Progress Theme Analysis

My father started the business in 1925, the year of my birth. It was a good business: roads were rough and tyres were punished. In those days, there was the inner tube and the outer casing of hard rubber. I always saw these as the body and the soul.

My father would tell me, when I was old enough, how one must never fall short of the highest standards in this job. The road was getting busier, and the future looked rosy. But, he said, if you fall short of the highest standards, and start “cutting corners,” or grow sloppy, and let a man drive away with a set of tyres unevenly inflated, or with an inner tube that – from the very kindest of intentions – you have pretended to yourself is passable, though frayed in one spot… you might be sending that man to his death. Every time we heard of a local accident, our hearts beat faster, and not only because this unfortunate occurrence might have involved someone dear to us; many if not most of those running around on the roads at that time were putting their faith in our rigour and honesty and skill. Even I, a pimply young lad handling the bicycle trade… knew that my hands were capable of bringing injury or even death, if I let my attention wander, or felt too lazy to tiple-check a pressure or a repair or a bolt or the depth of a tread.

André Paulhan et Fils. That sign was painted in 1942, when I was seventeen. I was very proud.

The next day, we saw our first German limousine. We had seen German trucks before, passing through the unoccupied zone, on their way to elsewhere, but never before had we seen a big, black Mercedes, with a little flag fluttering on its bonnet, and motorcycle outriders. It did not stop. There was much less activity on the road, after the country was defeated, but my bicycle hands were kept busier. Our old tyres were soon used up, and new tyres were only fitfully available, until my father came to some agreement with the local powers in the town.

But he said to me, one day, after the famous ‘Petit Ours’ (tall and elegant) had had a tube repaired on his motorcycle one evening, late: “Don’t get mixed up in all that. These boys, they are free. You are not. When all this is finished with, and those bastards are back in Berlin, that sign will have your name on it, and your son will be le fils. I will be the old fellow who stands watching the world go by, and getting in your hair, and proving, at ninety, what a damn good grip I still have at the expense of your clients’ knuckles!” He laughed uproariously at this, but I think he was nervous, inside. I suppose he was playing a delicate game. He was a man who could never take risks. It was moulded into him, it was part of his job.

That’s what it was like, during the war: people dealt with their own problems, their own repairs, more than in peacetime. Everyone “cut corners,” from necessity. It was a difficult period.

There was no doubt that the game he played was a strain on his nerves. I have no doubt that men like my non-peasant in peasant’s dress had approached him in recent months, when the bolts were turning tighter on our world. He must have felt cornered in some way. He wouldn’t have liked that.

Apart from anything else, he had put all his eggs into the basket of progress, which he saw as intimately connected with the automobile. Now we were living as people had been in his father’s time, or even his grandfather’s. To my father, the war was a personal attack on his business. Thus he felt no compunction in screwing what he could out of the enemy.

I tried – I still try – to explain her presence in the car, but I am not sure, now, anyone really cares, or even remembers her very much. When my father “retired,” in ’69, I did no more than touch up André Paulhan et Fils; I could not change it, I could not paint it out. Well, I have had no sons, of course, staying unmarried – and anyway, he still hangs around the yard, getting in my hair (what little of it I have left to me), and showing clients what a firm grip he has, at ninety-odd. The road is very busy, of course – business could not be better. But something went out of the job when it all went tubeless, to my mind. I don’t suppose I will miss it. You’ll see the flowers on your way in, to the left, tied to the trunk. When they begin to fade and wither, I replace them with the plastic type. To be honest, no one knows the difference – shooting past as they do, these days.