Europe @ 2.4 km/h (34 page)

The Anzac Hotel receptionist in Amiens told me I’d be back. ‘There is nowhere to stay in Villers-Bretonneux,’ she said. Still I checked out and headed to that town of 5000 east of Amiens which was wrested by Australians from the Germans in April 1918, dealing a blow to their last great offensive of World War I. Ever since, so I’ve been led to believe, Australians have been welcome here. Maybe the hotelier is right, but I’m willing to take a gamble. If my efforts to find a place to rest in Villers-Bretonneux come to naught, I am going to see if that place — in a town that is taught to love Australia — will come to me.

The first piece of fortune in this game of chance could not have been whistled up. This just happened to be the day of the annual school fete, and there was no shortage of residents milling in the quadrangle. Villers-Bretonneux Ecole Elémentaire Victoria, established in 1923 with donations from the State of Victoria, now teaches 130 children ranging in age from eight to twelve. Met at the entrance as if I were a long-lost friend and taken into the quadrangle, I found myself stifling tears on seeing the words NEVER FORGET AUSTRALIA spanning the yard.

More luck came my way, as the mayor — visiting the school for the fete — agreed to speak to me. Hubert Lelieur, his town’s leading representative for 25 years, fondly recalled his visit to the twin town of Robinvale, Victoria, in 1984. How realistic was it, I asked, to keep Great War memories alive now that the combatants had all gone to their graves? ‘
On ne va pas oublier
,’ he said. ‘We will not forget. For our children, it is their history. They [the Australians] were the creators of their liberty. It signified the re-entry of France into the world, the rebirth of the nation.’

Interview over, M. Lelieur let me photograph him. To his right sat a small boy, head on knee. Given the mayor’s remarks about the young, I thought it would be good to get them together. The lad was sheepish but eventually sloughed across to the mayor, who placed a hand lightly on his head and looked grim-faced while I took the snap.

Noting down their names for the caption — Victor, age five, and M. Lelieur, 75 — I thanked them both, then turned round to see the boy’s father grinning broadly. Frederick introduced himself before letting me in on the joke. ‘The mayor is a conservative, I’m a communist, and I’m standing against him in the next municipal election. You have done me a great service. That photo will be very useful in my campaign.’

Then I hit the jackpot. ‘Hey, would you like to stay at our house tonight?’ The invitation I hoped for had come from an unexpected quarter but I accepted it with alacrity. By the time a friend of Frederick’s came round this night to watch one of the most important matches, and what turned out to be the best one, of the rugby tournament — France versus New Zealand — I had learnt quite a bit about my hosts, and a fascinating lot they were.

Frederick, from a traditional French family, was married to Manuelle, from the Kabyle — an Algerian minority — who said their ‘mixed marriage’ had brought out racism among ‘some locals’. It was not the first marriage for either, and they shared the household with six children: Victor, Valentin, Fanny, Orlande, Leïla and Loona. Manuelle’s father, who is still alive, won the Cross of Military Valour with Bronze Stars three times for combat operations in Algeria and was admitted to the Legion of Honour in 2004.

The rugby match was grand — and I don’t even understand the game. At half-time, France, 13-3 behind, would have been unbackable (if bets were allowable after a match had begun). A great second-half fightback by
les Bleus
secured a slim victory over the All Blacks.

And what was Frederick’s plan of action if he were to become mayor? To extend Villers-Bretonneux’s welcome beyond the Anzacs, he would like to interest young Germans in the battles and the fate of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, whose bones also lie in the soil of Picardy. Yet he would be shrewd enough not to hard-pedal this aspiration during the campaign.

I see on its ticket covers that SNCF doesn’t wish its passengers
Bon
voyage
but
Bonne chance
(Good luck). Maybe it’s just me but I find this less than 100 per cent reassuring.

1042-1047 km

Another great city, another great cathedral. Rouen occupies a special place in French hearts because it was here their national heroine, Joan of Arc, was martyred. Rouen, my first taste of Normandy, has more character than Amiens. It
feels
more medieval. Its cathedral spire, at 151 metres standing just shy of Cologne’s, is the loftiest in all of France.

