A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

‘The war? We – they – helped you in the war . . .’ (‘Nous avons – ils vous ont fait une service . . .’)

  Yves is seventy-two. ‘Four when the Germans came, eight when they left.’

  In 1957 he was in Algeria.

  ‘You were a para?’ I exclaim, amazed. The barman, who is listening closely, snorts and laughs. Yves shakes his head. He was a Marine; he fought in the hills.

  With something like relief we get into it, raising our voices, seizing the other by the arm, underlining our points with grips. He is very small and our debate makes me feel almost as vivid as him, despite the long night.

  ‘Oran!’ he cries. ‘Mes-el-Kebir!’ (Where the Royal Navy sank half the French fleet rather than risk its falling into German hands.)

  ‘There were sailors in the ships . . . Et les Arrnglais . . .’

  He makes a horrible thrusting movement, calculated but forceful and with a twist, like a man picking out the killing spot of an opponent, stabbing between the second and third rib.

  ‘The British Empire!’

  We start to make a list, I start to write ‘our’ countries names in two columns: we agree there are too many. Africa splinters, east to the British and west to France: there at least we were equal.

  ‘Le vieux faucon,’ the barman calls him, proudly – the old falcon – with another affectionate laugh.

  ‘Do you think it was a good thing, Yves, in the end, colonialism?’

  He makes me repeat the question. Tears come to both his eyes. He did thirty-five years for SNCF after Algeria: hence his regular place at the bar of the Hotel Terminus at seven-thirty, his huge popularity, his – something like – totemic status among all the few who are around now, opening up for the day, for this day, 17 April 2008.

  He has a divorce, a daughter of forty, a house in Perpignan, and he shows me a brown and white postcard of his birthplace, Cerbere, in 1915, looking like heaven (like an Algerian heaven, actually): a little white fishing commune on a bare brown hill by the sea. It’s changed, now, he says.

  Swallows mean good weather, he says.

  ‘I’m talking about Les Arrnglais,’ he keeps saying, as if to reassure me, as if to implore, to save me from taking it personally, which I am not, and am.

  ‘But do you think –?’

  I kept coming back to the question. The tears which fill his eyes are so fine they will not run. Now he is imploring.

  ‘There are people there who – wish we had stayed – want us to go back – without us – Africa – would not be developed . . .’

  ‘If you have money,’ he said, ‘hide it’.

  That day was a confusion of sleep and sleeplessness in which I travelled hundreds of luxurious miles courtesy of SNCF: the cleanest, quickest, most comfortable and reliable system of transportation in 6,000 miles, a marvel of French style and efficiency and a huge gift to European travel. French passengers seemed remarkably displeased with it. Queuing for one of the wood and steel ticket desks, with its little lamp and sleek machinery – a world away from the grimy windows and shouted exchanges of the British equivalent, more like an appointment with a sympathetic travel agent than a ticketing system – I was amazed by the displeasure and frustration of others in the line. The man in front of me complained angrily about the timetable and the prices.

  ‘Well I think SNCF is wonderful,’ I informed the clerk, drowsily.

  ‘So do I!’ she exclaimed. ‘But people will always complain.’

  I arrived in Narbonne in a warm rain, in time for the morning market. Narbonne is a crossroads of canals and ancient footpaths. The Roman Via Domitia which linked the Alps to the Pyrenees runs through the middle of town. A section has been uncovered: you place your feet where once Roman sandals trod. In the market a man in young middle age with a mass of curly hair was setting out a second-hand bookstall.

  ‘I am Parisian, originally,’ he said, ‘but I gave it up for the South because here is the art of life.’

  A cheerful girl in a bakery and coffee shop played the lead in a series of sketches of a dead-pan polish that could only come from daily rehearsal.

  ‘Good day, Madame!’

  ‘Well, it’s a day, anyway . . .’

  ‘Good day, Monsieur!’

  ‘Good day, Miss.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Another day. And some bread.’

  ‘Good day, Madame.’

  ‘Well, we do our best . . .’

  ‘Good day, Monsieur.’ (This to a policeman.) ‘How is it going?’

  ‘It’s going, it’s going, but it’s not gone yet . . .’

  They discussed something. ‘Well that’s life!’ she concluded.

