"The Accidental Pilgrim." a Cherbourg Travel Page by antistar

I'd always hated the French. The enmity could be traced back to my childhood, where my earliest memories were befouled by a Gallic nemesis. The daughter of the elderly couple in the house that shared a connecting wall in a semi-detached house next to mine, had married a Frenchman, and lived in Paris. They had a son, Laurent, who they would leave with his grandparents every summer. I don't even remember what they looked like, and don't even remember if I ever saw them, as they were never there the entire summer, it was just me, Laurent, and his doting grandparents.

Being neighbours and the same age, we were expected to be friends, and my memories are rich with images of us playing together. Jumping in and out of a blue square of plastic pool in the sweltering summer of '76, digging a hole to Australia with the help of a big yellow Tonka truck, and the taste of dirt after stealing carrots straight from his grandma's garden. Laurent was a little terror, though, and would deliberately cause accidents around his grandparent's house. His grandma's pride and joy, a collection of porcelain figurines, would mysteriously break, and I would get the blame. The punctured pool, the missing vegetables, and the huge hole in the garden, were all my doing. Little precious, with his angelic blue eyes, couldn't possibly have been to blame. The ultimate sin was when Laurent allowed the bath to overflow and flood over, and, of course, fingering me as the culprit.

The stereotype of the arrogant and treacherous French is strong in the English psyche, and my life had already shown me empirical evidence of the truth of it. It didn't occur to me to shed my prejudices, even after I became a radical student, marching against racism, and taking up the politically correct cause. I even remember sitting with a group of my student friends, enjoying a beer and a cigarette with another French student, who was as funny, friendly and self-deprecating as you could wish for. Everyone liked him and enjoyed his company, and the moment he left, the whole group, to a one, agreed that he was a great guy.... for a Frenchman. Everyone laughed, amazed at the resonance of the anti-French attitude among a group of people who would otherwise have considered themselves extremely liberal.

When it came for me to visit France for the fist time, in my early twenties, it was very exciting. Strangely so, being as I'd already travelled around the world twice, even adventuring through the jungles and volcanoes of Java. I'd never travelled to mainland Europe, though, and this had been my dream throughout childhood. The continent was filled with all the exotic names I'd heard while following Liverpool in their days of European Cup glory, listening to the match commentary on my tiny orange transistor radio, pressed between my ear and my pillow as I furtively listened to the games being broadcast from the stadiums of alien sounding teams like Widzew Lodz and AZ'67 Alkmaar. I'd always wanted to go to these places, but I'd never left the country until after I'd left school.

Ioan, a somewhat chaotic friend, was coming with me, and being as neither of us had much money, the plan was to take a ferry to Cherbourg and then hitchhike to a place I had always wanted to see, the Mont Saint Michel in Brittany. Again, this place had been with me since childhood: the fairytale abbey on an island of rock in a sea of sand. We had brought nothing with us, except a small amount of money, and bags filled with a change of clothes and a tent borrowed from Harry with much reluctance on his part. The whole trip was going to be very much at ground level, and surviving on little more than our wits gave everything even more of an edge than it had when I'd first planned it.

Cherbourg was filled with the smell of fish when we arrived in the early hours of the morning. I was surprised by the number of multicoloured apartment blocks around the town, and it made the place feel a lot bigger than it really was. Ioan practiced his French on a black man selling sunglasses in the town's market. He swore that by calling him sir, and using his most polite, but basic, French, the guy had responded as if nobody had ever treated him with such respect before. He bought a pair of cheap mirror shades, to go with his shock of bleached blonde hair. Ioan was now dressed to impress, with a crumpled black short-sleeved shirt and a pair of thin cotton knee-length shorts in a mess of colour that I'd bought in Indonesia. The shorts didn't quite fit him, being a much bigger lad than me, and they stretched over his pale white legs, which were stuffed into a pair of huge black shin high army boots.

