Kerplunk! – [The scooterist]

Without having mentioned your list of household wants, Monsieur Drouet’s son, the scooterist, comes over with a table, a chair and a radio.  You don’t remember sending up a prayer for these items, so you make a note to get down on your mental knees later.  He also brings radishes from the family garden.  And lettuce, onions and parsley.  These are almost more pleasurably received than the unexpected loan of the radio.  You take the chance to ask him for a saucepan, and he invites you back to his home for an apéritif – it is a little after twelve.  In the simple dining room, the first room arrived at via the front door, Damian produces a bottle of Canadian whisky to which you give an assenting nod, and pours himself a Ricard.

He sits with one arm resting on the table tightly clutching his glass.  The whisky loosens the rudimentary French lodged precariously in your memory.  Between dark brown hair and moustache, he has a sharp pair of eyes as yet unglazed by too much of the liquid in front of him.  His head appears older than is suggested by the rather teenage clothes he wears about his slight but wiry frame.  He would drive a burgundy four-door Renault but, he confides, he lost his license for drink-driving; apparently he is still entitled to scooter about.  He has no fixed occupation, plays football for the team in the next village, used to compete at clay pigeon shooting, and dreams only of having his own sleepy village bar.  To this end he spends much of his time where you first found him, slowly knocking back the Ricard, occasionally serving behind the bar when either the woman with the cash-till eyes or her droopy-faced husband are out.  The couple are childless, and Damian is their spiritual, if not legal, heir.  Certainly his moustache is well on the way to looking like Droopy’s.  Madame Drouet, coming through from the kitchen, is unflustered by her son’s account of his essential inactivity.  You suspect his father is more than occasionally inflamed by it.  But despite his devilish name and idle hands, Damian is for some reason disposed to be friendly to you, and you are grateful.

Madame Drouet, built on as small a scale as her husband, is spry and playful, her joy inextinguishable.  You will never see her pensive, or too far from a smile, although sometimes she will appear tired.  So far, she is the only villager who speaks slowly for you.  How to explain to her, when she asks what you do at home, that you are a photographer, but you haven’t brought a camera with you.  So you tell her that you are on holiday from two jobs – photography and an office.  She asks you what then will you do with all your time, and you cannot say, because you don’t know yourself.

It was getting repetitive, taking shots of repetitively similar-looking quartets, quintets and sextets playing repetitively similar three and three-quarter minute pop songs based on the repetitive premise of repeated verse-chorus sequences with inevitable middle-eight guitar forays and slogan poetics.  With reasoning so slow-dawning that it could hardly be described as logical, you arrived at the idea of six months of photographic celibacy.  And when you ask yourself why others give up drink, or sex, or chocolate, or love, or writing, it’s no easier to put together a chain of thought that reaches back to first causes.  The simple answer is because you’ve had too much of all that you’d been pointing your camera at, and the shutter release no longer does for you what it used to.  But the simplest answer is no answer at all.

Kerplunk! – [Monument]

You cycle down to the shop and spend a hundred francs on wine and food and water.  Your first bottle of red, a litre for eight francs, and a second more expensive treat, prompt a swift invite to the bar next door from the shop owner, cash tills ringing up in her eyes.  But you will spend tonight alone, not thinking that such enforced contemplation might unwittingly be setting the tenor of your stay.  Returning to the cottage, you move the cooker into the most habitable room, having swept and scrubbed the floor.  As you move from backpack to panniers to crates, a flavour of all the tents you ever slept in comes haunting.  You draw fresh air at the door and watch how the dying light of the day falls across this new scenery.  Avenues of trees frame the foreground and protect you from a view of too much sky that might become too harsh a reminder of the Suffolk landscape which was the background to your formative years.  – Bonne nuit m’sieu, Monsieur Drouet says, appearing out of nowhere to pass across property that was once his, and across the dusk, short as a stable lad, a pitchfork resting against his shoulder as you rest against the door jamb.

Taking refuge in the warmth of the sleeping bag, never before slept in, you cannot bear to listen to music; it would sing too much of home, of everything before four days ago.  Music will require the distracting warmth of daylight.  You make a list, though the pen feels anything but comfortable in your hand.  You need – you would like – a radio, else the hours of silence, or thoughts that you cannot silence, will surely drive you mad; a bowl for washing up and washing in; a mirror; a saucepan; a table and chair; envelopes and paper.  You were wise enough to pack a corkscrew.

