A nice town, a nice port and some very nice oysters....

AVRANCHES

This is one of those proper French towns. Not special, no cathedral, no chateu although a bit of castle. But it has the proper Hotel de Ville, a proper marche, some parks, a bit of history and a lot of pride. It honours General Patton who broke through to free it in June 1944. What was left of it rejoiced. Then they set about re-building it as it was before the war. So now it is too new, too right but also just right and charming.

It is girt by hypermarkerts as usual but somehow the centre seems well off, richly endowed with bakers and butchers and epiciers and all that. The local health situation may however be open to doubt as I have never seen quite so many pharmacies.

I should add that our visits to hypermarkets has reminded us that while we in the UK may have made some mistakes by allowing the growth of the supermarket to become ludicrously extensive we did at least restrict the process. Here, every hypermarket includes a street of other shops, all robbing the local town centre of its usual trade. Yet along these 'streets' there is just one of each trader - no free competition here. Oh no.

FRIENDS

We have our friends Graham and Jane here at the moment. They are on their way back to the UK after 8 months touring mostly Spain in a very fine motor home. We may yet see them again on our way across Spain - they are so brown and they cannot bear to stay more than a a few weeks in Britain! They are newly retired and lapping it up.

CANCARLE

This little fishing port is in the great bay of St Michel but across the border from Normandy into Brittany – just. It is charming and entirely overwhelmed by its huge oyster and mussel fishing industry. The harbour is open and at this time of year empty, but for a few of those strange oyster landing craft – all flat bag-bed with but a single place for the pilot. We wander the strand checking the prices of the innumerable and well patronised restaurants. I am sure they are all the same really, varying only slightly in price and ambition. Vast and unreasonable plateu de fruit de mere in some, more sensible and better priced versions in others.

We choose, we sit with a harbour view, we eat joyously of oysters (mois), mussels (two plats), crevette (one), a splendid breton omelette (one), a fine fish soup, a panache of fish (underdone to our taste), some excellent and cheap Muscadet (what else), some crème caramel and Breton flans and coffe. We started out thinking French prices had gone barmy but four people, three courses, ample wine, coffees and less than 80 euroes. Cannot be bad really.

THIS SITE

Camping Mont St Michel is a classic French site, with Normandy finishings. We are placed in little evocations of the Normandy bocage which so foxed the Americans for a while after D-Day. Small fields, with hedges and trees. Plenty of cover for the enemy they found. Rather less for us but a nice touch. It has been dull and a bit wet, starkly different from the Pas de Calais where we enjoyed such unseasonal warmth and sun.

The trees are beginning to bud and the birds are singing. Of course it is for us a bit early each morning – effectively we are two hours ahead of GMT and it can feel it. But the evenings are suddenly longer. If only the sun were on duty.

Half the site is the usual array of statics but in this case they are rather charming pretend clapboard units, with proper gtiled roofs and real windows. They look rather sweet here, where normally they are a mess. They can be rented for £235 euroes a week out of season. But bthey are still not a huge amount bigger than our carfavan and awning compined for which the charge is about 90 euroes a week. Ok we carry our own water and wste but that's wuite a margin.

Today (Friuday) we should have been driving to Chartres but a package of medicines for Janet are awaited. Kate kindly bought and sent them by air mail last Monday. We hoped they would be here yesterday; now it will be Monday at best. We shall head for Chartres tomorrow and drive back via Rennes - seen but not enjoyed so it will make the trip worthwhile.

Up a hill and back to the front....

LE MONT ST MICHEL

Our journey was good and Janet drove with a caravan on tow for the first 'real' time. Before we left she had three hours tuition. I am sure she was nervous but we kept her first experience to dual carriageways, albeit driving on the right and sitting on the wrong side of the car of course. She did brilliantly and it means our usual four hour journeys will be half as tiring for me. And, yes I did let go of the dash very soon indeed.

The site we are on is excellent by French standards. Indeed pretty good by Caravan Club measures. Even our pitch is of reasonable size, which is not often the case over here. And its only 13 euroes a night all in so we are happy.

Little village of Courtils is sweet with a hotel, some gites, and a boulanger which appears to be never closed. Pleasing walk of about 500 metres to the village.

Nearest town is Avranches which I can now confirm is as good as first sight suggested. Hilltop and fortified again – I pick em – it is quite large, with a lot of new build but, as ever round here the wreckage of the war has been made good by recreation of what was lost. It does sometimes seem too crisp but overall the effect is great.

