Lost in France

September 1970

‘Ooh la la la dancing’ and ‘Ooh la la la Ooh la la la dance’ form almost half the lines in this song, a hit for Bonnie Tyler in 1976 – but it’s not the repetitiveness or the odd French that disturbs, me about the song and make it uncomfortable listening. It’s the being lost in France bit. I must have had getting on for a dozen holidays in France in my camping years – the most recent being in 2018. And every time I get lost. The French do it deliberately to get you onto the péages. Their maps are out of date, the roads each have at least two numbers and it isn’t unheard of to arrive at a crossroads and find the same village signed in all directions. As far as coordinates go there is a decimal system available and the old Babylonian one (degrees, minutes and seconds) but the French partially decimalise the Babylonian system. Sometimes. But it’s not even that really. I can get lost anywhere and generally do.

The 1970s were the time in my life where I had a break from camping, mostly, and took to travelling around with a small green holdall or my ruck sack from earlier hiking days. A lot of the time I went with friends, but I also got quite addicted to solo travel. I visited Goa, Kerala and Mysore on my own  before I met up with Malar in Madras (see previous blog); I crossed from the West to the East Coast of the United States, visiting a couple of people en route, and did shorter trips in Pulau Langkawi, the Outer Hebrides and various other places. The first time, though, was France in 1970. It was the first time in my life I had spent much time on my own at all. It was a strange experience.

I had spent the two months of the summer in London working as a clerk in the in the dim recesses of the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria, where they kept all the bent old people and their ledgers. My office had been different because the boss was so unpleasant that it was largely staffed by temporary people like me, from all over the world. I didn’t think I would last the whole summer there but hadn’t made any plans to go on holiday in advance and found my university friends were all off with boyfriends or working and even Ray, my travelling companion from schooldays, had met an American in Lincoln on our last trip and they were now an item, if not already married. The French chap I’d met at the same time came to visit me in London but I didn’t fancy going on holiday with him for some reason. It was on my own or nothing. I had saved £30. Ray and Michael were in London at the time and came to wave me off at Victoria Coach Station. It occurred to me that when I died there would be someone waving me off at a bus station.

It took all day to get to Paris where I eventually found a hostel to stay in off the Boulevard Strasbourg. I had Philadelphia and rolls in my room for supper and then went out for my first cup of French coffee in a street café. I’d arrived. It was the 3rd September and my closing figure (I’d been in Accounts at the A&N) was £20.00 or 36 NF.

7th September
Piriac

I’m sitting on the rocks. It’s about five or six o’clock in the afternoon and the late sun is still very hot. There isn’t a soul in sight. I came here with a German student of Anthroposophy whom I met in Chartres. Dorothé is romantic, nervy and kind of abstract. She’s a 37 year old teacher and smokes all day. We hitched to St Nazaire after a couple of days in Chartres to find that, as so often seems to be the case, ‘l’auberge n’existe plus’. We had to sleep in a brand new Centre d’Acceuil which we shared with a football team who, fortunately, didn’t discover our existence until the morning. We left at seven o’clock and came here to Piriac. There’s a nucleus of about five people here at the hostel and I’m already forgetting how to spell, how to write and how to speak English. Last night nine of us, wine merry, crammed into a VW and went to a café in the village. We’ve only been there a couple days in calendar time but much longer in real time. This morning a Breton Nationalist turned up and asked me to translate a brochure, which I think they are going to send over to Cornwall; after just four days in France I struggled to find the right English expressions and, to my horror, he insisted on putting my name on the pamphlet.
On our second day the ‘warden’ Jean Francois, left with two other visitors, leaving Dorothé, The Captain, Pat and me in the hostel. The Captain was a Marxist who regarded the hostel at Piriac as the HQ of his ‘mission’; Pat was a French hippie à cheveux longs, very attractive, very sympathique. In the winter he goes to Italy where he is a gigolo, for want of a better word. He says Italian men, contrary to their own view, are generally impotent. I’ve noticed since that the Italians and French seem to have a poor view of one another – but it’s normally food related. We played a card game called Belote in the evenings and Pat and the Captain sang songs. The Captain’s had a lot of liberty and fraternity in them and Pat’s favourite had the punchline ‘La morale de cette morale est que les femmes aiment les cochons.’ Dorothé and I decided to move on when the two of them started to ‘test the water,’ in a very gentle and discreet way. This was the first place I discovered the disorienting sensation of finding myself cut off by geography and language, making contact with a random selection of people whom I wouldn’t normally meet. Normal judgements get suspended and time has little meaning where you don’t share a past or a future with the people you’re with and no-one worries if you disappear for hours to sit on the rocks and look at the sea. The villagers didn’t come near the hostel; apparently they suspected it of being a centre gauchiste.

