For more than ten years a host of factors would conspire to make nonsense of the wishful thinking which had me becoming a writer.
First of all, there was the immediate time-consuming task of finding a suitable house to purchase as a family residence. Secondly, there was the early resignation of Michael O’Kennedy which led to the return to Brussels of Dick Burke, who was given the new special responsibilities for negotiations with Greece and Greenland, generating unforeseen Spokesman’s Group activity.
On a continuing basis there would be endless to and fro as Justin and Patricia’s school needs were reviewed, with time set aside for holidays in Ireland – particularly at Christmas – as we travelled more widely ourselves. There was also a constant succession of visitors, with Florence staying for as long as several months and friends of all ages arriving for shorter visits.
The house I found was a little further out from the centre than our previous Brussels home. There we had been in the commune of Woluwe Saint Lambert, now we would be in the adjoining commune of Woluwe Saint Pierre. It was a semi-detached house, with a double garage and a garden area, located on the corner of Avenue du Monoplan and Avenue Orban, all surrounded by a tall hedge. A No. 39 tram passed the front of the house on Avenue Orban, shaking it a little and raising dust in the summer. The tram continued to Stockel where it would in due course serve an extending metro line. Its other terminus was the Montgomery Metro station. The run via Montgomery would initially be my main route to the office, a trip at peak hours of no more than thirty minutes.
Although work was required on the house to make it warmer and to add a small bedroom to its top floor, it turned out to be a most suitable address for all the traffic it would have to take. A tall house with a sharply pitched roof, it rose from a spacious cave incorporating what we would call a boiler room, a laundry room and a freezer room.
At ground-floor level there was an attractive entrance hall opening straight ahead into a large sitting room/dining room, the full width of the house, or, going left, into a large kitchen. The dining room end of the larger space opened out to the back garden through French windows. A small patio was sheltered by the garage wall and the wall of the adjoining house.
There was a small toilet for guests at the foot of the stairs. The first floor had a magnificent bathroom and three other rooms. Anne and I chose the back room as our bedroom. It looked down on the patio, lawn, and three fine cherry trees. One of the two front rooms became a television room and the other a visitor’s bedroom. On the top floor, on the front side of the house, there was another good bathroom with a shower. The adjoining front room became Patricia’s room and Justin took the larger of the two back rooms.
Turning the smaller back room into a second visitor’s room was one of our first modifications to the house. From this small but comfortable room there was access to an attic space under the roof, which we insulated and floored for storage.
The house was to serve us well for the next ten years, a period during which Justin and Patricia would need a sense of home. Until double glazing and a new boiler was installed, it could be cold in winter. In spring and summer however, it was often very attractive. There was enough lawn space for a form of badminton to be played and it would also be pleasant to sit outside in the months between the appearance of the first cherry blossom till the disappearance of the fruit. The cherries were often good enough to eat fresh from the branches and were always delicious when cooked in syrup. The need to trim the hedge several times a year and to find roofers to maintain the high roof, which turned out to be vulnerable in severe weather, seemed to demand a lot of time summer and winter.
As the family settled into its new home, we discovered a neighbourhood exceptional for the friendly contact between Belgian families and their many international neighbours. Justin and Patricia also began, through their distinctive personalities and gifts, to contribute to the shaping of family interests. Justin’s contribution was as an early personal computer user initiating his parents into the information age. Patricia’s contribution was through her keen musical ear, which in time would make her a highly competent pianist. In encouraging her musical education Anne and I grew to enjoy a wide range of music and to appreciate quality performances.
The intellectual and cultural experience which most marked me in the 1982-83 season was, however, the evening course in film appreciation which I followed one evening a week at the famous Brussels Film museum. I went to the hour-long sessions straight from the office and became an enthusiastic admirer of the lecturer, Hadelin Trianon, who was a professor in Belgium’s main film and theatre school, INSAS.
In appearance, Hadelin Trianon was a smaller, slimmer version of my St. Andrew’s Latin teacher, Buster O’Neill. He had the same engaging smile and careful speech. Although he seemed to have no watch, always borrowing one from someone in the front row of the small film theatre, he was always on time.
At times he seemed to be rather the worse for wear, as if he had been drinking heavily, but he would nevertheless deliver, without the slightest hesitation, a fascinating and coherent lecture on the evening’s chosen theme. He never used notes of any kind and although he said he had been giving such courses for more than twenty years, each performance seemed fresh. His timing was always impeccable as he used a push-button signal to call up pre-chosen film extracts to illustrate his case. Many of the extracts would be of recent vintage, demonstrating that he kept his encyclopaedic knowledge of the cinema up to date.
Thanks to Hadelin Trianon’s performances, my French vocabulary was greatly extended and my interest in direction, editing, lighting and sound was greatly enhanced. The tour de force, which would always stay in my mind, was the lecturer’s presentation of Samuel Beckett’s only film, a film called “Film”, in which the central character was played by Buster Keaton. For most of the film Keaton wears a veil and acts as if trying to keep out of camera shot. The lecturer’s explanation was that the film was about Berkeley’s philosophy of perception, the famous “Esse est percipi”, to be is to be perceived. The actor’s avoidance of the camera was also illustrative of Beckett’s sceptical view of existence.
I would have loved to get to know Hadelin Trianon and was always disappointed that each lecture session seemed to be carefully conceived to end exactly on time, allowing the lecturer to slip away without offering any opportunity for questions and comment, other than an occasional reminder that there was a watch to be returned. He died well before his time in a fall down stairs.
Neville Keery 