3. A track that reminds you of a holiday trip

I’ve never been on holiday. Not what most people would call a holiday anyway. When we were children, dad was always offshore working and when he was onshore the last thing he wanted to do was live out of a suitcase. I suppose that mum could have bundled us up and taken us somewhere, but quite apart from the indelicacy of sending a “wish you were here postcard” to the person stuck in a sardine tin 4 days from the surface in order to pay for it, I can’t imagine that it’s much of a holiday to be trapped in a strange country with 2 children and none of the stuff you usually have around to keep them occupied. I’m being very charitable here by not mentioning the fact that mums pale and romantic colouring means that if she ventures outside in daylight, she turns as red a lobster and so the thought of being in any place where the temperature’s more than 2 degrees above freezing really doesn’t appeal to her.

That’s not to say that we didn’t go places. We were always bombing off to stay with someone (or someone was always bombing off to stay with us) and as we all had houses deep in the middle of nowhere then it worked out to be more or less the same thing anyway. But that was normal life not a break from it. So I have some brief memories of being in the car, zooming from one place to another with music blaring. The Wall Side 2 was a hot summer’s day crossing over the Pennines, with the top down and that rollercoaster feeling you get in your stomach when the car hits a bump in the road. I loved that. I used to yell “go for the bumps dad” as we rolled along and being a well trained dad, he’d accelerate just as we hit them so that the car took off. Or, finding a country road and doing donuts, spinning the car round and round, faster and faster till it was hard to tell what was squealing louder – us or the tyres.

Just as the sun always shone during the day, it always seemed to rain when we were in the car at night. I remember being half asleep in the back seat, watching the glimmer of the lights on the dashboard, the streaks of the headlights of cars going the other way, rising and dipping out of sight, following the curves of the road. It was comforting. Mum and dad in the front, the warm smell of cigarette smoke and music playing more quietly than it did when we were awake (herebe and I could sleep through anything at that point – I wish I could now)but still loud enough to hear. Peter Gabriel’s Games without Frontiers was playing the night we drove back from E’s, the rain sliding silver down the window and balancing in a little pool of light at the base – I loved that song from the start although I did wonder for years why Kate Bush was singing “she’s so funky yeah” when it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the lyrics. (She was actually singing “jeux sans frontières” but I was many many years older when I discovered that)

I suppose that I could have gone jetting off when I was a student – backpacking round India or something but I never felt the need. For me university was a holiday; no rules, out every night and only 2 lectures a week (I only got that you were meant to be studying the rest of the time in my final term) and they gave you money to live on. When it came to the vacation, I wanted to go home to see my friends. I’m the only person I know of who does not have even one person from uni that they keep in touch with. I never really spoke to anyone at uni, (it took the rest of my corridor 2 months to discover that my room was inhabited) because all the things that they were discovering for the first time, I’d already done and I didn’t see the point of hanging round the student union drinking watered down beer when you had the whole of London to discover. So my last day at uni was the last day I spoke to the people I’d been there with and I never went back to do the graduation ceremony thing – I just didn’t see the point. (Mum still hasn’t forgiven me for that – she’d bought the most amazing hat to wear at the ceremony)

As a grown up, a holiday has been one of the things that F and I have never gotton round to doing. When we had the time, we didn’t have the money and when we had the money, we never had the time. It’s only now, 9 years on, when we’re both knackered, that we’re talking about a holiday somewhere and even the thought of booking it is turning into a logistical nightmare. Partly too the problem is that we both live so far away from our families that when we do have some spare time they take priority.

I suppose what it boils down to is that I don’t have that much wanderlust, there are places that I would love to see – LA, the Great Wall of China, Siberia, Iceland and the Antarctic (for all I love to lie out in the sun and get brown, I have a real obsession with snow and ice) but that’s about it. Mum and I try to dash off to Paris for a few days every year but that’s not really a holiday – it’s more like circuit training with espressos. One of my abiding memories of the first trip mum and I took to Paris is sitting in the café at the Samaritans dept store (we don’t do queues so much of our trip is spent wandering round the shops – much more satisfying anyway) – looking out the window at the Seine while in the background a barber shop quartet sang (in French) “Satisfaction” It was quite surreal.

