Brussels: Entry into Collège St-Michel

In 1965, we moved to Brussels. My brother and I were admitted to Collège St-Michel

In the spring of 1965, my father found a house on the corner of avenue Edouard Lacomblé and rue Nestor Plissart, just opposite the Flemish Etterbeek Atheneum. It was his first house. At the time, it cost him 1,2 million Belgian francs. He borrowed money from the bank but also from his father and older sister. My parents would end up living there for the rest of their life. They paid for some renovation and the house was ready to be lived in by early September 1965. I remember that for years my father was watching his finances to see how much money was left for the month after servicing the various mortgages and loans. His income was much smaller than in Hong Kong, and so were our living standards, but he was happy to be back in Belgium.

There was a small garden in front of the house, too small to play football for Damien and me. All bedrooms were on the first floor. My brother and I were in one bedroom with a closet and a sink to wash ourselves. My sister had a smaller room all to herself. The second floor had two attic rooms, one used by Maren and the other which served as a playroom. I used it a lot.

I would have loved to have a train circuit like many boys my age had, but my parents thought it was too expensive and bought me instead a Scalextric electric car circuit. I later received a Heller car circuit, which had smaller cars and could be more easily expanded, for which I used my pocket money. I would also later build electronic toys in that room: a transistor radio, robots and self-moving cars with sensors.

I was very much into cars in the early 1960s. There was then a fascination for beautiful cars that seems to have disappeared today, now that cars are seen mostly as a major cause of CO2 emissions. Most people in my generation loved the jaguar Type E and James Bond’s Aston Martin was a big entertainment. Battista Pininfarina, the designer of Ferraris was seen as a wizard. At the other end, Alec Issigonis, the creator of the Mini was also hailed as a magician as the tiny cute Mini Coopers won year after the year the Monte Carlo rallye between 1964 and 1967, beating much larger cars. Formula 1 car races were very popular. I bought magazines to follow the exploits of Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Jim Surtees and Jackie Stewart, among others. Argentinian champion Fangio had already retired, but he was seen as a semi-god.

My father had gotten Damien and me enrolled at Collège St Michel, at that time an all-boys school. I entered 6^th grade and Damien third grade. The school was one block away from our house so we walked together back and forth. We could even return home for lunch, which is something many people did in those days, not just pupils but also employees. The entrance into St Michel’s playground was not as hostile as in Oostende, but it was not very welcoming. A kid came to me: “You are new here. What is your name?” “Roland”. “Connais pas (unknown name to me).” St-Michel was an elite school to which many children of the Belgian aristocracy went. Their families were (and are still) all registered in a “High Life Book” a kind of social register of the country’s elite. They usually keep among themselves and marry in the same circles. It was made very clear to us that our family was not worthy to be part of that group as we were plain commoners. I remember a later episode where my sister who was at the time 6 years old was invited by a classmate from the Davignon family for a week in the family castle in Pepinster. When my mother took me to pick her up, we had to enter via the servants’ entrance. Mrs Davignon was very nice and warm to us but there was no doubt that our family was not part of their circle. Being excluded from that social group made my mother envious, hoping she might be partly admitted. I, instead, developed a deep hatred for the Belgian aristocracy. I felt being treated the same way the British in Hong Kong treated the Chinese. Children from rich families in St-Michel had little incentives to work hard in school as they expected to get cushy jobs later in life and/or inherit fortunes. The less smart ones would boast about this and care little about school, waiting to be old enough to engage in the leisure activities of the aristocracy: hunting, golf, tennis, car rallyes and long weekends in family castles.

Collège St Michel.

When entering sixth grade in September 1965, I had not been in a French-speaking school since June 1961. In Oostende, my mother had stopped doing the French curriculum with me. She had no help before Maren came and had a hard time taking care of her three children alone in a town where she did not speak the language. I studied hard in St Michel and at the end of the first trimester, my class teacher was positively surprised that I had the best points in French (as well as in most other subjects).

Despite being now in Brussels, the emerging linguistic conflict did not quite spare us. On the way back home from Collège St-Michel, we often crossed the older Flemish boys from the Etterbeek Atheneum who were going to catch public transport near the Montgomery Square next to Collège St-Michel. Seeing we came out of that school, my brother and I were often insulted by these older Flemish boys and greeted with “Walen buiten” slogans (Walloons, leave). I recognized the oldest one many years later as Frans Demaegd who became a cadre of the Flemish Maoist party AMADA and later left that Party to join the Belgian Communist Party as a hardcore stalinist. These were just verbal insults, but they were unpleasant. When we saw that group, we usually changed sidewalks.

Those first few years in Belgium, we would usually spend most of the summer at Erbisoeul at my maternal grandparents’ place. My father would stay most of the time in Brussels and come for the weekends. We played mostly outdoors. Damien was always with me. There was a boy my age a few houses further, Patrick Lebon whose father was a notary. We played together in the woods and the large areas of wild grass. We built wooden huts, went on long rides in bicycle through the trails in the woods and talked a lot. My grandparents’ house was in front of the Jurbise Golf court where many people from SHAPE came to play (De Gaulle had closed the SHAPE headquarters in France and it moved to Casteau, between Mons and Soignies in 1967). Damien and I learned some basics of golf with a Scottish neighbor who was member of the golf club. The most thrilling activity was with my older cousin Patrick Leclercq (see https://gerardroland.substack.com/p/early-school-experiences-in-mons). He was more or less 18 when we came back from Hong Kong. He had acquired a 50cc Honda Cub. This was one of the first motorcycles with a 4-stroke engine. Most motorcycles at the time had 2-stroke engines requiring a mixture of gas and oil as fuel. He allowed me to ride his motorcycle on the empty country trails around the property of his mother, my aunt Gine. A bit later, my mother gave me car driving lessons on the 2CV of her mother who had started driving in her late 50s. This was more complicated (especially the part about changing gears) but there was no problem of staying in balance, as was the case with motorcycles. My sister at some point also got driving lessons, also with our grandmother’s 2CV. She was however barely 6 or 7 years old. She was too small to sit in the car and see in front of her, so she drove in a standing position. The major advantage with these early car and motorcycle driving lessons is that there were never any cars or pedestrians on these country trails.

1965 Honda Cub 50cc.

(To be continued)