Brexit-loyalist Mark Francois, it is rumoured, never takes foreign holidays. Never wanted to. Never would. One assumes Francois wouldn’t wish to be compared to a bloody foreigner, but he apparently shares Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy, which “abhors new ways of life and unfamiliar places…” More fool him.
It was 1975. I was 12. We were on a family holiday to Eastbourne. The old-fashioned thing. Staying in a guesthouse, sitting on the beach, eating ice creams, walking the pier. Me, my parents and my maternal grandparents.
And halfway along the pier we spotted an advert for day trips to France. I’d never been abroad. Nor had my grandparents, but my grandfather wasn’t going. They didn’t speak English in France. What if they arrest you? It’s the sort of thing they do (apparently). My disappointed grandmother opted out too. So it was me, my parents and our valid-for-one-year British Visitor’s Passports – folded cards collected from the post office. They weren’t even blue.
Presumably because we didn’t want to risk the food, we took the flasks of tea, and cheese and pickle sandwiches, the guest house offered. No cassoulet for us.
On to the coach, and on to the Free Enterprise VII (I never forgot the name), the ferry that disgorged at Calais. Everything looked different. Everything was exotic. And to somebody who holidayed in Eastbourne, Calais was exotic.
Shops with boulangerie and chocolaterie written above the door. Cafes on corners, serving tiny cups of coffee strong enough to smell as you passed by. Zebra crossings at which the traffic never stopped. Coffin-shaped “Tabac” signs dangling from walls. Citroën 2CVs. Teenagers without helmets riding mopeds. And everything wrapped in a sensual language that to an uncomprehending ear combined the nonchalant with the cerebral. A personal, unsubtitled art-house movie that had forsworn its customary black and white and was being played out in vibrant technicolour.
We visited the D-day memorial at Caen and stopped for a comfort break (I’d never seen hole-in-the-floor toilets). We bought apples from a roadside stall. I fell in love with our coach-party courier, Linda, who gave me a pain au chocolat.
I recall remarking to my mum that the men playing pétanque in the park were identical to my grandfather and his bowls partners. Wearing flat caps, they were pointing, engaging in faux arguments and eating sandwiches (cheese and pickle undoubtedly replaced with saucisson).
Before leaving, we bought strings of individually wrapped bon-bons for my friends back home. They tasted of fizzy orange. And on the return coach, a woman had bought escargots. The French, it seemed, really did eat snails. Enraptured by the occasion, I tried one, to “uuuurghs” all round. It was tender and garlicky. And it was something that 24 hours earlier I would never have contemplated eating.
And, because they were so integral to the experience, I even found those cheese and pickle sandwiches exotic as I polished them off. From then on, I demanded them in my school lunchbox simply to recreate the flavour of that day. They still do.
I can’t remember to take the washing out of the machine I switched on an hour before. I can’t remember to switch off the lights before leaving the house. But I can remember everything about that trip. The approaching French coast, the smells of the brasseries we’d avoided, the voices, the sheer, wonderful foreignness of it all. Utterly intoxicating. And I learned, at the young age of 12, over the course of just a few hours, that I didn’t dislike the French. On the contrary. Despite the hoary tropes of sub-standard TV comedians and a parochial media with its xenophobic references to the frogs, I discovered pretty much immediately that it was all so much bunkum. More than anything, that day – my first outside Britain – taught me that assumptions made in ignorance create needless divisions. Not that Mark Francois would know it, but travel broadened my mind.
