What immediately impressed me about Calais were its unsanitary street conditions. I passed one building and saw waste water being emptied from an open air pipe. Shaving cream and whiskers oozed slowly out and plopped into the gutter. Down the block I saw a cab driver coming out of one of those awful corner latrines still adjusting his trousers. Still further, a little girl said something to her mother and started going in the street. When I finally found a place to stay for the night, it was a second story room in a courtyard. There wasn't any bathroom. You had to go to the courtyard up against the wall. The "stalls" and urinals were open air with no partitions while strangers walked past. Toilet paper was made of wax and dispensed in squares. What was it like before the revolution?
The Calais opera house has undergone considerable restoration. Images of it on the Internet are really impressive, but in 1972 it looked dilapidated. The marquis out front had anti-American propaganda pasted on it telling the U.S. to get out of Indo-China. President Nixon was clobbering the North Vietnamese and the Left in France and elsewhere went ballistic to try to influence the peace process in their favor. The French love their communist party.
I visited the Calais Museum, saw the statue by Auguste Rodin of the Burghers of Calais, and discovered a Soviet cultural exhibition at the town hall. I was curious to meet my first Russian so I went in. There was propaganda everywhere. They had all the typical books. You expect that. They also had a lot of trinkets, like the Soviet Bear and chocolate for sale. They seemed malnourished and suspicious, but were friendly when I asked for some literature and they let me have piles of it. Incidentally, the Soviets I saw were basically of the cultural variety advocating closer French and Soviet economic ties, but, in reflection, they looked like Homer Simpson’s boss, Mr. Burns – pale, skinny, and predatory. My old drill instructor use to deride me for including this incident in my application for the Marine Corps which ended up in my Service Record Book. He said it was a career ender. He was wrong because when the intelligence services ask for full disclosure and the truth, they mean it. I got my Top Secret in 1979.
In one of the ironies of my life and many years later I discovered though genealogy not only my family’s origin in England, but in France before that. Both sides include French Normans. Cherry was Anglicized from Cheris. The Anglo-Saxons kept pronouncing the “s” so our family, somewhere along the line, changed it to preserve the original pronunciation. Maybe it means the French are not so bad after all. I’m just criticizing my own relatives.
