Le Moulin de Skansen

When I was 18 I ran away to Paris and got a job as a waitress in a posh restaurant on the Boulevard Montmartre.

I bet you did not see that one coming! Us Cupcakes are full of surprises.

The café where I worked was called Le Moulin de Skansen, and was slap bang next door to an old, historic and very respected café that was famous for being the starting point of the original Tour de France. Unfortunately I can’t remember its name, but this café shared its kitchen and thus some of its staff with the Moulin de Skansen, and of course it had the same patron.

The Moulin de Skansen was a Scandinavian restaurant which served food and drinks that I had never seen the like of before. All of us waitresses were dressed up as Scandinavian peasant girls, or I guess what the owner thought that Scandinavian peasant girls looked like. A little stream ran through the restaurant, with a pretty wooden bridge over it. Inside, the best seats were to be had in little Scandinavian wooden huts with red and white checkered curtains at their windows.

Monsieur Jean was the head maitre d’hôtel and he was the one who gave me the job. He was about 45 at the time. When I turned up at the restaurant, it was already my second day of looking for work. I was absolutely desperate. I had almost no money and I was tired, not to mention hungry. I had been refused work by umpteen restaurants because they said that I needed a work permit, but to get a work permit I needed to have been offered a job, and then to register with a permanent address and I didn’t have one. Monsieur Jean solved that problem. He said he would give me the job so that I could then go and register with a hotel address. He was so kind and always looking out for me, trying to find me a studio apartment so that I would not have to continue living in the hotel. But after two months this issue became academic, as my mother told me that I had been accepted by a university in England and if I did not return forthwith she would come to Paris and fetch me. After that I had to leave very abruptly.

After a few weeks I decided to get a haircut. I went to the cheap hairdresser’s near to my cheap hotel in the Rue Montholon. I did speak very good French, but the hairdresser was not the sharpest tool in the shed and she was also not listening to a word I said because her friend was there and she was talking non-stop to her. What I said was, I would like you to cut two centimeters off my hair. What she heard was, I would like you to cut my hair to two centimeters short (well it was 1977!). She had whisked my entire fringe off before I managed to stop her.

I had had beautiful hair, but of course after this, it was a train wreck. Even in 1977 this was not the style du jour. Every single day in the restaurant , at least one customer asked me if I was English and then said, “C’est pour ca que vous coupez les cheveux comme Jean d’Arc?” (Is that why you cut your hair like Joan of Arc?) Don’t ask me about the logic of this.

I was very happy at the restaurant. I earned so much money that I actually could afford to live in the cheap hotel, as well as buy all my clothes at the Galeries Lafayette, while still having loads over for my first year at university. I had ready-made friends, albeit there was very little time to do anything with them, and I met a number of interesting people. Sometimes, I wonder how things would have turned out if I had stayed on there for a couple of years and not returned to England to go to university.

About ten years ago, I took my daughter to Paris and wanted to show her the Moulin de Skansen. After having walked up and down the Boulevard Montmartre for at least half an hour, I realized that it no longer existed. In fact, my beautiful Scandinavian restaurant had been replaced by the Hard Rock Café.