A Traveller's Life (30 page)

In the library was the Hand of Mahomet, outlined on a document in which he gave security to the monastery and its occupants for ever. It was said to be the copy of a forgery. Whatever it was, the monastery and its monks were still miraculously intact in what was one of the lonelier Christian outposts, and at the time of writing they still are.

Outside in the ‘real' world, not more than an hour's brisk walk for an Englishman along the foot of Mount Sinai, was the place where the earth opened and swallowed Kora, Dathan, Abiram and their followers; the rock which Moses smote and from which the water gushed; the mould which Aaron used to cast the Golden Calf; and the place where Moses broke the Tablets of the Law. Whether it all happened here, on and around Jebel Serbâl, or at Petra in Jordan or in Saudi Arabia, is not of very much consequence. There, in the heart of Sinai, with such a wealth of terrestrial evidence, the Old Testament came very much alive.

Twice a year we used to go to Italy to see Wanda's mother in the Carso and to work a vineyard in Northern Tuscany. In early spring we dug and manured it and in the autumn we made the wine. In September 1971, having once more to go to Italy for the
vendemmia
, the vintage, and fed up with racing across France by car without ever having time to see anything worthwhile en route, I decided to acquire a bicycle to ride to Italy from Wimbledon, where we lived, following canal banks and other pleasant, vegetable routes through France. This gave me the excuse to order a bicycle. The sort of bicycle I ordered was the equivalent of a
gran turismo
motor car; fast and comfortable over long distances. It was also supposed to be a machine that could have any of its component parts replaced in France or Italy without having to wait about for days for items to be sent out from England. I only had ten days to spare for this journey and I reckoned that I would have to cover at least 1250 kilometres between Wimbledon and Alessandria in Italy, which for me was the end of the road so far as cycling was concerned. Cyclists are not allowed on
autostrade
or any other sort of motorway, and I had no desire to ride along the Via Aurelia, the coast road from Genoa to La Spezia, which is highly dangerous,
full of
autotreni
, huge lorries with trailers, and which has on it, as an ultimate deterrent, the atrocious Passo di Bracco. Neither did I have the time to wander through the Apennines on lesser, quieter but immensely mountainous roads, none of which would have delivered me where I wanted to go.

When I went to collect the bicycle in the Midlands where it was made, it seemed like a Euro-marketeer's dream. The chain-wheels – you had to have double ones for anything in excess of five speeds and I had been persuaded that I needed ten – the cranks, pedals, bottom bracket and head assemblies, fork-ends and seat pin and the gear changing mechanisms were all Italian, made by a firm called Campagnolo, and unbelievably expensive. The hubs and multiple free-wheel were French; the alloy wheel rims and the brakes were Swiss and the tyres were Belgian – almost unbelievably, by 1971 Dunlop had given up making bicycle tyres in Britain. What was left, or most of it – the frame, made of Reynolds 531 butted tubing which even the most xenophobic of continental riders regarded as good, the mudguards and pump, the leather saddle, the handlebars and the handlebar extension, were all British. I never found out where the chain was made. There was no earthly reason why that should not have been British too. Reynolds, a British firm, still made the best chains in the world and not only for bicycles; but by the 1970s everyone had gone mad about French and Italian accessories (British-made bicycle frames, allegedly French, were actually being sold to the British under Italian and French names), and as a result many British accessory manufacturers were giving up.

I took camping kit with me, which was a mistake as it took ages packing up each morning, and eventually towards the end I slept indoors: a 3¾-lb tent, a 3½-lb sleeping bag, a canvas water bucket and basin, and a Meta stove for making tea – I always ate
in cafés and restaurants as cycling to Italy in ten days provided me with quite enough exercise without cooking and washing up.

What brought, together with changes of clothing, the loaded weight of the machine up to a staggering sixty pounds were the tools for a bicycle that, it turned out, was partly constructed in English feet and inches and was partly metric. To do anything to the Campagnolo bottom bracket a number of very expensive tools were needed, and special spanners and a spring-loaded instrument were desirable for adjusting the brakes. Even with all this I somehow failed to acquire what turned out to be a small but vital piece of equipment, known as a free-wheel block remover. I also had to carry spare spokes, brake blocks, inner tubes, brake and gear cables, batteries for my bicycle lamp. I was told that one could not buy battery-operated bicycle lamps in France or Italy because they only used dynamo lamps, which operated off the tyre and which were not much use in a tent, unless you had a slave to turn the wheel. I also took a candle, nine Michelin maps and two Touring Club Italiano maps for Italy, as I could not be sure that I would be able to buy the next sheet en route when I ran off the previous one. I also started off with some excellent green Michelin regional guide books but I could not face carrying them and gave them away.