Probably the closest I’ve ever come to a holiday is the first time I went to meet F’s parents. F was between bands at the time and I wasn’t working, so we planned to drive down there and stay for a month. The night before we left was the night that Princess Diana was killed and I had the channels (I can never sleep the night before I’m due to travel anywhere – even if its just taking the train to Newcastle and dad once told me that the soldiers in the first World War had christened this form of insomnia the “channels” – I don’t know if its true or not, but it’s a lovely way to describe it) so I sat up all night with F watching the news as it came in. We left the next day and drove down to Dover for the ferry. I’d done the crossing years ago when I went on a school trip but this time was different. For a start I didn’t believe that France and England were so close together. You could see the lights from Dover until you were nearly in Calais. I sat there the whole crossing – entranced by this liminalness – neither in one country or another but drifting, until I mentioned it to F and he pointed out that I was looking at the lights reflected from the ferry windows. England had disappeared out of sight quite quickly. By the time we got to Paris (where we were to spend a night before driving down to the south of France the next day) it was dark. My abiding image of that first journey is stopping at some traffic lights in a quiet square bordered by tall shuttered buildings and seeing three elderly Arab men in incandescent white robes, standing in the spilled light from a café door. Even to someone who had lived in London for years, the scene was so foreign, so outside of what I’d ever seen before, beautiful and strangely for a city, so still and quiet. It was as if we’d stepped outside of time, outside of reality. I’ve always loved the otherness of a city in the dead of night, when even the shadowy people who inhabit the fringes of the dark have gone and all that is left is the past. That’s why I don’t like new buildings. They’re built with no thought. Buildings are no longer a testament to man belief, whether that’s a belief in God or a belief in commerce, they’re thrown up not hewn and the stones don’t breathe.

The thermostat on the car broke just outside Notre Dame (which, if you’re going to break down is as good a place to break down as any) so F jerry rigged it with a paperclip. ( I have no idea how he did it – it’s a man thing - apparently you can stop the thermostat on a car registering that it’s overheating by bending a paperclip a certain way and attaching it to something in the depths of the engine and therefore the car doesn’t blow up or something) This was where I discovered that the French for paperclip is trombone, which explained my blank looks when F asked if I had a trombone in my handbag. Though my handbag contains many weird and mysterious items, a trombone wasn’t one of them on that particular occasion although obviously I’ve carried one ever since - just in case. At this point we were also completely lost (or as lost as you can be while parked outside one of the great landmarks of a country) so once it was fixed F phoned V and she drove to meet us and led us back to her flat.

Meeting V terrified me. She had been F’s first serious girlfriend, from when he was 15 to the time he left for LA. Even after he’d gone she’d continued to live with his parents until she got a job in Paris and she spent every holiday back with them. I’d never met a French girlfriend before, much less one who lived in Paris, so obviously I envisaged her being all long red fingernails, perfect coiffure and way more sophistication than I had. All I can remember of the first meeting is that she was tiny, ballerina small, with the biggest meltingest brown eyes I’d ever seen. I was bundled up in a blanket before I knew what had hit me and slept like a baby for the rest of the night. I woke the next morning to grey skies, an alien landscape and an inherited terror. Ripping through the grey morning was the moan of a siren, swelling and expanding into the skies. An air raid siren. A thousand war stories rushed through my head. My grandparents experiences; bombed out cities and concentration camps. This was not my land. It didn’t even feel like my planet. I was uprooted, in a different time and place. I could quite easily be in a country at war. There was no mistaking the sound. We had to leave. Now. A city was no place to be. The survival instinct kicked in.

I woke F, who explained that France still tested their sirens every so often. That frightened me more. I’d grown up with the second world war being something that had happened in living memory albeit the living memory of my grandparents. Even the First World War had touched me. My great granddad had taught me the Hindustani he remembered from working on the red cross ships, I could remember us singing Mademoiselle from Armentieres (parley voos?) together If it hadn’t been for the war I wouldn’t exist – or at least not as me. Now, with this sound, the horror of what war was, bombing, bereavement, estrangement – the antithesis of being - was brought home to me. This land did not have war as a memory of growing up, dancing with soldiers and digging for victory. Nor, did it have the devil-may-care attitude Grandpa T gifted his time in the camps with – something that was so terrible the only way you could speak of it was as a game, watery soup, sawdust cigarettes, black market dealings. This land was the cold march of troops on tarmac, of tanks rolling down streets and the dread hanging horror of it happening once more.

We set off for the South and the sun came out as we drove. I was overwhelmed at the vastness of the land. I’d grown up in the Pennines so I was used to high skies, but at some point they did fall to meet the tops of the moors. Here there was not that delineation. The horizon wavered miles before us, unreachable. We drove all day, chasing a sun that seemed to be so much stronger and so much further away than it was at home. Stopping off for coffees at roadside cafes, watching as the fields gave way to vineyards and the horizon became broken by a line of mountains. When darkness fell, we passed a nuclear power station. Vast it was, suspended darker than the dark, lit by great floodlights of white and red, carved out of mountains which dwarfed it and made of us something less significant than ants. Sirens and nuclear stations, mountains taller than any I’d ever seen. This was a strange land, we would never stop travelling, just F and I in a small car moving through the night.

