Journey to the Sea

by Gil McNeil

  Only the tape was still playing (he must have turned it over while we slept). But although the candles were gone, we could still smell them, grass and fig and lavender and thyme, quite covering up that Meadowbank smell, and when I popped back to my room I found the brochures there, stacked tidily behind a row of books, with a note from Chris lying on top.

  Welcome back, it said.

  I returned to the lounge just in time to hear the coach pulling up into the driveway. Hope heard it too, and neatly removed the tape from the machine before putting it into the pocket of her dress. Neither of us spoke, though we held hands and smiled to ourselves as we waited for our friends to return: Polish John and Mrs McAllister and Mr Bannerman and Mr Braun and poor Mrs Swathen, who had, she said, lost her lace handkerchief on the beach, had sand in her shoes and had surely caught heatstroke from that horrid sun, it was a disgrace, no one knew how much she suffered and if she had only known –

  No one noticed, among that disorder, that we, too, had sand in our shoes. No one saw us pick at our ‘celebration dinner’ (rissoles) – unless it was Sad Harry, who never talks much anyway – and no one seemed to care when we went to bed early, Hope to smell the candles that Chris had slipped into her bedside drawer, and I to read my brochures and dream of orange groves and strawberry daiquiris and plane rides and yachts. Next week we might try Greece, I think. Or the Bahamas; Australia; New York; Paris. If Tom can do it, so can we – besides, as Hope always says, travel broadens the mind.

  IN PRAISE OF NARBONNE PLAGE

  FI GLOVER

  AT LEAST SOME things in life have a certainty to them. You always breathe in when you are trying to squeeze through a tight space in your car, somehow singing really loudly helps when you are dying for a pee, and as a woman you will never be able to emerge from the sea or a swimming pool without adjusting your swimsuit or bikini. Sometimes you try to effect this whilst still in the water – just a quick hoick to make sure that your nether regions are suitably covered, a sly glance to make certain that you aren’t about to go a bit Janet Jackson. The exception is, of course, Ursula Andress, entering the world’s conchiousness with that walk up the surf. Perfect, wasn’t it? – but only because you know that in take one she had a sneaky tug around the buttock area and a fiddle with the halter neck before the director shouted an exasperated ‘Cut!’

  And so on the beach at Narbonne every woman emerging from the sea is tweaking and pulling and hoicking and checking. It’s an age thing, too; it’s possibly one of the firmest signs that you have left the innocence of youth behind you and entered the hormonally charged arena of adolescent life. For every woman it’s a different age – for me I think it was about a precocious twelve. Before that I remained relatively carefree around water whilst wearing very little. But then came frosted pink lipstick, Anne French cleanser and that strong notion that there was going to be more to life than I had hitherto known. It was that glorious age of adolescence when you feel like a sneeze waiting to happen, and when the beach changes from being a place of certain, stodgy family fun into a strange land of self-consciousness and hormonal angst. Little do you realise then that you are going to have to wait another sixty years before you get to the equally carefree age when you let it all hang out again – in a more weathered, septuagenarian way. In between will be six decades of leg waxing, underwired support and numerous unsuccessful trials of self-tanning products.

  On a sun-lounger in one of Narbonne’s plages priveés, I think that I can spot the French equivalent of myself at that turning age. She still has the podgy curves that I would now love to have, and the hair that curls up gently in the sun. Perhaps if she avoids the bleaching and dying then she can prevent hers turning into the straw that is now attached to my head, which, when dry, looks like someone has rubbed it with a balloon. La petite française is on the beach by herself, although the spare sun-lounger next to her looks as if it may be expecting a friend later in the day.

  She’s lying down facing the sea with her feet up on the raised headrest, iPod earphones in, foot gently tapping, just having a look around. I wonder what her summer has held? First kisses and hangovers? A sense of freedom or fear? She has a look on her face that’s alternating between intense boredom and gentle curiosity. It’s classic middle-distance staring look that teenagers of all nationalities can effect.

