by Susie Kelly
“I don’t know how they work. Are they for washing, or are they some sort of lavatory?” she asked. “There aren’t any taps.”
I took her into the shower for handicapped people, where there was a safety rail which she could hold while she showered, and explained how to lock the door, where to hang her clothes, and how to push the button that would turn on the water.
“But when you push it the first time, wait for a moment because the water may be a bit chilly when it first comes out.”
“Where are the taps?” she asked.
“The button is instead of the taps.”
She wasn’t convinced.
“It’s such a long time since we came to France. They used to have taps. I don’t suppose they have a bath here, do they?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But the showers really are easy. Just push the button, and when the water stops running you push again, and more water comes out. As much as you want. And hold the rail if you need to.”
She looked doubtful.
Did she think she could manage?
Yes, she said, rather uncertainly.
“I’ll be outside. If you need any help, you can call me.”
While I applied eye-drops and cleaned my teeth, I could hear her talking to herself, but no water running, so I tapped on the door and asked if she was managing.
“I’m fine, dear, thank you. Don’t worry about me.”
Should I have offered to stay in the shower with her? Would she have been grateful, or offended? Whether she ever did succeed, I’ll never know, but I felt so sorry for this old lady who was confused by a shower with no taps. I thought how difficult it must be for older people to keep up with the amazing acceleration in design and technology that made something as simple as having a shower turn into a struggle. I hope it won’t happen to me.
A few miles west of Val-de-Vesle is the small town of Verzy, and once we’d freshened up we thought we’d cycle there to have a look at the strange, twisted little beech trees that grow in the forest, the faux de Verzy, and to have our evening meal.
In whichever direction we looked there were champagne vineyards stretching to the horizon. Nothing but a vast, tranquil sea of vines. Oh, and arising from this ocean, a lighthouse, built at the beginning of the 20th century to advertise one of the local champagne producers. For a few years it was a place where local people came to eat and drink, and the children to play. When WWI broke out it was requisitioned by the military and used as an observation post, and after the war it fell into disuse until quite recently when it was converted into a wine museum.
On the way to Verzy we had a quite surreal experience. There was a very long, smooth road with a slight downhill gradient but, oddly, we had to pedal hard to make headway, when logically we should have been able to cruise. The temperature was 38°C at 7.00 pm, causing the sticky tarmac surface to snatch at our tyres. Even Terry was feeling the heat. When we arrived in the town and discovered that the mutant trees were another mile further on, up a very steep hill, we felt we could live without seeing them, and were content to simply sit in a bar instead, drinking shandy. Only one restaurant was open, and it didn’t look like the kind of establishment where sweaty cyclists would be very welcome or feel comfortable. Apart from that, the menu was all meat apart from the lobster menu – three courses all made out of lobster and priced accordingly. Not for us, sadly.
So we bid farewell to Verzy without having accomplished either of our goals, and cycled back to Val de Vesle. On the way we passed a field of horses, reminding me sadly that our lovely old mare, Leila, had died just one month previously, at the great age of 40.
Back in Val-de-Vesle we stood outside a vine-swathed restaurant debating what we would choose from the menu, when an open-top sports car drew up noisily. An English gentleman climbed out, shouting to his companion that this was the place with such an excellent reputation and he’d give the menu a quick snifty. We moved aside for him, and he read it out loud, smacking his lips and saying “Mm, mmm,” turning to call out some of the dishes to the lady in the car.
“Damn fine food, so I’m told,” he said.
“Looks pretty good,” said Terry. We’d had nothing to eat since we left Châlons ten hours earlier.
A lady came out of the main door to the restaurant, and looked at us in surprise.
“Mais c’est fermé ce soir,” she trilled.
“Eh? What’s that?” asked the lip-smacking man.
“Apparently they’re closed tonight,” I replied.
“Bugger! Double bugger!” he said. That summed up our feelings perfectly. We had no food with us, there were no other restaurants in Val-de-Vesle, and it was 8.15 pm. With a car it was still feasible to find somewhere open, but on bikes it looked as if we were in for an enforced fast. The Englishman and his companion roared away with a cheerful wave, and we rather despondently turned towards the campsite. Terry spotted a young man carrying a large, flat carton. “Pizza?” he asked. “Oui,” replied the young man, pointing to a lane leading to a small square where a van was parked. We were saved.
During the night I was woken up by a strange noise, a harsh crackling sound like a crisp packet being rhythmically crumpled up. At first I thought it might be a hedgehog, and then perhaps a fox, or a rat. It sounded very close, and went on for what seemed like hours, while I lay trying to ignore it and feeling more and more irritable. Surely Terry couldn’t be sleeping through this racket? I nudged him.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Can you hear that peculiar noise? It’s been going on for hours. What do you think it can be? It’s driving me mad.”
“It’s me. I’m fiddling with my wallet. Opening and closing the Velcro fastener.”
“You must be disturbing everybody around us. Why on earth are you fiddling with the Velcro on your wallet, in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know.”
I took the wallet away from him and put it under my pillow.
