In our family, we attended the local public school—not out of deep republican conviction but simply because it was the closest one.
The school stood in Hamanxard, a small village about a mile and a quarter from the hamlet called Les Mousses. Each day meant a mile in the morning, two miles round trip at noon, and another mile in the evening. Without knowing it, we had begun our first daily athletic routine—long before anyone had heard the word jogging.
On that road we often passed the workers from the cotton mill. The morning shift was heading home, their faces gray with fatigue. My aunt Claire—my mother’s sister—walked among them, her hair dusted with fine white cotton.
Whenever I spotted her, I would run ahead and throw my arms around her neck, shouting the nickname I had invented just for her. I was immensely proud of it.
Looking back, it wasn’t exactly flattering.
She endured it patiently… until the day she asked me, with a gentle but unmistakably firm smile, to stop.
At that school, boys and girls began at five and stayed until they earned the primary school certificate at fourteen. The diploma itself was nothing impressive—a thin sheet of paper—but it carried weight. It would disappear in 1989. Much earlier, in 1959, schooling in France had become compulsory until age sixteen. Had we been born a few years later, our long walks might have stretched even farther.
In those days the valley was more alive. The Koechlin cotton mill provided steady work and fed many households. Today the town of Val-d’Ajol has lost nearly half its population. The school seems to sleep beneath the dust of time, and the old mill stands like a dismantled skeleton—mute witness to a vanished world of labor.
Inside the classroom, the desks held small inkwells filled with purple ink that forgave no clumsy movement.
Two grades shared the same room. The teacher stood on a wooden platform like an actor on a modest stage. A tall wood stove gave off an uncertain warmth while its wood box waited hungrily nearby. On the blackboard, the moral sentence of the day stretched across the slate in careful white chalk.
For us, it was pure delight to arrange cardboard letters into sounds, then words, then short sentences.
It was also a cause for sudden fury when the child sitting ahead of us turned around and, like Aeolus releasing a storm, blew across our desk, scattering our carefully ordered alphabet into chaos.
Even now, thinking of Mrs. R…, our teacher, fills my heart with quiet gratitude.
Another memory floats back—slightly detached from the others, like a photograph misplaced in an album.
I must have been six or seven. My parents and I were climbing the Peutet Pass when a small Renault 4CV stopped beside us. Inside were Mr. and Mrs. R…, our teachers from Hamanxard.
Perhaps they felt sorry for this couple and their little girl trudging along what looked suspiciously like a Himalayan expedition. With simple kindness, they offered to drive us home.
Why my parents had decided to walk ten miles that day remains a mystery. Perhaps they were training for a marathon that none of us yet knew existed.
A country path is already an adventure—especially when it leads home.
Parents were absent, older brothers had their own companions, and what remained were the children of the neighborhood and an irresistible urge to explore, to gather things… and, if truth be told, to conduct small but methodical raids.
Past the mill, the paved road gave way to two stony tracks. Between them ran the Méreille stream—more a determined brook than a true river, though it did its best to appear important.
Part of its water slipped beneath the path to power the mill’s turbines. Its original mission had been renewable electricity. The factory may be gone, but the stream continues its work.
A model civil servant.
The valley there is narrow. To reach Les Mousses, the path passed sheds where discarded mill equipment lay in dusty piles. To the adults it was junk.
To us, it was treasure.
Among the most coveted objects were the round metal disks from the bottoms of the carding drums. For the workers they were scrap metal.
For us they became paddles, perfect for steering our makeshift rafts on the reservoir near the lock.
Recycling, long before anyone used the word.
Shipwrecks included. 🤣
Farther along, a small brook danced through stones beside a steep pasture below a place known as Le Sauté. That hillside hosted the unofficial championship of applied botany.
The challenge was to discover the first anemones, standing upright on their thin stems—the messengers of spring.
The search demanded agility. The slope was steep, and falling down it did little for one’s dignity.
Soon afterward came the lungwort, its soft leaves speckled with white and its flowers shifting from pink to violet as though unsure which color to wear.
Then autumn arrived.
At the top of the slope stood old fruit trees, never pruned, offering apples and pears that were bruised but delicious. The hillside was so steep the owner rarely saw us.
Unless, perhaps, he preferred not to see.
That too is a form of rural wisdom.
One section of the path passed through tall dark firs. There was something solemn about that place, almost oppressive. We walked more quickly there without quite knowing why, as though the trees themselves were counting our steps.
The final stretch was kinder: a small woodland of beeches, hazel bushes, and above all a magnificent walnut tree.
Here the competition changed scale. No longer children against children, but families against families. After a night of strong wind, everyone raced to see who would wake first and fill their baskets.
In that contest, the family whose father had heart trouble always won.
No one disputed that particular advantage.
My parents’ rented property had its own fruit trees and even a walnut tree. Yet somehow the neighbor’s always seemed more generous. The neighbor’s walnuts always looked larger.
A little cheerful pilfering was simply part of the local children’s DNA.
A parallel education—offered by nature and validated by appetite.
The mill manager’s house stood along our route. During apple season his wife would wait for us with baskets filled to the brim. We did not leave until our pockets bulged.
It felt like Saint Nicholas had come early.
In eastern France, Saint Nicholas rewards well-behaved children in early December. His darker companion, the one who punishes the naughty ones, was curiously absent on apple day.
A fortunate coincidence.
A distant relative by blood, but very close by heart. The youngest of a large family, she had lost her mother shortly after birth. Her father, a farmer in an even more isolated place, could not manage both the farm and a household of children.
So Marie-L was entrusted to my grandmother and grew up beside my mother—until the day someone decided she was old enough to be useful elsewhere.
For both of them it was a painful separation. The wound never quite healed.
Her house also stood along the road to school. Sometimes she would signal for me to wait a moment.
She would return with a slice of bread prepared in her own secret way.
A thick piece of bread, lavishly buttered, generously sprinkled with sugar and—crowning glory—covered with a cloud of cocoa powder.
A luxury unknown in our home, where breakfast consisted of a bowl of coffee with milk in which cubes of stale bread floated with quiet dignity.
So—were the roads to school really our first lessons in freedom?
I cannot say for certain.
But they filled the bellies of children who were not always well fed.
They taught us to brush against legality with a certain moral flexibility.
They taught us generosity, sharing…
and gave our childhood the unforgettable taste of forbidden fruit.
The previous article promised the continuation of the family story. Where do the author’s present-day azure-blue eyes come from?
That genetic thread will appear in another chapter.
Until next week—take care.
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