The first fifty kilometres out of Abbeville took half an hour. The next five took one hour and fifty-five minutes. The effects of a pile-up on the F3 are NOTHING compared to its French counterpart. Every main road in the region was seized up. People became bored, tempers flared, children hit each other in the back seat and grown men fled their vehicles to frolic amidst the daisies and blow dandelions (not me – the guys in the van behind us).
In between changing cds* and soothing the driver’s fevered brow, I sat in the passenger seat doing mental arithmetic. From Bayeux to the D-Day beaches and back, plus looking time; how long to Bayeux itself, how long in the museum with the tapestry, how long for lunch; and how long from Bayeux to our hotel in Rouen. The time required grew larger, and the time available grew smaller. ‘We’ll have to pass on the beaches,’ I announced.
After ten minutes we advanced another one hundred metres and the guys from the van raced into the woods for a toilet stop. ‘Honey, we have to get out of here,’ Megan announced, and at the next chance we turned onto a back road and made our way to Neufchatel-en-Bray. It was almost midday, and the whole schedule was blown. No battlefields for us today. We decided to run for Rouen. The trick was to find a road that wasn’t full of trucks and cars trying to head west. The best option was the D1 going northwest towards the coast. And what’s that town on the coast at the end of the D1?
On 19 August 1942 several thousand Canadian troops launched a raid on Dieppe, partly to cause trouble, partly for reconnaissance. It was a disaster; many died or were captured, and few made it safely back to England.
When we got to Dieppe we drove up to the headland overlooking the harbour. We had to put on our jackets because a cold wind was blowing off the Channel and it was less than ten degrees. Waves were dashing against the breakwaters, seagulls were hovering, and the horizon was obscured by mist after a few kilometres. Not having had a chance to do any research we didn’t know what evidence of the raid remained, but we could see part of an old blockhouse or gun position overlooking the harbour entrance.
Once away from the coast the sun came out and the temperature went up, so by Rouen it was twenty degrees. The cathedral is of course impressive, if only for its size. You can see what Monet saw in the western façade, although to get the viewpoint of his paintings you would have to knock down a few trees and possibly some buildings. I may be jaded from having seen too many cathedrals (saw a great one at Abbeville on Saturday), but I was excited by the pillars. Yes, they are massive bits of masonry, but they also play an important part in one of Dornford Yates’s thrillers (Red in the Morning, I think; my mind is fuzzy and for some strange reason I haven’t packed Yates’s complete works in my bag).
I like this part of Rouen; it is like the old town of Cologne, only there is more of it – winding, narrow streets of teetering buildings, cafés and tabacs. We looked for a street that might fit the description of one in Yates’s Shoal Water, a cul de sac home to a den of thieves named the Wet Flag. No cul de sacs, but a disreputable-looking laneway called Rue du Petit Mouton ended in a small square with a narrow exit between buildings. I could imagine the unwary meeting an evil fate there.
Rouen is the place where Jeanne d’Arc met her fate, put on trial in the cathedral and burned at the stake in the marketplace. An ugly modern church covers most of the site now, but at the back the actual location is a garden badly in need of weeding. It’s interesting how the places, unadorned and unexplained as they might be, say more than the monuments.
Tomorrow we invade England.
*We have found that Art vs Science (The Experiment) and the Brand New Heavies (compilation) are good for tollway driving, and Tame Impala (Innerspeaker) is perfect for the open countryside. These things are important.