The eye drops were not helping. From the neck up I still resembled a mottled crimson rugby ball with purple hair. I couldn’t possibly have looked any worse unless I had a giant cold sore on my nose.
CHAPTER TEN
A Lame Duck and a Second Epiphany
“Anything may happen in France.” François de la Rochefoucauld
Taffeta frocks and saucy hats
THE next morning I woke up with a huge cold sore on my nose. Could things possibly get any worse? I freely confess to having more faults than most – as the kindly nuns used to remind me at every opportunity during my school days – but vanity has never been one of them. However, I felt very self-conscious knowing that I looked such a frightful mess, and began to resent my own face for the way it was letting me down.
Once every year Reims holds a spectacular two-day folklore festival and a great pageant in honour of Joan of Arc, and I’d arranged our itinerary to be there for this special event. As there were no campsites in the city, and I had heard that it might be difficult to find hotel accommodation due to the great number of visitors coming from all over the world for the spectacle, I had panicked and booked the first available room I could find on the Internet. Subsequently reading reviews of the hotel, I regretted my choice, because many people who had stayed there didn’t have a good word to say for the place. Noisy, cramped and rude staff were just some of the complaints. I had e-mailed them several weeks before to ask about overnight storage for our bikes, but had never received a reply, and I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to find anywhere safe to leave them. Not wanting to alarm Terry I had kept all this to myself, but privately I wondered what I had let us in for.
In sizzling heat we left Val-de-Vesle. We passed the airfield at Prunay where we had landed twenty years previously, during a light aircraft rally in the little Beagle Pup aircraft Terry had owned at the time. At the grand cru village of Sillery, from whose wine the ambrosial dessert called syllabub was born, we sipped a more prosaic chilled ci
der, and then picked up the Canal de l’Aisne. After a peaceful and uneventful ride, we arrived at mid-morning almost in the very heart of Reims. The only problem was that we arrived on the opposite bank of the canal from the town. Over a high metal bridge a very thin, tanned man who looked about eighty was carrying his bike on his shoulder. He trotted nimbly down the forty or so metal steps.
When I asked him where we could cross the canal, he turned and pointed up the same steps. It was simple – just carry the bikes up, over and down the other side, and we would be right in the centre of town. I pointed to our bikes, and invited him to try to lift mine. With a grimace he raised the front wheel about six inches off the ground. He pointed to a road a few hundred yards away, pirouetted gracefully onto his machine and purred away.
The road he had indicated seemed to be the main artery leading into the town, and it was heaving with traffic. It took a few exciting minutes to navigate our way into a smaller minor road, and then we found ourselves right on the doorstep of the hotel, a narrow orifice clamped between two shoe shops in a shopping arcade.
“Funny sort of hotel,” remarked Terry.
“No, I’m sure it will be fine. And such a great location right here in the centre of town,” I said, more positively than I was feeling. “I’ll go and check in and find out where we can put the bikes.”
There was only just room in the tiny ground-floor lobby for a single armchair, a staircase and a lift door. On the first floor, a beautiful black girl stood at the reception desk. A youth sprawled out on a settee, playing a computer game. Somebody else was laughing, out of sight. Yes, reception said, she had a record of our booking. Our room was ready.
“Do you have somewhere we can leave our bikes overnight, or do you know of anywhere we can lock them up? We can’t leave them out on the street.”
She had a quick conversation with another girl. It was no problem: we could put the bicycles in one of the empty bedrooms, and there wouldn’t be any charge. It seemed quite normal to them that bicycles should be brought up into the rooms, and it would suit us very well.
The receptionist took me up to see whether I was happy with our bedroom. On the way she told me that she came from the Congo, that she was studying hotel management, and that although she liked France well enough, where she really wanted to be was in the United States, where she would be going next month to continue her training.
I asked her if she didn’t feel homesick sometimes, and her eyes turned soft and dreamy, like her voice. “Yes, I love my job but I miss my family, and I miss the Congo. But when I have finished my training, one day I’ll be able to go back and work in a hotel there.”
Our room wasn’t luxurious. It was quite small and basic. The furniture wasn’t antique. There was no wardrobe, just a rail with a few coat hangers. The view from the window was of the glass roof of the shopping arcade. But it was clean, the bed was firm and comfortable, the location was ideal, and the staff couldn’t have been more helpful. I am fairly easily pleased: a night sleeping on a proper bed, and being able to soak in a bath were all I wanted. Apart from a new face. And body.
Somehow we were going to have to get the bikes upstairs and into their bedroom. Outside in the arcade we stripped off all the attachments and baggage, and heaved and twisted the machines into many kinds of unusual configurations to squeeze them in through the narrow glass doors, which were further narrowed by a thick vertical pole between them. Terry’s lightweight aluminium mountain bike was relatively easy to manhandle into the lobby, but getting it into a tiny little lift with himself was rather a challenge. We could squash 98% of the bike in, but there was always a small piece that wouldn’t quite fit, making it impossible to close the lift doors. Eventually, with the handlebars draped over his shoulders and the pedals jammed against his legs, Terry succeeded and arrived on the first floor, where we wheeled the bike through a tight corridor and into a bedroom that was almost entirely filled with a double bed. How, though, I was wondering, could he possibly manage to bring my far larger and much heavier bike up to the first floor. It would never fit in the lift, and neither could it come up the stairs, which were steep and narrow with a sharp turn.
