Perfectly Ordinary People(94)

I expect he’s a millionaire now and owns some awful corporation or something.

Yes. I think you’re probably right about that. I expect he probably does.

And next, you travelled to London?

Yes, we arrived on the 29th of September, 1945. It was a Saturday. I remember that, because the next day, everything was closed and—

Sorry to interrupt you, but how did you travel? Did you . . . I don’t suppose you could fly in 1945, could you?

Oh, OK. No, we went on the train, or rather a whole string of trains. And no, I don’t think you could fly back then. At any rate, if it was possible to fly from Cannes to London, it certainly wasn’t for the likes of us. Cheap air travel didn’t happen until the seventies, I don’t think. The late seventies, even.

So yes, we travelled by train. I think it was Nice to Marseille, and then Marseille – Lyon, then Paris, where we stayed in a horrible hotel just opposite the Gare du Nord. I remember that because it had bed bugs and we all got bitten to death. It was ghastly.

And then the next morning, we went from Paris to Rouen, then Rouen – Dieppe, and finally we got a ferry from Dieppe to . . . Newhaven, perhaps?

I’m sorry, but I really wouldn’t know.

It doesn’t matter that much anyway. But I think that was it. Dieppe – Newhaven, and then more trains to London Victoria.

That all sounds utterly exhausting.

Oh, it was! But it was also incredibly exciting, and when you’re excited you don’t notice how tiring things are. It took four days altogether, I think, but the only bits I really remember are that awful hotel in Paris and the boat trip. Because that was one of the most wonderful things I’d ever experienced.

You’d never been on a ferry before?

No, never. Neither of us had. So seeing your country slip away and then shrink into the distance . . . then seeing another island appear on the horizon. Well, that was just so exciting I could barely contain myself. You have to realise just how exotic foreign travel was back then, before cheap flights and the EEC and all of that stuff . . . My heart was all of a flutter. Plus we were incredibly lucky, because it was a beautiful day. There wasn’t a gust of breeze and the sea was like a mirror. So we stood on the deck in the sunshine for the entire trip. Guillaume loved it too.

Arriving in England was really scary because neither of us had ever been to a foreign country. Speaking English, explaining ourselves to the passport police, changing our francs for pounds . . . it was all pretty challenging.

And did you cope OK? Speaking English, I mean?

<Laughs> Just about. Barely, sometimes. Christophe kept pushing me forward so I had to do all the talking. And that was utterly ridiculous because his English was far better than mine. We’d found that out when the pilot was staying, so we knew his was better. But Christophe never wanted to say a word if he could avoid it, so he’d stand behind me whispering clues in my ear and pushing me forward – it always came down to me.

I’d forgotten you’d practised your English with the pilot.

Yes, but he was American, not English. And from Georgia, to boot. So he’d spoken much more slowly than the English did. They all had these terribly clipped accents in the forties, and they seemed to speak at a rate of about a thousand words a minute. Especially once we got to London, where everyone seemed in a permanent hurry.

People were helpful, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that they wanted to be helpful in the fastest, most efficient way possible. But we found people to help us change money and buy tickets. People pointed us to the right platform and told us when to get off. And so, somehow, we made it to London.

We arrived at Victoria Station, and the first thing we saw when we stepped outside was a pub. I think it was called the George’s Arms or something. It was one of those very standard pub names. Anyway, it had a sign in the window that said ‘Food/Drink/Rooms/Entertainment’.

By that point I was starving hungry, we were utterly exhausted, and Guillaume had started to cry. So I pointed at the sign and nudged Christophe, and he laughed and said, ‘All four in one place! OK! But only if it’s not too expensive. Otherwise we look further afield.’ And we were lucky because it wasn’t expensive at all.

Was this hotel better than the one in Paris?

Thankfully, it was. It was basic but clean and comfortable. And above all, no bed bugs.

We ate our first ever English meal in the pub downstairs. It was so exotic to us . . . it’s funny really.

Do you remember what you ate?

Absolutely, I do! It was sausage and mash with gravy. The gravy surprised us a bit. We’d never seen mashed potato swimming in that strange brown sauce before. But we hadn’t known what to order and a man at the bar was eating sausage and mash so I’d pointed and said we’d have two of those. Christophe asked the barman for a ‘good English beer’ and he served the poor thing a pint of bitter.

Is that bad? I’m not much of a beer drinker, myself.

It was bad for Christophe. Turned out he hated it. But he forced himself to drink it because he was afraid of offending the barman. I didn’t realise until later on why he worried about that so much.

We had to leave the pub-restaurant bit by six thirty, and as far as I can remember that was because we had Guillaume with us. So we found ourselves in our little room pretty early that evening. We talked a bit about how we were going to tackle looking for Ethel the next day, and then Christophe surprised me by declaring that he was going to pop back downstairs and have another pint of horrible beer with the handsome barman. That really shocked me.