Hemingway & Paris

There is never any end to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other

Ernest Hemingway – A Moveable Feast

Gemma and I arrived at the end of the pier at Ryde as the sun was coming up, and the colours of things were rising from a morning blue and grey. It was May, and still cold at that time of day. A catamaran service runs between Ryde pierhead and Portsmouth harbour, which doubles as a train station and coach stop. We were starting as we meant to go on, on the cheap, or rather the-cheap-as-you-can-get-within-the-law, and we were catching a coach from Portsmouth onto London Victoria, where we would catch another coach onwards to Paris, arriving that evening.

We had both lectured each other on the necessity of adequate and suitable clothing for travelling. The books and all other sources were unanimous – denim was out. When it got wet, it took ages to dry, and whilst it was wet it was extremely heavy and kept you well within the temperatures at which people start spoiling for colds and ‘flu. Lightweight trousers were the thing; light, quick-drying, and available in a range of stylish and fashionable colours. Others that were in on the great trouser conspiracy would regard our lightweight trousers and have to admit that here were people that knew how to dress for the perils of a European summer.

So when we both turned up at Ryde pierhead in jeans, we smiled awkwardly and complemented each other on our sensible thinking. On our usefulness scale, jeans were great because they were warm, they were comfortable, they went with anything, and when they get dirty, anyone looking at them finds it difficult to tell.

We smiled through the shock of carrying our backpacks for longer than thirty seconds in our bedrooms and saying to watching family members, “Yeah, that feels alright,”, we smiled our goodbyes to our families, and we smiled right up until the point when we sat down on the catamaran and looked back to see the island as a dark brown horizon rapidly dropping below the waves.

"We’re actually going, aren't we," I said.
"Yeah," said Gemma, and we both smiled again, "we are."

The National Express coach was a little late, but we had a generous margin for error in London, and we didn’t mind. The driver took each of our backpacks in turn and slung them into the baggage compartment in the coach. He was a jolly fellow, quipping and jesting with the passengers, and quite neatly matched our mood that morning. He picked up Gemma’s backpack, made a joke about women packing for long trips, and popped it into the appropriate area in the compartment. He picked up my backpack and his smile froze and quickly slid into a painful grimace as he turned to place it in the compartment in a laboured fashion.
I wasn’t happy about this.
How the hell was Gemma doing this? All I had was clothes and three phrasebooks, and she had a tent with metal pegs and everything. I came to the conclusion that Gemma’s rucksack was outside the bounds of normal physics and must be the Interrail traveller’s equivalent of Dr. Who’s TARDIS. I nipped onto the coach, avoiding the driver’s resentful gaze, and already debating chipping into my packed lunch, despite the fact that I’d had an enormous cooked breakfast and it was still only eight o’clock in the morning.

Travel does this to me. Whatever the time of the day or night, no matter how recent my last meal, if I board a coach or train with food in any form, I eat it immediately and then I’ve got it out of the way and I can get properly excited and/or bored.

On this occasion it was definitely excitement, and halfway through the sandwiches I was already engrossed in the Lonely Planet guide, reading about Paris.

I was blessed with what I can only describe as a wonderful childhood. I was given more books than any child could want, I was encouraged, despite my own laissez-faire attitude, to try my hand at anything and everything, and to top it all off we had the most wonderful holidays.

I was the snag in the planning of my parents’ otherwise flawless schemes. The books I was given, the majority of which were of the Enid Blyton and Willard Price variety, had left me with the impression that travel was one of the most wonderful things that a human being can undertake, and also, really gut-wrenchingly exciting things happened abroad ALL THE TIME, whereas it was only the odd mystery that the Famous Five or Secret Seven solved within miles of their own homes. The result of this was that when we were preparing to go on holiday, I would get excited. Not just average excited, as in going to sleep on Christmas Eve, or building up to Sports Day at school. We are talking absolutely off the chart excited, phenomenally excited, so excited that the night before leaving, sleep was totally out of the question, and I lay awake all night just squirming with complete and total joy, and I can only conclude that in the feverish anticipation, my immune system shut down completely and we always left to go on holiday with me sickening for something, usually contagious.

I have no idea whether it was the continuing contagious nature of my holiday illnesses that meant we always went to islands, but we always did. We went to Mallorca, we went to Crete, we went to Malta, we went to Ibiza and liked it so much that we went back again the following year (the second time I wasn’t ill, which unfortunately left my sister in line...she had to have her appendix out while we were there) and we went to Tenerife.

This was, as I’ve already said, fantastic, but it left rather a large gap on the map. The entirety of mainland Europe was left unexplored, and by the time Gemma and I set out, I had been to mainland Europe twice – once when I was six, on a weekend to Northern France when my parents had taken us to the Bayeux Tapestry and stuck it out because they believed it was Educational, and a week’s trip to Holland at the age of ten with my Catholic middle school, the outstanding memory of which was a load of us trooping down to the local swimming pool one evening with one of the nuns, trunks and towels at the ready, only to find that it was a nudist night.

Mainland Europe was, by and large, something I’d only read about, and even though I’d moved on from reading Ms. Blyton and Mr. Price, it still appeared to be an incredibly exciting place to be.

