Postcards From France

More memories, this time from Family Holidays in Northern France (1978-2017)…

A Postcard From Northern France

My favourite part of all of France.

Something like ten-million British travellers arrive in Calais each year and then without looking left or right, or stopping for even a moment head for the motorways and the long drive south and in doing so they miss the treat of visiting this Anglo-neglected part of France; the Côte d’Opale is a craggy, green, undulating and often dramatic coastline stretching for eighty miles between the port towns of Calais and the Baie de la Somme and the mouth of the river.

English tourists may avoid it but it has been long prized by the French and the Belgians, who enjoy the informal seafood restaurants in fishing villages dotted along the coast and the miles of intriguing coves and sandy beaches that run all the way down this coast that looks across at the south coast of England and leaks away inland to a glorious countryside.

Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…

Northern France, Commonwealth War Graves

It was early, peaceful and eerily serene and apart from a gardener carefully tending the flowers and the occasional snipping of his secateurs around the graves we were the only people there and there was no sound and I was struck by the quiet solemness that seemed to lay heavily on this place. Each gravestone is the same regardless of rank and they line up in rows as though they were soldiers on a parade ground.

Most of these victims of war were obscenely young but what struck me the most was that many were buried here but simply marked in the words of Rudyard Kipling as ‘An unknown soldier of the Great War’.  I didn’t care to think about the horrific injuries that they must have endured that stripped away their identity.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: (The Price of) Victory

“If I should die, think only this of me: 
That there’s some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;”                                                                 Rupert Brooke – ‘The Soldier’

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Creepy

Uninvited Sleeping Partner…

During the night a crawly insect had disturbed Rachel but Richard had dismissed this as imagination and told her to back to sleep.  He was forced to reassess his judgment and apologise next morning when he came across a spider that was at least four inches from the end of one of its legs to another.  I wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with it that’s for sure and Richard absolutely wouldn’t tackle it without back-up!

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Abandoned French Plans

In August this year my travel itinerary included plans to take my children and young grandchildren to a holiday cottage in Northern France.

I like Northern France, I have been there many times but today I have been forced to reconsider my plans and to cancel the proposed holiday.

Thank you France…

Thank you for allowing any rag tag trade union organisation to call a wildcat strike and close down the cross channel ferries and the Eurostar service.  How absurd is it for a western European country to allow militant strikers to close roads and railway lines by lighting toxic bonfires of tyres and hay bales.

The French are unbelievable, they think that rules of modern European society do not apply to them and they can do pretty much anything they please.

Thank you to the French police who are clearly strike sympathisers and stand by and take no action against this transportation vandalism.

Thank you again to the idle French police who slide off for a gauloise and a MacDonalds and turn a blind eye to economic migrants who daily attempt to cross the channel to get to England.

Thank you also to the French public who seem by some twisted logic to think this is the fault of the UK Government.  These law breakers are in France but the authorities there want the UK to pay for dealing with the problems.

So my decision is made.  My holiday is cancelled.  With three young children I simply will not take the risk of wildcat strikes, ferry cancellations and scenes of unpleasantness that the French authorities refuse to deal with.

I have always liked France but right at this moment – NEVER AGAIN, I will not spend another Euro in France,  I am off to Wales instead.

Remembrance, Reverance and Respect

“If I should die, think only this of me: 
That there’s some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;”                                                                 Rupert Brooke – ‘The Soldier’

Read the full story…

Northern France, Images of Pays De Calais

Northern France, Commonwealth War Graves

“If I should die, think only this of me: 
That there’s some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;”                                                                 Rupert Brooke – ‘The Soldier’

As we were in no particular hurry we slept in and took a late breakfast and then as the sun began to break through the clouds we set off for the short journey to nearby Boulogne, bypassing the direct route and taking a meandering drive through the countryside and the villages.  On the northern outskirts of the town we came across a British and Commonwealth war graves cemetery and stopped the car for a visit.

During the First-World-War Boulogne-Sur-Mer was one of three important base ports for the British Army.  The coastline between General Haig’s headquarters in Montreuil-Sur-Mer (actually nowhere near the sea but with a very fine chateaux and wine cellar) and the Port of Calais was an immense logistics zone made up of army camps, munitions depots and hospitals which for the most part were supplied with men and equipment through the Port of Boulogne.

Boulogne was essentially an enormous extended barracks and hospital complex and most of the public buildings including the schools were requisitioned to take care of the wounded who had been evacuated from the front line and the fighting. Thousands of Commonwealth soldiers died in Boulogne and the surrounding area as a result of their injuries and they are buried and remembered all along this coast in immaculately maintained military war graves.

The job of maintaining the burial sites is that of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which, according to Wikipedia:

 “… is currently responsible for the continued commemoration of 1.69 million deceased Commonwealth military service members in 150 countries. Since its inception, the Commission has constructed approximately 2,500 war cemeteries and numerous memorials. The Commission is currently responsible for the care of war dead at over 23,000 separate burial sites and the maintenance of more than 200 memorials worldwide. In addition to commemorating Commonwealth military service members, the Commission maintains, under arrangement with applicable governments, over 40,000 non-Commonwealth war graves and over 25,000 non-war military and civilian graves. The Commission operates through the continued financial support of the member states: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa.”

It was early, peaceful and eerily serene and apart from a gardener carefully tending the flowers and the occasional snipping of his secateurs around the graves we were the only people there and there was no sound and I was struck by the quiet solemness that seemed to lay heavily on this place. Each gravestone is the same regardless of rank and they line up in rows as though they were soldiers on a parade ground.  Most of these victims of war were obscenely young but what struck me the most was that many were buried here but simply marked in the words of Rudyard Kipling as ‘An unknown soldier of the Great War’.  I didn’t care to think about the horrific injuries that they must have endured that stripped away their identity.