  It’s a look I like to think that I perfected during my adolescent years. I believe it was learned in chemistry lessons where in a couple of seconds I could switch from the boredom of reciting the periodic table to the curiosity of wondering why Mr Taylor wore such very tight white lab coats which gave him the look of an overweight cruise ship physician. It was not a particularly elevating part of my education. The only thing that seems to rouse la petite française out of the boredom that life obviously inspires in her is when the boys playing in the surf look her way – which is more often than their game of water ping-pong really calls for. They’re playing just near enough to the beach to ensure an audience and create maximum disturbance. The four of them have that cocky pose that only tanned, fit fifteen-year-old boys can truly pull off. When they reach up for high shots you can see the winter white of their thighs – suggesting that like air-conditioning and rosé wine they are much more appealing in summer.

  They have been hollering and whooping and splashing in the shallows for an hour at least, delighting in the fact that they have at least one nubile female onlooker. In fact, they have many more, as four ladies of a more certain age in the middle of the plage privée have also been watching their antics, with looks of envy and kind amusement. The boys are oblivious to their gazes. Their game gets even louder on the arrival of une amie de la petite française, who plonks herself down on the vacant sun-lounger. The iPod earphones are taken out and both girls turn their backs on the gang of four to chat as only teenage girls can. The ley line of unspoken teenage attraction from lounger to the shallows is temporarily broken and within minutes the boys give up their game and trudge back to their towels and bags on the other side of the plage privée fence – on the public beach.

  Plage privées are found on most French beaches – and their name is somewhat misleading. All they consist of are parts of the beach cordoned off with windbreaks, where rows of neat sun-loungers and umbrellas are placed – waiting for you, the person who slightly fears the hoi polloi, the person who wants to feel a little more special in life, a little more privileged. It’s kind of a Premium Economy beach experience – a little more legroom, a little more money and the illusion that you are being in some way exclusive.

  On Narbonne Plage – with its miles and miles of open beach – there are several blue-and-white windbreaks that cordon off little private bits from huge expanses of public bits. And for just eight euros you can buy a sun-lounger for the day – with table and umbrella – and gaze out across exactly the same Mediterranean as those who haven’t seen the need to pay for the privilege.

  Narbonne isn’t the kind of beach you will see mentioned in the Top Ten Beaches of the World in magazines like Wallpaper or Traveller. Their Top Tens always seem to exist entirely of stretches of white sand that are cocooned in privacy, with nothing but a wafting breeze to keep you and your £500 kaftan cool. And, of course, those kinds of beaches are beautiful in their exquisite, exclusive way – but oh! the boredom that must ensue from actually trying to spend a whole day on one of them. Even if you are with the one you love. The notion that by escaping everyone else you will be content is an odd one, propagated uniquely by travel pages with their constant message that ‘getting away from it all’ is the nirvana of life. Sitting staring out to sea with little or no company is the kind of thing that induces madness. Otherwise Guantanamo Bay would be a little more bearable. And have you ever stopped to wonder why all these beaches are so deserted if they are so wonderful? Where are all the other people who read Wallpaper’s Top Ten? Is it possible they arrived and only managed a couple of hours too?

  I have tried the secluded beach experience only once –
on a nature reserve in Mallorca, where we were dropped off in the morning with the promise that we would be picked up later on in the afternoon. Time ticked slowly by whilst the midday sun got higher and higher. We ate our picnic too soon and the beer started to get a little too warm as we jostled each other for some of the shade of the umbrella. We ended up playing alphabetical word games where we had to list world leaders alternately. It was almost as fun as Chemistry at school. Neither of us could get over the hurdle of ‘Q’, however, so we tried capital cities and realised that ‘Q’ was still a stumbling block, and had a row about whether Qatar had a city in it called simply Qatar. We abandoned that, but when we got to Chart Toppers of the Eighties, I would happily have started swimming to Menorca. Thankfully, another family turned up, zooming into view on their speedboat, and we could at least watch them. In fact, we ended up being extremely envious of the fact they had brought plastic inflatable dolphins, much larger sandwiches and had thought to have olive skin, which genetically enabled them to be on a beach in the midday sun. We should really have been hiding in the shade of a Constable haystack at midday – for good reason.

