September 1937
The Le Havre boat train to Paris was crowded with other young Americans.
Some were staring out at the green fields and red roofs of northern France trundling backwards in the hot afternoon sun. Others were whispering, then suddenly laughing too loudly, so that they embarrassed themselves, before hastily turning their laughs into coughs, and blushing.
They were mostly young men in baggy tweed jackets, and many had notebooks in hand, as if planning on writing their great novels before even reaching Paris.
They were so hopeful that I couldn’t help liking them. I’d talked briefly to some of them on the boat, whenever I couldn’t shut myself away behind a book. In other circumstances, I might even have flirted with one or two. But now I unfolded my copy of Le Figaro across my lap and hid myself and my slightly wrinkled flowery dress behind it, not really reading it but just letting the stories about the aftermath of the Blum government’s collapse and whether Charles Lindbergh was going to move his family to France dance before my eyes. I wasn’t part of their crowd. I wasn’t about to write a modern novel, or become an artist, or go on south to fight fascism in Spain, or to Berlin to interview Mr Hitler.
It wasn’t that I thought their dreams mundane. Not at all. I was with them all the way, inside my head. What 21-year-old wouldn’t be? But I’d spent eighty dollars for my own one-way steerage ticket on the Normandie, that rolling old rust-bucket we’d all just escaped from, in pursuit of an ambition so much more miniature and domestic than any of theirs that I couldn’t help thinking that all those young heroes would find my plan dull.
I was going to Paris because I wanted to meet my grandmother.