D-Day: "Les Anglais sont arrives"

[Note: please excuse lack of correct accent as I don't know how to use full editorial capabilities of Shaw webmail.]

This is a true story about D-Day as remembered by me from about ten years ago (between 1999 and 2006), as told by an elderly neighbour of mine in Kitsilano on Waterloo Street.
A geological colleague of mine introduced me to his mother, Suzanne, who lived on the next block of Waterloo Street (11th & Waterloo). One summer day -- it happened to be D-Day -- I was out by her front yard admiring her apple tree, and we were talking about the "June Apple Drop", which is when apple trees decide to drop off a certain percentage of apples to allow the rest to thrive -- if you have an apple tree, watch for this phenomenon around now. Link to explanation of "June Drop" in apples: http://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=611

Then Suzanne told me a true story about D-Day in France.

Suzanne had been a member of the French resistance to the Nazis. On D-Day (June 6, 1944) she was an inmate in a German prison in Normandy. One day someone came and said to her,
"Les Anglais sont arrives!" and took her out of her cell.  Now at first she thought this was an order to wash up because of her personal hygiene. She started to laugh. To understand why this is funny, she explained to me about the French expression, "Les Anglais sont arrives!" -- see the link -- related to the historical reference to the British as "redcoats". [I also come from a town with a historical reference to the redcoats, the cultural memory of Paul Revere and Samuel Prescott riding through towns west of Boston shouting "The British are coming! The British are coming!" on April 18, 1775 (immortalized in a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).] Anyway, Suzanne explained that the French idiom means that a woman is getting her period:

http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/lesanglaissontarrives.htm

So it took Suzanne a few minutes to realize she wasn't being released just to clean up, but because the Nazi occupation was over. She won some kind of medal of honor for her work in France for the Allies. Now when it is D-Day I think of her (she's probably no longer with us) and go out to look at my apple trees. So far this year they have set a good crop, but have not dropped any fruit yet. I expect that will happen around the same time as another seasonal occurrence that hasn't started yet: when the ants come marching in.

Have a nice day! 

Jennifer Getsinger
June 6, 2014