Oh - with all this history talk this seems like a good place to introduce the man who lives in the apartment above ours.
We live in a town that is very popular with immigrants. It is a great place to live because we have this in common. Each of us loves France, the little town we live in and Paris that we can walk to from here. But we also nearly all have another land in our hearts and this fact unites us. Even though my French is very shaky and in the developmental stages I have made many friends as everyone knows what I am going through and like me wear clothes from their homeland, speak a different language at home and eat different food to the French.
Above our apartment live an elderly couple. A French woman who is bent double, wears a wig and refuses to let us help her lift her shopping trolley up the two flights of stairs. "If I let you do it today and then the next day and then the next..." she wisely explained "...you will have to do it for me in a months time." Her thin and quiet husband we thought, like many residence of our town was a Portuese man who had moved here to find work.
A few weeks ago he stopped me in the street - "Hello, you are the English lady who lives in our building, aren't you?" "Yes!" I nodded. "And what nationality are you?" I enquired to make conversation. "Spanish." He answered. "There used to be two Spanards in this town but the other one moved away. I miss speaking my language."
After showing me the medication he had just bought from the pharmacy and demonstrating its powers by jumping up and down a bit he told me he had been in London in the 50s. He had gone to London for work but had quickly discovered the London nightlife. Infact his hang out was Soho and Leiceter Square!
"The English are friendly..." He explained "...not like the French. I warn you they smile, they wish you good day, they seem ok but the French will turn on you when times are bad."
"O.K" I blondely nodded - thinking how late I was likely to be for a meeting with a friend.
"You don't understand...." He continued then went on to explain that when he was a young man the civil war in Spain broke out (1939). Worried about saving her family his mother organised for her children to escape from war-torn Spain into France. On arrival into France, along with many Spanish refuges they were collected up by the French army and put into concentration camps.
In these camps, like the ones the Nazis used during the earlier stages of the war, they were treated badly, fed very little and it was a regime of forced labour. People went mad and often killed themselves by walking into the sea.
So that was one hard time to put it lightly!
The next hard time in my neighbours life was the second world war where along with all the other Spanish people in France he was taken to a special jail where he was treated as a criminal for the war years!
I was silent. I didn't know what to say. If we were talking in English I wouldn't know what to say but we were speaking in French and so I really had no idea. "That is not good." I said in my best accent which is really bad then I frowned and shook my head.
"My life has been hard." He said "hard, hard, hard..."
"But you never returned to Spain?" I wondered.
"Well... no... I fell in love." He laughed!
An African lady walked over to us and asked for directions. "I know where that is!" He began to explain how to get to the town theatre and I said "Goodbye." "See you soon." And then wished him "A good day."