Chapter 108

We woke up almost as soon as the rising sun hit our tents the following morning; it was surprising how quickly they started heating up. Julie and I pulled on shorts and shirts, grabbed our wash bags and towels, and headed over to the campsite facilities. They were basic but okay – apart from the inevitable square vitreous china slab with a hole in the middle and two raised ‘footprint’ shapes to suggest where you should squat. I don’t know about Julie, but I stripped off my underpants and shorts to make sure they were well out of the way. I did make the mistake of pulling the lever to flush before I had moved off the slab; there was a gush of water against my shoes and I was lucky not to get wet socks. When I came out of the WC room and saw Adrian and Hamish, I warned them to be careful.

It was, though, marginally better than trying to find a convenient bit of bramble- and nettle-free hedge to poo behind, so we all used the designated places, and then grimaced as we chatted later. We’d all experienced some public conveniences at home that were in far less hygienic condition, but a ‘squat toilet’ was still rather new and frightening. We did remember to thank Sheila for her mother’s insistence that we bring some rolls of Andrex loo paper – there hadn’t been any in the ‘cubicle’, not even torn up sheets of newspaper.

(The loo paper had another use – there were no plugs in the sinks. If we wanted to fill the sinks with water to wash our faces, then we had to block the waste pipe temporarily with toilet roll!)

Washed and dressed, we headed for the village square, and when the shops opened, we were there eagerly waiting! The boulangerie was of course the first to open its doors at half past six, and we joined the queue of locals picking up their breakfast bread. We quickly realised that the ubiquitous croissant or baguette formed only a small part of the offering – the French Government insists that each bakery displays the price of its bread in a prominent place (something Hamish reckoned dated from the French Revolution), and the simple word pain followed by a weight in grammes was much more common.

We did manage to lay our hands on half a dozen croissants and the same number of something called pain au chocolat to keep us going until we could get a few things to put on the crusty loaves that Sheila bought. With them eaten and hunger not quite satisfied, we risked indigestion and ripped one of the loaves apart, then another, enjoying the still-warm bread on its own. We sat munching our breakfast and chatting in the morning sunshine, opposite the Mairie with its tricolor and War Memorial, until the other shops opened at eight. Sheila and Julie headed off in search of milk, butter, cold meat, cheese, drinking water and wine; we three male beasts of burden following to do the carrying.

Back at the camping, we packed up the tents, adjusted the bike loads to accommodate our purchases, and looked at the map before setting off. We picnicked at the top of a hill, on the wide grass verge overlooking a lovely scene of rural tranquillity, and had the sense to stop at another Camping Municipale shortly after four. The girls hit the shops while we erected the tents, and we had a proper evening meal with a couple of bottles of what I described to my fellow wine buffs as vin rouge tres ordinaire avec un rouge plastic stopper instead of a cork – but it went down absolutely fine, and at a most attractive price. A third of a bottle each with food was ideal; our consensus was that it was rough enough to give you a memorable hangover if you had too much. We’d also seen vin du table in brown plastic five-litre barrels at an even cheaper price (almost the same as the bottled water), but had wisely decided that the old adage about a thing looking too good to be true probably applied. Yes, they were also too big to carry on a bike, and even at that price we would have hated to have abandoned the two-thirds that we hadn’t drunk in one sitting.

The twins gave us an amusing learned discourse on drinking and hangovers; they laughingly said that the topic was one of the major private research interests of most of the medical profession! There was apparently some real research evidence that it was indeed not sensible to mix the grain and the grape, it was widely acknowledged that drinking a pint of water before bed did ameliorate the dehydration part of the hangover, and a new anti-inflammatory prescription drug named Brufen seemed to have real potential to dramatically reduce the length and severity of the headache. Not much could be done about the nausea; that was an inevitable side-effect of poisoning the digestive system and liver with too much ethyl alcohol!

The next day a couple of hours cycling got us to Mont Saint Michel, the French twin of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, that Julie and I had seen from the train to Penzance the previous summer. We rode across the causeway and took our bikes into the bottom level, but the place was so crowded with tourists that we came out again, and took turns guarding the bikes while those not playing sentry got to look around. It was fascinating and olde worlde, but just too busy. That afternoon we had to try three campsites before we found vacant emplacements; it wasn’t a great place, cold water only in the washrooms, but we survived. We made an early start the next morning and headed west, buying food for breakfast and lunch at the next place with shops.

The discussion over lunch centred on a growing wish for a shower with hot water. We rolled into another village at about five; there was an ancient hostelry in the square opposite the war memorial with its bright tricolors, and Adrian entered to see if they had any rooms. He came out ten minutes later smiling.

“I’ve got both good news and bad news.”

“Oh?”

“They have got a room available, but we’ll ALL have to share it, and it’s just got the one big bed. It’s got a shower with hot water, but the toilet isn’t quite what I had hoped for. However there’s no problem with feeding us, as long as we’re okay with the table d’hote, and considering it’s August and peak season, the price isn’t bad at all. I’d say that we should go for it, unless any of you want to ride on and try and find something better.”