Looming larger than the rocks on either side of us was the knowledge that each mile was bringing me closer to meeting his mum and dad. After all, it wouldn’t be under the most auspicious of circumstances. The summer previously, F had gone home. To be married. I’d seen the photos. Now, a scant year later he was making the same journey home. With me. Despite the circumstances we’d met in, I’d never thought of F and I being together as being wrong. It had always felt like the universe had gone through a slight hiccup to put things the way things should be – realigning so that we could be together. Yet as we grew nearer, I realised that others might not see it the same way. His parents hadn’t taken the news of his marriage break up as being especially good news (I don’t think they were being particularly unreasonable in this, they didn’t know me and my own family weren’t exactly thrilled that I’d broken up a marriage, no matter how brief it had been) and though they had always been unfailingly polite to me when I’d spoken to them on the phone, it was a guarded courtesy.

It was essential that they like me. Not for myself, although I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t want to be liked for me. But if F and I were going to be together - and I was sure that we were – then it was important for our future, for the life we’d make together, for any children we might have, that our families fused too. Sure, F and I could live quite happily without their approbation. But that wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. Family is very important to me. I don’t have any false picture of a family as a happy-clappy Brady bunch, I understand that a family is a howling wolf pack, ripping and snarling at each other in an unending battle to become top dog. Interfamily wars are one of the great joys of life – after all who will watch your back as well as someone who has a vested interest in sticking their own knife in it? I don’t think that you have to like them, see them or speak to them if you so choose, but at the same time, I know how it feels to be alienated from your family, a part of your heart constantly open and bleeding. You get used to the ache, you can laugh through it, feed the fire of self-righteous anger, but it never goes away and the pain permanently bubbling up to the surface has such an accompanying feeling of wrongness that it taints everything you touch.

It seemed right somehow that I’d meet them after a long journey through a land that I didn’t understand, felt no pull towards, had no roots in. It seemed right to, as we drew up beside their home and were met in the hall, that F’s mum seemed to be cold and forbidding, greeting me with a formal kiss. I remember going up to the apartment in the tiny lift and the heavy wooden door with their name on it. I remember their cat, Popeye, sitting on the dining room table – and that he got me through the first 5 minutes of frantic greetings once we were inside the flat. I remember entering a strange kitchen – so tidy and organised, and the spaghetti Bolognese that I was too tired to eat. I remember waking the next morning in an unfamiliar room with a tiled floor and heavy iron shutters on the window. I remember struggling with the unfamiliar catch and the sunlight pouring in as I swung them open, the unfamiliar shape of Mount Faron overwhelming the view. I remember that I didn’t in the least feel uncomfortable or ill at ease as I usually did in a strange house, but swung into my clothes and wandered into the kitchen, helping myself to coffee and rifling through the cupboard until I found some brioche. I didn’t know I was looking for brioches because I didn’t know what a brioche was. I was looking for croissants as obviously all French people only ever ate croissants for breakfast (apart from F who never ate breakfast).

I was just at that nice stage; halfway down my second coffee and my first cigarette and all was well with the world, when F and his mum came into the kitchen. They’d been in the basement - F had left a pedal there when he’d gone to America and though he had been home several times since then, it became of paramount importance for him to find it that morning. I understood that. There are places you have to touch when you go back home just to make sure that though the wallpaper might be different, the vital things remain unchanged. It was nice too, not to be treated as a guest but to be left to find my own way around the house, not to be the centre of pressing attention but to float amongst a language I didn’t understand. I think that the joy of discovering this is the reason that I’ve never really properly learnt to speak French. I can get by, I can follow a conversation, but to not have to make conversation – even of the briefest sort – is so restful that I look forward to my time there as a time to switch off the world.

The days passed in a progression of sun and sea and sand. A long slow breakfast of bitter black coffee and then F would begin his pacing with the phone, chattering twenty to the dozen to one of the countless musician friends who’d discovered that he was home. I’d sit at the kitchen table while his mum prepared the lunch and, in between peeling and paring, she’d tell me the history of her family. Stories from the past: of F’s childhood, of her own and her husbands, family histories. Who was who and what they’d done. It was important to me to know his past as well as I knew my own, to have stories that maybe one day I could pass on from my own kitchen table.

It had never occurred to me that maybe F’s mum had felt as nervous of meeting me as I had been of meeting her and that her view of an English girlfriend had been the same as my view of a French one. The reality was that my own ignorance of French custom had taken the formality of the first greeting as her state of mind towards me when that hadn’t been the case at all. I was used to the North East – where people either spoke to you or didn’t, depending on their mood and where introductions are something you do if you remember to in the split second before a character judgement has made all future negotiation pointless. The reality was that F’s parents had accepted me from the first.