This cemetery at Terlincthun is quite small with just over three and a half thousand graves but it reminded me of an earlier visit to this part of France with my family when we visited the largest Commonwealth War Graves site in France at Étaples where nearly twelve thousand soldiers are buried.

Because of its strategic position Étaples was the scene of much Allied activity during World War One due to its safety from attack by enemy land forces and the existence of railway connections with both the northern and southern battlefields. The town was home to sixteen hospitals and a convalescent depot, in addition to a number of reinforcement camps for Commonwealth soldiers and general barracks for the French Army.

By all accounts this was a truly dreadful place and most soldiers buried in the cemetery died after treatment in the hospitals.  It is said that after two weeks, many of the wounded would rather return to the front with unhealed wounds rather than remain at Étaples.

It was also a particularly notorious base camp for those on their way to the front. Under atrocious conditions, both raw recruits and battle-weary veterans were subjected to intensive training in gas warfare, bayonet drill, and long sessions of marching at the double across the dunes.  There was resentment against the officers who enjoyed the better conditions of Le Touquet and from which the men were forbidden to visit and this led to a famous mutiny in September 1917 which was brutally repressed.

Apart from the solemn rows of white headstones there was no reminder of this unpleasantness that day as we entered the cemetery through the impressive memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and walked through the carefully tended graves.

I had never visited a war graves site before and it was poignant to read the inscriptions on the graves and sad to see how young so many of them were who never returned to England.  My granddaughter, Molly ran and skipped through the rows of graves and I was struck by the fact that she could only do this because of the ultimate sacrifices made by all those brave men.

Northern France, Eurotunnel and The Côte d’Opale

2013 is a special birthday year for my mum as she noisily tips over from her seventy-ninth year to become an octogenarian and as part of the celebrations she invited my brother Richard and me to join her and her partner Alan to visit the north east corner of France and stay at at a hotel that they especially like, the Chateaux de Tourelles in the village of Le Wast, just a short distance away from one of my favourite French towns, Boulogne-Sur-Mer.

Normally I have a preference for travelling by sea and always enjoy the short, weather unpredictable, ferry crossing but they like the Eurotunnel shuttle so on this occasion we took the thirty-minute subterranean route rather than risk the choppy seas of the English Channel and the mad rush to the car deck upon docking.  It was busy at the terminal and on the following day the service set a new record for numbers of vehicles at almost sixteen-thousand. I had been through the tunnel before on Eurostar but never on the vehicle carrying train so this was a new experience for me and overall I have to say that although it is quick and convenient I think I prefer the boats and the rugby scrum.

After arrival disembarkation was quick and we were in the Cite d’Europe, which is an international shopping centre that was constructed as part of the Channel Tunnel project and is designed to bring English shoppers across to France to stock up on cheap booze and cigarettes.  The place has one hundred and forty shops and restaurants but we made straight for Carrefour and the substantial alcohol section where we piled the trolley with cheap beer and wine and then set off for the short trip towards Boulogne but avoiding the direct route down the A16 and driving sedately down the Côte d’Opale instead.

Something like ten-million British travellers arrive in Calais each year and then without looking left or right, or stopping for even a moment head for the motorways and the long drive south and in doing so they miss the treat of visiting this Anglo-neglected part of France; the Côte d’Opale is a craggy, green, undulating and often dramatic coastline stretching for forty kilometres between the port towns of Calais and Boulogne.  English tourists may avoid it but it has been long prized by the French and the Belgians, who enjoy the informal seafood restaurants in fishing villages dotted along the coast and the miles of intriguing coves and sandy beaches that run all the way down this coast that looks across at the south coast of England.

The coastline is punctuated with history, most of it bloody and violent and as soon as we could we found a place to stretch our legs at the Cap Blanc Nez about twenty minutes from the port where we strolled up to the breezy hilltop obelisk commemorating the Dover Patrol that kept the Channel free from U-boats during the First World War and then walked along paths surrounded on all sides by German World-War-Two gun emplacements and bunkers that were built here in anticipation of an Allied invasion.

These concrete defences are so well built and inconveniently indestructible that it is difficult to easily demolish and dispose of them so the answer seems to be to just leave them where they are and let nature do its work and simply let the grass grow around and over them because no one really wants to be reminded of this grim heritage any more and this approach seems to be very effective because five years after I first saw them there is now a lot less to see.

Our next stop was Cap Gris Nez, where France pokes its large chalky white de Gaulle like nose westwards towards Dover and where there are more remains of mighty bunkers that are slowly disappearing under the earth because this is where the Germans aimed their big guns on Britain during the Second World War. Windblown, isolated and perched high above the choppy waves bathed in the iridescent light which gave the Opal Coast its name, the headland was an exhilarating place to watch vessels passing by below in the English Channel and then to become alarmed by a few spots of rain that blew in with the clouds racing in from the west.

It was time for lunch now but Friday in France must be a day when no one goes to work because every town that we passed through was busy and chock full of cars so we drove through Wissant, Audreselles and Ambleteuse without stopping and finally found a parking space in Wimereux as the lunch-time rush finally  began to subside and we found a small bar for a beer and a snack before resuming our afternoon drive towards Boulogne and then to the Chateaux.

The sensible thing to do was to avoid Boulogne in late afternoon but we didn’t do the sensible thing and instead crawled through the traffic and then through the other side and on a thankfully open road to the small village of Le Wast and the Chateaux de Tourelles which lived up completely to the gushing reviews that promised us a wonderful hotel in extensive gardens, a good room and the prospect of an excellent evening meal. 

We unpacked, sorted out the bar, poured a drink and sat for a while and simply enjoyed the place until it was time to eat.