What you really need, and sooner than you thought, is Louise.  Though you have left your cameras at home, you have brought some photos with you.  Three are of her.  Your favourite shows her standing by the Grand Union Canal, the shape of her face outlined by the light on the water, towards which she is leaning, wisps of hair in her eyes and a shout of laughter bursting from her mouth as a coot disappears beneath the surface, leaving its bum in the air.  Catching her unawares and natural was easy, because your camera was such an everyday and every moment object, like spectacles for the short-sighted, or jackets in winter and sunglasses in summer.  Like camcorders and nineties children.  Even when the surroundings were deliberate – here is the shot of her looking abstractedly into the distance from the top of the Monument – Louise retained a disregard for the viewfinder that helped keep her from weariness or irritation.  It was only when there was no lens to filter the tension that she shrank from view.

With only the wine for company, you can’t help but sing to yourself the songs you cannot listen to, until you lose heart and the feeble melodies dwindle against the imposing background of silence.  Fixed in time and space, movement seems a lifeline.  You don’t have to stay here.  You can move around.  It doesn’t have to be six months – you could honourably get away with five.  You concentrate on the visits you have promised yourself, to the sea and to the Seine, to the cities and the mountains.  You will not let yourself rot here, when escape is possible.

Kerplunk! – [Room]

He has shown you what little there is to show and has left you, unfussily going about his business.  You face up to the room in which you have condemned yourself to spend six months.  The earlier presentiment returns, that you are jumping voluntarily into an abyss of space and time.  The newly locked-up prisoner, or the mutineer ordered to walk the plank, could feel no worse than you do now.  You open out the folds of a sun bed and sit on it as if it were a bench at a country bus stop where buses halt infrequently.  The latest in a long line of struggles to make a room familiar and friendly.  You have to think back to the first time for one as desolate as this.  Leaving home for a ground floor off Green Lanes, not far above the rumble of Piccadilly line trains every three minutes for four-fifths of the day.  Cream wallpaper discoloured by patches of brown fluid, a mixture of damp and paste.  An outside toilet, looked down upon by tower blocks, with a freakish cat painted on its wall.  Once you had been left alone, you cried for a long while before moving to unpack.  And ever since you have found it hard not to baptise a new room with tears.

Gradually your inward gaze turns out.  The room is the odd one out of the three, the thatch directly above it being intact.  It is empty but for a couple of old fruit crates stacked with kitchenware; plates, bowls and two sets of unused glasses.  You turn over each object, making it yours by mentally noting its possible use.  The floor is tiled in a pattern of beige and brown, veiled with the dust of seasons, and here and there a white mould, like flour.  Across the ceiling run beams of ginger-coloured wood, the spaces between insulated with white polystyrene.  There is a circular hole set in a rectangle of stone towards one edge of the ceiling, but no fireplace or hearth beneath it, only a thicker layer of dirt.  A bare bulb hangs in the centre of the room.  The walls are skirted with a couple of feet of stone, above which there are shreds of unmemorable wallpaper, torn away completely in places to reveal a sandy wall.  There are two windows, the larger giving out onto the garden grass and apple trees, and beyond the fence, more often than not patrolled by a German shepherd, an ordinary looking house, a blue van.  In the opposite wall, a single oblong pane frames the green palmy plastic leaves of a hedge that screens your cottage from another, like a sombre painting hung low on the wall.

The door is in farmhouse style, heavy wooden verticals held together by diagonal planks and split into two portions.  You rise to unlatch the upper half, filling the emptiness of the room with the heat and light of the day.  You pass back through the other rooms to see what they offer.  Nothing in the middle room except colonies of mould on baked red floor tiles and mossy green on the walls.  In the kitchen, the front door room, there is a gas cooker and canister, an unused red and black barbeque, firelighters, a bucket, and two brooms, one stiff, one soft.  Next to the chimney which juts into the room, a shallow slab of sink webbed with fine cracks.  The tap does not work, as Monsieur Drouet demonstrated, and would require more plumbing to fix than he thought himself capable of.  There is an outside tap which stands at one corner of the cottage.  In the shed beyond the three rooms, you find a soil floor littered with ageing beer bottles, presumably left by your uncle.  There is no toilet.

