One Thing Leads to Another

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,"                

- John Masefield: "Sea Fever"

I first came across those lines in a school art class fifty-five years ago.  Art was far from being my favourite subject ... mainly because I had no skill at handling a brush.  The teacher who had been saddled with the task of keeping us in order (his main subject was PE, but he also taught geography and art) read this verse to us, suggested that it might inspire a picture and then returned to the book he was reading.  I recall the envy with which I viewed one classmate's effort: an elegant three-master sailing on rough seas ... with the ubiquitous seagulls in the sky.

This was the culmination of a line of thought prompted by spotting a book the other day on my shelves - one of many that have yet to be read - "As I Walked out one Midsummer Morning" by Laurie Lee.  I picked it up and was entranced by some of the illustrations in this edition.  They reminded me of my first visit to France, and evoked an involuntary exclamation, "I must go to France again!"  This was almost immediately followed by, "... and Ireland, too."

Let me tell you first about Ireland.  On Tuesday morning I visited my GP and, as is sadly so often the case, I had to wait.  However, the waiting was not without reward for, as I sat wondering upon which blank wall to fix my gaze, in walked in one of my former driving colleagues.  Pete and I were soon cheerfully exchanging experiences, much to the interest of other patients present, and it gave a completely different complexion to the whole business of waiting.

Sitting with Laurie Lee's book 'parked' in my hand, I now recalled one particular job that this driver and I had undertaken jointly.  A well-known financial company had plucked our firm from a national list to fulfil a simple task of independent witness.  They were changing the location of their computer operation from the north-west to Northern Ireland, and sought a guarantee that their servers were not tampered with during the shipment from one place to the other.

Since two locations were involved at each end of this transfer, Pete and I were each assigned to one server, to observe the loading of the servers onto the vehicles of a specialist carrier, and note the serial numbers of the seals that secured the vehicles.  We then witnessed that these seals were the same, and still intact on arrival at the port, on being loaded to the ferry, on being unloaded, and then at arrival at the destination sites near Belfast.  It was my first commercial trip on a ferry, and my first visit to Northern Ireland.

I have since made many visits to the 'Emerald Isle', mostly to the North, and usually by my preferred route of going via Holyhead to Dublin and returning via Cairnryan.  I'm resolved to return in the leisure of retirement, but it will need planning so as to get the best out of such a trip.

And what about France? I hear you ask.  I picked up "As I Walked out ..." and read the blurb on the jacket: "in 1934 at the age of nineteen he left home and walked to London, and then travelled on foot through Spain".  My first thought was about the apparent spontaneity of Lee's expedition, seemingly undertaken with no consideration of where stops could be made, where a bed would be found for the night.  I then recalled that first trip I'd made to France, over fifty hears later, when similarly, nothing was planned in advance.  I drove my Austin Maestro down to Ramsgate, and we took the Sally Line to Dunkerque.  We were both insured to drive each other's cars and, knowing that I'd never driven on the right-hand side of the road before, my friend was reluctant to let me drive until I'd got the feel of being 'back to front'.  I think that was wise for I still recall my confusion when we came to a dual carriageway and wanted to enter and turn left!

Our first night was at a small hotel a few streets from the centre of St Omer. Our room was up two floors and probably not en-suite.  I think there was an old-fashioned iron bedstead.  It was fairly basic ... but it was France!   The next night was spent at Blois, where we took it in turns to get food poisoning.  I was unwell at bedtime, but by morning felt up to having breakfast; I ate alone however, while my friend stayed in our room feeling sick.  After that, we camped when we could find a site.

Bonnieux - looking down on the church

I remember so many of the places we passed through ... some by name!  One night in the Auvergne we couldn't find a campsite, and forked out for a chalet that had a french window overlooking a lake.  Eventually we made it to Provence, with the masses of roofs clad with the characteristic of curved tiles. We sampled the wine in the Luberon, and delighted in the village of Bonnieux, straggling up the mountainside.

Bonnieux - the lower church

We lay flat to look down the face of the Pont du Gard, although neither of us had the courage to walk across the top, and preferred to go through the aqueduct to get to the other side.

Pont du Gard

All too soon, the first week was over.  I left my friend at the railway station in Avignon, from where she was going to take a train to visit her mother in southern Spain, and I drove up to Alsace, where I discovered the town of Riquewihr, with its medieval centre that had escaped damage in either of the World Wars.  I drove through many of the places I later learned had been key points on the Western Front and past many a war cemetery, eventually making my way home again, largely without appreciating the great freedom that we had enjoyed.

As Masefield put it in his poem, "the vagrant gypsy life ... and quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over."