  Perhaps the secluded beach thing is an age thing too. I presume that the success of Alex Garland’s The Beach was because it tapped into that youthful desire to believe there is a world out there that no one else can get to – and that by reaching it you will find contentment along with a complete understanding of yourself. From my experience, there’s little evidence in the huddles of gap-year students clutching Garland’s epic that much is being enlarged except for their pupils of an evening.

  Narbonne lies to the west of the long stretch of coastline that is the South of France. Go any further west and you will be in Spain. It’s at the heart of plonk country with the bountiful vineyards of the Corbières and it’s a place that seems very happy with itself. In fact, the current slogan for the city is ‘J’aime ma ville – il y a de punch!’ The actual city of Narbonne is slightly inland and has a stupendously magnificent cathedral, a central square where you can take the air and the wine of an evening, and a pretty canal running through it all. It’s famous for having been the birthplace of the last of the troubadours, a Guiraut Riquier, who seems to have been somewhat of a melancholy soul and who left us all in peace in 1292. Because of its proximity to Spain, the whole area had pretty much non-stop trouble from the Middle Ages onwards. The Midi region was disputed by Visigoths and Saracens, by whoever was in charge of Spain and even by Paris itself. Now that things have calmed down, Narbonne is having a bit of a growth spurt in this new millennium – and there are plans to almost double the size of the city, plans that aren’t universally popular. For the moment, though, it’s a place where French families take their holidays, and on the beaches that stretch from Narbonne to Spain you can see why. This is a more grounded part of the French coast – it would be the sensible but pretty kitten-heeled shoe compared to the sophisticated but trashy Liz Hurley high-heeled sandal of the resorts further east. It has none of the boutique hotels of St Tropez, or the grand mansion living of Cap d’Antibes. You won’t see George Michael taking in the promenade in Narbonne, or those coiffured French women taking their matching poodles and Chanel handbags for a walk in the late afternoon. Neighbouring Gruissan Plage made the area with its stilted houses a little famous in the film Betty Blue, but apart from that it’s probably not somewhere you can automatically picture.

  This is the last long weekend of the summer, late in August, when the French are savouring the remnants of l’annuelle before they head back to the cities for another year of crazy driving, eating good food and avoiding stereotypes like that one. It’s been a long hot summer in the South of France, but the breeze is just about to change and bring in the cool air of autumn and the thunderclouds of September. Across the world it’s also been the summer of Norah Jones – her tunes lurked around the pubs and barbecues of London, they’d been hanging around the duty-free of the airport when we left, and now they are floating out over Narbonne Plage from the hut where the man running the plage privée sits waiting for customers.

  At eight in the morning there were only about a dozen of us on the beach – the sun-lounger man was waiting whilst an Algerian guy raked the sand for its litter of Marlborough Light fag butts and buried Coke cans. Once the sand had been suitably manicured he started chucking the sun-loungers down ready for another day of beach action. He looked as if he’d had a long season already. His face weary, his skin scorched by a summer out on the plage. He looked as if he needed some seriously shady months. His eyes looked straight through the nubile group of joggers bouncing across the firm sand. I imagine his gaze may have dwelt a little longer in the days of early May.

  The beach has a life of its own that it completes every day. The early mornings are for the seriously fit: the runners and cyclists and rollerbladers, each zooming past on the concrete track above the beach, driven by some aerobic purpose and desire for what the personal trainers would call ‘goal achievement’.