On Monday I went on my own to see some of the Normandy landing sights – Arromances and Gold beach, where the main British contingent landed. This was where the successful one of the two Mulberry harbours was built. The US had the other for Omaha but the weather, an onshore wind and an error over water depth meant it was largely lost. I have never been in doubt of the amazing importance and achievemt of the Mulberry harbours, alongside the sheer cold blooded heroism of every man who took part in the landings. But I had never grasped the scale of the logistical achievement.

To be told they were 60 metres long, 18 metres wide, 14 metres deep and weighed 6,000 tons each is not at all the get the point. They are immense. They are massive quantities of steel and concrete formed into multi-celled boxes of thin air, ready to be floated 60 miles or so and then to be sunk. They would then sit in six or seven metres of water and provide the breakwater for the piers that were then floated inside, sunk and used as docks. Whereupon the Americans' floating bridges were strung out up to ten MILES long for the resultant mass of tanks, trucks, guns, ammo, men, Red Cross vans and all the rest to make its way ashore. Until this week I saw this as huge, impressive, amazing. Today I am lost for words. They amassed all this, towed it across the Channel under fire, assembled it in raging seas. Their breakwater is the size of Plymouth sound. It is huge, immense, amazing but it also now seems impossible. At Arromanches it had always distressed me that some of the remains of this flotsam was left stranded on this stunning strand. But I was wrong. Of the, now wait for this, 118 – yes 118 – bits of Mulberry harbour brought here a mere 20 odd remain. And these few still dominate the scene. Close in one of the dock units lies crooked in the sand. You could play football on top of it. Maybe you should, just to prove the point. For what I cannot concieve is that in the midst of dreadful war, turning out fighter aircraft, and bombers by the hundred, and tanks, and guns by the thousands, and trucks and ammo by the millions of rounds somehow these massive chunks of stuff could have been built, assembled, transported, gathered together on the beach, dragged into the sea and finally towed to their destination. How? How could it have been managed? And in heavens name what did it cost? No wonder we were broke. No wonder it took us until this century to pay off the war debt. And maybe we should be even more angry that a bunch of chancers and duckers and divers in the City should have robbed us of the chance to recover fully from that long ago horror. Shame on you, City of my fathers. Shame.

I roamed a little along the beaches but the sun shone, the sea was blue, the sand almost white. The realisation that men dressed in dripping serge had stepped off creaking landing craft, armed with a rifle or a machine gun and faced with withering fire from the slopes above seemed hard to handle.

Until I got to the Cinema 360 degrees. It is a bit commercial, yes. But this a little bit of a thank you as the French know how to do it. Son et lumiere in effect. Nine screens ring the audience. Brilliant editing puts images and sound from the landing, the battle, the ruin but then mixes them with the same places today. The grainy black and white is loud in volume and in pathos. Today is quiet and serene. Where a tank crashes through a street then, today uses clever filiming and has us sitting in 'it' but running through the same peaceful orchard or busy market or street. Where a landing craft crashed clumsily through the surf to oblivion or heroism, we ride a fishing boat serenely. In either case we sit within, looking forward or watching behind. Then, again and suddenly, gunfire, noise, pain, bandages, blood. They do not hold back. One lady gasped involuntarily at what we saw. What lasted then for hours, days, weeks and whole lifetime for too many, is done in 20 minutes. But you leave a little wiser. Three young Americans appeared as I entered, coming as I later realised from the exit to re-enter and watch again. One said too loudly, too excitedly: “That was not at all what I expected”. Right, nor I. They watched a second time. Not sure I could have actually.

I drove along Gold Beach where the main British divisions landed. There is little today to show for the carnage and sacrifice. As someone who held a 303 rifle, fired it over mid and long range, saw what it could do I have little doubt this was a place of fear and horror. The Germans fired their machine guns from good cover on the running figures of Lowry-esque targets. They would see no faces, see no terror, hear no cries. A man would fall, maybe rise, shudder again and move no more. In the nest the German would suddenly freeze. A step, a crack of twig, a skittering metal pineapple, a shattering blast and, maybe mercifully silence.

There was, there is no separation, no point of differenc for friend or foe. They fear, they fight, they suffer, they die. Grey Nazi or Khaki Brit they bleed red and die cold. What a waste, even if for this one war we at least could claim a true aggressor to be held back.

Over La Manche once again....

MONTREUIL SUR MER

So here we are back in France for the first time in four years. May not seem long but the changes are, like in the UK, substantial.

Of course the French had already failed to stop the march of the supermarkets and the 'globularisation' of their shopping centres. But now it seems every town is like the worst of Britain – shut shops, boarded windows, dusty unkempt streets. Except where some glitzy new Carrefour City (Tesco Metro?) or similar has parked itself where real shops once paraded.

