, one of the most delightful times of the year to be there. The main industry now is tourism, proclaiming Bruges as the best preserved/restored medieval town in Europe. If you like this kind of thing, it’s simply beautiful. In earlier times, it was famed for the manufacture of fine lace and, in common with many Belgian towns, this was supplemented by beer brewing, among other commerce. It’s the capital of the Flemish zone up in Belgium’s northwest in the province of West-vlaanderen, not too far from Ostend port and the seaside resort of Blankenberge. The nearest point on the Dutch border is probably less than 20 miles away.
Within the town’s canal system there are over 50 bridges that can open to allow shipping to pass through. Walk the canals and you get the feel of an Amsterdam writ smaller and even more appealing for that very reason. Notable medieval buildings include les Halles, the Belfry 353 feet high, the Béguinage, the Cathedral and several churches, the Hôpital, and the Hôtel de Ville, the oldest town hall in the country. The painter Hans Memling settled here in 1465 and, establishing workshops here, eventually became one of the burgh’s wealthiest citizens. The cobbled streets, alleys and squares of Bruges speak volumes of the Middle Ages, and it must have been much less intensively smothered in tourists in ’61 than it is today. On more recent visits, I’ve met an elderly little English woman there who did cross-channel day trips to the Continent for £1 return whenever she found them offered in the tabloid newspapers, and then wrote a travel article about her destination once she’d got home. I’ve also seen the permanent exhibition of Frank Brangwen’s paintings, and eaten some superb dinners. About ten years ago, I walked into a restaurant expressly to eat mussels for dinner, only to find they’d just served the final portion from their stock. The last time we were there, the flocks of female Japanese tourists were all wearing facemasks, as though Bruges, of all places, could remotely compete with Tokyo for air pollution.
Ghent is very different. There’s no shortage of medieval history and architecture but the city is much larger, with cathedral and a feast of medieval churches containing many valuable art works, ringing out their incessant carillons, and several tram routes clanging and rattling through the centre. There was major 19th century development in some of the main streets as the city regained considerable prosperity and the place has the kind of bigger commercial atmosphere about it, something that Bruges simply doesn’t have. By the 13th century Ghent was one of the largest north European towns, capital of East Flanders and virtually independent of any who wished to control it, largely by virtue of its astonishingly successful cloth trade, until around the mid-16th century. The future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was born here in 1500. There’s a selection of medieval public buildings similar to those of Bruges, plus the feudal castle from 1180, one of the most imposing moated castles surviving in Europe. The linking of Ghent by canal to the river Scheldt during the 19th century made it the country’s second largest port. On another visit about 25 years later, Ghent turned out to be the place where I learned to use Chinese chopsticks properly, taking the instructions from the diagrams on the restaurant’s paper serviette. On a later visit with a friend, it was raining so much that we decided to see a film after lunch. The multiplex cinema had eight screens, only one of which we would remotely want to watch, but, in any case, they’d all started twenty minutes before we got there. Today I can recall absolutely nothing of my visit to Ghent with Jimmy, though one or two images from the Bruges trip still recur, especially the daffodil gardens beneath the trees outside the Béguinage and the Watermolen restaurant visible from the fast dual carriageway.
In Antwerp, a north European working port of considerable size and importance, Jimmy warned me not to look closely at, or talk to, any dockers we might bump into in the occasional bar along the Scheldt. As if I was going to. After all, in those days a similar warning could equally apply in London’s East End, an area I’d not yet penetrated – though, as we know, the myths surrounding such places are frequently more potent than their unexciting reality. I think he wanted to introduce me, still only twenty-one, a good few years younger than himself and still inexperienced, to something a little bit edgy and risky. As I recall it, what we found in those little bars was simply quiet, working class and a bit dull. You could find much the same in the alleys along the south bank of the Thames near our office.