Awaiting inside, lest I forget my part-Viking heritage, is a reminder that the Normans were Norsemen. The sarcophagus of the second Duke of Normandy, supine in a side aisle, bears a citation worth quoting, ‘Here lies William Longsword, son of Rollon. He established the frontiers of Normandy and died, victim of the snares of treason, in 942.’ Not everyone betrayed him, though. His faithful hound lies at his feet.

Luftwaffe bombs dropped on 19 April 1944, the eve of Hitler’s 55th birthday, spared only one chapel, on the southern side of the church. Fifty-five years later, part of the church was reduced to rubble again. A plaque explains, ‘The tornado of 26 December 1999 that struck the North of France was particularly violent and disastrous to the Cathedral of Rouen …’ One of the roof monuments (the 25-metre-tall north-eastern
Clocheton de la Flèche
weighing 28 tonnes) dropped through the ceiling, destroying part of the 15th-century choir stalls, and restoration work continued until mid-2000.

Claude Monet was a regular visitor here and the tale of one of his greatest series of paintings captures my imagination. In 1892 he arrived to pursue his most ambitious project yet, dedicated to Rouen Cathedral. Monet boldly proclaimed his goal, to see if light ‘can exert its disintegrating power on an architectural mass as solid and as immovable as this Gothic cathedral’. I like the way he posed the question as one might for a scientific experiment rather than a work of art. But, then, impressionism
was
an experiment of sorts, a self-conducted course in artistic Enlightenment.

In the spring of 1892, and again a year later, the artist was working on fourteen canvases at a time, moving from one to the next. In the end he had 30 paintings of the 12th-century church’s western façade, of which he selected twenty for an 1895 exhibition. The politician Georges Clemenceau wrote an article lamenting the French Government’s failure to acquire ‘these twenty paintings which together represent a great moment in art … a revolution without gunfire’. What an unexpectedly avant-garde sentiment from crusty old Clemenceau. The soldier backed up his words with action, buying one of the works and donating it to the state.

Monet had set up his easel in an empty apartment over a shop opposite the cathedral, premises he was soon forced to quit. Shortly thereafter he had to move from a second studio which the owner, a draper, wanted for a fitting room. Then another draper, a little further off, not only gave Monet a room with a view but agreed to build an extension just for his use. How like a parable this is — of the artist twice rejected by mercantile minds that regarded him as a nuisance, only to encounter a businessman of rare visionary spirit.

Boat-like Jeanne d’Arc Church dominates the town’s market square next to the spot — a desolate square of dusty earth — where she was burned alive on 14 May 1431.

Downtown this morning I phoned ahead to book a place on Saturday’s tour to the D-Day beaches of Normandy, and got through to Monsieur Bacon, the proprietor of Normandy Tours (in Bayeux). His reaction was unexpectedly brusque, and he tried to bluff me, ‘We have legislation in France that doesn’t allow me to take you. You must travel with another company. I will not take you.’ And he hung up.

I rang back to appeal to his better nature and point out that hanging up is ‘
très
impoli
’. Before I could tell him so, he hung up again. The third time I rang, the woman who answered was reasonable enough but M. Bacon grabbed the phone from her and said, ‘I respect the law [the law, if I understand him correctly, that discriminates against the disabled] and I have nothing to add.’ Fairly seething, I hatched a Plan B.

1051-1057 km

As our bus rolls down to the Atlantic coast, villages are dotted along the banks of the ever widening Seine. We are in Normandy, the land conquered by Norsemen eleven centuries ago.

In a family-run hotel opposite the bus terminal in Le Havre — where the husband, Christian, is an award-winning chef — wife Jacqueline has a ready-made solution that converts my disappointment at the lift being too small for my wheelchair to unbounded admiration for her ingenuity. She places a wooden chair inside the lift and sends me up in it, then one of her sons takes my wheelchair upstairs to have it ready for my arrival. Now why didn’t I think of that? If I had, her technique would have saved me five days in Paris.

Unusual graffiti spotted on a shop window in downtown Le Havre: LA RICHESSE AUX RICHES! (Wealth for the Wealthy!) Odd to see inequality being defended rather than condemned. Perhaps, in these counter-revolutionary times, we can expect more of the same? I daydream of a world turned upside down, where placards read DON’T SOAK THE RICH, LEAVE THE POOR HIGH AND DRY, subtitled THEY CAN LEAST AFFORD IT, and millions chant MAKE POVERTY THE FUTURE.