We pitched the tent at the camp site some distance from town, and there we drank the bottle of the free wine our ferry tickets had awarded us, watching the old men play boules in a tiny courtyard lit in the same yellow as the halogen lamps that French cars use to pierce the night. Later we took a walk along the coast in the pitch black of the evening, nearly falling over two Dutch guys sitting on a bench looking out over the sea to England. They were drinking too, as there was little else to do in Cherbourg, and were complaining bitterly about how difficult it was to bed French women. "They don't ***", he stated in his gruff Amsterdammer accent. Their sexual odyssey was next to lead them across the channel to England, where they'd heard the girls were much easier.

The camp site's shop was not well stocked, and the next morning I breakfasted on stale bread, while Ioan tucked into a tin of mixed vegetables. We headed out as early as possible, to try and get as far as we could, and made it to Carteret via a number of lifts. Ioan insisted that one guy, in a beat up old Citroen CX, the one with the hydraulic suspension that lifts it up as you start it up, had kept putting his hand on his pristine white leg every time he'd reached for the gear stick. We'd made a good distance that day, even though I'd initially been quite despondent about our chances. Ioan's eccentric demeanor had hardly filled me with confidence, standing at the side of the road, smiling inanely at passing cars, and encouraging me to choreograph our thumbing action, ala ZZ Top, while singing how "every girl's crazy about a sharp dressed man."

Carteret was pleasant, filled with tourists, and everyone of them French. We gave our last bottle of cheap wine to the camp site owner, hoping that she understood that we wanted it placed in the refrigerator for later. It was late August, but it was the middle of a heat wave. Ioan's pure white legs were starting to sizzle, and were to turn a shade of brick red before the end of the journey, but he didn't care. That evening when we returned to collect the wine, the woman smiled and made gestures as if to suggest that she'd drunk it. We heard her express that the "vin" was "tres bon", and we figured that she must have thought it was a gift. We shuffled off, slightly embarrassed, and bought ourselves a slab of cheap beer to take its place.

We'd gone in search of the only nightlife in the town, a club in the neighbouring village of Barneville. We'd got completely lost in the country lanes, only to be saved by a pensive man in a black Peugeot 205. He'd been driving around and around at break neck speed, passing us at least a few times, before stopping to ask something we couldn't understand. He had invited us into the car, and without another word, drove us crazily to our destination. The Barneville nightclub was attended only by a handful of young people and a number of very expensive bottles of Pelforth. I'd danced, alone, to Blur's "Girls and Boys", before we returned to the camp site to entertain ourselves. We had been finding puerile enjoyment from practicing our broken French on each other, and using words that we thought were rude, or taken at random from our phrasebook to make no sense at all. We'd come to the conclusion that the French word for "thing", was a euphemism for "***", and so we had fun with the word "chose", and other biological terms from the phrasebook, all night long.

"Regardez! Ma grand chose!", said Ioan in loud stilted French.

"Alors! C'est bon", I replied in the gloom.

"peut-?tre ma grand chose dans vos fesses?", he suggested.

"Est-ce que le petit d?jeuner compris?", I replied.

If that wasn't enough to convince the neighbours they were sharing a patch of grass with the demented, the fiasco in the middle of the night must have sealed it. Ioan had wandered out in the early hours of the morning to use the toilet, and blundering around in the dark his large clumsy body had fallen onto the tent, pinning me to the ground underneath. I'd woken up to find myself smothered by the polythene flysheet, and crushed under the heavy weight of Ioan's torso. Thinking I was under attack, I cursed and shouted at my imagined assailant, and attempted to wrestle the body off me. It was too dark to rebuild the tent, so we spent the rest of the night sleeping under what remained of the tent. The sight of two bodies collapsed next to each other under a mountain of polythene must have perplexed the poor families nearby. The commotion had probably woken everyone within a hundred yards, and the next day we decided not to linger before hitting the road.

