Leaving part 4: Finally to France.

It was on a Sunday that I left Norwich because Sunday was the day Jeremy drove his refrigerated truck full of dead chickens down to London. We hit the city around four in the afternoon and he dropped me close to Victoria where I hung around for 6 hours to catch the late train to Folkestone that connected with the night ferry to Calais.

London was as miserable as sin, though I suppose the areas around main train stations in any town always are. I was cold, chilled to the bone, and the tawdriness of the sad little day depressed me. I bought a whiskey in the station bar - first treat I’d given myself in weeks - but the sullen barman wouldn’t talk so I settled myself in a corner of the bar and got lost in the first few chapters of “Crime and Punishment”. The man at the next table annoyed me with his chain smoking and I caught him looking at me when I glanced over in his direction several times.

“Are you a Young Conservative then?” he asked, nodding his head towards the book. I couldn’t see the connection, still can’t, and I knew there would be no company to be had from him and I hoped he wouldn’t be on the train to Folkestone and he wasn’t.

The hot sultry days and nights Dostoyevsky was telling me about in “Crime and Punishment” started to irritate me too. The atmosphere was oppressive and claustrophobic with low ceilings and stuffy, airless rooms, but what connected Petersburg with London were the stench of stale alcohol and the brooding sense of desolation weighing in my heart. I walked outside to take some air and the cold drizzle brought me back sharply from the stifling Russian summer to London. Somehow though, I was cheered by the thought that at least Petersburg began with a P and I started to look forward to the next few chapters.

The train to Folkestone was exactly that - the train to Folkestone. It was dirty, noisy, crowded and in every way unpleasant, and the ferry to France was no more than a re-run of the ferry to Scotland but with fewer drunkards and no sign of malevolent, luggage-emptying, body-searching officialdom.

And this time I didn’t leave the boat walking as planned - I was driven. Again at the bar the book I had my nose stuck in caught someone’s attention, but on a more productive level this time. Mark was an American driving back from England to Hamburg where he lived. He asked where I was heading and I said Hamburg. It didn’t start with a P but there was a car headed that way so why not go to Hamburg, and what’s in a letter anyway? An H is every bit as good as a P. PH. Phamburg. And it wasn’t a car Mark was driving; it was a home on wheels.

We drove off the ferry and away from Calais port into the emptiness of rural France, on and on along empty roads. Mark said he was taking back roads so we could pull over and stop for a sleep later and I got a bit nervous. Two hours later I saw a sign for Lille and Mark pulled the van over down a rough track and parked it behind a clump of trees.

“This guy’s been here before”, I thought to myself. When the car lights were off and I stepped outside to stretch there wasn’t even an isolated farm house in sight, just fields and fields and more fields, and an acute dose of anxiety welled up in my innards. What had I got myself into? What was the deal with Mark?