FINDING YVETTE

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Like a master baker assembling her ingredients for a special cake, I scoured my tattered English-French dictionary seeking the precise words, laying out the correct past tense carefully in front of me. I was ready.
We were in an unremarkable village called Grisoles, France, several miles north of Toulouse. Ken had been here once before - 48 summers ago.

When he was 23 he had been part of an ambitious family outing, setting out from Liverpool for sunny Spain in a battered old Standard Vanguard station wagon that had been freshly hand-painted a shiny black the day before for the trip. It had been a massive undertaking for the time with 9 family members compressed like kippers into the old car. It was in this dusty little town along a narrow canal that the Vanguard had coughed and clanked to a defiant halt. The crankshaft bearings had seized with a vengance.

For two weeks the band of Liverpudlians were trapped in the village, waiting for car parts through the German mechanic’s garage while exhausting their meager remaining funds. With modest means of communication beyond pantomine and winning smiles, the French village embraced them. The local antique dealers providing kindness, the occasional meal, and convivial evening card game; the elderly farmer opening his house to the ladies and children of the group for sleeping and jam making; the garage owner allowing Ken and his Uncle John to sleep on the seats of the car in the shelter of his garage, he remembered them all fondly. Then there was the memory of charming little Yvette. This shy young girl had befriended them without benefit of a shared language and brought them juicy ripe peaches from her parents’ orchard.

Young Yvette 1961.


Same bridge so many years later.

While Ken was content to have his photo taken on the same arched bridge over the canal on which Uncle John and he had posed with little Yvette, I urged him to make an effort to find her in the little town to thank her personally for her kindness. After all, his Uncle John, Aunt Margie and mother Emily, who had been part of the adventure, had since passed away, and Yvette would be in her early 60s now. It would, in my mind, be a lovely closure for the family, something he could tell his cousins - the children who were on the trip, now in their 60s as well. Ken was game for it. This was where those years of high school French I took would finally have a payback - I consulted the dictionary and composed grammatically flawless sentences in my head, (sounding very much like Catherine Deneuve).

We started at the little one room museum where we were greeted by the cheerful elderly lady who staffs small town museums all over the world, and as my previously well composed sentences began to unravel mid-air when uttered aloud, I was delighted to see that she actually understood! She was charmed by the story of her village helping strangers, and yes, she knew of Yvette’s family, and yes, they lived a little south of the town now and good luck!

A little south of town we found a jaunty young salesman leaving his elderly mother’s old house. Certain he would speak some English I approached. No English spoken nor understood so I flung my high school French at him as well. After a few trips back and forth to his mother’s door he invited us to follow him by car to where Yvette might live according to his mother who waved happily at us from her doorway and called out “Bon chance!” (good luck) as she wiped her hands on her apron.

At the house to which he led us there were 3 doors and all windows were shuttered tight with an air of unrestrained disinterest. Certain that no one would be boarded up on such a lovely day I knocked with low expectation for an answer at the first door. Surprisingly a young woman with olive skin and dark eyes answered. She spoke no French she said (in French). Delighted that I had found my English speaker I babbled away in my native tongue to her with the entire story, after which she said (in French) that she didn’t speak English either - she was Turkish. Next door was tightly shuttered but as the centuries of peeling paint fell away from the door when knocked upon, the shutters cracked open a bit and a tousled gray head appraised us and then opened the door. Could this be our Yvette?

No, it wasn’t Yvette, and no she didn’t speak any English, but intrigued with the tale, she disclosed that she had lived there long enough to remember that the German mechanic had plied his trade just across the street, and that while she didn’t personally know where Yvette was, she knew that Yvette had a nephew who lived next to the post office in the village and that there would be a red car (rouge voiture) parked there. She even knew that the nephew’s name was Jean Marc Boue. Scribbling a rudimentary map on a torn envelope for us we sallied off to the post office with her cheerful ‘Bon chance!’ ringing down the lane.

The old antique shop now a failed Tapas Bar.

At the post office, the house next door was derelict and empty, although the red car was parked with promise on the street. From the post office a businessman appeared, and while he spoke no English and wasn’t the nephew, he said he would ask at the post office for us. On his return he pointed in the direction of an alley, at the end of which was a modern house with a swimming pool. On the door was the name Jean Marc Boue. With ‘merci’s’ and ‘bon chance’s in the air we walked down the alley. We were almost at our finish line.

We were intercepted at the door by a larger than life, loud, colorful friend of Jean Marc’s who announced that he was a professional comedian as well as a respected teacher of the French language. Only peripherally interested in the saga of 48 summers ago and turning his back on Ken altogether, he would rather discuss how I could not be American because no American would ever go to the trouble of learning French, his face within 4 inches of my own breathing garlic in clouds around my head. He kept asking me if it was a difficult language to master. Since I obviously hadn’t ’mastered’ it , the short answer was ’yes’. Some high level rapid discussion went on between the comedian and Jean Marc, (although which one was really Jean Marc we may never know), that resulted in our following yet another car, a Mercedes this time, to the door of ’Aunt Yvette’.

Buoyed by all the friendly, kind people who had become engaged in our search and assisted us along this path to Yvette we commented to each other that the village of Grisoles had maintained that same warm spirit of helpfulness to strangers that had been displayed 48 summers ago.

Behind a large spiky forbidding electric gate guarding a long driveway to a modest modern home behind some commercial buildings was Yvette’s house. A colorful sign indicated that a very unpredictable Rottweiller lived there, and judging from the accompanying artwork, he wanted to eat us. A small electronic box on the gate was the last remaining barrier between us and thanking the charming Yvette. I composed my sentences carefully in my head before ringing the buzzer. After a crackle and a ‘Oui?’ from the female voice at the other end, I explained as precisely as I could who we were and that on behalf of my husband and his family wanted to thank her for her kindness so many years ago.




The disembodied response came back in rapidfire French that she didn’t remember anything about that, never met any English people, never gave peaches to anyone and that we could just leave now or she‘d let the dog loose.

The End.

She was a friendly, curious young lady was Yvette. Wanted to know more about people from England.

Sharon writing from our room overlooking the Rhone River.