Still at the officers’ rest home, Sherriff wrote to Pips that, ‘As I am living the “quiet life” still, with no events to record, I will continue a few of my “meditations upon the manners and customs of the French”.’
Describing their habits and customs as ‘peculiar’, he began by observing that anyone who wanted to sell anything blew on a ‘little tin trumpet’ – the paper-sellers, the milkman and even the guards on trains. But it had its good points: ‘whereas the English paper-seller cries himself hoarse with vain yells of “Pipe-ee” he would find it much more labour-saving to have a bugle.’
Next he turned to their clothing, observing that men’s trousers were typically too long, and their coats too short. Calculating that trousers were on average 3 inches too long, and that there were some 20 million pairs of trousers in the country, he estimated that, if all the spare material was sewn together to form a tube, it would stretch for 1899 miles – ‘quite useful for a cable to America or for other purposes.’ But their most ‘imposing’ item of clothing was the muffler, seen frequently because of the cold weather: ‘I went into a bank to cash a cheque yesterday – a clerk appeared behind a barred grating, neatly dressed in black with a large woollen grey muffler wound round and round his neck, a habit I don’t believe is allowed in Cox & Co.’
Next he turned to the French soldiers, who were ‘as variously clothed as Parisian ladies (or as I have heard Parisian ladies are clothed, for till now all the female sex I have seen look like bundles of black cloth covered head to foot).’ The officers were ‘very smart’, and could be described in race-card style: ‘”Blue – with gold spots, sky blue sleeves, crimson cap”, or “Grey, with black hoops, black collar, Pink cap”, etc.’
He found their habits to be ‘singularly happy go lucky’, observing how they would simply throw potato peelings away on the pavement, or how the greengrocer would dispose of his rotten fruit by ‘flinging it violently out of the shop at imminent risk too passers-by’, a habit that the butcher observed in similar fashion with ‘obsolete bones and giblets’. It was even ‘quite the thing’, he wrote, ‘to walk along eating a piece of bread and butter, just as you would smoke a pipe.’ Falling down also seemed to be a popular pastime – ‘practised just now more than usual on account of the frost’ – and he wasn’t sure whether it should be blamed on the extra three inches of trouser leg, or ‘on their overgrown moustaches impeding their sight’.
At the end of his letter, he concede that ‘I may be wronging them – and I may have exaggerated a bit, for after all they are not a bad people – though very ugly – and they are not above “doing” you either’. He cited the example of an old Frenchwoman who would charge you a shilling for a sixpenny bit of chocolate, but at least he allowed that ‘I suppose times are hard with them as they are for everyone’.
[Next letter: 1 February]