paris 2

Every second of that journey was wonderfully exciting. Not only was I with one of the people I loved best, but also we were doing something amazing – travelling! I had been desperate to travel all of my life and now I finally was; I was so happy. The journey took most of the day; I think it was evening before we arrived at the Gare du Nord. Even throwing up on the ferry wasn’t too bad. It was soon over, and we were off again, albeit with slightly paler faces than before, laughing our way along the gangways of the lurching boat as we staggered about trying and failing to keep our balance.

I loved the idea that you could get on a train and actually go abroad. I had hardly ever been; it was so unfair. I think because my parents had spent their whole lives travelling – around Europe and America and beyond, they didn’t bother to do it once they’d settled in London. I felt that was a big mistake. As a child I pored over old photographs of me as a baby in a hot African country, lying in a big pram pushed proudly by a smiling man in a white uniform, with palm trees and exotic looking plants framing us. Try as I might, I just couldn’t remember any of it, and I couldn’t remember Switzerland either, where we went next. Only boring grey London. It was deeply unfair.

My father was a journalist and he was often away – he would go to interesting countries, many of them war zones, and I’d be allowed to listen to him on the radio or television sometimes, talking about check points being blown up. I thought that sounded thrilling and was desperate to go along too. I couldn’t see why I’d get in the way and I refused to accept the shallow excuse that it was dangerous, or that there were flies everywhere – why on earth would I mind flies if there were palm trees and check points? Nobody understood.

Instead, for holidays as a child, I had to endure Walberswick twice a year. The same cottage, last but one before the dunes started, the green with its swings and seesaw, the dark low-ceilinged tea room run by old ladies in pinafores, with moustaches, the stony beach, and the cold grey North Sea. Even the children I was allowed to play with were boringly normal – most of them came from London anyway, like me – in fact most of them were the children of friends of my parents, and I would be dragged round endless rectories and country cottages to visit them. It was so uninspiring - I might just as well have been in London. The only nice thing about the cottage was that it was full of bookshelves and I would sit inside, watching the rain batter against the windows, simmering with resentment, and reading P G Wodehouse and thick, bound collections of wartime Punch.

The novelty of being abroad, the long straight rows of trees, the bleak empty landscape of Northern France as we sped towards Paris; it was all so deeply exciting and different. I couldn’t understand a word anyone said. Like T, I was also half French, but my parents had thought it was bad for children to be brought up bilingual, so I missed out on the only useful part of the heritage, and instead only got an embarrassing first name that no one could pronounce, an upbringing that made me feel completely different from everyone else, and a small vocabulary based on nursery rhymes, Christmas carols, and instructions – be quiet, hurry up, etc

On the concourse at the Gare Du Nord, we were too awed to do much at first, except stand, wide-eyed, admiring everything – the smells, the noises, the people; it was all so different, and there was absolutely no one to tell us what to do. We made our way to a little café and sat for a while, taking it all in.

“Shall we have a drink first, and then look for somewhere to stay?”

There was a fierce looking man in an apron, with a big moustache, tapping his foot impatiently next to our table

“Oh yes why not, since we’re here. Pernod?”

“Absolutely”

We’d decided in advance that Pernod was to be the drink of choice. It was so lovely – the angular little jug of water, the ceremony of pouring it into the glass and seeing the clear liquid turn cloudy – it almost made up for the rather horrible taste and smell, but we were pretty sure we’d get used to that with time. On the way out, we stopped to buy some Boyard cigarettes; if they were good enough for Jean-Paul Sartre, they’d be good enough for us too. They also smelled and tasted foul and did something worrying to the backs of our throats, but they looked very sophisticated.

Fortified, we set off into the dark streets of Paris to look for a hotel. It wasn’t very hard, there seemed to be hundreds, all with space. We chose one, which had a large room, full of enormous mismatched mahogany pieces of furniture. There seemed to be enough wardrobes in it for a party of twenty. We hadn’t brought much with us – maybe a couple of pairs of jeans each. We marvelled at the uncomfortable bolsters on the beds – why on earth would anyone use such an odd thing for a pillow? We had a fight with them instead. Then we hit the bars.

That’s pretty much all we did – the bars. We drank more or less solidly for a week. When we could no longer walk straight, we would stagger back to the hotel singing, with our arms around each other for stability, to sleep. Once, we went to the Galleries Lafayette, and we bought carnival masks as presents for everyone at home. They were astonishingly cheap – delicate tiny things in bright jewel colours covered with feathers and sequins, on shiny little sticks.

Then we went back into the bars again – we just couldn’t get over the novelty that they were open all day and half the night. No one seemed to mind that we couldn’t speak any French – we could say Pernod and biere and please and thank you and hello and goodbye – that was all it seemed to require. I was having the time of my life. I had thought that travelling might be harder somehow, but there were no difficulties at all – everyone was so kind to us.

When the week was nearly over, we discovered to our astonishment that we had almost completely run out of money. We had no idea how it could have vanished so quickly; we hadn’t been keeping tabs on things, but it had seemed such a lot at first, there hadn’t seemed to be much need to count every centime. We decided it was best if we both went back to Joel’s for a while – his parents wouldn’t mind so much about the month being cut short. First, however, we would pop along to T’s grandparents’ flat, to say hello, as he’d suggested. We didn’t want to disappoint them after all.

It took us longer than we expected to reach the address. T had given us instructions from the nearest metro station, but we hadn’t used it up until then. I don’t think we had strayed very far from the hotel before – there were so many little bars just in that one area there hadn’t seemed any need to. It hadn’t occurred to us to phone in advance but still, it wasn’t all that late when we finally found the small apartment block. Relieved, we pressed on their doorbell. There was no answer; we tried again; still no answer. Joel looked at me;

“One more time?”

I agreed;

“They could be a little deaf or something.”

We pressed it and stood there. Then we heard a noise above us. We looked up and a woman was leaning out of the window. She was saying something in extremely rapid French and looking pointedly at us. She didn’t seem very friendly. There was no need to ask Joel; I knew he hadn’t any more idea than me. I thought for a minute, then I shouted back;

“Nous sommes des amis de Thierry”

The woman at the window disappeared and we relaxed, thinking she would come down to let us in, welcome us, and maybe give us something to eat. Instead, shortly after, a man appeared. We smiled hopefully at him.

“Thierry not here” he said slowly, “Go away”, and he firmly closed the window.

We were amazed. He must have got the wrong end of the stick somehow; perhaps he thought we were asking for Thierry. We rang the bell again. If only we could explain that we were T’s friends, and he’d told us to come, surely they’d open the door. It was no good though; we tried several times but the window and door remained firmly shut. We waited around for a bit, and then gave up and walked slowly back off the way we had come, puzzled and slightly hurt. Joel put his arm around me.

“One last drink?” he suggested.