And roads. You will not believe this but the roar and clatter of trains is as nothing, I tell you, as nothing, to what is coming our way. The matted muddy lanes, wheel-loosening, splattering, splintering lanes, what a relief, you will say, to see them smoothed out, smartly surfaced, flat as flagstones, what a pleasure to be alive and bowling along in the trap to the clean pleasant noise of clopping, as they will be shortly on the relatively decent and well-travelled road to Sant Yann. But it won’t be horses for much longer. When the roads come, according to a popular prophecy much in vogue in the middle ages and still doing the rounds in some areas, then will come Trouble and Despair and War. And if the prophetic mode seems melodramatic and not a little imprecise, I can tell you for free, having glimpsed it myself, that in Morlaix alone they will pave over the very river to find room for the bright massed ranks of cars.
And that’s not all. At first, what a carnage of trees, what an orgy of release: heaven and the other place struggling to cope with the overflow, the technically liberated anaon clustered miserably at the pearly and the not-so-pearly gates like camps full of refugees waiting to be processed. But then, concrete. Rivers of concrete, setting fast, from the little slow meandering ones that will take English visitors from calvary to calvary and from boulangerie to patisserie through all the neat, geraniumed villages of the coastal belt, to the rush of the double voie-express linking the busy towns. Brest will rise from the ashes in concrete. Villages will give their hearts to it. And in one tiny place in Finistère the municipality will, quite suddenly, realise that it is down to its last talus, its last traditional banked and planted hedge, and the hedge will be labelled and protected and deemed a rare and valuable thing. But what then for the poor anaon stranded in its beautiful old beech? Cut off from the immensity by concrete; and not only them. Anaon stuck on idiotic roundabouts planted with hydrangeas. Anaon islanded by slipways. Trapped between traffic lanes flowing north and south. The gossips, never desperately reliable, hitting more and more patches of emptiness, with nothing to ripple through; strips of concrete entirely devoid of souls.