And the prices are dreadful. With the pound bouncing ever closer to parity they seem even worse. And gone is that beloved inexpensive menu prix fixe that would include the wine. Generally round here the price is about 14 Euros 'boisson non inclusif'.

But hey the food is still terrific, the supermarkets may seem like ours but the array of tratoria and patisserie food is fantastic, the cheese mesmeric and meat diverse and wonderfully butchered. The fish is less in quantity but I find that oddly reassuring since it always seemed impossible there was that much in the seas EVER!

And the weak pound notwithstanding their wine is still way way cheaper than back home. So are the spirits and liqueurs. So the liver is still France’s major casualty. Talking of which the pate choice, style and quality leaves even beloved Waitrose wilting.

So where are we? Well the van is on a little triangle of camping site between the Canche River and the walls of the fortified hill town of Montreuil sur mer – to be honest the sur mer bit is a touch confusing as we are 15k inland and the river is not even slightly an estuary yet.

Montreuil is charming. It first got some fortifying in 1042, lots more in 1340 and then some, yet more in the 15^th and 16^th century and finally some serious gunnery action in the 18^th and 19^th. But for us the surprise and a claim to fame was that this was the British Communication HQ during the 1914-18 horror. I trekked down 48 steps (and then up sadly!) to tour the bastion constructed under the castle citadelle in the 19^th century and extended to provide the nerve centre of operations to send hundreds of thousand of commonwealth (empire, even back then) troops to their deaths. The walls are covered in panels extolling the events while hardly mentioning the matter of death.

Anyway we toured the citadel, some of the walls and repaired to the town which is charming. We enjoyed two splendid squares before discovering the real big one at the heart of town. Superb rows of mostly 18^th and 19^th century houses and shops on three long sides of the 'square' – La Place de Gaulle. Roughly the shape of his nose in profile actually but slightly smaller.

We have also visited several towns nearby but made a point of visiting the largest single military cemetery in France at Etaples. It was built on the site of the camps where tens of thousands were 'trained' to fight or die bravely whichever came sooner. They called the town 'Eat Apples' but we are not told what they called the camp.

It is now a place for real tears. It is hard not to well up in the face of 12,000 identical headstones. I had the same feeling at Arlington in Washington DC. Janet was telling me the message on one of the headstones but had to pause some time for the words to come.

Wonderful cenotaphs by Lutyens command the view across the disciplined ranks of the dead. A team of French artisans works among the lines, planting, pruning and trimming at the feet of the fallen. Then, incomprehension as we find first a lone Chinese army labourer's headstone planted many yards and alone from the throng. Then yards further away a dozen headstones of fallen Hindu and Sikh soldiers of the empire. The sun sets at a slightly different time on their graves. Why? Oh really... why?

Later we were in Le Touqet, known as Paris Plage and for both horse racing and its 'aerodrome' as the French have it – a word we nearly adopted in the 20s. Given the real aviation pioneering of the French – rubbed out by the 14-18 war – it would have been a wonderful word. Le Touqet is effectively a built resort – hence Paris Plage. Full of elegant houses of the Fin de Siecle and many more from the 20s and 30s of course. But not on the sea front any longer. Little patches do survive; like bleak memorials they peek between the uniformly tedious six and seven storey slabs that have replaced them. You could be anywhere but only every 100 metres or so!

Of course to an aviation buff like me Le Touqet is special. An early destination from Croydon, later the point of arrival fro Southend's fleet of Carvair ferries and once my landing place in a splendid very bearly 1950s De Havilland Dove from Biggin Hill (on a press jolly and returned by 1960s Britten Norman Islander – not bad!). It is still busy but today it is with the light and not-so-light aircraft of the rich. The town is home to gambling, horse racing, polo, tennis, croquet and boules championships. And an excellent mid-point for London-Paris trysts of affairs and affaires, as it were.

Our stay here has been interesting on the domestic front. A variety of minor caravan glitches have occurred and been sorted or can be readily. But the car suddenly produced an amber oil level warning light. Given its hi-tech engine management system and the incredibly expensive oil that provides an “I know when I need servicing” set up to rival Mae West, this took me by total surprise. I bought some oil (see Mr Osborne, the banks are lending again!) and all seemed well. But the front of the van had some nasty muck up the font which we had assumed was mud. Around five a.m. I convinced myself we had burned the oil because of towing and heavy load and the engine was frekked. I started the day in a right tizz, spilled it on Janet only to find the ruddy thing is so sensitive that a mere half litre shortage in its 4.5 litre system will set the light off! So now it is slightly over full, about which I can do nothing frankly.

So tomorrow is Thursday and we shall further tour Montreuil, pack up later and on Friday set our sails towards Mont St Michel. It is a hard life this retirement.