Day 1

A mysterious distortion in the wired-on tyre on the back wheel developed two hours out of Wimbledon, giving the illusion that the wheel was buckled. Believing that there would be enough time at Newhaven to buy a new one, I pushed on. At Newhaven (eighty kilometres) I had to choose between buying a tyre or missing the boat, but I comforted myself with the thought that as the bicycle had 27-inch wheels, a size I seemed to recall that had been used in France before the war by racing cyclists, I would have no difficulty in replacing it.

However it was not so. ‘You will not find a shop with
une enveloppe anglaise
in all France,' said the proprietor of the best bicycle shop in Dieppe, with what I identified as Gallic relish. ‘Your
enveloppe
has an ineradicable defect.' And how long it would last before it collapsed was anybody's guess – thirty kilometres, a hundred …

Apparently French and Italian bicycles fitted with wired-on tyres, as opposed to tubular tyres which are stuck on, now had slightly larger diameter rims than British ones. The best thing, he said, would have been for me to have had my bicycle fitted with tubular tyres which were the same size in Britain as on the Continent, but they needed a different sort of rim and, anyway, such tyres are more suitable for day trips or touring with minimal luggage than for cycle-camping with a comparatively heavy weight over the back wheel.

In the face of all this depressing news I was nevertheless reluctant to return to Newhaven and face two more sessions with the French ship's gruesome ham sandwiches and equally gruesome self-service cafeteria – by this time, the early 1970s, the French were catching on fast to what the British had known for a long time, that it was not necessary actually to provide any sort of civilized service at all on a cross-Channel ferry service, as even if you offered them nothing the customers would travel just the same. I therefore decided, stubbornly and irrationally, to press on to Rouen and try the Michelin depot there. Had I had any sense I would have telephoned them, but even if I had done so they would have told me that they had the size I needed in stock, which was not in fact the case, so the result was the same.

4 p.m. The Route Nationale unrolled ahead of me between the enfilades of poplars, like an endless strip of paper. How vast France was. By the time the environs of Dieppe were left behind, cars with GB plates were already thin on the ground. Soon they
disappeared completely and I was alone with the Citroëns, the long-distance lorries that seem to coast past at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, and strange, bus-like but windowless, pale-grey vehicles, containing what – the guillotine? Not only empty of vehicles, empty of French, except in the towns which in France are so evenly spaced that they could have been established where they stand by ministerial decree, towns that have things we do not have in Britain, or if we do are not the same:
charcuteries, drogueries, huissiers, terrains viabilisées, toutes directions
, signs which I now knew, after years of being taken in by them, despatch you where you do not want to go (the only way to deal with a French town is to charge through the middle of it), past devilishly-sited
priorités à droits
, from which old ladies in rusty black shoot out on autocycles, like witches on broomsticks. ‘
Faites attention!'
If the French say something they mean it. Devil's Island was established expressly for those who do not believe in
la loi
. Which was why I soon left this Route Nationale to travel on ‘D' roads,
chemins départementals
, which are generally much safer for cyclists than English roads and often go on and on across enormous tracts of country avoiding all but the smallest towns. ‘V' roads,
chemins vicinal
, are quieter still.

Spent the first night in the back garden of the Auberge du Val du Saâne, in the pastoral valley of the Saâne, having dined in it and having covered one hundred and ten kilometres on my bicycle since leaving Wimbledon.

Day 2

At Rouen great excitement when a Michelin man announced, after a good rummage, ‘Yes, we have twenty-seven-inch
enveloppes
.' Removed the rear wheel – not easy as you cannot turn a bike upside down with loaded pannier bags fitted to it, and these particular models took ages to put on and take off – then removed
the tyre only to find that whatever his
enveloppe
was it was not twenty-seven-inch.

