Norman Explosions

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Caen

Writing about fireworks yesterday has put me in mind of  incidents which took place when I was a thirteen year old exchange student spending time in Caen, which is in Normandy, France. I spent two different spells there, during different school years, and thoroughly enjoyed living with my exchange student’s family, eating his mother’s superb cuisine, drinking wine or cider at the dinner table (the countryside surrounding Caen is apple country) and I even enjoyed some of the organised excursions we were taken on (I wandered off on my own in Paris, but that’s another story).

There were so many cool things about France compared to the restrictions on a young teenager in England at the time. It was no problem to walk into shops and buy cigarettes (Gitannes, of course). Some lads bought flick-knives (I bought a more sensible, and more liable to pass through customs, lock knife). Practically every cafe had several pinball tables and it seems the French often disable the tilt mechanism on their pinball so that it is possible to jerk the machine to bump your ball back in place, or even to lift it up and tip the ball onto your flippers again. I spent happy hours drinking Orangina, flipping balls around the pinball table and telling my exchange student, Jean-Louis, to go away and stop bugging me. Oh, did I not say? While I got on really well with his parents and his two brothers, I could not stand Jean-Louis. we were quite opposite in character; I wanted to stay out late and generally mess around; he wanted to study and drag me away from noisy cafes when I was having fun. The only thing we seemed to have in common was a love of football but even this could cause arguments because my team,

Pinball Museum at Aubervilliers, north of Paris

Liverpool, had dumped his team, St Etienne, out of the European Cup a season or two before.

One thing in particular that Jean-Louis did not approve of was my fascination with fireworks. To be precise, my fascination was for big bangers and firecrackers. Just like the cigarettes and the knives, there did not seem to be any enforced restriction on the selling of fireworks to children in Caen. At first I bought handfuls of the firecrackers and swiftly realised that they were actually lots of tiny bangers all fused together and that it was possible to untangle them from each other and have loads and loads of mini bangers with shortish fuses. This led to my first firework related argument with Jean-Louis.

When we went on excursions his mum, like many of the French mothers, made us both a huge baguette each filled with Brie and tomato. I used to throw the tomatoes at Jean-Louis but this annoyed him less than my ingenious idea for ruining his lunch one day. You have to understand that the baguettes were so long that it was barely possible to hold them upright whilst taking the early bites. So it was quite easy for me to slip one of the mini bangers into the far end of Jean-Louis’ baguette without him noticing. Just as he was taking a bite I walked off, flicking my lighter on as I reached the end of his baguette, and sparking the fuse. A couple of seconds later there was a satisfying ‘crack!’ and the end of his sandwich had been splattered all over the floor. Throughout his ten minute tirade against my actions I repeatedly pointed out that the bangers were too small to have actually hurt anyone, and let one go off in my hand to prove it (turning away quickly so that he didn’t see that, while it was too weak to have burned me, it did cause pain).

So Jean-Louis was anti-fireworks from then on. He certainly didn’t find it funny when his brother Martial and I placed a larger banger under an economy sized baked bean tin and watched as it flew fifteen feet straight up in the air and then nearly hit someone’s car as it landed. But there was one time that he failed to reprimand me and was simply my partner-in-crime. He was showing me around Caen Castle, which had been built by William the Conqueror. We’d already seen the castle where William had been born (back then, of course, he’d been known as Guillaume le Batard, or William the Bastard, on account of his mother not being his father’s wife), and I was keen to look at this impressive medieval building. I quickly became fascinated by the huge and deep moat which surrounds it. Back in William’s day,  and presumably for centuries afterwards, the moat was filled with murky water. In modern times it is empty, just a big, cavernous, echo-chamber of a pit all around the castle. Which gave me an idea. If shouting down into the moat, as we had been doing, produced such clear and even amplified echoes, what sort of echo would I get from a huge banger? Without telling Jean-Louis what I was doing I sneaked a banger from my bag, lit it behind my back and only as I was throwing it down into the moat did I tell him he might want to cover his ears. ‘Ka-boom!’ Even with my hands over my ears the sound of the explosion nearly deafened me. It sounded like a bomb had gone off. Jean-Louis just looked at me with his jaw hanging open while I grinned smugly and pondered trying it again. Suddenly there was a shout. Turning around we saw a security guard. And his alsatian dog. The alsatian he was letting off the leash and yelling the French equivalent of ‘Get the bastards!’ to. We ran, we scrambled over a six foot high fence which the dog  tried (and luckily failed) to jump over after us. We fell into a heap and fought for our breath. The security guard was yelling at us from the other side of the fence but Jean-Louis, far from slinking away or giving me that aggrieved look he did so well, shouted abuse back at him. We ambled away and he even complimented me on the way I’d scaled the fence so swiftly. We were arguing about pinball again by the evening but for a while there I’d finally made a connection with my exchange student. These days we’d probably have both been arrested as potential terrorists.

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Tags: Liverpool Football Club, France, Fireworks, Caen, Normandy, Exchange Student, Gitannes, Flick Knives, Pinball, Orangina, Association Sportive de St Etienne, Brie, Baguette, Caen Castle, Aubervilliers, William the Conqueror, Alsatian, Terrorism, European Champion's Cup