I bought what they told me was ‘the last word’ in rucksacks. I don’t know what the word was because when I packed it and hoisted it onto my shoulders I felt like a coolie crouching under a load of cement. I bought a body-belt for money and documents and a little case on wheels to carry the laptop, back cushion, neck cushion, sleeping bag, toilet bag, medicine case, little yoga stool and the books I needed. It bulged.
‘You don’t need all those books,’ my mother said.
I did. I needed my phrase books, guides to Paris, to Provence and a number of books on Vincent to help me plot my search for him, my Relais Routiers, a regrettably heavy copy of John Ardagh’s Writers’ France, because I might as well extend my education on French literature while I was at it, and a dozen English paperbacks because I couldn’t be expected to think in French all the time.
I refused to let my parents see me off. ‘Don’t’ fuss,’ I said, ‘it’s not as though I’m leaving for ever.’
My mother looked so stricken she obviously thought I was.
I never contacted Jo. Nor she me.
Setting off for ‘abroad’ was for me not the high excitement most Australian girls must feel when the door opens on a new world. Unaccustomed as I was to having money I had automatically booked economy. Thank God I had an aisle seat and could stretch my long legs out into the gangway and be a nuisance to other people. I would have preferred to feel like a ‘traveller’ and not a ‘tourist’. First lesson learned. I enquired as to the possibility of being upgraded to Business Class and was told they would see. They were still ‘seeing’ when we changed planes at Singapore and then they regretted — I would have to keep my legs folded for the long hours of the flight to London.
I was starting in England. A look at London was obligatory of course — you don’t cross the world and leave that out. I had allotted three days to it by booking a room at a relatively inexpensive hotel in Kensington. ‘Relative’ was the operative word.
It was my first experience of a long flight and, if Jo had been with me, I might have been able to endure the discomforts by mocking them, but, on my own, I could only feel boredom and resentment. I arrived at Heathrow, bloated with food I had been unwise enough to eat to pass the time and in desperate need of a shower.
The taxi to the hotel cost an arm and a leg.
So this was England. Looking out of the taxi window at factory and traffic I decided it was not all it was cracked up to be. Not that anything much could have pleased me just then.
The three days in London were spent on tour buses. I crammed it all in. Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard, the Tower, the Thames, Greenwich Palace, et al.
‘Now we are seeing —’ the bored voice intoned, expecting the passengers to rubberneck from side to side and see, in a flash, all that was too soon left behind.
I am not mad on cities — or history for that matter. Jo would have got far more out of it all than I could — or would. I could not shake off the sourness of mood, nor did I really try. It was an expensive way of not enjoying oneself and I was glad when it was over.
Crossing the City by taxi from Euston to Waterloo to catch the Eurostar and make the tunnel journey beneath the Channel to France was all tote-that-barge and lift-that-bale stuff — I was weighed down with impedimenta and by the time I had made it through the crowds and was finally on the famous train I was no happier.
I sat and watched England peel away through the train window and found no joy in the untidy embankments, ragged with flowers I recognised as rosebay willow herb, and strewn with litter, or the rows of dingy little houses with washing flapping in even dingier little gardens. Here and there there were sudden shows of bright paint, hanging baskets and small green spaces, valiant with neat rows of flowers standing primly upright. It did get better as we ran into open spaces where there were tidy hedgerows and slow-munching cattle, standing under trees switching their tails and turning their long, indifferent faces away as the train rushed by, but, by the time a disembodied voice said ‘you are now entering the famous Tunnel and will be in France in half an hour’ I was aware I had made another mistake. Sod the miracle of engineering. Eurostar is for people in a hurry, not for the traveller. I should have taken the ferry across to France. Standing on the deck of a ship, feeling the wind in your face and the lift of the vessel under your feet, and watching for the smudge of land on the horizon that says ‘Foreign Parts ahead’ must be a much more exciting way of making the crossing than sitting in a perfectly ordinary bloody train.
There were French people in the seats across from me and I studied them with interest — they looked angular and vivid. I tried to eavesdrop on their conversation but found to my annoyance they gabbled so badly I could hardly understand a word. Our French mistress had been a woman obsessed with grammatical correctness — she had played us innumerable tapes of speeches by General de Gaulle to make sure our accent was pure. His slow and careful diction had made him wonderfully easy to understand. Now I realised I had been lulled into a false sense of security for there didn’t seem to me many of him around. I rummaged in my case for my phrase book and morosely studied the phonetics. And then we were in France. It didn’t look all that different. There were the same dismal-looking buildings, daubed with the same sort of graffiti, then the same looking countryside. Thank heaven things started to look better as we ran into Paris.
‘You are here!’ I told myself, determinedly summoning up elation as I stood among my baggage on the bustling platform wondering where the hell I could find the office of the Accueill des Jaunes, which I had been assured would find me ‘decent and low-cost accomodation with immediate reservation’.
‘Pardonnez-moi’ I said to a man rushing by, ‘ou est —?’
But he just spread his hands at me and went on plunging forward. He didn’t even say ‘sorry’. The wheels of my pushcart thing proved as intractable as those of a faulty supermarket trolley and, bending down to try and fix them, my ill-adjusted rucksack slipped and I felt it make heavy contact with something. Coming upright I was faced with an irate woman, nursing her elbow and showing both outrage and distaste. ‘Pardonnez-moi,’ I mumbled as she swept away.
I was unprepared for the impatient blaring that surrounded the taxi rank I managed to find outside the station, but at least the queue was orderly and quite polite. Ahead of me a bewildered-looking young Japanese couple were obviously having trouble trying to make sense of a street map and an elderly lady was burrowing frantically into the depths of a very large handbag.
‘There is too much tension in travelling,’ I thought, checking to see that all my bits and pieces were present and intact.
