Pardon the delay...the end of the school year happened.
One of my life goals was to cross the British Channel, and so after our sojourn to England, our tour group boarded a ferry to do just that.
We embarked in Portsmouth, which has a rich literary heritage. In a pub called "The Slug and Lettuce" (I kid you not), photographs of Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle don the walls, and here I learned that Conan Doyle actually wrote "A Study in Scarlet" while living in Portsmouth. Thus, this seaside town is the birthplace of Sherlock Holmes.
Now on to the Channel crossing, but let me begin by taking a moment to tell you just how much I underestimated the term "ferry". We were to take a "ferry"across the English Channel. Now, where I come from, in South Carolina, a "ferry" is a small, sometimes double-decker boat that has little benches inside and a narrow, railed deck wrapping about the "cabin". We usually have a cocktail and cross the harbor on our "ferry" at sunset, looking for dolphins.
This was not like our South Carolina ferries. For starters, when I walked out of the terminal, I saw what amounted to a cruise ship and proceeded to wheel my suitcase up a series of ramps to reach the gangway. We gathered in the movie theatre for our embarkation instructions, were notified of the disco upstairs as well as the cafeteria, and were then sent to our staterooms, rooms so tiny, our suitcases wouldn't fit on the floor, but with bunks, which is very literary indeed!
Being the person I am, I immediately ran to the back of the ferry to catch a glimpse of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Victoria and Albert's vacation home. It was nearly eleven at night, so I didn't get the view I had hoped for, but I saw the dim outline of the island and the faint glow of a light. And then I took about ten pictures--of what amounted to darkness. No matter. My heart was full. My roommate and fellow English teacher took the opportunity to read Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach": "The sea is calm tonight./The tide is full, the moon lies fair/Upon the straits" (1-3).
The next day began with a visit to Arromanches, Normandy, and Omaha Beach. There's no sense trying to describe the feeling of these places. I stood on the beach on a beautiful April day, looking inland, towards the hills, and I was overwhelmed. That's all I can say. Sometimes the absence of words matters as well.
We stopped in the picturesque town of Bayeux and had crepes and frites at a creekside restaurant before visiting the famed Bayeux Tapestry, a literary landmark in its own right. The ability to tell stories through images is astounding to me. Every detail was specifically determined, and it was a wonder to imagine the fingers that made each stitch, thousands of stitches used to tell the story of the Battle of Hastings. More than reading reprinted ink words on a page, the human touch on the story had a significant impact on me.
We spent the night in Caen (where I broke down a bought a cheeseburger after an unfortunate salmon incident) and that was the night that Notre Dame was overtaken by flames. I recall standing in a restaurant, waiting on my to-go order, and watching the tragedy play out on two giant flat screen televisions. The restaurant was remarkably quiet, and our server was visibly distraught, at one point apologizing through her tears because she was so distracted. It is surreal being in a place where a national tragedy is happening, and yet being not of that nation. There were no words to comfort our French neighbors, but the images of people singing and praying and holding one another revealed the strength and endurance of the French people.
My literary travels continued the next day when we stopped for lunch at Montreuil-sur-mer. This was an unscheduled stop, but a happy one, as it is the town where Victor Hugo often visited and which he immortalized as the town of which Jean Valjean is mayor in Les Miserables. I naturally overreacted about this in an embarrassing display that may have included a quiet rendition of "Look Down". Laurence Sterne also describes this beautiful locale in A Sentimental Journey. Afterwards, we went to La Coupole, a site of which I was completely unaware before the trip. La Coupole was a Nazi bunker complex where V-2 rockets were to be launched at London. It's built into the side of a quarry and, as one fellow chaperone put it, looks like the Death Star embedded in the side of a mountain. This was another place that words cannot describe. A sign upon entry reads, "La Coupole was a place of suffering. Today, it is a place of remembrance. Europeans of nowadays, you who live on a continent at peace, please visit in SILENCE."
Our time in France ended with an overnight stay in my new favorite city in France: St. Omer. I vow to return there one day, pen and paper in hand. If you want a place to be inspired to write, St. Omer will certainly fulfill your need. We stayed in a hotel just off the central square, where restaurants, pubs, churches, and markets mingle. I purchased pastries from a local chocolatier and fresh blueberries from the open air market. I could see myself residing there, giving up my vehicle for a place where I could walk wherever I needed to go, writing in the creperies and coffee shops.
Hemingway was always fond of France for writing. He was certainly onto something.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach
https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/
https://www.lacoupole-france.co.uk/
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