Kerplunk! – [Oilcan]

You pass a château; it belongs to the village at the end of your journey.  You come to a church, and turning left, find yourself in front of a bar and shop combined.  A woman is standing on the steps, and two children turn about on their bikes.  She calls to someone inside as you stop before her to ask for Monsieur Drouet’s house.  To your surprise she knows your name.  The young man who then appears and grasps your hand turns out to be Monsieur Drouet’s son.  It seems he will take you to the cottage.  He puts a helmet on and scooters up the road, having indicated that you should follow.  The girl and the boy also follow on their bikes, so providing you with a welcoming cavalcade.  The procession turns left at a junction, then stops abruptly when the scooter turns in up a driveway on the right, where the two outriders fall away.  This cannot be the cottage, for its roof is more intact than you have been led to believe yours will be.  After the scooterist has gone inside, a woman past middle-age comes out, and with great friendliness introduces herself as Madame Drouet.  You are struck by her voice, which has both the playfulness of a child and the joviality of a not discontentedly ageing mother.  She in turn fetches her husband, and it is he who escorts you to your new home.

By a path through an orchard, and past run-down wooden outbuildings, the cottage is not more than thirty metres away, standing in a garden of sheep-munched grass and randomly scattered apple trees.  In one corner there is a fenced-off vegetable plot.  On the far side, in the fence running along the road, there is a rusting, white-painted gate.  Trees line the bank beyond the road.  Though a small man, Monsieur Drouet looks physically strong, and is as quiet as he seems powerful, with well-worn, leathery skin and a canny but bashful face.  He is very much like one of the old boys with whom you worked on the farm – the village man the world over, the semi-independent paysan.

Half of the storm-damaged thatch is covered with black plastic sheeting held down by strips of wood nailed to the structure of the roof – you notice this, looking up, before you take in the cottage as a whole.  Some of the sheeting has torn, and flaps gently in the summer breeze, revealing the gash in the thatch, like a cross-sectional diagram.  Monsieur Drouet eyes it with detached concern, and you eye it with detached surprise.  The cottage is long and one room thin.  The thatch droops low over the white walls and burgundy-coloured wooden beams.  There are three doors along the front, one a back door to the right-hand room, the front door to the left, and another still further left, presumably to a shed.

The key won’t turn in the lock.  It takes all Monsieur Drouet’s wiry strength to open the front door.  As he does so, you puzzle out his dialect to mean that he’ll oil the lock for you.

Kerplunk! – [Four]

The last few weeks slipped away, before you slipped away, in  stomach-constricting horror at the possible emptiness ahead, at all the bonds you were loosening by leaving, perhaps to the point of loss.  Now this morbid embrace of six months of discomfort vanishes at an imagined and momentary point of perfection.  Whichever route you follow, you have escaped – temporarily – you have successfully fought  the wish to close out the world and sleep, mollycoddled by inertia, sedated and oblivious.  There is no-one to depend upon for the feeling of being alive but yourself, and you accept the responsibility after having fled from it for so long.

You make good time, eating up the road, fearing no hill.  You are disinclined to stop, even with dark coming on.  Far from any town that may have a hotel, and failing the wayside appearance of a chambre d’hôte, you will have to find a spot to sleep.  The descending rows of an orchard seem to offer cover from both the road and the night air.  You bed down and once again eat your road meal, watching the stars through the narrow alleyway of trees; free from the screening orange glow of London, they are brighter, closer, milkier.  With heavy legs and on a full belly, sleep comes soon to a less tormented mind.

A gortex ground bag will shield you from the next morning’s heavy dew, but not from insect bites.  You scratch and cycle your way through a succession of villages and towns of varying size.  The pays de Caux.  Not far off now.  You lunch on a bank by a junction, under the shade of trees and at the centre of a stretch of fields.  A distant water tower perches at the top of a long gradient.  An occasional car grinds to a halt at the junction, and the driver exchanges a nod or a wave with you.  Such greetings seem like signs of acceptance, that if the driver were not on the road from A to B, for reasons as numerous as C to Z, then they could think of no better thing than to be cycling freely, and beyond that feeling of freedom, aimlessly.  Perhaps they are thinking of no more than a month; you, however, have signed up for six.  You are not sure this makes for a stay, a holiday, or a sentence, always with the chance of remission for good behaviour.