I had never been to Paris. People I told we were starting in Paris went all slitty-eyed and jealous, my parents looked at each other and started reminiscing about holidays they’d taken on their own, and the Lonely Planet put Paris as Number One Beautiful City, Planet Earth. Needless to say, I was looking forward to it.

Our first night’s accommodation had been booked from a phone box in Newport a few days before, when Gemma and I had met for a coffee and decided that we had better book at least the one night ahead. Standing in the middle of St. Thomas' Square, looking vacantly into the window of Millets and attempting to speak in haltering schoolboy French had felt very, very strange, but we had managed, despite both our and the hotel’s attempts to speak each other’s languages, to book a room. L’Hôtel Moderne was our first port of call.

Gemma. Gemma Heath. A bit more on her. As far as I knew, she wasn’t much better travelled than I was, but the line-up of relatives and friends, and friends of friends that she had drawn up for us to visit or fall back on was very impressive. She and I had both gone to the same middle school that the trip to Holland originated from, despite living at opposite ends of the Island. Apart from the fact that she lived in Cowes, was going to study Psychology at Bangor University and I got along with her really well, there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff between us.

Her wrangled arrangements for Paris were magnificent. This is the background to our situation. Gemma’s brother had been travelling in India the previous summer. There, he had met a Parisian Frenchman by the name of Herve, who offered Gemma’s brother his flat in Paris, should he ever be passing that way. Herve was away in Tanzania while we were aiming to be in Paris, and somehow, Gemma had managed to get Herve to agree to loan us his flat – and we had never met him. So thanks to Gemma’s organisation, out of all the time we were planning on spending in Paris, only one night would be in paid accommodation. The rest of the time, we would be staying in a flat somewhere in a Western suburb of Paris.
The National Express coach deposited us on the concrete in London Victoria Coach station, and we went for a wander with our backpacks on, to get a feel for the weight. We went through Victoria train station, and on the way back to the coach station someone gave us a promotional Eyewitness Travel Guide. It was meant to be a demonstration of how good the guides were, with more photos and pictures than the average travel guide, but seeing as we were heading onto the continent, the fact that the guide was for Paris seemed a little too good to be true.
We boarded the Eurolines coach to Paris nervously clutching our security wallets. We found seats, and excitement tapered off into a kind of provisional boredom as the journey wore on, and the scenery stayed resolutely British for the first leg.

The only real highlight of the journey was the driver, who felt it his duty to inform us of any details that might affect our arrival time. I have never heard anything like it. Imagine someone with a French accent...make it worse. Make it a cartoon French accent, such as you might hear on "'Allo 'Allo".
Stop.
Now imagine a Welsh accent. A broad, piss-take-in-the-pub style Welsh accent. Now, and I know this is difficult, and I only manage it because it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard, mix the two together.

Weird, isn’t it? That’s how he sounded.

The ferry was packed with Brummies, and we rushed up to the outside deck to wave goodbye to the stonily indifferent White Cliffs of Dover before being blown back below decks by a vicious sea breeze.

It was dark. There were a few lights on the horizon, and they seemed to throw a disproportionately large glow onto the clouds. They seemed to remain far away for a long time, until we were inside them, for a few short minutes we were looking on tall, severe concrete buildings lit in orange by the motorway lights, and then we sank into a tunnel, which went on for a long time. By the time we arrived at the coach station at Paris Bagnolet, we had been in a tunnel for so long it felt as though the entire station was deep underground.

We dashed along a stone-floored corridor, following the signs to the ticket office, which was closed. There were ticket machines, but they only accepted coins, and all the French currency we had was crisp, high-denomination notes, fresh from the travel agents of the Isle of Wight. In the end we found a random bloke who appeared to be minding his own business, and through a barrage of late-night garbled French, harassed him into exchanging our notes for some coins.

We both sat with our backpacks on, nervously perched on the edge of the seats on the metro, consulting maps and the train walls, making 100% sure that we would end up where we were heading.

We reached a decision and got off, jemmying through the turnstiles with our backpacks on with a little difficulty, and heading for the steps upwards.

I will never forget coming up those steps.

It was dark, and it was raining, but the steps were flagged by two lampposts throwing their light upwards into the sky. I climbed looking upwards, and the first thing I saw was the rain coming down through a pale orange light, and then the silhouette of trees behind the rain, and then, finally, as we reached the top, we emerged in the middle of a boulevard, with roads either side of us, and the wonderful, gloriously tall balconied buildings beyond them.

We both stood for a moment in the cooling rain, turning slowly.
Despite the nagging feeling that all our planning and work would ultimately come to nothing, it was Paris.

We checked into our hotel, which was on a nearby side street. It was small, it was cramped, our wardrobe door fell off when we tried to open it, and the shower and toilet were down a murderously curving staircase, but it was a Parisian hotel, and it was damned perfect.

17th May 1999 Monday, 11:45pm (French Time!) Rain. V. nice.
Arrived to ‘L’Hôtel Moderne’, a cleaner kind of VERY cheap hotel.170FF for us both, in Central Paris. Nice. Trip ran uneventfully, apart from highlight of a brief panic session when a sign ‘Paris 204’ went by at speed. A few seconds and a miles to kilometres conversion later, we were a bit happier. Ferry a bit rough! Dazed as we’re actually here. Bloody hell.