We looked at each other. Sheila piped up.

“I suspect that we’re pretty lucky to find a room available, and especially so that they don’t mind us all sharing it. Frankly, I’d kill for a hot shower, and even a hole in the floor beats squatting behind a gorse bush again!”

She had a point. The offer of a room was accepted unanimously. There was the usual French checking-in formality; we’d all seen “Day of the Jackal”, so it was no surprise to have to fill in a little registration card with our passport details.

Once we were all in the room, we had to do some working out how this was going to happen. The bed was a huge dark wooden construction with a very soft mattress; our cycle panniers and sleeping bags took up quite a proportion of the available floor, and it was after all a room for two people! The initial thought was that we’d put the three girls in the bed, and us roughy-toughy lads would be on the floor. That decided, the girls had an urgent appointment with the shower!

An hour later, we were all clean, and there was a respectable display of drying underwear strewn around the bathroom and bedroom – the opportunity of washing our smalls had been too good to miss. Adrian announced that it was time to eat, so we all trooped downstairs.

Dinner was very French! There was a large dimly lit dining room with lots of tables, of which two or three were currently occupied; the waiter showed us to one that was set for eight and removed a couple of place settings. There were two bottles of red wine already on the table, he gestured to them and when Adrian nodded, he whipped out his corkscrew and opened them.

“Aimez-vouz les cous-cous?”

We nodded vigorously, although none of us actually had a clue what they were – we just assumed that it would be edible, and, after all, much of the purpose of the holiday was to explore French life and cuisine. Getting thrown in at the deep end wasn’t a bad way to go about it.

“Bon!”

He turned on his heels, and was back a minute later with six plates and a big bowl balanced on a tray; the plates each carried a chunk of coarse pate, and the bowl was full of baguette bread cut on the diagonal.

“Bon appetit!”

The pate was very good, the bread fresh and crusty, and washed down with a glass of the rough red wine, it was food fit for a king. More people were being seated, and a couple more people were helping out with the service. Our own waiter came back, smiled as we passed our plates to Hamish to gather together and hand over, and asked Adrian a question, to which he replied “Oui, s’il vous plait.”

“What was that about?”

“He was asking if we wanted all four courses, so of course I said yes.”

Next up were six hot plates, a shallow bowl filled with pale yellow grain, and a big earthenware pot containing what looked like stew, with a large steel ladle resting on the top.

We treated the grain – which we later confirmed was the cous-cous – like we would rice with a curry at home, with Jen playing ‘Mother’ and giving us all a good heap on the plate. Then Sheila dipped the ladle into the stew and stirred it up a bit before distributing it.

We reckoned it was a mutton stew; the meat was on short sections of what looked like sawn-through leg bones, and it had a stronger taste than just lamb. It was actually delicious, and the cous-cous stuff soaked up the gravy very well. We’d all had seconds to empty the pot and cleared up the last crumb of cous-cous before our waiter returned to collect our plates and the serving bowls; in exchange we got side plates, a small bowl of green salad, bottles containing oil and vinegar, and a platter displaying two cheeses, one with a yellowy-orange rind, and one much more like the Camembert we’d occasionally had at home. Sheila was put in charge again, and she dished out the salad leaves while Hamish cut both the cheeses into sixes.

“Is that it?”

“No, the French serve the cheese before the dessert, so there’s still a course to come.”

The cheese board was good, the salad fresh, and the sweet chutney served with it was new to all of us and much enjoyed. Jen and I were brought up within easy distance of all the dairies that make Stilton cheese, and all of us were used to hard English cheeses like Cheddar, Red Leicester, Cheshire, and Wensleydale, or the Dutch Edam and Gouda imports. Yeah, we’d all had Brie or Camembert on special occasions, but the two cheeses here were a world apart from our previous experiences (especially with the cheapest ‘mousetrap’ we lived on at University). The cheese with the edible rind was a Saint-Paulin, the other was a generic but perfectly ripened soft cheese.

The final course was a sweet fruit tart filled with apricots and a thick cream. It also was delicious. Sheila was smiling as she gave us the bad news.

“You know, doing this may have been a serious mistake. Tomorrow night, when we’re eating our yummy Batchelors Savoury Rice in between fighting off the flies, we’ll all be thinking of this meal and wishing we were back here!”

“Do they serve non-residents?”

She looked round the room; there was a table of about twelve people over the other side, what looked like three generations of the same family.

“Those look like locals, so probably yes. Why, are you suggesting that we camp locally and eat here every night?”

“It’s not a bad idea, but we did say we wanted to get to the coast, so sadly, I think we’d better stick to our plan. Anyway, tonight has been a special treat, and at least we can say that we’ve lived like the locals for one evening!”

We splurged and agreed to have coffee afterwards; it was a very different animal from the ‘Nescafe’ or ‘Maxwell House’ instant coffee that we were used to at home. Then we left the table, thanked the waiter, and went to explore. There was a framed map of Brittany fixed to the wall in the hotel entrance; we gathered round it and discussed where to go next.