Despite the mind- and muscle-loosening effort of cycling, you are a little too tensed up to eat much, and when you have packed the baguette away, you are hit by the first breaths of a winding depression.  You would prefer not to move, but rather to remain at this transitory beginning of your adventure.  The end of the journey will mean a commitment to the place to which you are travelling, and the reality of that place fills you with anxiety.  The kinetic hope which has fuelled the journey itself will be of no use to you when it ends.

You cycle more slowly, as if towards a halt.  You check the roads more often on the map.  Your stomach turns over, your legs feel drunk.  This, then, you begin to realise, will be your immediate scenery for some time to come: crests and dips of gently undulating chalk, rivulet valleys fed by ambling or cantering tributaries.  The villages are not so very old, but nor are they young, their character largely unaffected by new building.

Kerplunk! – [Three]

You leave the coach-loads of over-confidence behind and search for a hotel, which soon presents itself, overlooking the estuary.  The old wooden room and the placid grey view relax your fatigued body and mind, so that later you have energy enough to explore the town.  The streets all return to the monumental water, and your steps drift, Somme-somnambulant, past the tree gardens of the houses facing the bay, to the point at the end of the quay come promenade where the setting grey sets most impressively.  Turning, you find the steely frame of un cabinet téléphonique, and thinking to impress with what you can see and where you are, you crank open its door to ring home.  But no-one’s in, and no-one but yourself can stop the familiar sound of home’s ringing tone.

The next morning, you are some way into a ten kilometre diversion before you realise you have forgotten, or have not been reminded, to return the Hôtel du Port’s room key.  You worry the less about the curses the staff are undoubtedly sending after you for their having required that you hand over an extra unwrinkled note to cover what they call ‘taxe de voyage’.  Unless St. Valery-sur-Somme has recently declared itself an independent state, you suspect this is more a directly pocketed tax on the English than a legitimate levy.  The diversion reroutes you past a bird sanctuary; the reward for the extra strain on your legs is a sudden Red Arrow display, black and white birds glinting silver in the sun as they turn and airily rise.

After days both hot and cold, this one is lukewarm, and your knuckling-under body responds well, falling into a rhythm which allows your mind to run freely ahead, step sideways, glance behind.  The road into Eu is a speedy, shaded hill descent, with the sun above the trees creating a brief maelstrom of backlit greens, marking your arrival in Seine-Maritime, and also your first taste of Normandie.

Beyond the town, gliding first along Roman avenues, then less rhythmically around the lanes encircling hilltops, you reach an intensity inexplicably arrived at, the first emphatic certainty of the rightness of what you have done and the way you will live.  It is a kind of elemental joy you have only ever experienced alone, that used to send you charging along a London street, giddy with dumb pleasure; a happiness born of motion, or more accurately of self-generated speed, as well as real or imagined good fortune.  Conversely it is an intensity which you meet in the most hapless situation, a carefree frenzy that comes upon you when stuck waiting on a slip road at a motorway junction with a minimal flow of traffic, alone and indulging in an act of faith, absolutely sure of the lift that’s soon to come.  Whether it is arrival, or expectation, or attainment, here it is again.  And it, in part, is what you came here for.

You hear the sounds of the books you read as a child in the wind that rustles the goldening greens of the fields.  And just as you sang defiantly at any passing car while waiting at a junction, fragments of song now carry you along, your bones rattling over the stones, a poor little beggarman whom nobody owns / come on beautiful we’ll go sit on your front lawn, and watch the fireflies as the sun goes down / it joins the list of things I’ll miss like fencing foils and lovely girls I’ll never kiss / dream, dream what you like, you’ve lost me this time, and I know I won’t find you, I’m lost in your eyes / it’s a happy time inside my mind, when a melody does find a rhyme / I can feel time slipping away, so what does it matter which direction I’m pointed in?