At least the taxidriver was pleasant when I asked him if he would find me the ‘la plus prochaine Youth Hostel if it pleased him. ‘Sans doute!’ he said heartily and actually helped me to stow my gear in his cab.
The guidebook had said that every taxidriver would know where the youth hostels were. I knew there were at least a couple in the city and did not expect to have to make a long drive but we seemed to be going a fair way through the wide traffic-infested streets where I caught an occasional glimpse of a world-famous name above a shop doorway, the sudden brilliance of gilt on extravagantly shaped buildings and what seemed like the same statue of an over-dressed man on an excessively solid horse. After about fifteen minutes I began to worry about the cost of the fare. Did I have enough in my wallet or would I have to make an embarrassing foray into the body belt strapped beneath my clothing.
The traffic lessened as the streets became narrower and quieter and, at last, the driver pulled up by the pavement, turned around, gave me a brilliant smile and said, ‘Voila! We arrive!’ I flustered my way through the unfamiliar notes and paid what he asked and then gave him a tip that made him so cordial I realised that I must pay serious attention to the real worth of this alien currency. I was all thumbs as I searched through my wallet for my youth hostel card.
At least the place looked pleasant.
When I opened the door I was greeted by a loud blast of American voice. My immediate reaction was exactly what my father’s would have been. Bloody Yanks! My mother’s addiction to imported sit-coms had made the nasal twang, so different from ours, an irritation to us both. The place was aswarm with voluble young people, mostly French.
Had I booked? I was asked, by a young man at the desk.
No, I hadn’t. I had been in too much of a hurry to get away to waste time on that.
‘T-tt,’ he said, and despair fell upon me. I know how to look beseeching.
‘Une nuite seulement,’ he said, relenting nicely.
‘Gracias,’ I said, forgetting where I was.
I was given a bed in a dormitory, shown where to stow my stuff and that was it.
The communal kitchen was much as I expected it to be though I didn’t like the look of the stoves. The refrigerators were full of packets of food, tied up securely and name-labelled conspicuously. But at least the showers were clean and the water hot — so hot that I nearly skinned myself because I forgot the ‘C’ on the tap meant ‘chaud’ and not ‘cold’.
Marginally cheered I ventured outside to have a look round.
The street was shady and pleasant; young mothers were pushing their children along in strangely shaped perambulators and ladies of spreading middle-age were being forceful with their shopping-baskets. I walked to the end of the road — and then came back again. I knew that if I went round the corner I would probably get lost. I also felt the need to keep an eye on the door of the hostel in case someone came out wearing a furtive expression and carrying a parcel that contained my laptop. I found a seat under a tree and sat down for a while but my legs were jumpy so I got up again and walked back to the corner and tried to get up the courage to explore a bit — but couldn’t — so went back to the seat. All this skulking and lurking was ridiculous. I felt mad with myself, madder with Josie who should have been here with me turning everything into fun but, curiously, not in the least mad with Peter who, after all, was the main reason I was here alone. I had a sudden desperate longing to be somewhere known and safe.
And then I remembered the scrap of paper Jo had thrust on me the day they left.
‘This is how to contact Peter’s friend at his holiday home near St Malo. Why not look him up?’ An Australian with a ‘holiday home’ in France!
Why not indeed? Somebody like Peter, quiet and helpful! Somebody who knew the area and would probably be able to find me a nice little hotel or pension where I could hole up and get my eye and ear in! It had taken only a few hours in the country to realise I had been far too precipitous and that going around loaded like a camel was just not on. My plan to spend time looking around Paris before taking the long-distance bus down to Nice, where I could get a tan that would make my legs look more acceptable in shorts, before setting out on my Vincent pilgrimage was not practicable. It had seemed unthinkable to leave Paris without even walking down the Champs Elysées — well, it wasn’t unthinkable now. I had had enough of being bothered and bewildered. Paris would have to wait until I felt up to it. It made me grit my teeth to find that I was behaving like the inexperienced vulnerable young girl my mother kept telling me I was.
Where had I stuffed the scrap of paper? Dear God, be on my side for once and let me find it without too much hassle!
He must have thought me a deserving case for there it was the minute I opened my wallet. Robert Martin, I read. ‘It’s only a little place — Le Verger, on the coast, near La Guimorais. Ask the locals.’
I went back into the hostel.
‘Je veux aller à St Malo,’ I said to the young man who had booked me in.
He looked startled. ‘A ce moment?’
‘Non!’The boy was an idiot.’ Demain!’
‘You want that I should find a lift for you?’
‘Non!’ I barked, with my mother in mind. ‘A train! A bus!’
‘Then you must go to the city,’ he said. ‘You must ask there. ‘And that was it. If this was a version of French helpfulness I wondered what it was like when need was desperate.
There weren’t many people around and I took no more notice of the ones that were than they did of me. I thought I heard a French boy say something to his friend about ‘l’Anglaise, très grande’ but since I didn’t know whether he meant I was tall or stuck-up I pretended not to have heard. I found a quiet corner and settled down to have a go at my Writers’ France — I had to find something positive to go on. I did.
To my surprise I found that Colette had lived at La Guimorais while she was writing her well-known little book Le Blé en Herbe, which Jo and I had read in the English translation as The Ripening Seed. This gave me a wonderful cop-out. I need not tell anybody I had chickened out and run for cover. I could say, ‘One was so near it would have been unthinkable not to have gone there — I couldn’t resist it.’
Jo’s voice rang in my mind, loud and clear. ‘But you didn’t like the book! You said it was all adjectives and adolescent angst!’
‘Shut up!’ I told her firmly.
My sharpest memory of my night in that hostel is the discomfort one can suffer when keeping one’s body-belt on, in case …