Opening Country , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - John Micklewright

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79 pages

English

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In this journey of discovery, John Micklewright travels the slow way, on foot, on paths, tracks and byways from the Channel to the Alps - from the coast of Normandy to the flanks of Mont Blanc. The Opening Country is a beautifully written account of his progress through the French countryside, an evocative patchwork of landscape, nature, history, literature, film, and - drawing on his father's diaries that stretch back to the 1930s - of memoir.Always curious, absorbing all around him, ready on a whim to divert from his chosen route as he heads unhurriedly southwards. The natural world unfolds as spring turns to summer with surprises of bird song and butterflies, against a constant background of reminders of the economic and social story of rural France and of wars past. The result is an engrossing record of a classic long-distance walk through Britain's nearest continental neighbour. The Opening Country is a book to fire the imagination - a call to travel slowly, to open eyes and ears, to discover and explore.

Sujets

France

Memoir

Philosophie et théologie

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	10 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781800469204
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 John Micklewright

Cover illustration, map and line drawings
copyright © 2021 Charlotte Micklewright

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781800469204

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To the memory of Alasdair, Jon, and Tony,
who contributed in different ways,
and my father, David, whose contribution was fundamental

La liberté alors, c’est une bouchée de pain, une gorgée d’eau fraîche, un paysage ouvert.

Frédéric Gros, Marcher, une philosophie, 2009

So many architectural masterpieces, so many varied countrysides, so many distant prospects of the world – villages, towns, flowers, birds, human contacts, and sun. But my main enjoyment has consisted of sitting at café tables or on benches in parks or under plane trees, gently absorbing the visual impressions and watching the French at work and play, and listening to the blackcaps singing in the poplars of the north, or the cicadas in the mulberry trees of the south, in fact, just being in France.

Letter from my father to his father, August 1975
Contents
Prologue

1. Landing
2. Walking alone
3. Town and forest
4. Heading upstream
5. Rich and poor
6. Heat
7. Mountains

Envoi

Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements

Prologue
Marcher – to walk; to travel on foot.
I first went to France as a child in the 1960s, for just a day – an excursion during a family holiday on the Channel Island of Alderney. My parents, my sister, my brother, and me, the youngest. A dim memory stays of the small ferry arriving in Cherbourg and – unbelievably, given our parents’ usual frugal habits – of going to a restaurant for lunch. I did not want to eat what was offered. Father would have been keen to introduce us children to the France he loved so much. His own first visit was as a young man in 1939 and it was always the country to which he wanted to return; the chance of doing so for even a day would have been impossible to resist. The landscape, the mountains, the natural history, the architecture, the people, the food, the feeling rural France evoked in him of a different pace of life, of a quieter, slower world – all drew him back time after time.
For the next twenty-five years after that Cherbourg lunch, France was the default for my own travel outside Britain. No cheap flights to the rest of Europe or further afield. My generation, like our parents, looked across the Channel to France as the first place abroad, the nearest source of another culture. A couple of visits with my parents before I left school and a first holiday without them when I was sixteen, trying and often failing to hitch-hike my way around with a friend. More holidays with friends when a student plus a day trip on a hovercraft to Boulogne for lunch again, which this time I ate – an enormous blow-out of seafood. Walking twice with my father in the Pyrenees in my twenties and skiing in the Alps with my future wife. Going to France felt natural.
Then for another twenty-five years, France became the opposite: a country to ignore, a country to hurry through. Or to fly over and avoid entirely. This new state of affairs arose when I went with my young family to live in Italy, settling in the hills north of Florence. France was now an obstacle, somewhere to get across quickly. Father had never been to Italy. He came with my mother to visit us willingly but I always had the feeling that he would have been happier had we moved to France instead. Italy absorbed us and adopted us, and Italian quickly pushed out my schoolboy French. We moved back to England a dozen years later but kept a part of our Italian life, returning at every opportunity. France, Britain’s closest continental neighbour, was now foreign.
That foreignness unsettled me. I felt European – I wanted to know the country across the Channel. To feel, if not at home as in Italy, at least an easy familiarity. The time had come to rediscover France, to fill in what had become an uneasy void in my mind. To do so I would cross the country, back to Italy, slowly, on foot. ‘Walking causes absorption… The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads,’ argues the French writer Frédéric Gros in A Philosophy of Walking . In walking through France, I would absorb the country – its geography, its nature, its history, its language and culture, all those things that had captivated my father down the years.
I would also at last be realising an idea I’d had on leaving school of doing exactly this, of crossing France on foot. The seeds for that included a passage in a John Buchan novel that enthused my teenage self. The hero of The House of the Four Winds , Jaikie Galt, has just left university and is walking alone on the Continent. Buchan conjures up landscapes and sensations with prose that seems a bit overblown now but it portrayed such an adventure as bliss to my young imagination:

