The BBC are pushing the boat out this week for the 80th anniversary of D-Day; the biggest opposed military landing in history. There are reconstructions every night this week, with live broadcasts from Portsmouth and from Normandy on Wednesday and Thursday. And a variety of D-Day films. My abiding memory of The Longest Day is of John Wayne being pushed around in a wheelbarrow behind Utah beach. It was less gruesome than the opening sequence, on Omaha beach, of Saving Private Ryan, which I saw with Jem in Edinburgh some 30 years ago. Sitting in the cinema was scary. For the troops landing on the beaches eighty years ago it must have been utterly terrifying.
We enjoyed another three family holiday to Normandy for half-term. It was our third time there, with Craig and the girls, Amelia and Ellie, and Jem & Anna, Freya & Oskar. Joanna was of course conspicuous by her absence. We rented the same house as last year, close to the front at Carteret. It is a spacious house; with a big sitting room, a big kitchen, a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor [for the grandparents]; and a further three or four bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. There is also an enormous garden; space for dining outside, a sufficiency of sun beds, and a giant trampoline, usually dominated by Oskar with a supporting cast of the other children. It is a good year for roses in Normandy. As in Edinburgh.
Carteret is a pleasing, old-fashioned kind of resort. The centre of town is a short street of shops. The bakery, which was threatening to close last year for lack of staff, is thankfully still there. A distinctly up-market épicerie. A new-ish, equally up-market cheese shop, whose range includes Shropshire Blue. A shop selling paintings and framed photos. Two shops that sell postcards and table-mats. At least two shops selling holiday gear, mainly sweaters and tee-shirts in Breton blue and white hoops. Two ice cream shops. And La Poste, a period building, set back on a side road.
Beyond the shops, and beyond a board-walk, there is an enormous beach, backed by a row of colourful beach huts. And a decent cafe and restaurant called La Potinière. Where we ate on our last night. Above the beach there are assorted villas and a road that winds up to the lighthouse and the semaphore station. There is a second beach on the other side of the river, but this can only be accessed by driving a couple of kilometres to Barneville. The marina is set at the other end of the front. And back from the sea there is a railway station, now used only for tourist trains in the summer holidays. Also the pleasing St Louis of Carteret chapel , which was discarded when a new and ugly parish church was built. Neither of the churches currently offers any Sunday services.
The weather was mixed: hot sunshine, grey clouds, often windy, and one very wet day. The kids were happy to divide their time between the beach and the garden. On Monday Jem and I walked up the road, inland, to Hatouville, and then back across the dunes to the beach. Nether Jem nor I saw a golden salamander, nor a viper, as promised by the information board. But we did hear and fleetingly see a cuckoo.
On a damp Tuesday morning we drove a short distance to the market at Portbail. This is the village where my school-friend Clive holidayed for some twenty years. [Clive did French at school and at Oxford, and returned to Paris in 1968 as soon as he had finished his degree, initially teaching at the Université de Vincennes, alongside Christine Brooke-Rose and Jeff Kaplow. He spent all his life in Paris, acquiring two Master’s degrees, and died all too young of cancer.] The stall-holders in Portbail were damp and unenthusiastic. We had lunch in a Pizzeria/Creperie, and then walked along the side of the river to the stone pedestrian bridge on the way to Lindenbergh Plage.
On a very wet Wednesday morning we ventured further afield to the Mont St Michel. I had only been there once before, an early morning visit in the summer of 1987, when we went camping as a family across France and down into Spain. On that occasion we parked our car on or close to a shingle causeway, and walked across into a relatively quiet main street. Now you park in a series of car-parks each the size of Murrayfield, and are transported by navette to the foot of the island. In spite of the rain we shared the visit with some four thousand Japanese tourists, all bristling with cameras and umbrellas. We had a decent lunch [poulet pays dAuge] in a busy restaurant on the main street. And I abandoned a planned trip up to the chapel in the face of crowds and slippery steps.
The sun returned on Thursday and Friday. And I returned to Hatainville which had become my daily walk. A few decades after the rest of the world, I have discovered the Health icon on my phone records my number of daily steps. I have set myself the quite arbitrary target of 10,000 steps a day. As of today I am averaging 11, 969 steps during the past week, 10, 015 steps during the past month.
We are greatly blessed with our children and grand-children. And it was good to spend time with them. Saturday was for tidying and packing up. Jem and family travelled back via Caen and Portsmouth. Susie and I were with Craig and the girls on the boat from Cherbourg to Poole. It took a little over an hour to clear the Borders Authorities, no doubt another consequence of BREXIT; and we were home to Wycombe just before midnight. Morning service at King’s Church, Wycombe, with a good sermon on Isaiah 11 by Rich Horne. Train down to London and home to Edinburgh on the 4.00pm from King’s Cross. Long enough to discover what a dreadful paper the Sunday Times now is. A whole troupe of ‘star’ columnists: Rod Liddle, Matthew Syed, Richard Coles, Jeremy Clarkson. Each of them worse than the last.
Now it is time to cut the grass. And look at the post. And catch up with the election. [Today’s news is that the self-obsessed clown Nigel Farage has swopped his customary pint for a banana milk-shake. After the election when Rishi disappears back to California, Farage will contest the leadership of the English Nationalist party [formerly known as the Conservatives] with Suella Braverman.]
And, more happily, to think about another short trip to the Hebrides.
PS
In case you think I didn’t read at all … I read 600 pages of A Life at the Centre in Normandy, Roy Jenkins’ 1991 autobiography. He was a good and civilised man, but very pleased with himself. And I started to read Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Which is much shorter !
June 2024
Through a glass darkly 