Adventures in Normandy, June 1991
It was the first time I had ever seen the world at 4am. Streetlights were on, but the road was empty of cars and of people until we arrived at the school. It was a warm June night in 1991, and at such times there never seems to be complete darkness, just a second kind of extra day. Then suddenly there was a small crowd around a large coach, parents leading their sleepy children up the steps.
It was the end of our first year at high school – or year seven at secondary school. Either works. Most of the kids were twelve, I was still eleven, one of the youngest and one of the smallest in the year. James was one of the tallest, and didn’t appreciate being tall as much as I didn’t appreciate being short. We were on a week-long trip to France, first years only, led by two of our French teachers, an older one, probably only in her thirties but seeming like an ancient schoolmarm to us, and a younger one, in her mid-20s, with long brown wavey hair and very recently married – this would always be news to students as we would have to get used to a new name. If a male teacher married, naturally we would never hear about it. We were also joined by a tetchy male geography teacher, who seemed as pleased about the trip as he did about everything else, that is not at all pleased. Then there was the school headmaster, a terrifying ageless man with very neat hair and a steely look in his eye. He was in the habit of marching slowly around the school with his hands folded behind his back, looking sternly for trouble-makers. I was about to say that we never saw him smile, but that’s wrong, we did see him smile, and it was even worse. On this trip he had brought his son, a a curly-haired youth somewhere between harmless and gormless, who to his credit kept completely to himself for the entire week. And of course there was a coach driver, he was called Andy, and he will come up again.
For presumably cost-saving reasons we did not head to Dover, where the premium ferries departed, but to a less well-known alternative on the South Coast. These were the days before the channel tunnel, when going to the continent usually meant risking sea sickness. We were all sleepy, of course, and much of the journey we presumably spent napping, but nevertheless Andy the bus driver kept things entertaining. We were asked for tapes to play and I sent my copy of Dire Straits Greatest Hits up to the front. It turned out to be the only thing the kids and the grown ups could agree on – Andy would play it and encourage us all to stamp in time. There were also TV screens on board, a first for most of us. The first film chosen for this group of children was the 1959 trade union satire I’m All Right Jack, which lasted a good fifteen minutes or so before we drove on to the ferry, and was ejected once we got to the other side. The next selection for these eleven and twelve year old children was the 18 certificate film The Lost Boys, which we watched in full. I vividly remember driving down French country roads as the characters in the film also moved to a new town, to the sound of a cover of The Doors’ People Are Strange. The final selection, played as we pulled up, was Madonna’s new Immaculate Collection
The accommodation seemed odd at the time and seems even odder now. With a crab farm at one end, there was a suite of rooms including a sports hall and a restaurant, then a number of long corridors trailed away with a series of chalets on either side, like the knotted tendrils of a Portuguese man o’ war. Our set of rooms over two floors consisted of a lower floor bedroom, for James and Phil, a lower floor bathroom, and an upper-floor bedroom under a steeply sloping roof with an outsized skylight, occupied by myself and Jason.
Jason was not someone any of us knew well, he was from New Zealand, had blonde hair whipped into a slight quiff and was absolutely sex mad. As soon as we arrived his only mode of conversation was a mix of leering innuendo and open discussion of which girls on the trip he was planning to get with. Aged eleven I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone talk like this in real life, and thought of it as an amusing quirk. Was this what talking to other boys would be like from now on. I’d brought a tape recorded with my cousins where we improvised songs, and Jason thought “Pump Up The Bouncing On The Bed” and “Oh No My Trousers Have Fallen Down” were both the height of smut. I did not play the tape to disabuse him of this notion, as I seemed to have somehow impressed him.
The following morning Jason described to me how one of the girls he fancied had climbed up, come in through the skylight, had sex with him and had left by the same route. However I checked this with her later and it turned out not to be true.