  ‘It’s a life,’ corrected the policeman.

  I sipped café au lait and thought of Eric Newby’s description of the French:

  A people with the oldest colonial tradition in Europe who built up one empire, lost most of it and then started all over again to build another, the second biggest in the world, in which no one in what the empire builders called La France de la Métropole was ever very interested. Voltaire’s description of Canada as ‘a few square miles of snow’ was not only witty but typical of what Les Métropolitains felt about it . . .

  In that bakery you could scarcely feel further from Brazzaville, from Douala, from Birni n’Konni, from Casablanca, even from Algiers, and yet something of the same scene is played out in each of them, over the same food and drink, in the same language, and therefore through something of the same sensibility every morning of the week.

  On another train I zig-zagged up to Toulouse, where the station café was full of Algerians and Moroccans, young men, their skins pale and ill-looking through lack of sun, smoking dope and flirting with the waitress. One of them led me to an internet café.

  ‘I am Moroccan, yes, but I am also French – Toulousian. My father came here but I was born here. It’s nothing special, here. It’s the Birmingham of France!’

  ‘Are you going to leave?’

  ‘And go where? This is home.’

  The next train followed the track of the Roman Via Aquitania, curving north-west up towards Bordeaux. It was a beautiful spring day here, perhaps the first of the year in Aquitaine. Ten miles west of Agen a crowd of swallows swooped over the river – here the Tarn joins the Garonne, draining the whole of south-west France into the Gironde estuary and the Atlantic at Bordeaux. On the north bank the land was a dark green; a damp, bright shade, the first time I had seen the colour of home since January.

  Tiny gradations of changing soil and vegetation bleed earth’s colours into one another almost imperceptibly: you do not notice the sandy yellows of the veldt becoming the pastel ochres of Zambia becoming the dark gut-red of Cameroon, unless perhaps you over-fly them all in less than a month. Perhaps to the swallows the earth is a colour-coded route map of chromatic change.

  The train passed fortified châteaux and the sites of much older forts, castles on peaks: to travel this way would have been like journeying in Congo, once; after the Romans left and France fractured into Mérovingien and Frankish principalities, soldiers extracted border taxes on behalf of each fiefdom. On the south side of the river the land was fairer, with blonde grasses. Bright blossom like dollops of ice cream covered the orchards and there were palm trees in the gardens, as though the Via Aquitania divided northern from southern Europe.

  In the evening, in the last of the sun, we came into Bordeaux St Jean, a station which seems to have fallen out of a Monet: the roof is a fretwork, functional, no doubt, but which multiplies into a cobweb of thin dark iron below the stained glass. The city presents an impeccably neat, grandly high-bourgeois façade, its history of wealth displayed as space, diamond-shaped squares aligned with the river. Bordeaux seems as needless and heedless of the rest of the country as France itself is of the rest of the world: to get out of here, you must take the TGV. It is a spring evening but the tail of a long winter still twitches in the air; the wind whips cold off the wide Garonne and there is no hea
t in the sinking sun.

  ‘The old Bordeaux people are very snobby, very bourgeois, very posh and very mean,’ says Fleur, lightly: she is a student of International Relations and the receptionist at a hotel near the centre which is too expensive for me, as are all the places I try. This trading city is far beyond my means.

  The train for Paris leaves at 04.40 but the ticket includes a blessing: the right to the waiting room, where men and women, many of them black, curl up on their luggage and sleep. I wake with a start, having set no alarm, and am out, hurrying through the underpass, up onto the platform and into the train before I really know what time it is, what train I am boarding or whether I am dreaming. The doors shut behind me and the train rolled. My inbuilt alarm clock never cut it so fine, before or since.

  TGV 8406, the 04.40 service from Bordeaux St Jean to Paris Montparnasse is under the control of a tall, saturnine conductor who would inevitably be portrayed by Gérard Depardieu, should it ever be the subject of a film, a man with black crocodile-effect cowboy boots protruding below the turn-ups of his grey SNCF uniform, who despatches the train at every station, after he has had just as much of his cigarette as he wants, according to the sweeping gold hand of his Breitling aviator watch – the same watch Sarkozy wears, he informs me. This train does not leave to the minute, but on the second. We meet in the buffet, where he considers me, in between flirting with the girl behind the counter who makes us coffee.

