IT’S A courtyard in the French style. From the street outside, the tourist passes through a stone archway wide enough for a coach and four and into an expansive sun-trap, sheltered on three sides by the wings of an 18th-century hotel-style mansion.
Deep red bistro chairs and tables are scattered across the tended gravel; crows bicker in the burgeoning foliage of the chestnut trees. Paris and its clamour seems a world away.
Only the bell in the clock-tower that marks the hours, plus the names of 29 Irish dioceses inscribed on decorative plaques around the walls, give the clue that this seemingly quintessential Parisian space was once a closely guarded piece of Catholic Ireland. And never more so than during the second World War when this elegant courtyard was pressed into service – as a potato patch.
At that time it was the Irish College, a seminary set up for the training of Irish priests forced abroad for their education by the strictures of the Penal Laws. In 1939 the superior of the college, Sligo-born Vincentian Father Pat Travers, waved the 70 student priests off on their summer holidays. There were rumours of war, but neither he nor his charges could have believed that it was the end of an era for their alma mater on the Rue des Irlandais. They would never return and the college itself would pass out of Irish hands.
Fr Travers settled into what should have been a quiet off-season. Except the off-season lasted nearly six years, during which he and a cook were the only occupants of the college that had operated since 1775 in the heart of Paris’s Latin quarter, a stone’s throw from the Pantheon. And it was far from quiet.
Within days of the occupation of Paris, a German officer called to the door insisting on requisitioning the college for his troops. Fr Travers insisted equally that the college was Irish property and so exempt from German authority because Ireland had chosen to remain outside the war. A long and heated discussion ensued. “I think,” Fr Travers wrote later, “the officer got tired of the argument. At any rate,” he added rather disingenuously, “he went away under the impression that we were expecting our students back in September.”
In August 1940, Fr Travers received another German visitor – of a completely different tenor. Speaking perfect English, this German officer told Fr Travers he had lived in Carlow before the war working as an organist and music professor. He was involved in intelligence work which made Fr Travers wary. Luckily, his unnamed visitor would arrive under cover of night, so that Fr Travers did not have to justify this strange and unorthodox wartime friendship. Their discussions were wide-ranging, but mostly Fr Travers’s German friend was puzzled by Ireland’s neutrality and ebullient about victory. A tour of duty on the Russian front and the Allied landings in Normandy changed that. After Dunkirk, Fr Travers never saw his secret friend again.
The priest’s third communication from the Nazis was a summons to broadcast on Radio Paris. But Fr Travers was not about to become another Lord Haw-Haw. “I thought it better not to reply,” Fr Travers said, “and the matter was not pursued further.” As the war progressed, food became the lone priest’s single biggest worry. And here Fr Travers showed himself to be another kind of green hero. While the college boasted quite a bit of ground – enough for a tennis court and handball alley – most of it was hard surface. But the croquet court was under grass, so he set about digging it up. He struck up a friendship with a gardener in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens “as decent a Frenchman as I ever came across”.
The gardener acquired eight lorry-loads of good soil and four consignments of decayed leaves, which Fr Travers used as manure for his plot. During the winter of 1940 and spring of 1941 he sowed potatoes and set up a seed-bed where he grew tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, marrows and Brussels sprouts. He gave away much of it to his neighbours or used it to barter for things he needed. The Irish College cook pickled the excess for use in the winter.
The following year, Fr Travers diversified into chickens but these were not a success. Five of them died over the winter and the survivor was not a good layer. The cook suggested the priest should try his hand at rabbits and soon, as is the way with rabbits, they had as many as 40 or 50. “It was sometimes said that I lived by rearing these,” Fr Travers said. “That’s not strictly true,” he went on in a neat side-step. “The cook carried out that part of our industry and was very successful.”
As the war progressed, bombing raids became a nightly occurrence. Hiding in the cellar of the college, Fr Travers recalled his terror. “The college seemed to be rocking above me . . . Besides the bursting bombs and shells the noise of the planes as they dived down on the target was terrific.” When the liberation of Paris finally came, Fr Travers’ solitary existence was changed almost overnight. The college was used to repatriate first French, then Dutch and finally Polish prisoners of war. Then with the bishops’ permission, he acceded to an American request to use the college as a clearing centre for refugees of American extraction.
Meanwhile, Fr Travers worked on in his garden. “I harvested my potatoes and tomatoes,” he said, “the latter were just ripening during the liberation”. The Irish College never operated again as a seminary for Irish priests. After the war, the property was leased to the Polish church which used it until 1997 (Pope John Paul II completed some of his training there). The building was extensively renovated and reopened in 2002 as the Centre Culturel Irlandais, a flagship for Irish art and literature in the French capital.
As for the green-fingered Fr Travers, he eventually made it home in late 1945. He served in Ireland until his death in 1987.