The city’s present-day fame as a high fashion centre would have been entirely unpredicted in the early 1960s, but the city certainly was, as it is even more today (like Amsterdam), a key centre for diamond trading, a line of business that, unlike many traditional trades, has not seen any decline during the past forty or more years. Sierra Leone will have guaranteed that in recent years, apart from any other source. Around the turn of the 21st century, Antwerp is an immensely brighter and more attractive city to visit than when Jimmy and I went there. Several days spent there only a few years ago revealed some extremely good restaurants as well as other features such as the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, the Rubens House and the Cathedral of Our Lady. Of course, like any town or city with medieval buildings to show, devotion to catering for tourists is what now generates the wealth needed to support the renovations and restorations that we all come to see.
The Atomium
The one remaining place we needed to see now was the Atomium at the 1958 Exposition site (Expo 58). That same year had seen the opening of the Belgian South Pole Expedition base but also the crash of a Sabena Airlines DC7 at Casablanca, killing 65 people. A Dominican friar, Father Pire, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Brussels supermarket was opened in Place Flagey, and the Belgian television service was five years old.
Expo 58 was the first World’s Fair type of exhibition staged anywhere since the end of the war, and more than 42 million people came. The spirit behind it was the democratic wish for peace and cooperation between different nations, coupled with future hopes for prosperity for everyone’s lives through technology. Apart from any other motive, the point of the Expo was, like earlier ones in Antwerp (1930) and Brussels (1935), the development of Belgium’s economy, and that of its colonies in Africa. The idea first emerged in 1947 and the fair was originally intended to take place in 1955, but worries about the Korean War and the Cold War in the mid-Fifties caused its postponement. Apart from the national and international pavilions, the site plan includes a 1-kilometre concrete viaduct linking the exhibition area with the surrounding parkland, which would give people an overview of the whole area. There’s also a cable railway with 165 cable cars, and several trains covering the whole site. The entire enormous area took in the former royal estate of Parc de Laeken, Bois d’Ossegem and the Chateau de Belvédère in what is claimed as ‘one of the most beautiful natural environments ever used’ for such an event.
Open between April and October 1958, we saw the Expo site only two and a half years after it had closed. It was typical of so many big prestige events of this nature - set up for six months or so, or much less as in the case of Olympic Games installations - and then abandoned, having only a single purpose which had been discharged. My mind has registered little of the detail. I think we expected the Atomium to have a revolving restaurant, ready and waiting for us in 1961. There was no sign of life anywhere, and it has had to wait for the unstoppable progress of mass tourism to provide the means. Pavilions stood around in the encroaching grass, derelict and without purpose. The plywood and other thin boarding and cladding used in their construction now betrayed serious signs of their original cheapness. Intended to last for six months, they had doubtless looked modern, slick and trendy at the time, but should have been pulled down at the end. Instead, they were left there to decompose gently, tragic and neglected (interestingly, not unlike the scenes of abandoned waste Conrad had reported in the Congo). Apart from the Atomium, closed, dusty and lacklustre, the only pavilion I recall specifically is the British one, with an abstract unicorn’s nose projecting from its fragile front as you approached the entrance steps. I took the necessary couple of photographs of the Atomium and we left this sad and deserted collection of discarded structures to crumble and moulder in their own good time.
A much more recent publicity photo shows a highly illuminated, glittering structure, sparkling in the night, throbbing with the satisfying of contemporary consumer desires – or, at least, some of them – including the revolving restaurant. In fact, my latest website visit (atomium.be) announces that a monumental renovation, first mooted in 2001, has been taking place since March 2004 at a cost of 23 million Euros, to be complete by the end of 2005. The website offers over 400 photographs of the Atomium, plus the history, plans and photos from Expo 58. When it’s reopened, ‘the most astonishing building in the world’ (sic) will have been entirely re-clad, and will ‘shine like a star’. The public are even invited to purchase portions of the old cladding for their collections of interesting things to keep in the loft and forget about. Still, whatever else it may have achieved, Expo 58 did inspire two very good permanent developments: the new airport building at Melsbroek with its fast train link to the city centre, and the renewal of the Brussels boulevard ring.
I saw the Atomium from a Eurostar window only a few years ago, shining magnificently in the sunshine, and it all came back to me. That was truly a Time of My Life. [Click on the Congo button below to read a long essay on Congo history, the colonial period and the horrendous independence experience.]