Monday was la rentrée here in France, the moment when the entire country returns to school and to work pretty much simultaneously. At the end of last week, even on Saturday, most of our favourite shops and market stalls were still shut; first thing on Monday morning, everything was back to normal, the summer over. This is our fourth September in France, and the first time all three children went ‘back to school’ (or crèche) together. It’s also the first year that our second son, who’s 9, entered a class his brother had already been in here in Paris. Perhaps for that reason, this was the first year that I felt something like nostalgia not only for the English “back-to-schools” of my own childhood or of the older boys in London when they were younger, but for that very first, overwhelming rentrée (really une entrée) back in 2021.
Three years ago the older boys were 8 and 6. They spoke French fairly fluently but had only ever done so with family and friends, and they were fresh from an ordinary (though excellent) English primary school in London, supplemented by some French workbooks at weekends. Although our eldest son could read fairly well in French, and my husband had tried to teach him the distinctive (and very much obligatory) French cursive script over the summer, the boys had never been, as the French put it, scolarisés (‘schooled’) in French: a word which denotes not just the language environment but the whole distinctive educational culture of France.
If we’d known we were settling here permanently, we might have opted for a gentler transition for them. As it was, we thought at the start that we were coming just for a year; keen to maximise their exposure to the French experience, we put them directly into the nearest école primaire. Coming from a typical English state primary (and I think the same would be true, perhaps even more so, from a US elementary school), a French primary school is a major shock, even more so if, as our eldest son did, you get a particularly “traditional” teacher.
This Monday, the first day of term, my second son came home, just as my eldest did three years ago, with the same carefully copied-out poem in the first page of his “poésies” exercise book, of which he had to learn the first two verses by today and the rest by sometime next week. The children then take turns to stand at the front of the class and recite it (if you muck it up, you have to try again a few days later). The poem is by Maurice Carême — a Belgian poet who is clearly a stalwart of French primary school poetry lessons, as we’ve had quite a few by him. Appropriately enough for la rentrée, it’s called ‘L’école’ (‘The School’), though how many of the children who’ve had to learn it can identify with its particular brand of nostalgia I am not so sure:
L’école était au bord du monde,
L’école était au bord du temps.
Au dedans, c’était plein de rondes;
Au dehors, plein de pigeons blancs.On y racontait des histoires
Si merveilleuses qu’aujourd’hui,
Dès que je commence à y croire,
Je ne sais plus bien où j’en suis.Des fleurs y grimpaient aux fenêtres
Comme on n’en trouve nulle part,
Et, dans la cour gonflée de hêtres,
Il pleuvait de l’or en miroirs.Sur les tableaux d’un noir profond,
Voguaient de grandes majuscules
Où, de l’aube au soir, nous glissions
Vers de nouvelles péninsules.L’école était au bord du monde,
L’école était au bord du temps.
Ah! que n’y suis-je encor dedans
Pour voir, au dehors, les colombes.1
This means something like:
The school was at the verge of the world,
The school was at the verge of time.
Inside, it was full of dancing rounds;
Outside, full of white pigeons.There were stories told that were
So marvellous that still today
As soon as I start to think of them
I cannot tell you where I am.Flowers climbed up the windows there
In a way I’ve seen nowhere else
And the beech trees in the courtyard
Rained on us their golden mirrors.Over the blackness of the chalkboards
Sailed in grandeur cursive capitals
Where, from dawn to dusk, we’d glide
To shores and lands quite new to us.The school was at the verge of the world,
The school was at the verge of time.
Oh if only I were still inside:
To see, beyond the glass, the doves.
Our second son, at least, is unfazed by learning poems: with three years of French scolarisation behind him, he has already memorized plenty of them. For our eldest three years ago, this initiation came — along with dozens of other things — as a big surprise. He didn’t really know how to form all the French majuscules letters yet, and if he was able to take in what he was copying at all that first day, that line about the grand sailing capitals might have felt a bit personal. I was surprised, too, on that first afternoon when he got back and showed me what he had to learn, though also impressed. ‘L’école’ is a real poem and it has stayed with me.
Revisiting Carême’s piece this week made me think about that ambiguous category of poems about childhood which are in their form and content accessible to children, even in some sense “for” children, but imbued with a kind of nostalgia for childhood which is really adult. I have found two such poems, in particular, very moving since I was myself a child, though they are both a couple of hundred years old now. (Carême, by contrast, only died in 1978.) The first is ‘A Boy’s Song’ by James Hogg, a Scottish poet and novelist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (he was born in 1770 and died in 1835):
Where the pools are bright and deep,
Where the grey trout lies asleep,
Up the river and over the lea,
That's the way for Billy and me.