Hitchhiking in France is considered difficult at the best of times, but on the small country roads, and being the unlikely looking pair of lads that we were made it exponentially more difficult. The lifts came, and we made it that day to our destination, the Mont Saint Michel, but the entire journey had been energy sapping, and involved walking a good 10-20 miles in the sweltering temperatures of a late summer heat wave. We'd had to intrude upon a number of country houses in the middle of nowhere in order to refill our quickly emptying water bottles, and had found the people we met to be incredibly friendly, helpful and inquisitive, if initially suspicious. They all wanted to know where we were going, and when we told them it was the Abbey on the mount, they all asked if we were travelling "a la pied". I didn't know the French for hitchhiking, and just gave up and agreed, leaving them with the impression that we were on some kind of pilgrimage. I hadn't ever intended it to be, but the gruelling nature of the almost hobo like nature of the travelling started to give it a distinct flavour of a spiritual journey.

In fact, when we arrived at the Mont, the sight of this magnificent abbey soaring high into the sky straight up from the sand flats that surrounded it, was so awe inspiring that I felt like I was having an epiphany. That's possibly an exaggeration, but the exhaustion from the heat, walking, stress, lack of sleep and poor food had made the eventual destination feel like the end of a real journey, and left my mind very open to suggestion, and all the talk of pilgrimages had started me thinking. As we walked around the village and abbey on the rock, devoid of people as evening had fallen by the time we'd reached the base, I was agog. The place must be impressive even if you had just driven up on a day trip, but for me it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. The views of the sand flats shaded in a ghostly blue from the moonlight were trumped only by the views down from the sheer medieval stone walls that tore out of the ground, straight up for several stories.

After a night being eaten alive by the hungry marsh mosquitoes of the Mont Saint Michel it was time to head back to Cherbourg to catch the returning ferry. We gave ourselves almost 24 hours for a marathon hitchhiking session to cover in one go, what had taken two days previously. We were standing by the side of the road in Pontorson ready to go at nine o'clock in the morning. We'd checked the times of the trains, and had left ourselves enough money to get a single ticket to Cherbourg if all went awry, but that meant going without food. We'd figured the last train would be leaving at about 9pm, and so prepared to give ourselves that long to get a lift. Twelve hours later we hadn't moved an inch, and the only car that had stopped was a lost Italian tourist wanting directions to the abbey. The situation was dire, so we picked up our bags and went to spend the last of our Francs on a ticket to the ferry port.

The station was mysteriously empty, and the station attendants who had given us the information earlier in the day were nowhere to be seen. We agreed that we would just get on the train, and buy a ticket there, but after waiting an hour, things were looking bad. I checked the slip of paper on which the station officer had printed the train times, and suddenly I realised my mistake. The last train didn't leave Pontorson at 9pm, that was the time we had to change at Caen in order to reach Cherbourg. It was a disaster. The ferry was leaving at 6am the next morning. Without the train there was no way we were ever going to make it, and we were about to run out of money. I had no credit card in those days, and while there was money in my bank account, technology hadn't reached the point where I could draw it from the bank in the early 90s.

My mind started to overheat, as I faced up to a situation that I had no immediate solution to. I suddenly felt like I would be trapped in France forever, with no money for food, forced to sleep rough and beg for food indefinitely. I went into a panic, and stalked up and down the station platform trying to think of a way out of our predicament. I wandered outside and, with eyes about to burst out of their sockets, addressed an unsuspecting couple near the station, and asked them in my best French if they had any clue as to how I could dig myself out of the hole I had dug for myself. I guess I thought that maybe they would take pity on me and drive me to Cherbourg or something. It seemed unlikely, but I was suddenly in need of miracle, or for another human being to be spurred to an act of improbable altruism. It didn't happen, though, and so we hitchhiked into the early hours, standing dangerously on highway N175, hoping that someone would be insane enough to stop for two strange looking men in the middle of the night, after seeing them for only a brief moment, caught in the yellow halogen lights that flooded the road in front of them.