[His journey] had led him through vineyards grey at the fringes with dust, through baking beet-fields and drowsy cornlands and solemn forests; up into wooded hills and flowery meadows, and once or twice almost into the jaws of the great mountains… He had walked and walked, seeking to travel and not to arrive, and making no plans except that his face was always to the sunrise… He began to rise whistling from his bed in a pine wood or in a cheap country inn, with a sense that the earth was very spacious and curious.

After a month on the road, puffing at his pipe after a fine supper, Jaikie feels that ‘he had walked himself into contentment’. (I think the pipe was part of the attraction for me.) I thought the world of Buchan at the time and I remember asking Father whether he was one of England’s great writers. He smiled gently and, without pouring on too much cold water, managed to convey that he did not see him in quite that light.
I hadn’t always liked walking. As a child it annoyed me, often. Why did our parents, and especially our father, always insist on walking? We walked everywhere during that holiday in Alderney, criss-crossing the island. Going to the beach always meant a walk to get there, we children grumbling. But the day of childhood walking that stands out from others was during another family holiday, my first proper visit to France. We got off a train at the stop before our destination for the day so that we could walk the last two or three miles across the hills. My siblings and I seethed – it was just incomprehensible. Why on earth would one want to do that? But I have another memory from the same holiday, of following a path marked every now and again with red and white horizontal flashes of paint, one below the other, daubed on rocks, on trees, on the corner of old farm buildings. Of eagerly seeking out these marks, a treasure hunt threading through the landscape. Of walking as a mystery, never knowing what’s ahead. As I grew older I slowly caught the bug. It infected me, thoroughly, and never left. And the idea of walking across France kept coming back.
Buchan’s Jaikie tramped across France into Germany. My teenage plan had been to walk to Spain; this was long before the Camino de Santiago became the draw that it is today but I had heard of the paths to Compostela. Now, for this journey, I would have to plot a route to Italy instead.
***
Where to start in France and where to cross into Italy? Had he still been alive, my father would surely have urged me to consult The Path to Rome . Written by one of his favourite authors, Hilaire Belloc – sometime Liberal MP and prolific man of letters – it is the account of a journey on foot to Italy in 1901. But Belloc started from Toul, where he had spent time in the French army, and Toul is in north-east France, well away from the Channel. Belloc’s path to Rome also took him into Switzerland along the way. Another possibility leading to the same destination would be to follow the Via Francigena, a recently revived pilgrim way from Canterbury to Rome, now a ‘cultural route’ of the Council of Europe. But again, this passes through Switzerland and anyway the idea of following a named path with its associated infrastructure for walkers did not appeal. I wanted something anonymous, something personal. Something to work out myself and then to deviate from if I had a better idea. My start and finish in fact needed little thought; the obvious choices were where we had always come into and out of France in our car-bound hurry across the country. Our standard entry was a ferry from Portsmouth to the little port of Ouistreham, in Normandy. And our usual exit was the Mont Blanc tunnel through the Alps, although this time I would go over the mountains rather than under them.
How to get between these start and end points? The days are long gone when you could walk on dusty, unpaved country roads, like Belloc or Buchan’s hero, just heading where you would, picki