The Michelin man went off to telephone Paris and eventually returned with two interesting alternatives, both almost equally awful. Either to spend the weekend in Rouen – this was a Friday – and await delivery of a 27”×1¼”
enveloppe
some time on Monday, or somehow get to Clermont-Ferrand in the thousands of feet high Massif Central, a region I had been planning to avoid at all costs, only about five hundred and fifty kilometres to the south by Route Nationale, but presumably much more by the kind of roads I used. There, he said, there was a Michelin
usine
which, as a rare example of French clemency, turned out these
mini-enveloppes
for the British who were mad enough to use them when almost no one else in Europe did, except perhaps the inhabitants of Gibraltar.

After thinking about this while eating a cheap, copious but rather greasy luncheon for such a hot day at Au Carreau des Halles in the port area of Rouen, which was destroyed during the war and has been rebuilt in a manner that no one could describe as picturesque, I set off for Clermont-Ferrand, hoping that the tyre would hold out, but with all my romantic visions of cycling day after day along canal banks under the plane trees, which was what I had planned, now dispelled. In doing so, in order to avoid going through Rouen itself, which is inconveniently situated so far as cyclists are concerned in a hole in the ground, I made what turned out to be an unwise detour down the right bank of the valley of the Seine, large parts of which are an industrial mess, pedalling past Flaubert's Pavilion at Croisset, now a museum, which stood below steep chalk cliffs, both of which, museum and cliffs, looked as if they could have done with a good rinse. I then crossed the river at Val-de-la-Haye in a motor-boat to the left bank where I immediately got lost, first in a forest which had been messed up
by the builders of the Paris – Caen
autoroute
, then in a labyrinth of signpostless lanes from which I was rescued, almost weeping with vexation, by a kindly lorry driver.

7 p.m. Reached St André-de-l'Eure, having ridden one hundred and twenty-eight boiling kilometres and having passed through Evreux in the six o'clock rush hour – never again on a bicycle! Ate a
prix-fixe
dinner,
rillettes
(ugh, in such heat!) and
tripes
, separately of course, at the Café de la Ville, to which, in spite of it costing only F8.50 (64p or $1.60), I shall not be returning. (At this time, in 1971, sterling was about F13.30 to the pound.)

Camped in the midst of huge, flat, prairie-like fields and, as it was very early and still daylight, thought about France and the French, about which I now thought I knew a little more than I had in 1946, up to which time I had never been to France, and made some notes about them which were eventually expanded into what follows. (Any reader not interested in the writer's views on France but still keen on cycling can stop here and start again at Day 3.)

The emptiness of France is not a figment of the imagination. This is a country nearly four times the size of Britain, yet with a smaller population. In the villages, apart from one old man in faded
bleus
(dungarees) gazing at what to him (and to me) is agricultural machinery, the only other figure in sight is often the
poilu
on the war memorial. The huge, prairie-like fields, such as the one in which I am sitting in my tent, are as empty as any real prairie, except perhaps for one man with a tractor who often works far into the night using headlights (as is now common in other parts of Europe, including Britain). Yet this is, as it was before the tractors came, which is only recently, the most productive agricultural country in Europe.

The sun is setting now. It is the moment recorded in Millet's
Angelus
, but without the peasants with their heads bowed, a picture
of which my Auntie May had a reproduction in her home in Stamford Brook, and now usually without the bell.

Out there beyond the
plaine
is the rest of France, a country arguably – and I am thinking of it from the point of view of a visitor, rather than an inhabitant of the Lens coalfields or of a workers' housing complex in Marseille – the most beautiful, in its infinite variety, in Europe.

Out there, too, are the French, a nation made up of Celts, Latins and people of Germanic origin: yet all of them regarding themselves, not as the Scots, Irish and Welsh tend to, and increasingly so, as separate, distinct nationalities within the British Isles, but as one people, wholly and utterly French. A people who in moments of collective emotion may begin to sing
La Marseillaise
, as the French prisoners-of-war did on hearing of a French victory at Verdun, in the film
La Grande Illusion
. To the British, the thought of singing ‘God Save the Queen', admittedly an anthem with less verve, except on strictly ritual occasions, or before the first act, would be unthinkable. If one's ship was sinking one would think twice about singing even ‘Rule, Britannia'.