Kerplunk! – [Two]

When your legs finally give in, and you glide to a halt in a town not a million miles from Boulogne, you fall onto your hotel bed like snow. Mental waves take over from the physical, and the voices of ghosts sound in your ears. They have the quality of presence of a dream, though you are too exhausted even to close your eyes. Quietly, happily they call you back, with a kind and loving laugh. Too tired to be conscious, too mentally taut and hungry to fall unconscious, you are held in a wakeful limbo. Familiar voices burst in your ear. Your wrecked body is far from sure that it can cope with the additional burden of emotional hangover, but it appears to have no choice.

After being countenanced with raised eyebrows and sideways glances at the friterie, you walk out of the little town to a river and a bridge, to watch the sun drop. Its disappearance signals that you are here, and no longer at home.

***

You will not be beaten by a second day of physical exhaustion nor by the rain that scalds your sunburnt face. Lunchtime, you dig into a sandy track off the main road through the forest to eat the meal that is to become your travelling staple: half a baguette, a segment of camembert, a tomato, some peanuts, bottled source water, fruit, perhaps a swig of yoghurt drink – there is always one ingredient or another missing from the set menu. In this unseen place, grim determination loses by a fall and two submissions to a freedom as absolute as you are ever likely to experience. The bargain struck, a year of work for six months without it.

You are warmer than the rain from cycling more heavily burdened than a squaddie with a thirty pound backpack and five miles more to jog. You plough on, and it is some kind of finishing line that you cross at Rue, when you can put away your blanket map of France and use in its stead a 1cm:2km map of the Somme and Seine-Maritime. Racing clouds of greys and whites chase you round the bay of the Somme. You zip car-like past the marshy wash, headed southeastward with the wind and the weight of your bike behind you. Gradually the road loops round to the west and into the wind and you slow to snail speed, your house on your back, the bad weather moving as if it is tracking you. Grim determination having gained the upper hand, it is now under threat from a misery the more complete for your inability to see the point of your actions, from the bending of your knees to the reasoning behind where these joint and muscle movements are taking you. You have no-one to blame but yourself. You wonder where it was that history happened, thinking of those muddy, wartime souls laden with a torment greater than you are ever likely to experience. You slow to a stop in the wind-spat rain. Pause. Resume.

After coaxing your body and bike into crossing the canal, you decide that St. Valery-sur-Somme is your staging post for the night. You arrive alongside the estuary promenade at the same time as two coach-loads of young generation English. Officially they are on a school holiday, but are actually embarking on sex and alcohol adventures. You never had the pleasure of a teacher-escorted holiday, but instead, a privately arranged exchange, which unsuitably matched you with a girl named Legrand. A fortnight wasted on a fifteen year old, courageous only in his timid refusal to be plunged defenceless and comradeless into a school full of young French lions.

Kerplunk! – [One]

You saw the sun rise in England and the sunset in France.

On the ferry, you stay at the rails longer than anyone.  You watch the holiday makers minimising the detail of the Seven Sisters to a photographic slither between sheets of blue sky and sea.  The wind soon becomes too fresh for them; their snapshots taken, they head into the warmth of the duty-free shop, or the bar.  A few remain, and for a time you are caught up in the exclamations and laughter of departure.  The excitement overcomes the heavy feeling in your gut and the lightness in your head, which is floating in unfamiliar territory.  Your right index finger itches, and your eyes ceaselessly cut the cliffs into rectangles.  The wind will soon be too much for you too, but it is a point of honour, or pride, to watch the old life slip away, until the seagull-spattered landscape which had so far shaped you can no longer be seen.

Finding leeward shelter, you turn your attention to the view from the prow, and search the deepening blue of the sea as if you will find there the point that will justify your leave-taking.  A child nearby says, I love the sea… I’d dive in if I was allowed.  The crossing will become her earliest recollection, and the sea colour inform her later dreams.

The ferry docks, as ferries do, and you wait by your cycle for your turn to emerge from the hull.  This is Boulogne, and that is a roundabout, around which you will have to pass the wrong way.  It is seeming too difficult, to reverse the trajectories and habits of a lifetime.  While affecting to sort out your backpack and tie your boot laces, you study the traffic flow for quarter of an hour, lost in needing not to be anywhere at any time.  The cars pinball round the roundabout, leaving the strange configuration of their number plates chasing trails in your mind.  You haven’t cycled for six years, let alone on inverse highways, weighed down by stuffed panniers, a bed roll, an army sleeping bag, your life on your back.  For a moment you wish you’d chosen a port closer to your final destination.  But how should an adventure begin, if not with a little testing adventure?