Where the blackbird sings the latest,
Where the hawthorn blooms the sweetest,
Where the nestlings chirp and flee,
That's the way for Billy and me.
Where the mowers mow the cleanest,
Where the hay lies thick and greenest,
There to track the homeward bee,
That's the way for Billy and me.
Where the hazel bank is steepest,
Where the shadow falls the deepest,
Where the clustering nuts fall free,
That's the way for Billy and me.
Why the boys should drive away
Little sweet maidens from the play,
Or love to banter and fight so well,
That's the thing I never could tell.
But this I know, I love to play
Through the meadow, among the hay;
Up the water and over the lea,
That's the way for Billy and me.
This poem — or at least the first (best) four verses of it — makes me feel intensely nostalgic for childhood, and has done since I was a child, even though it doesn’t resemble my own childhood in any way. I wasn’t a boy, of course, and though we had a fairly large and partly overgrown garden in which I spent a great deal of time engaged in various kinds of nature study and imaginative play, my childhood was solidly suburban. I knew what blackbirds and hawthorns and hazel trees were, but I couldn’t have differentiated a trout from any other kind of fish, or known in what sort of water you’d be likely to find it, and I’d certainly never seen freshly cut hay.
The poem is ostensibly about play and companionship, but that’s not where its power lies — we learn nothing about what the speaker and Billy play together. The romance is all about the natural idyll, a semi-secret and somewhat remote place where nature is most beautiful and bountiful — a common trope, I suppose, in pretty much all traditions, with links both to the Garden of Eden and the classical ‘Garden of Venus’, as well as many geographically or politically specific versions, like Virgil’s laudes Italiae (praise of Italy) in the Georgics.
The other poem that has made me feel nostalgic for childhood since I was myself a child is Thomas Hood’s sadder “I remember, I remember”. (Philip Larkin borrowed Hood’s first line as the title of his own determinedly un-nostalgic poem about remembering childhood.) Hood, an interesting figure who wrote verse about the working poor, was just thirty years younger than Hogg (1799-1845):
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white,
The vi'lets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,—
The tree is living yet!I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from heav'n
Than when I was a boy.
I think as a very young child I liked this poem because of its sound, of course, but also because aspects of the scene seemed familiar: we had a swing in the garden, and a laburnum (a pleasing, grown-up word), and though no firs, some very tall trees. In my mind I always associated the end of the poem with the earlier passage about swinging: that feeling as you swing that you might get almost as high as the top of a tree. But I also remember the satisfaction I felt in working out the very simple sort of riddle or paradox in the final lines; the feeling that, because I could understand the basic meaning of the poem, I was no longer in ‘childish ignorance’.
I didn’t have a great time at primary school, so perhaps that’s why no nostalgic English “school” poem has stayed with me; or perhaps there’s something a bit deeper than that going on, and the distinctive French school experience and attitude to education is somehow more culturally central than any English equivalent. I am struck, at least, that the English poems about childhood that most moved me — both as an adult but also, with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia, as a child — are really about the experience of nature: the countryside or the garden, not the city or the school. But if you can think of anything like Carême’s ‘L’école’ in English, do let me know.
I can't think of any poems in English with school-nostalgia, but one of Robert Louis Stevenson's comes close. (Did he even attend school as a child? He was ill so much, he must have been educated mostly at home.) It's "Keepsake Mill," which ends, "You with the bean that I gave when we quarreled, / I with your marble of Saturday last, / Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled, / Here we shall meet and remember the past."
I enjoyed your description of your boys' French rentree. I grew up in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the word rentree actually makes me think nostalgically of the school days of characters from books I read in school. I think of Le Petit Nicholas, and of the young Marcel Pagnol whose father was a teacher and I think school administrator. And in English, the Mallory Towers books and how lovely it was to see the swimming pool by the sea!
This is lovely. Will think about relevant English-language poems. The only ones that jumped to mind immediately on reading this were the doggerel of very early childhood: Mary and her little lamb that followed her to school one day, or “Say say oh playmate” and climbing apple trees and sliding down cellar doors.
But in French, the first school-related poem that came to mind was Jacques Prévert's Le Cancre. It's funny, because it's as far from my own school experience as could be! But it's such a vibrant poem, somehow. And I always vaguely assumed that the “huées des enfants prodiges” was meant to evoke the huées at the end of Baudelaire's L'Albatros.