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ANECDOTES about ELEANOR BERRY by Rozanne Robinson, a freelance journalist
"I don't want that brat on my boat, ever again!"
To most, Eleanor Berry is a highly likeable person but to others, she can be a pest, a remorseless mimic and a deliberate tease.
She was twelve years old at the time of the following incident. She and one of her brothers were staying in the South of France and joined other visitors on a boat on which aqualung diving was taught.
The boat was run by an over-excitable, hot-tempered Frenchman called Christian Malinet. He had been a close colleague of an aqualung-diving buff, a certain Jacques Cousteau who invented the aqualung.
Relations between the young Eleanor Berry and Christian Malinet were poor, even from the start. Berry picked up the rudiments of diving quickly. Malinet suggested to her, her brother and two others that they descend about eighty feet below water level, to look at a wreck.
Malinet made a point of telling his class not to enter the wreck in case the divers' mouthpieces became punctured by brushing with jagged edges, letting gushes of water into the breathing pipes.
Berry decided to deliberately disobey Malinet, not for malicious, but for purely perverse reasons. She had noticed that whenever he swore, he shouted at the top of his voice and used an expression which was nectar to Berry's ears, to quote her own words, "more wonderful than the rarest music ever composed."
When Malinet was in a rage, he did not simply shout "Merde". It had to be "Et puis, Merde-e!" Had he just said "Merde" Berry would not have insisted on permanently baiting him.
Malinet, was livid when he saw that Berry had disobediently swum into the wreck. He swam in, immobilized her arms and legs, and took her to the Bends level barrier, five or six feet beneath the surface of the water and held her to the anchor chain. He waited for the two water pressures to settle, to avoid the Bends, and using furious hand language, ordered her to get out of the water and up the ladder.
Berry wanted to hear an "Et puis, Merde-e" more than anything else in the world. She gesticulated with her arms, "No, I will not get out."
Exasperated, and now only two feet below the surface of the water, Malinet turned Berry's oxygen supply off, so that she would be faced with no choice but to come to the water's surface.
Berry knew she had to breathe. As an unplanned reflex action, she seized Malinet's breathing pipe from his mouth and put it in her own.
Probably homicidal, Malinet pulled and pulled on it, to get it back, but Berry had very strong teeth and bit onto it.
While Berry was breathing happily and Malinet was fuming with rage, Berry made a circle with the thumb and index finger of her right hand, which is the standard under-water signal for "Are you all right?"
Once Malinet and Berry (then having hysterical giggles) had scrambled onto the deck of the boat, Berry inadvertently dropped her four kilo weight belt onto Malinet's toe.
Although it had been an accident, Berry was able to rejoice in Malinet's cursed words, which at that time meant more to her than anything else in the world:
"Eh puis, Merde-e!"
Berry's brother came up the ladder a few minutes later. Malinet stormed up to him, screaming and shouting in French.
"I don't want that brat on my boat ever again!" he bellowed.
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