Back in the
middle of the 1970's my wife and daughter and I decided to go to France for a
camping holiday. Our daughter was four years old and we had never been camping
before, though I had done a lot as a Boy Scout, but I had never before driven
in Europe, with all its peculiarities, like driving on the wrong side of the
road, and 'Prioritie a droite' - whatever that was.
Not only
that, we did not own any camping gear. However, not to be put off and having
decided to go for it I booked a round trip passage on a Dover to Calais car
ferry which included hiring the necessary camping gear from the ferry company
at the port of Dover, some 300 plus miles from our home in the north of
England. I was a member of a motoring organisation which would, for a small
fee, provide us with a small A5 size booklet with the route from home to the
area of France we had intended to go to. In the end it turned out to be an
absolutely fantastic piece of kit which my wife took to like a duck to water,
reading off the instructions well before arriving at a junction or town. Rather
like having your own personalised satellite navigation system before they were
even dreamed about.
Strangely
enough the whole journey to the west of France was fairly uneventful, in fact
there are only a few memories of the journey which today come to mind. The
first is where we loaded the car in the middle of the night with the camping
gear we had hired from the ferry company in Dover, that was fun! Next was
watching my wife go green as we listened to the sound of a couple of kids
behind her on the ferry who threw up for most of the two hour journey. I suppose that most parents travelling for
the first time with their four year old will be well aware of the 'Are we
nearly there yet?' syndrome. Our daughter kicked in with that about ten miles
after leaving home. Ah well, only 300 more before Dover.
The boat
itself became known as 'The coffee boat' by all of us from something the little
one said, and ferry boat it remained for years after. From Calais to La
Rochelle was a little over four hundred miles, by which time the cries from our daughter of 'Are we nearly
there yet,' had become more of an anthem than anything else, but we made it, and
pitched out tent in a field recommended to me by a colleague who had stayed there
the year before. The morning after our
arrival my wife waited in eager anticipation for comments from the little one.
We did not wait long. "Teddy likes it," she said. We breathed a long
sigh of relief. The only comment I would make about the site is that my
colleagues standards were almost non-existent, so much so that the following
morning we searched for and found a far nicer place a few miles south of the
town, right on the coast. The village was called Les Bouchelours, and was
beautiful. The campsite itself was a
couple of hundred metres from the village centre and perched on top of a small
cliff with paths leading down onto a long gently sloping fine sandy beach.
The village
had a small bar in the centre of a dusty unmade up roundabout, and there we
soon learned that children were welcome and loved by all the fishermen who
lived and worked in the village. A glass of red wine, a coffee for my wife and
a glass of fresh orange for my daughter would see us off for the day, or
welcome us home at the end of a hard day of being a tourist.
Close to the
end of the holiday, probably the day before we had to pack up and leave, we
were lounging in the sun on the beach. There were only a few French people on
the beach, who like us were enjoying the sun, the peace and quiet and perhaps a
picnic. Keeping an eye out for our girl as she wandered around the beach
towards the distant oyster beds, nothing really could mar our very pleasant life
at that time. Peaceful and warm with only a few others around us. Then of
course the Law of Sod came into force. As the three of us were sitting quietly
in the sun we were suddenly aware of the braying voice of an Englishman
somewhere in our vicinity. He was loud, though he was probably only talking to
his wife in the tone of voice which he normally used.
We glanced around us to find the source of this upper class southern English
voice and soon saw him coming towards us. He was over six feet in height and
skinny with a flying mop of unruly white hair.
Neither my wife nor myself could really believe what we were seeing. It
was the cartoon quintessential 'Englishman on holiday'. He was wearing khaki
shorts which came to just above his knobbly white knees, and which had probably last seen service in
the far east on a plantation. His white cotton shirt was unbuttoned three
buttons from his rather scrawny neck, and he wore a cream coloured straw Panama hat. He carried
a long stick in his hand, picked from a hedgerow on his way to the beach, and
used this as a walking stick, finding his way along the sand. As he came closer
I blinked at the sight of his feet and almost choked on what I saw. Open toed
sandals and grey short socks. Behind him carrying their days necessities for
the beach was his long suffering overweight wife, blood red face and dressed in
a multicoloured floral patterned tent, or so it looked.
As they came
closer and closer to our little band of hope on the beach I quickly turned to
my wife and daughter and hissed under my breath, 'Don't say a word in English'.
They both nodded and sank their faces down into whatever they were doing. The
dynamic duo passed us by, and took up camp about twenty feet from us on a patch
of unclaimed beach. From the corner of my eye I watched as she started to set
up camp for the afternoon whilst he went off along the beach in the far direction
to explore what the natives had to offer. The flask of tea came out and was half buried in the sand to
prevent it falling over, joined by the Tupperware container of white bread
sandwiches and two apples.
We put up
with them for thirty minutes by which time neither of us had said more than two
words, but finally we could stand it no longer and I suggested that we abandon
our area of peace on the beach and go somewhere else. His voice was loud and he
had the braying sound which it appears only the English can create, but the
final straw was when he inflicted himself on the French people on the beach and
started to speak French. That was it. We had to go.
Let me give you
an indication of how bad it was. I have two very good friends who are French, we've known each other for over thirty years. When we are together we laugh and joke
and talk as though we have never been apart, though it might have been two years since the previous time we had met. One of the party pieces is for me
to speak French with a very bad English accent. It reduces my friends to
tears. It is from the idiot on the beach
where I learned how to speak bad, heavily accented French. It really is bad.
So, to the
Englishman abroad that day on the beach near La Rochelle, thank you for
providing me with ammunition to keep my friends entertained for almost half a century.