After lunch we’d grab out towels and head for the beach, usually Hyere and spend the afternoon lying in the sun. I lapped it up like a lizard, getting warm into the marrow of my bones. Then, at sunset we’d return to the flat for F’s mum to shoo us off for a siesta as “the sea air is very tiring”. .

Some mornings we’d wake very early and go fishing with F’s dad. Though he spoke no English and my French was limited, we had long silent conversations, in which a single glance spoke for hours. I hadn’t realised until F told me some time later, that the frequency of my being on the boat was a mark of his regard as here; as in Newcastle, a woman on a fishing boat was considered unlucky. I discovered a knack for it, splitting still writhing scarlet and green worms with my fingernails, twisting them round the hook and casting off, feeling the most delicate of shudders on the line and spinning in something that for the weight on the line seemed so incredibly small. On one of the trips I caught a starfish. F’s dad dried it in the sun for me and, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and balanced on my knee, it survived the long drive back to London. When I dust the shelf its on, I’m always tempted to resubmerge it, as if the touch of water will bring it back to being that miraculous scarlet star – as if a ruby had suddenly sprouted legs and gone skittering off across the seabed.

The rocking of the boat on the Mediterranean; a sea so much warmer, so much more maternal than my own cold North Sea, the tug of the line, the heavily occupied silence that surrounds fishermen and arching above it all, a sun so bright the sky was white. Then, when the weight of the heat became too much, to jump off the boat into water so clear it was like swimming in light, searching for sea urchins, their prickly shells hiding the tiniest slivers of bright orange, salty sweet.

Worries about life (what I intended to do with it), job (I didn’t have one), apartment (see job), bills (see job), had all faded in this dreamland I’d created for myself. I felt protected here. Safe. Nothing could touch me. It was not my language, it was not my land. I’d made it all up, it was a mirage fashioned from sun and sea.

After dinner in the evening – languorous many coursed meals – we’d wander along the “>main port stopping at one of the cafés and lingering for hours over an espresso. By now I’d caught the French way of drinking coffee – holding the sugarcube just touching the top, watching it inch up the block one grain at a time and then crumble – continually stirring and smoking and chatting and only actually knocking the stuff back in the minute before you got up to leave.

Other nights we’d meet up with F’s friends for a jam. Sometimes this would be in a bar and F would be dragged up to play a few numbers, more often we’d drive deep into the countryside, past Cézannes mountain trailing long country roads until we found whatever barn had been requisitioned for the night.

The sheer number of people who turned up each time amazed me. Fifteen or twenty people all loaded with food and wine and instruments (including a guitar for F who never travels with one on the basis that there are a people planted on this planet whose sole purpose in life is to loan him guitars when he pitches up in their part of the world. I’m not joking here) I wasn’t used to someone having that many friends – much less from a place he’d left years before. Some of them I already knew. Big O (the bass player) so called to differentiate him from little O (the singer) had both followed F to London when he came back from America and had lived with him in the tumbledown house on the North Circular, C the chef who’d ended up in London (and therefore the tumbledown house on the North Circular) after taking a wrong turn on the way to Tibet. R, the jazz pianist who looked like Jesus and refused to learn any of the standards lest his own ideas be polluted but who could play like a dream when the mood for melody struck him (and who had also stayed in the tumbledown house on the North Circular for a while).

It was nice to sit there. By the fire, outside. Like being caught inside a painting. Listening to the muffled thump of the drums cutting through the stone, the faint shadow of laughter and conversation, the continuous wavering of the crickets melting the darkness into soft wet indigo, secure in the knowledge that the language barrier meant that no fucker would even try to attempt all 163 verses of “Like a Rolling Stone”.

I think it was after one of those nights that we sat on the bed and talked until morning. No particular conversation – just a jumble of memories and stories and then the decision to open the door of the bureaux, surprising a whole stack of tapes that F hadn’t seen for years. All the bands he’d been in – from the first French band when he was 12 right through the LA years to the last still sealed envelope containing the masters of his last band. His past. Literally on tape. So we listened to them all and then, somewhere towards the bottom of the pile was one that wasn’t his.

I had no idea who it was. But from the first notes of the piano, I got goose bumps. From the utter perfection of the playing, no tune, just raindrop notes plucked out of the air, falling between the rise and fall and tears of the voice.

And so we rewound the tape and played it again. And between the rise and fall and tears of the voice was the rise and fall of my mans voice - translating…

…I shall invent
senseless words
which you will understand.
I shall tell you about
those lovers who
saw twice
their hearts
go up in flames.
I shall tell you
the story of this king
dead
for not having succeeded
in finding you

Ladies and gentlemen. I give you Jacques BrelNe me quitte pas. If you only check out one song of the twenty that I shall (eventually) get round to putting up - make it this one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Twenty Tracks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.