Dorothé and I parted company in Tours where I found myself in a big, modern youth hostel full of non-French travellers. I couldn’t wait to get out. Early the next morning I set off to Angouleme with an Irish girl called Niamh. She was going to carry on to Bordeaux from there while I went on to Sarlat. It was a Saturday. We got a lift to within 20 miles of Angouleme within 10 minutes and Niamh had just about persuaded me that I would be fine hitching on on my own, when… well the next lift we got was like a warning from on high. It was a lorry and after we set off a second driver emerged from a sleeping compartment in the back. The two of them set to talking quietly in strongly accented French but we picked up that they were planning to pull off somewhere before Angouleme. In my diary I just noted that we ‘turned off the charm’ – whatever that meant – but however we did it, it worked. They dropped us off in Angouleme. I trailed up the hill to find the Syndicat d’Initiative, only to be told the hostel was back where I’d started. I must have looked a bit gloomy at that because a kind man there offered to drive me down. First we went on a tour of the city centre. It was a lovely city, ‘full of little narrow streets and nunneries and churches and so on,’ and a beautiful, elaborate cathedral. He persuaded me to take a bus on to Périgueux that evening and I had two or three hours in the city on my own before it left (having left my rucksack in his friend’s café.) I fell in love with the place. The journey to Perigueux when I eventually got the bus was enchanting – through crumbling, higgledy-piggledy villages past half-ruined châteaux. It was my introduction to the South of France. It was, nevertheless, a mistake.

I arrived late in Périgueux and, having missed the last train to Sarlat by ten minutes, realised, belatedly that once I’d paid for my room I had no money left for food. The next day was Sunday. I only had a few grapes, a slice of bread and a small bit of Camembert left for the whole day – and the banks were shut. My day in Périgueux passed slowly; I even spent a couple of hours in the Cathedral during Mass; it was the only place to sit down in the cool without being expected to spend money. I resisted the temptation to take Communion for something to eat. Otherwise, I just walked and walked. It was a long, light headed day until I could get the evening bus to Sarlat. Some boys in the hostel there gave me bread and cheese that night and breakfast in the morning before they left – and told me where I could change money as the banks were closed on the Monday, too, for some reason.

16th September
Sarlat

Once they’d gone, I was on my own in the stone hostel on the hill. I changed my traveller’s cheque, and celebrated with bread, cheese, tomatoes, garlic and wine. And chocolate. I then fell asleep the sun. Wine was a novelty for me. My parents only had it on special occasions and, as a student, all I could afford was beer or cider. You could buy Riesling or Hungarian Bull’s Blood in an off licence if you were very sophisticated, but a bottle would cost more than ten times as much as a half pint of bitter – the modern day equivalent of £14.50 for the cheapest bottle of wine on the shelf, based on Scottish prices. The next day I walked out to Temniac and back round on a scenic route of my devising and collapsed into a café for a limonade. I felt very peaceful and relaxed in Sarlat; it was a bustling place even then but I loved it. I was also very comfortable on my own. I had had an idea that without the constant need to react with other people, I would find a place where, with only myself to consider, I would identify my own needs and wishes more clearly and be able to bring that confidence home with me. What I found was that I was more than capable of providing my own internal chatter and debate. I was a bit disappointed at the time but the realisation that I was OK on my own was ultimately very liberating.

In the end I did my accounts and realised that I had just enough francs to get me to Paris, with a stopover on the way and one last night in Paris and enough English money to get me from Victoria out to Crystal Palace where, I hoped, I would find my sister and her family. They had been waiting for a sale completion date when I left, so I couldn’t be sure. I had my stash of food nicked at the Youth Hostel in Brive, a most inhospitable and unfriendly town, and became reacquainted with the lightheadedness that can replace hunger and was definitely part of that whole French experience – but all went well apart from that. I had been away less than three weeks, I think, but it seemed like a life time.

When I came to write this bit of my blog, it took me a while to disentangle where I went when and how long I stayed in any one place. I wrote my diary out of sequence, with bits of Piriac appearing in Sarlat and bits of Perigueux in both. It’s a disjointed stream of consciousness journal and I did wonder whether I should have transposed it verbatim. I was lost in France but, in the muddle I found something, too.