You take the plunge, a wrong turning, and finally the right road along similar coastal rolls to those you had followed that morning in the opposite direction on the other side of the sea.  The sun had shone horizontally into the car, dawn-yellow and dazzling.  Now it is adding harshly to your trial, shining perpendicular to your back, and prompting you to stop and make your first purchase inside the cool shade of a village store, a litre and a half of water.

The sun may burn you, but you have already discovered the pleasure to be had in not knowing what’s around the next bend, and in not giving up, when ascending the crests of the waves of land, until your legs jelly completely.  And then there is the speed with which your heavy bike makes its descents.  Pausing before such a descent to survey a village whose centre is the conjunction of an old stone bridge and a church, your hand automatically dabs at the pocket where you normally keep your Leica.  But you have left it behind.

Kerplunk! – [Objects]

Day-to-day objects that you brought with you, or found here, or were given to you, have become over six months things that you will leave behind with sadness, as friends who cannot travel with you.  In your attachment to them, there is a recognition of your up until then unacknowledged dependence on the familiar objects of the past, the ones your eyes rested upon daily, first in your mother’s house, and next in various rooms of your own.  You cling to these objects as solid, unchanging, each one harbouring a set of memories and associations.  A plastic orange mixing bowl; a mahogany knife-sharpener, never to your knowledge used; golden curtains, garish and making-do; a yoghurt maker; a clock under a glass dome, the one step back, two forward swinging motion of its weights long since rested; a nest of three three-legged teak tables; a cased black mono record player that still manages to sound richer than more technologically advanced equipment when playing some of your older, noisier 45s; a battered, rusting coal shovel; a toasting fork; a dark blue felt backgammon briefcase; a flowery high-backed armchair.

And later, a woollen ostrich on a puppeteer’s cross; an empty yellow-green glass beer bottle with a long neck and a fat, squat base, adorned by a small circular label showing an abbot wearing a red mitre; a rectangular black clock with the hours and minutes dissected in white, and an alarm like a speeded up version of the Greenwich Time Signal; assorted measuring graduates, some with funnels stuck in their tops; a mustard-coloured hole punch; a miniature wooden chess set; a mug-sized vase with creamy yellow and violet colouring; a felt brush record cleaner; small black wooden speakers with coils and coils of white lead; a cushion made from an old blue-grey t-shirt and a tartan skirt; a white elephant made of wood, its howdah painted with red and black diamonds.

The form of countless objects is printed blue on your mind.  Take them away at any time and your world would be in pieces, but conversely, in a state where it could be rebuilt.  You always had a fascination for those photos of familiar objects from unfamiliar angles or taken right up close.  In six months you have lost the familiar objects of your life and come to depend on a new set.  The blue-mauve plastic bowl in which you stack your dirty plates, and take to the tap daily, occasionally using it to strip-wash; it goes together with the cheap tube of washing-up liquid that has the squashable consistency of a taut but ample belly and a smell – clementines with a dash of creosote – that competes surprisingly favourably with the apple smell of autumn; the small, rectangular magenta-edged mirror; the black cycle tool kit, small enough to be attached to the top tube of the frame; the set of now tea-stained thick bottomed hexagonal glasses; a flowery saucepan and a larger stainless steel one; and the front door key, which is attached to a heavy medal of tarnished metal.  Engraved round the edge are a laurel and a calf’s head.  The face of the medal is filled by a steak, and above it a cleaver embedded in a joint, on top of which lies a carving knife.  The wording on the reverse gives you the name and telephone number of a local butcher.

You’ve a kind of affection for what is simple and necessary, but also for objects that relieve you of the austerity of your surroundings – the dice, the scissors, coloured bowls, the Buvez Coca Cola cap.  You begin to understand that the austere conditions you have set yourself turn what you took to be necessities into luxuries.  Your hunger is redefined, your needs realigned, and gratitude re-enters their workings.  And yet, when these six months have taken you further from the excesses of the world than ever before, you have plunged yourself into an excess of time, of memory, and of yearning.  You are too much yourself.