  ‘English? I hate the English,’ he says, without a flicker of a smile.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are destroying Europe, destroying the world, destroying everything. You and your liberalism. The first Gulf War, Lebanon, Palestine . . .’

  ‘What are you listening to on the i-Pod?’

  ‘Amy Winehouse!’

  ‘You like her? She’s English . . .’

  ‘She is wonderful! And Massive Attack – they are formidable.’

  He has written a novel. ‘But it is not commercial,’ he says with a shrug. I half-expect him to blame the English for this.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It is philosophy. It is about a man . . .’

  The man sounds remarkably like him. I am not clear on the philosophy of the philosophy but it is a very big book.

  ‘Too big, I think,’ he sniffs. ‘I sent it to a publisher but . . .’ He shrugs.

  ‘And what is the problem with the English?’

  ‘The Anglo-Saxon way. Sarkozy is going to privatise SNCF, you know, they are going to destroy it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they are jealous. That is the Anglo-Saxon system. Thatcher, Blair – all the same. Like the Americans . . .’

  And Sarkozy?

  ‘Une petite mouche,’ he snorts. A little fly.

  The spring dawn passes in a beautiful dark-blue blur, lightening as we go north through wooded hills and farmland. There are armed police on the train and soldiers with rifles at the station. Guns have been ubiquitous all the way from Cape Town, only the makes have changed.

  We made Paris just before rush hour. At the top of the platform I turned to admire the engine of the silver TGV, half-missile, half-serpent. Plastered over half the windscreen in a crimson slur was a large, violent bloodstain and a single feather.

  It is a long and delightful walk from Montparnasse east along St Germain heading for the Seine, Charonne, the Porte de Montreuil and the bus station. Spring is coming to the boulevards, sprays of buds like flicked gold paint, leaves brighter, paler than the green of Aquitaine, and then there are the chestnut trees, holding their little white candles bashfully against their new green skirts, like debutantes. A procession comes up St Germain, eighty chanting students escorted by police. They are holding placards and shouting ‘No!’ to tuition fees. ‘Révolte!’ They look very young and laugh self-consciously; the police guarding them smile indulgently and passers-by nod approval: the next generation of the bourgeoisie doing as they should, cutting their revolutionary teeth. In a shop specialising in prints and maps of North Africa the proprietor, a Tunisian-turned-Parisian who has been here for twenty years, says he hates the English, ‘the dogs of the Americans’: ‘Which is worse,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘the illness or the whore who gives it to you?’

  He remembers swallows migrating through the Tunisia of his childhood. ‘We used to shoot at them with our catapults,’ he remembers, smiling fondly. ‘I got one once! It wasn’t easy . . .’

  The route bends past Austerlitz and the Gare de Lyon, along the Boulevard Diderot, over Nation, along the rue de Pyrenees where workmen are planting a lovely young Japonica tree outside the Bar Biarritz, and through old Charonne, once a separate town, with a handsome church and a village-like square. At one intersection a plaque records that a salamander stopped here once, and rested.

  The bus station is a slow world. People move slowly, work things out slowly: we are the time-rich, cash-poor of Europe.

  An Algerian man is waiting for a friend on the delayed bus from Madrid.

  ‘Yes, I live in Paris now. I hate it. It’s shit, I’m going to move to London. How much is it to go there?’

  ‘Forty-five euros, plus five in tax.’ (The first departure tax anyone has asked in the entire journey.) Because he was the first Francophone not to proclaim a hatred of the English I told him he was welcome to Britain, and advised him to try not to arrive in the winter.

  The motorway from Paris to Calais is full of trans-continental traffic. According to its markings one truck belongs to a Russia–Poland–Spain–Morocco transport company. A British vehicle belonging to C. J. Bird Transport is decorated with a huge swallow. The lorries cross the wide flat spaces of the Picardie plains like tramp steamers on a dead sea. A sign proclaims ‘Picardie – Terre Fertile’ but the earth’s fertility is being flogged remorselessly: sprayed, ploughed and planted. There are no hedges or fences; gangs of tractors permit the earth no rest. This is a land which has been made addicted to chemicals; nothing lives here but a scattering of crows. There is nothing for a swallow to eat and no sign of them. Outside the old mining villages are spectacular slag heaps, straight out of a Zola novel, and spring covers the distant hillsides with buds. The country reminds me of Gulliver in Lilliput: mighty, in its sweep to the horizon, but tied down by the million tiny ministrations of men and machinery, enslaved.