It looked as if the only way we’d ever be able to get the thing inside was by taking it entirely to pieces, or by smashing down the doors. I began wringing my hands and tutting.
“Why don’t you go and do something useful,” Terry suggested. “You could wash our clothes instead of standing there moaning.”
So that’s what I did, in the bath, bashing and thrashing and wringing and rinsing until the whole room was steamed up and filled with wet clothing, which I hung out of the windows, and draped over the door handles and anywhere else I could find. Twenty minutes had passed, and there was no sign of Terry, so I was sure that he was either having to dismantle the bike so he could get it in the lift, or he had found somewhere else to put it.
It was another fifteen minutes before he arrived, and I said cautiously: “Did you manage to sort it out? Did you get it in the lift?”
“Of course I did. They’re both in the bedroom.”
I should have had more faith. It constantly surprises me, although it shouldn’t any more, how he can achieve things that most people regard as impossible. In fact the more difficult something is, the more determined he is to succeed. I’ll never know how he fitted that machine into the tiny lift.
Once we’d soaked in a soapy bath, we went out sightseeing. It felt strange to be travelling around on feet instead of wheels, and while Terry said he felt he could happily live on a bicycle I much preferred walking and was looking forward to the prospect of having a rest from pedalling.
We sat over lunch in a square just around the corner from our hotel, listening to an Italian brass band tuning up, and then playing stirring tunes con molto brio. A bearded young man and his brown mongrel dog came and sat at the table adjacent to us. The young man had some slight mental disability, and he wanted to talk to us. Because of his speech impediment we had great difficulty understanding most of what he was saying, but very happily he put this down to our foreign stupidity and was not at all embarrassed. He stood up, and said to the dog, “Wait here, next to the lady, until I come back. Don’t move.” Giving us a meaningful look that said, “Just you watch how my dog understands me,” he disappeared, returned after five minutes, walked to the bar and stayed there talking to the barmen, and then went away into the gents. All that time his little brown dog didn’t move an eyelash. It sat like a rock, absolutely motionless, just as its master had told it. I called it, clicked my fingers, offered it a chunk of baguette, but it wouldn’t even turn its head until its owner came back and gave it permission. When we had finished our lunch and stood up to leave, he reached out and shook my hand, saying something that I couldn’t make out. Only later it occurred to me that he maybe felt he had found a kindred spirit.
Reims is a reassuringly solid sort of town of substantial three-storey buildings with slate roofs, sufficient chic shops to cater for the most exacting tastes, and generously wide streets that were submerged beneath a sea of weekend visitors – Japanese, Italian, American and others speaking in tongues I did not recognise.
The air was pungent with grilled meats, wood smoke, charcoal, toffee apples, candyfloss, perspiration, leather, and gunpowder from battle re-enactments. Metal grated against metal as soldiers in chain mail fought with broadswords; canon and musket fire resounded, and trumpet blasts announced the passage of royalty resplendent in silk and velvet.
It was impossible not to be excited and carried away by the cacophony of sounds, the cocktail of smells and the panorama of sights. Stalls offered leather ware and ornaments, foods, jewellery, ceramics, clothing, souvenirs and gifts. Men in lederhosen and ladies in dirndl (actually I don’t know if that’s what it was, I just wanted to use the word, never having had an opportunity to do so before) wove themselves around a pole, holding ribbons. Children queued for the chance of an archery lesson; vultures, falcons and owls stood patiently on
wooden blocks in a square, staring inscrutably at the crowds watching them; a lady selling large metallic balloons in the shapes of birds and animals looked in danger of being lifted by them into the skies. Bejewelled nobles in sumptuous robes and floppy headwear strolled around, nodding regally to the hoi polloi. A ragged wretch begged for mercy as he was hauled away in a metal cage to be executed. Plump clergymen, knights clanking around in full suits of armour, peasants in rough woollen tunics, lepers ringing bells, and jesters with jingly hats mingled with the 21st century crowd.
A handful of medieval buildings remain in Reims and a few vestiges of the Roman occupation still stand, but in the main the architecture is predominantly early 20th century, a consequence of the city having to be almost entirely rebuilt after WWI. Over the four years of the war, the Germans slowly and systematically destroyed the cathedral with their heavy artillery.
It was an act of vandalism that shocked the world: the deliberate destruction of one of Europe’s greatest architectural jewels and France’s most sacred church. If it was a tactic designed to crush the morale of the Remois, it failed. The townspeople continued going about their daily lives with determination and good humour. I remembered reading somewhere that out of 40,000 houses only 40 remained when hostilities ended, and the champagne house of Pommery was hit by 200,000 shells. When the war ended, thousands of German prisoners were put to work clearing the rubble and rebuilding the city for its citizens.