“Here we are, almost at Dinan. We want to avoid St. Malo, I think, but the big decision is whether we go all out and try to reach the west coast, or go easier and stay on the north?”

“How far to the west coast?”

There was a pause as Adrian looked carefully at the map.

“From the scale of this map, I’d say a hundred and fifty kilometres, that’s about a hundred miles. Not quite as far as we’ve come already, but then of course we’d have to come back, and at the same speed we’ve been doing, we’d probably have a day there on the coast, maybe two, and have to turn round.”

“Blast! They say the west coast is beautiful.”

There was another pause for thought.

“Do the French allow bikes on trains?”

“That’s not a bad idea!”

The upshot was that we cycled into Dinan, found the railway station, asked the question, and an hour later found ourselves on a train to Brest. It took nearly four hours, but it was fascinating watching the countryside go past, and seeing the locals as they got on and off the train. Nearly every placename began with a “P” or an “L”, and many of them seemed unpronounceable – though oddly similar to the placenames Julie and I had seen on our trip through Cornwall. Of course the same applied to the other Celtic parts of Great Britain; I reckoned that our little Welsh college flatmate Vee would have been at home with the same sing-song language. The Bretons say there are two parts to Brittany, the woods and the sea. Ar-mor or Ar-vor (by the sea) and Ar-goat (by the forest) as the locals refer to them. Much of the forest has now been cultivated with small fields forming a bocage, the granite never all that far from the surface under the fertile soil. We didn’t tire of looking out of the window at this alien but incredibly attractive landscape.

From the centre of Brest, we headed west. A couple of hours steady cycling brought us to a large village named Plougonvelin, where we bought some supplies, and from which we headed south-west, hoping to find a seaside campsite. We got lost, but we had a real stroke of luck. We followed a track which we thought might lead to a sandy beach, and quickly discovered that it petered out into a rough path where it was clear that nothing had travelled this way for a while. We propped the bikes up against the hedge and continued on foot to see where it did go. Our mistake led us to a grassy valley between two cliffs, which ended up with a small and very secluded rocky beach, but with grass banks almost up to the shore. There was what looked like a perfect camping spot under a couple of gnarled oak trees, and a half-derelict stone cowshed offered somewhere to stow the bikes. I don’t remember who vocalised our thought first, but the suggestion that we spend a few days camping in this very private spot received unanimous support.

At the track junction there had been a typical Breton farmhouse, a rectangular single storey stone building with a slate roof proof against the winter gales, and an old lady had waved at us as we cycled past. We sent the twins back (as their French was by far the best) to ask about camping, and to our delight they came back not only with permission, but with the revelation that she was more than happy for us to use her tapwater, and she would sell us eggs, milk and butter if we wished.

“We apologised for our French and said that we were English students on holiday, and she couldn’t have been more helpful. I’m not sure that we’d have got the same reception of we’d been German, though!”

I’d heard something similar to this from a colleague who’d taken the ferry from Newcastle to Bergen earlier that year for a short holiday in Norway – as soon as the people in the hotel realised he was British, they couldn’t do enough for him. Having said that, he found the price of a glass of beer absolutely outrageous, and was reduced to drinking it slowly and actually appreciating the taste. He reckoned that the locals overdid the booze in the long cold dark winters, hence the government taxed it heavily to try and limit consumption.

We set up our tents under the trees, stashed the bikes in the cowshed, and explored our little piece of France. It was like going back in time thirty years; you could almost imagine the German sentries making their way to the shore. It was quiet and peaceful, and we had it entirely to ourselves.

Sheila had been correct about the comedown from the evening meal at the hotel. Our Vesta Curry from the packet was distinctly underwhelming after the four courses of real food. The dehydration process really had removed pretty much all the natural flavours, but it was at least filling. That was pretty much the end of our emergency rations from home; we’d be trying real food the next night.

The year before, at Sennen Cove, Julie and I had discovered the delights of making love under the moon on a grassy sward on top of the sea cliffs; she had clearly told the other girls all about it, because it wasn’t even nearly dark before Sheila had hold of my hand and was taking me for a walk.

We quickly found a secluded bank, pulled off our clothes, and rolled around in the grass enjoying the freedom of being naked in the open air. One thing led to another, and before very long Sheila was kneeling high above me, her firm young breasts and their wonderful long nipples proudly jutting out, as she skilfully used the whole of Gustav’s length to massage her innermost tissues. All sorts of sounds were coming from her throat; growls of lust, squeals of delight, moans and screams, and it was just as well that we were miles from anywhere. I held her by the waist for stability as her howls reached a crescendo, and she bucked and jerked in my grip as her muscles reacted to the nerve overload. All the movement was enough to make Gustav jerk four or five times as he gave Sheila’s cervix its liquid reward, and then Sheila collapsed forward onto me and stuck her tongue into my tonsils as if her life depended upon it.