We got a couple of hours sleep in the station, and made plans for the next day. We'd keep on course for Cherbourg, and hope that we could talk P&O into letting us on the later ferry. The most important thing was to escape the now jinxed Pontorson, and so we spent the last remaining money on a chocolate bar and a sandwich, and kept enough for a ticket to the next stop, Avranche, where we hoped for better luck. It worked, and almost immediately we got a lift to the beautiful city of Coutances, with its impressive Gothic cathedral, but then the rot set in again. After toiling in the hot sun for over an hour, walking from one side of the city to the other, to find a place to set down our bags and extend our thumbs, we found yet another drought of transport. We waited several hours, and Ioan, hungry and exhausted, had all but given up, sitting by the side of the road, head in his lap and complaining about it being impossible. It certainly looked that way. We had only a few hours to reach the ferry port, and even if someone was to immediately stop and pick us up, it seemed unlikely that they would be going all the way to Cherbourg.

And at that moment someone did stop. However, they pulled up about as far away from us as possible, and made no gesture for us to get in. It was as if they had pulled over for some other reason, perhaps to look at a map, or eat a snack. Ioan insisted that they weren't going to give us a lift, they didn't even look the type. He was right, they were a middle age couple, quite unlike the usual lift we got, but I was desperate. I walked up to the car, tapped on the window, and asked in my best, most polite French, if they were going anywhere near Cherbourg. They smiled broadly, said, "oui", and opened the back door of the car for me. I called for Ioan, and he came bounding over like someone had shown him the door to heaven at the gates of hell. We were amazed, happy, smiling, and just plain relieved to be moving again. Maybe we would make it. They weren't going to Cherbourg, but it didn't matter, they said they weren't far away either.

The man drove, while his wife asked us questions. They didn't seem to speak a word of English, but we managed to explain our journey to the abbey, the disaster that had befallen us the previous night, and the predicament we were now in. She smiled and said something about "fate" and "god". She asked if we were hungry, and when we replied that we were, she invited us to their home for dinner. First of all we declined, because despite our stomachs rumbling like it tumble-driers, we just didn't have the time. She said that it was no problem, as we would make the ferry on time. We couldn't be sure, but it seemed that they were offering to take us to their home, feed us, and then go out of their way to drive us all the rest of the way to Cherbourg in order for us to catch our ferry. It seemed to good to be true, and the talk of fate and god had made us suspicious. Were these people part of some kind of brainwashing Christian cult that picked up desperate looking people and then kidnapped them? We weren't totally convinced, but agreed that the risk was worth it.

We were about to be thoroughly disabused. Miracles can happen, or at least people can be spurred into acts of improbably altruism. We were taken to their lovely country cottage, where we were introduced to the entire family, as if we were long lost friends. Even the neighbours were invited in to meet us. The food they gave us was plain, an omelette and tomatoes in basilicum, but it was the quickest food they could prepare, and came straight from their own gardens. In spite of its simple nature the food tasted as good as anything I had ever tasted before. The omelette filled my stomach like a rugby ball, and the tomatoes exploded in my mouth in an avalanche of flavour. We at the food while we watched the dog angrily snapping at wasps in the garden, and talked to their daughter, Dauphine, who was about to attend Caen university. The food was washed down with a number of glasses of red wine, which came straight from their own vineyard in the Bordeaux region. They gave us a bottle each to take home with us, before driving us all the way to the ferry port, and leaving us with the fondest of farewells.

We were so lifted by the generosity of this family, that we no longer worried that we might not be let onto the ferry, or what we were going to do once we arrived back in Southampton, in the middle of the night, when all the transport was dead. And it was no problem either, as we walked straight onto the ferry, and strolled happily up and down the deck, the conversation completely fixed on the incredulity of what had just happened. After the ship set sail, we cracked open the bottles of wine, and guzzled them greedily as we sailed into the night, but we were already drunk more on happiness than wine. To say these people had, with their actions, completely and immediately changed my view of the French would be a lie, but after this trip I could no longer see them in the same light. I will never forget that journey through Normandy, and the kindness of all the people we met, and today, far from being a Francophobe, I now travel to France more than any other country in the world, have many French friends, and defend the French from invective more than I would even my own country.