We went on a trip to a nearby seaside town, but one without a sandy beach, just a few drizzly shops. I suspect this was one of the beaches for the D-Day landings, but nobody told us. It wasn’t a wasted trip, though, because one boy called Freddy bought a pen with a drawing of a woman in a bikini on the side. Turn the pen upside-down and the bikini disappeared. This was passed around the coach as if it were a porn magazine. How had the shopkeeper ever allowed him to buy such a thing?
We went to Mont St Michel, a town wrapped around a tidal island and one of the most flat-out astonishing things to encounter, especially having just read C. S. Lewis’s The Horse & His Boy, featuring a superficially similar but significantly more Arab-flavoured city called Tashbaan. Approaching Mont St Michel from the mainland, if the weather is right, you catch sight of this castle rising up from the sea with city walls around its base and it’s hard to accept that such a thing exists, especially in the English Channel. It’s straight out of a medieval fantasy.
We all agreed that the food at the hotel was bad, and considering our only comparison was English school lunches, we were probably correct. The only thing anyone liked was the sickly strawberry Nesquik, and I had never been a fan of anything artificially strawberry-flavoured. Jason and I came up with a plan, we would pool our money, and next time we were anywhere near a shop, we would load up with snack foods. The plan was immediately torpedoed by Phil, whose take on the food was “like it or lump it,” a phrase I have singularly disliked ever since.
We went to see the Bayeaux Tapestry. No attempt had been made to tie this in to our history classes, we just entered and all walked past it in about fifteen minutes. The theory, I suppose, was that we would just absorb it all for future use.
We went to a museum at the D-day landing beaches, a dingy room full of tanks and mobile artillery. I’d brought a camera with me for the trip and the majority of my photos were from this museum, the flash bouncing off the display cases, rendering them useless.
Later on I did manage to take a better photo however. The final evening of the trip had, naturally, a disco. We were too old to dance unselfconsciously and too young to pair up or dance in groups without embarrassment, but two people did join in with the slow dance – Mrs Williams the French teacher and Andy the bus driver, first slow-dancing, then as the disco wound to an end, kissing passionately, alone on the dancefloor. A few kids were laughing, a few embarrassed at the scene, some saving the gossip for the trip home. I, for some reason, walked up and took a photo.
The journey back was difficult, for reasons we did not have fully explained to us. I just remember it being dark, raining and our diversion to another port, possibly Calais. The stressed looks on the teachers indicated that we had missed at least one ferry, and an emergency meal of hamburger patties and French fries was organised. One of the kids must have started a rumour that the meat was horse, and lots of kids refused to eat any. The boat journey was shorter this time, it was late at night at it seemed to be deserted. I sat on the steps for a lot of the journey and a girl sat down and talked to me. This was a completely unheard of event for me, and not one I knew how to deal with, though I think I was ok. After the trip she continued to ignore me at school, maybe I should have made the effort to talk to her after she’d done the same for me, but it just wasn’t in me, and the long wait would continue for quite a while.
A few weeks after we arrived home, we had a post-trip party. A teacher had brought brie and baguettes of the sort we didn’t eat on the trip, and there was some Orangina, which we hadn’t drunk on the trip. The main activity was just mingling and sharing our photos, and one of mine proved particularly popular – the picture of Mrs Williams with her lips locked on Andy the bus driver in the romantic semi-darkness of the disco. Ten minutes into the party that same Mrs Williams found me and asked me to go to another nearby classroom, where she produced the photo, apparently confiscated from a giggling child, and offered me a whole pound for it. Though I didn’t understand the full ramifications were this picture to be seen by her new husband, I knew it was an embarrassing photo, and a pound was a pound, so I handed it over and was allowed to head back into the party. In retrospect I probably should have at least got a tenner from her.
Names of some teachers have been changed, especially that one
Thanks to James Hand for agreeing to be interviewed for this, it was great to catch up after so many years.
Photograph taken by another kid, I have completely forgotten which one (it wasn’t James)
You know what the music is.