THE HOUSE WHERE THEY PROMOTED DISQUE BLEU

The imagination plays tricks, does it not? There is more going on inside the brain than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio! Even inside a tired old box of grey matter like mine.

My sister has been married forty-years and her children had kindly organised a surprise party for her to take place in what is now the family home of her eldest daughter. We were invited too and last week we stayed chez our eldest daughter in Frome en route across England to the fastness of East Anglia. Sleeping on the sofa bed I dreamed a dream of being taken in a bouncy small bronze-coloured car to see the place 'where they promoted Disque Bleu' - that being a brand of French cigarette common about forty years ago. Why I was being taken there I was not told: dreams don't always provide much by way of explanation.

So there I was sitting on the leather back seat of this car while in front rode a man and a woman with thick black hair. We drove down an avenue lined with plane trees, the sun shining and hot, the road dusty and eventually we came past a tall red brick house at the end of a row. It looked like the house of some mid-nineteenth century industrialist, imposing but in a rather grim sort of a way, with a great bay window and next to it a forbidding black front door towering above broad stone steps.

Although mainly built of brick, and therefore red, the architect had specified stone facings and mullions for the windows. At some point it had also been divided into two - 'the place where they promoted Disque Bleu' being thus semi-detached. Only one half of the house thus boasted a confectionery of advertising slogans, none, this being the modern age, had anything to do with tobacco.

Le voilà shouted my companions as we sped past looking now for somewhere to park; but I knew as soon as I had seen the house that I had been there long before. I had visited this very house. I could describe to you what lay beyond those stone steps and forbidding front door; what you could see inside that bay window.

I knew that the interior, as that of so many French houses of the period, would be dark and gloomy and smelling of that mixture of garlic, coffee and black tobacco so typical of France. Inside the room with the bay window, a large enough ‘salle de jour’ incidentally, was, and perhaps would still be, a café-style bar taking up much of the space. Someone had tried to reproduce a café in this front room.

When I had been there before I’d taken a beer and sat down on one of the nondescript chairs at a small table and lit a cigarette: Disque Bleu in all probability for it had been at the time that everyone smoked. I remember no other visitors, the bar had been empty except for the gruff man with an apron who had poured me my beer and who appeared to be ‘le patron.’

I had been there some minutes when from somewhere in the interior arrived a sharp-suited fellow with a little attaché case. He too had been smoking and he talked fast and quickly to the ‘patron,’ occasionally looking round and lowering his voice as though he were discussing business of a kind that visitors shouldn’t hear. He drank pastis, I seem to remember, and wore a Trilby, and looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant.

Someone even then had told me then that this was the house from which the entire marketing operation for the cigarette company was run - it seemed unlikely, but looking round the walls I could see faded photographs and certificates that looked, I supposed like those you might expect to find in some under used board room, faded photographs and the odd curling and yellowed certificate. Perhaps I had arrived in the town and someone had said I could buy a drink there and I suppose I had gone in the hope, if not the expectation, of some largesse of cigarettes. But none was to be forthcoming. I left and forgot the episode. Maybe I had been about eighteen or twenty at the time.

But now the memory came back with a start as the driver found a parking slot and skidded the car deftly into it. I got out. The man and woman talked animatedly, but not to me, but I followed them back down the hot and empty road with the light dust blowing on the wind. Looking up, I saw a paper sign high on a gable end, black and white. It read LOT . I wondered if that was where we were. But the letters might simply have been the first three or the last three letters of a longer word. I didn't know and it didn't seem to matter.

And I was never to learn either. For at that point I woke up.

Now I was back in England and time had rolled forward to the present. We were off to my niece's house in Suffolk which had once belonged to my brother-in-law's parents. I had, it is true, once been there briefly during the time it had been left unoccupied and semi-derelict, its steps and terraces overgrown with weeds, its timbers ravaged by rot; That had been perhaps about twenty years before. I had forgotten completely what it looked like other than we approached it via an avenue of trees. Still this is an imposing house. Built around 1850 - the same age as my French house - and it is built of red brick. Moreover the mullions around the windows are stone and there are steps up to the door.

But if my conscious brain had forgotten this house, my unconscious brain clearly hadn't. Indeed, it had remembered it on cue and bolted it into my dream. I was even being driven, too, for younger daughter, who has dark brown hair, was driving. It is all uncanny and spooky. But who was the fellow in the Trilby that looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant? And where is the woman with the thick black hair?