Old Memories

When I posted a link to my recent blog entry on the teacher in Wolcott where I grew up, one of the people who commented on it was one of my school classmates – Jeanne [Wilson] Cyr. I was not friends with her on Facebook [but have since become so] but we were both members of the Facebook group “You know you’re from Wolcott, CT if…”. I had built out her family tree last year as I was investigating all my high school classmates, and in referring to it noticed that she lived in Dennis Port, MA, which is on Cape Cod.

This is the same town that the father of Sheila [Crichton] Johnson was buried and whom I had written about a few days ago (see here). Seeing the name Dennis Port twice in just a couple of days then reminded me of the first, and I believe only, time that I was there. And as I thought about it, some of my old memories from that time came flooding back.

I had written about that experience once before (see here) when talking about my Aunt Vi and her family. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

In 1953 our family took our first family vacation (only two children at the time as the next sibling didn’t come along until late 1954). We rented a small cottage in Dennisport on Cape Cod (small bedroom, eat-in kitchen, and screened in porch). My sister was only 3-1/2 and so slept with my parents. I (at the ripe old age of 5) got to sleep on the screened-in porch. Cape Cod back then was not the overbuilt, pricy tourist place that it has since become. The beach was one block away. Uncle Tony and Aunt Vi rented another small cottage next door to us for the week. Since they had no children, my parents were more than willing to share!

But there was one other memory from that summer vacation that also came back to me that I had not though about since that summer now nearly 70 years ago. (The mind is a strange thing!)

Besides our family and my Uncle Tony and Aunt Vi who were staying right next door, there was another family from Wolcott who was staying in a cabin nearby. They had a daughter who was a few years older than my sister and I. So, we often spent the day together on the beach at the end of the street. But she was also studying French in school and thought it would be fun to teach my sister and I how to sing a couple of French songs that she had recently learned.

One of these was Frere Jacques, the French equivalent of Are You Sleeping? That was a fairly common kids’ song at the time and we already knew it in English, so learning the French version was pretty easy.

Are You Sleeping? / Frère Jacques

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines
Ding ding dong, ding ding dong.

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping?
Brother John, Brother John?
Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing
Ding ding dong, ding ding dong.

But the other song she taught us was one that I have not thought about in the nearly 70 years since that idyllic summer. But for some reason, this thinking about Dennis Port brought both the words and lyrics back to me and I began singing it to myself. However, unlike the above song, I only knew it in French and had no idea what the English equivalent was. And since I’ve never learned French, I didn’t even know how to spell the words that I was singing. And was my memory from that long-ago summer accurate? The human mind is an amazing thing, but I had to check it out.

I know that many French words have silent letters at the end and that things like “Notre Dame” are pronounced as “Notra dahm”, but if I didn’t know the spelling of what I was singing, could the power of the computer help me out? I figured, no harm in trying, so I went to Google and typed in what I thought the letters might be that matched the sounds of the song. Amazingly it worked! So, I present to you one of only two French songs that I know – and this one that I had not sung for nearly 70 years.

The song is titled, “Le Carrillon de Vendôme” and you can see the story behind the song here. We only learned the chorus which can be sung as a round and that is how we learned it. I was able to find a YouTube video of it being sung, and amazingly I had all the music and pronunciation right all these years later. The power of the human mind is absolutely amazing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly3oF1GSvU8