If Fanon and his friends had expected to be repatriated directly from Toulon, they were to be very disappointed. With an inscrutable logic of its own, the army now transported them from a port in the Mediterranean to one on the Seine estuary. Their port of embarkation should have been Le Havre at the mouth of the river’s estuary, but the port facilities had been badly damaged by Allied bombing and they were therefore now taken to Rouen, which was 90 kilometres upstream from Le Havre. Rouen is a beautiful city with fine Gothic architecture and medieval streets, but in August 1945 it was in a sorry state. During the previous summer, the bridges across the Seine had been a major target for the US Air Force. They were at the time the last bridges before the sea and they had to be bombed to prevent the Germans from bringing reinforcements into Normandy from the south-west. The bridges were destroyed and so too was everything between the river and the cathedral, which was itself badly damaged. Much of medieval Rouen disappeared during the raids before the city was liberated on 1 September 1944.
The men of the 5BMA had expected to be in Rouen for a week, but they were there for a month. This time it was not military bureaucracy that caused the delay. There were still German mines in the Seine and its estuary, and they had to be cleared before any ship could leave in safety. In the meantime, Fanon and his comrades were billeted in what Manville called a ‘disused château’. This was the Château du chapitre, an abandoned country house in the richly wooded hills to the north-east of Rouen. It was badly dilapidated but, for soldiers accustomed to sleeping in two-men tents, being under any kind of roof felt like luxury. The house no longer exists and the Bois-Guillaume area is now covered with handsome and expensive suburban housing. There were few houses in 1945 and there was little for bored soldiers to do. They had been granted free use of public transport but the privilege did not mean a great deal in practice. The only link between Bois-Guillaume and central Rouen was a light railway with an infrequent passenger service. It was more convenient to use an army truck when one was available. The only alternative was a long walk. Some thought that the walk was worth the effort. Marcel Manville found Rouen ‘bourgeois, puritanical, reserved and austere’104 but Cézette, who still lives there, thought otherwise. Although in ruins, the city was in festive mood as it prepared to celebrate the anniversary of its liberation and open-air dances were held. Cézette met his future wife at a dance in the place du Marché during his enforced stay in Rouen.
The boredom of Bois-Guillaume was relieved when the unit commander was invited by a local councillor to come to dinner on Sunday, 2 September, with fifteen of his men. Marcel Lemonnier was a prosperous businessman who sold stationery and supplies for artists and architects. He had also been a member of the local resistance. The invitation was readily accepted. The guests now had to be selected. The unit commander was anxious to make a good impression and was slightly worried when he learned that Lemonnier had three teenaged daughters. He wanted men who could be trusted to be on their best behaviour and therefore selected fifteen soldiers who came from good families and who had reached a relatively high standard of education. Fanon, Cézette and Manville all passed muster. As they approached the Lemonnier home, Manville thought he was going to a real château. The large thatched house standing in an extensive garden was originally part of the farm buildings belonging to the Château du chapitre. Lemonnier bought it in the late 1920s and gradually converted it into a large and very comfortable family residence. The house still stands, with its low thatched roof and thick whitewashed walls, and is the only chaumière of its vintage in the area to have survived. It is no longer in the possession of the Lemonnier family.
The dinner was a great success. For the first time in a very long time, Fanon and his friends dined off white linen tablecloths and ate good home-cooking. The talk was not of the war but of plans for the future. The young Martinicans talked excitedly of what they wanted to be. Manville was going to be a lawyer, and so was Fanon. The law was a good choice for Manville. In colloquial French, a lawyer is ‘un bavard’, or a chatter-box, and Manville was very rarely silent for long. Mosole was going be a pharmacist, but eventually became a dentist. The young black soldiers proved to pose absolutely no threat to the Lemonnier girls. Given Fanon’s subsequent traumatic encounter with the white gaze (‘Look, maman, a negro’), it is ironic that it was he and Manville who gazed at the children and could not take their eyes off them. They had never seen a girl with truly red hair, or such a blond boy, and they were fascinated. There was one slightly embarrassing moment, however. When Monsieur Lemonnier learned how his guests had been chosen, he protested that surely not everyone in the 5BMA was a middle-class young man with good educational qualifications and insisted on meeting some of the others. A second and larger meal was arranged for the next Sunday, and it was just as successful and enjoyable.
In the east of France, Fanon had met peasants who had been reluctant to fight on their own behalf and who seemed to show no gratitude to their liberators. The hospitality of the Lemonnier family showed him that France could and did have a very different face. Odette Fresel (née Lemonnier) still speaks with great emotion of the young black troops ‘who left their beautiful Martinique to liberate us’. Inviting two groups of soldiers into his house was an act of great generosity on Marcel Lemonnier’s part; Rouen may well have been in festive mood, but food was still in short supply and it was expensive. The generosity was typical of the man: he simply liked inviting people into his home. After the war, he would take an indirect route home from work in the hope that he might meet foreign cyclists or hitchhikers he could take home for dinner. As his daughter admits, this did make for a rather eventful and unpredictable home life, as the house was often full of unexpected guests. Her mother’s visitors’ book contained expressions of thanks from numerous servicemen, cyclists, hitchhikers and walkers – many of them English. It also contained several pages headed, ‘In memory of a good evening, hoping that we meet again’ and dated ‘9 September 1945’. Two of the inscriptions read as follows: ‘With thanks for the pleasant evenings spent under the sign of the great friendship shown by the welcoming Lemonnier family to some sons of the far-off Martinique’ and ‘I beg the Lemonnier family to believe that our West Indian gratitude will think for a long time to come, despite the distance and the passage of time, of these evenings when the family was unstintingly kind and generous to these spiritual sons of the immortal France. We will continue to love our motherland and her children, who were so hospitable.’ They are signed, respectively, ‘Charles Cézette, 36 rue Perinnon, Fort-de-France, Martinique’ and ‘Marcel Manville, 72 rue Victor Hugo, Fort-de-France, Martinique’. A third and shorter message is signed ‘F. Fanon, 33 rue République F de F’: ‘With thanks for the generous hospitality and homely quality of the evenings spent with the Lemonnier family.’105 Whether or not Fanon remained in contact with the family is unclear. Odette Fresel was no longer living at home at the time, but thinks that both he and his sister Gabrielle visited her family when the latter was studying pharmacy in Rouen after the war. She remained in touch with both Manville and Cézette, and that evening in 1945 provided the basis for lasting friendships.
The return journey to Martinique began in October, and it was not a comfortable one. The San Mateo was a cargo boat normally used for transporting cattle and provided poor accommodation for the 700 Martinicans, Guadaloupeans and Guyanese who were shipped out of Rouen. The food was worse. The hard biscuits came from the supplies issued to the army that was defeated in 1940. The meat was corned beef, which was so loathed by the French troops who first encountered it in the trenches of the First World War that they called it singe (‘monkey’). Manville shared their opinion.106
On his return to Martinique, Fanon found himself in a curious position.