'C'est tres jolie,' she said in a kind of astonished hush when she realized that I was prepared to pay real money for it, and bustled off to get it wrapped and paid for before I came to my senses and cried, 'Say, where am I? And what, pray, is this tacky piece of Francomerde I see before me?'
'C'est tres jolie,' she kept repeating soothingly, as if afraid of disturbing my wakeful slumber. I think it may have been some time since she had sold a VirginMarywith Seashells Occasional Light. In any case, as the shop door shut behind me, I distinctly heard a whoop of joy.
Afterwards, to celebrate, I called in for a coffee at a popular cafe on the rue de Gaston Papin et Autres Dignitaires Obscures. Indoors, Calais seemed much more agreeably Gallic. People greeted each other with twocheeked kisses and wreathed themselves in blue smoke from Gauloises and Gitanes. An elegant woman in black across the room looked uncannily like Jeanne Moreau having a quick fag and a Pernod before playing a funeral scene in a movie called La Vie Drearieuse. I wrote a postcard home and enjoyed my coffee, then passed the hours before dusk waving in a friendly but futile way at the bustling waiter in the hope of coaxing him back to my table to settle my modest account.
I dined cheaply and astonishingly well at a little place across the road there is this to be said for the French: they can make chips drank two bottles of Stella Artois in a cafe, where I was served bya Philippe Noiret lookalike in a slaughterhouse apron, and retired early to my modest hotel room, where I played with my seashell Madonna for a bit, then got into bed and passed the night listening to cars crashing in the street below.
In the morning, I breakfasted early, settled my bill with Gerard Depardieu now there was a surprise and stepped out to another promising day. Clutching an inadequate little map that came with my ferry ticket, I set off in search of the ferry terminus. On the map it looked to be quite near by, practically in the town centre, but in reality it was a good two miles away at the far end of a bewildering wasteland of oil refineries, derelict factories, and acres of waste ground strewn with old girders and piles of jagged concrete. I found myself squeezing through holes in chainlink fences and picking my way between rusting railway carriages with broken windows. I don't know how other people get to the ferry at Calais, but I had the distinct feeling that noone had ever done it this way before. And all the while I walked I was uncomfortably aware actually in a whimpering panic that departure time was drawing nigh and that the ferry terminus, though always visible, never seemed to get any closer.
Eventually, after dodging across a dual carriageway and clambering up an embankment, I arrived breathless and late and looking like someone who'd just survived a mining disaster, and was hustled aboard a shuttle bus by an officious woman with a serious case of dysmenorrhoea. On the way, I took stock of my possessions and discovered with quiet dismay that my beloved and costly Madonna had lost her halo and was shedding seashells.
I boarded the ship perspiring freely and with a certain disquiet. I'm not a good sailor, I freely admit. I get sick on pedalos. Nor was I helped by the fact that this was one of those RoRo ferries (short for roll on, roll over) and that I was entrusting my life to a company that had a significantly less than flawless record when it came to remembering to shut the bow doors, the nautical equivalent of forgetting to take off your shoes before getting into the bath.
The boat was chockablock with people, all of them English. I spent the first quarter of an hour wandering around wondering how they had got there without getting filthy, inserted myself briefly into the shellsuited mayhem that was the dutyfree shop and as quickly found my way out again, strolled around the cafeteria with a tray looking at the food and then put the tray back (there was a queue for this), searched for a seat among hordes of dementedly lively children, and finally found my way out onto the breezy deck where 274 people with blue lips and dancing hair were trying to convince themselves that because the sun was shining they couldn't possibly be cold. The wind whipped our anoraks with a sound like gunshot, scooted small children along the deck and, to everyone's private gratification, tipped a styrofoam cup of tea onto a fat lady's lap.
Before long, the White Cliffs of Dover rose from the sea and began creeping towards us and in no time at all, it seemed, we were sailing into Dover Harbour and clumsily nuzzling up to the dock. As a disembodied voice instructed foot passengers to assemble at the starboard egress point on Deck ZX2 by the Sunshine Lounge as if that meant anything to anybody we all embarked on long, befuddled, highly individual explorations of the ship: up and down stairways, through the cafeteria and clubclass lounge, in and out of storerooms, through a kitchen full of toiling lascars, back through the cafeteria from another angle, and finally without knowing quite how out into the welcoming, watery sunshine of England.
I was eager to see Dover again after all these years. I strode into the centre along Marine Parade and with a small cry of pleasure spied the shelter I'd slept in those many years ago. It was covered in about eleven more layers of bilegreen paint but otherwise unchanged. The view out to sea was likewise unchanged, though the water was bluer and more glittery than when I'd last seen it. But everything else looked different. Where I recalled there being a row of elegant Georgian terraces there was now a vast and unbecoming brick apartment block. Townwall Street, the main through road to the west, was wider and more menacing with traffic than I remembered, and there was now a subway to the town centre, which itself was unrecognizable.
The main shopping street had been pedestrianized and the Market Square had been turned into a kind of piazza with showoff paving and the usual array of castiron trimmings. The whole town centre seemed uncomfortably squeezed by busy, wide relief roads of which I had no recollection and there was now a big tourist edifice called the White Cliffs Experience, where, I presume from the name, you can discover what it feels like to be 800millionyearold chalk. I didn't recognize anything. The trouble with English towns is that they are so indistinguishable one from another. They all have a Boots and W.H. Smith and Marks & Spencer. You could be anywhere really.I plodded distractedly through the streets, unhappy that a place so central to my memories was so unfamiliar. Then, on my third grumbling pass through the town centre, on a lane I would swear I had never walked before, I came across the cinema, still recognizable as the home of Suburban WifeSwap despite a heavy patina of arty refurbishment, and everything suddenly became clear. Now that I had a fixed point of reference, I knew precisely where I was. I strode purposefully 500 yards north and then west now I could almost have done it blindfolded and found myself square in front of Mrs Smegma's establishment. It was still a hotel and looked substantially unchanged, as far as I could remember, except for the addition of some hardstanding in the front garden and a plastic sign announcing colour TVs and en suite bathrooms. I thought about knocking at the door, but there didn't seem much point. The dragonlike Mrs Smegma must be long since gone retired or dead or perhaps resident in one of the many nursing homes that crowd the south coast. She couldn't possibly have coped with the modern age of British guesthouses, with their en suite bathrooms and coffeemaking facilities and people having pizzas delivered to their rooms.