  The coach stops on a windy stretch of tarmac between French and British customs. Unclear on which way they should go first, the fifteen travellers fragment, some heading one way and some the other. The customs officers swiftly realise that half the head count provided by the driver is missing and immediately, comically, blame each other. The English are liars, mutter the French officers, darkly; the French are playing silly buggers again, say the English. An English officer is on the phone to his boss.

  ‘Yeah, yes, I know I said I was going to do that thing for you but I haven’t even had time to start. As it is I’ve only got eleven of us on. Eleven staff and one Immigration Officer for the whole port of Calais . . . It’s a complete . . . That’s all thanks to the new – you know. It’s UK plc or whoever . . .’

  They stamp us all through and the bus drives us onto the ferry. The boat seems a wonderfully old-fashioned cross-Channel world: children wailing, adults nattering, the first British voices and the first Welsh, too. An excitable woman on the stairs informed her family ‘So now we know what’s up there we wanna see what’s down here!’ and they follow her, complaining contentedly. It was a dizzying, elating experience to be on the ship, amid the throng, to look around and to see myself no longer as singular, but as one of a crowd, of a type – of a people. All the way from Cape Town, I marvelled, and here I am. Almost home! The matter-of-factness of the British seemed to preclude any great celebration. Cape Town, I could imagine them saying, what a long way; was the weather nice?

  Before we cast off the captain’s voice addresses us in calm, estuarine tones reminiscent of an Essex golf club: ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re ready for sea now; conditions
in the Channel . . . there was a gale earlier on but now it’s overcast . . . murky . . . and with our stabilisers we should be fine, it’s just a stiff wind from the east. Sailing time is about one and a half hours. I do hope you have a pleasant crossing.’

  ‘I hate boats. Make me sick!’ announces an elderly lady. ‘That’s why I’m out here.’

  I see her later, mid-Channel, wrapped up on the veranda deck under the misty sun, as we steam through a calm eye in the veering wind. She looks completely happy.

  A lorry driver from Manchester is leaning over the rail, eyeing the listless grey surging of the Channel. ‘You should see it when it’s rough or blocked because of strikes or whatever. Operation Stack they call it: anyone can do it, a couple of lorries or a few fishing boats blockading a port – chaos. Normally come over at night – this is the first time I’ve seen it in daylight for ages.’

  His boss made a fortune in VAT washing, he says. ‘You take a bunch of mobile phones, drive them to the Czech Republic, take a break while they change the seals on the crates, then drive them back. He made millions. Had a whole fleet of little vans doing it.’

  Today he is driving a load of thirty-five pallets of car interiors.

  ‘You sweat it a bit in customs, hoping no one has stuck any tobacco or whatever in there for a mate, because if they have it’s you who sits in the cells waiting while they sort out the paper trail . . .’

  I spend most of the crossing on deck, shivering happily in opaque sunlight. It would be too much to hope for the sight of a swallow making the crossing; with the wind settled in the north-east they must either be waiting for a shift in its direction, or battling in against it from somewhere further south and west, the Cherbourg peninsula, perhaps, or Saint-Malo.

  The cloud breaks and suddenly there are the White Cliffs, and there is Dover. I feel another surge of exultation, and something like trepidation, too. How will I find the world I had left – how will it find me? And though I had faith in them, there was still an illogical question mark in my mind: would the swallows really make it? It seemed extraordinary that after all this way, and having reached the vast farmlands of France, so many swallows should go the extra perilous miles out to these islands in the North Atlantic. Ornithologists have no way of explaining it but that the birds probably began their migrations at the end of the last Ice Age, following food sources, and have continued simply because it is a successful strategy. The urge to return to where they were born is less explicable, and not all do. Young males seem to head for ‘home’, their parents’ nesting area, moving on only if all the spots are taken. But young females are more adventurous. One female, ringed as a nestling in Warwickshire, was found the following year breeding in the Netherlands. She must have met her mate on migration or in their winter quarters.