  Mornings are for families, the little ones eager to widdle in the sea and get their chubby bottoms in the sand, parents keen to leave the rented accommodation before the tearful malhumeur begins. A British family had been the first to arrive, weighed down with two toddlers and about twelve bags. My, my – the British don’t travel light, do we? Is this some remnant from the empire, or our adventurous spirit in Africa? Stewart Gore Brown, an early settler in Rhodesia, penned in his diary that he loathed ‘the kind of Englishman who travels with folding tables and enamel mugs’. It wasn’t that he preferred the light option of a rug and a flask and a horse – he went for the full china dinner service and long wooden table on his trips out into the bush. Lucky, lucky servants. There seems to be something of this left in many modern-day British travellers. Perhaps some clever psychologist will turn this into a greater metaphor for our troubled minds – calling his book Life’s A Beach and carefully deconstructing every meaning behind our unwillingness to leave the house without taking the house with us. This family of two parents and two toddlers would provide the perfect starting point for that theory. They’d brought string bags of toys, holdalls of food, rolls and rolls of towels, a big bag of books and suntan cream, and a spare umbrella for good measure. There were little bags hanging off the big bags and I suspect that inside those bags were a few more bags for good measure. Poor old Mum looked worried – hassled and troubled. When she ordered her nice new underwired bikini from the ‘all sizes catered for’ catalogue back home I bet she didn’t imagine that her holiday would be this detailed all the time.

  They settled only after everything had been unpacked, which was done whilst Dad looked on in a slightly helpless way that suggested he feared being put into a bag if he did something wrong. Mum had the pushchair-tan of an English summer – just arms and shoulders. Dad hadn’t seen the sun for quite some time and was looking quite longingly at a copy of the Daily Telegraph poking out of the top of one of the bags. Meanwhile, four young Americans had arrived at the sun-loungers next door: two couples, all with glow-in-the-dark white trainers and matching teeth. They looked honed and preened and had the Manhattan accents that explained both those adjectives.

  ‘Hiya!’ screeched one of the girls in the direction of the sun-lounger man. It’s possibly one of the worst greetings in the world, and a word that should only ever be said by Bruce Forsyth and followed by a cry of ‘Lower!’ from the audience. He sorted them out through a series of gestures and money changing hands. The Americans all looked a little exhausted by being away from their own territory, a slight look of fear behind the eyes at how this Europe thing works. It emerged that some of this may well have been caused by the fact that they are the kind of people who care more for their armpit hygiene than they do for the future of fossil fuels. They have all been suffering dreadfully from a lack of air-conditioning in their rooms at their hotel.

  ‘Oh, but it’s so not working – and I called the porter and he said they’d fix it, in like half an hour – and he so never s
howed up,’ sulked one of the girls.

  And so it went on. Please note my proper use of the word ‘so’ in that sentence.

  Once they had calmed down, the most thorough application of suntan cream began, with much discussion about factor numbers. It is indeed a tricky thing going on the kind of holiday where you take most of your clothes off all the time. You don’t really ever have to do that in Manhattan. In fact, I don’t think you are allowed to take too much off in Central Park. And the sunshine poses such a problem. Tanning comes with the fear of ageing, and you don’t really age in Manhattan – you just move to New Jersey and go out less. About four different bottles are needed to prevent this terrible thing from occurring: one for the legs, a special one for the nose, a big orange spray for the body and something approaching Farrow and Ball eggshell finish for the face. Of course, these sensible people are to be admired for their attention to cancer prevention, and if I lived in a country where it was a toss-up between being able to afford a house and having a mole removed then I would probably reapply more often. It got worse, though, as it also turned out that the girls have eaten carbohydrates on this visit. ‘Cwa-ssants’ to be precise. I imagine that penance will be extreme on their return to the land of skinny milk and antioxidant honey – it’s quite possible that no bread or potatoes will pass their lips again until Thanksgiving. 2008.

  By the time some kind of calm had settled at the plage privée, it was almost lunchtime. A couple of large French families arrived during the suntan application. Children of all ages spilling out from the shade of the umbrellas, possibly three generations, maybe four – it’s hard to tell which of the still-svelte women is a mum. They are the lucky people to whom a beach is simply where you spend most of your summer. It comes with little ceremony and fuss, and lunch for each of them is simply a baguette sandwich, just the one – brought in a paper bag, no fuss, no plastic cutlery, no special containers of mini sausages and salads. No thermos of tea – just a munching old sandwich.