For my 21st birthday, in April 1951, my mother scraped up the money to send me to visit my brother in Paris, my first trip out of the country. I took the Heysham boat from Belfast, train to London and on to Newhaven, boat to Dieppe and train to Paris. My brother met me at Gare du Nord and brought me to his garret in the ╔cole Normale SupΘrieur in the Rue d'Ulm, where he was a post-graduate student. He had borrowed a mattress and I was to sleep on the floor.
That week in Paris, after post-war Belfast, was magic. The famous ╔cole Normale, where Beckett had studied and later lectured, was a heady place for me after Queen's in Belfast. The brightest minds from the universities of Europe gravitated there, and were given the lowly title of "Θleves".
To my peasant mind, the Θleves seemed eccentric. For instance, there was a dining-hall, serving bad food, where everything, the waiters, the kitchens, the cooks, the food itself - bore the collective name of "Le Pot". When the food was very bad, the Θleves would stage a protest. They would pick up their plates and march around the room, smearing food on radiators and chanting "Mort au Pot! Mort au Pot!" But I spent little time in there. Outside was the Paris of Piaf, of Josephine Baker at the Folies Begeres, of Jean-Louis Barrault.
Every day I would walk along the Boulevard St Germain, slowing as I passed the Brasserie Lipp and Aux Deux Magots, hoping for a glimpse of Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. Not that I would have known what they looked like, nor could I have afforded to sit at the next table and earwig - though when I got home to Belfast I put it about that I had done just that.
In fact, the place I chose to hang out in was the CafΘ Dupont, on the Boulevard St Michel, where I hoped to cavort with female students. My theory was that my Belfast-accented French would prove as attractive to them as their French-accented English was to me.
HΘlas.
I had made friends with a family called Couty, in the east of the city. M Couty made wooden toys in his workshop behind the house, while Mme Couty cooked. Brought up on a war-time diet of Spam fritters and reconstituted egg, I thought of meals as a penance to be borne quickly and forgotten, so I was quite unprepared for these three-hour celebrations of eating. And though I was learning to love wine, I was not ready for the great unlabelled litre-bottles which would replace each other endlessly.
Twice (I think), it was decided that I would be better staying the night, and the one who had the job of putting me to bed was the comely 17-year old daughter Emmeline. I am proud to say that a certain amount of cavorting took place, though probably less than I like to remember. I came home a committed Francophile, and have remained one.
I went back often in the 1950s and 1960s, less often in the 1970s and 1980s, and not at all in the 1990s. But when the Golden Jubilee of that first visit came round, I had to return. No boats and trains this time, no mattress on the floor. We stayed, my wife and I, with two old friends from Scotland, at the splendid Paris RΘsidence.
Residence International began life in Edinburgh, then in Paris, then at the famous One Devonshire in Glasgow. The Paris RΘsidenceThe suites and apartments have original cornicing, tall French windows and wrought iron balconies. I could quite happily have lived in our suite's bathroom, with a bath the size of a lifeboat and a shower cabinet in which you could hold a small cocktail party.
In such an establishment, you might expect the staff to be grand and intimidating, but this was happily untrue. A cosmopolitan lot, they were The Riordans. Shouts of reminiscence, of Ollie Walsh and Eddie Keher and "Que le monde est petit!".
It was an experience of Paris - au sein de luxe - very different from the first one 50 years ago, but just as memorable. We happily bored our friends with reminiscences and dragged them remorselessly around our old haunts, which, happily, have not changed.
Lunch in the Taverne Henri Quatre, on the Pont Neuf, dinner in La Mere Catherine in the Place de Tertre, which, they tell me, hasn't changed in 200 years.
Mind you, around the corner an Irish pub has appeared, called, I think, O'Loan's. They've built a silly pyramid in front of the Louvre. And an even sillier big wheel at the Place de la Concorde, spoiling the wonderful vista from the Arc du Carrousel up the Champs ElysΘes to the Arc de Tr∅omphe. But these are tiny blemishes, with a temporary feel. The rest is unchanged and, I hope, unchanging.