That’s the Sparknotes synopsis. Here’s the real story, the honest to God truth (mostly), right from the beginning, which is sometime around noon last Wednesday.
We went back to London in the late afternoon (Jaysus, again?), heading for the British Library before visiting the Fortune Theatre, the second smallest West End theatre, for the thriller-drama The Woman in Black. After a reconnaissance mission to find Tash after missing the tube to King’s Cross, we came up to the brick building where D. Nix, ominously enough, told us he’d like to be buried. Even though the outside of the spot was nothing to write home about (despite the fact that I’m writing about it, and it will inevitably be read at home – that’s a stupid saying), inside it there’s the world’s biggest library collection. So that’s pretty cool.
And I’m not just talking about Harry Potter books, either. There were stacks and stacks, reaching up to the ceiling, of really old books, books that require a library card and a handwritten note from Jesus to look at. Those reading rooms were off limits to lowly ol’ us, but we did have access to the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, a free public gallery of manuscripts and generally cool stuff. Things like the handwritten lyrics to “Yesterday” by the Beatles, Beethoven’s tuning fork, a Da Vinci notebook, a Guttenberg Bible, and the freakin’ Magna Carta, the oh-so-important charter from 1215 that limited the king from being above the law (the king in question was John, otherwise known as the douchebag lion from Disney’s Robin Hood), amongst other things.
Radiating douchieness
Totally unexpected and a cool pit stop. The Pasadena Public Library only has the handwritten lyrics to “Maggie Madigan: Titanic Survivor” by the Sharecroppers.
For the evening show, after going out to a Piccadilly Thai restaurant, we piled into the 432-seater venue. The Woman in Black has been on the go for the last 23 years (that makes it the second-longest running show in the West End, if you’ve been paying attention), and it’s a pretty novel concept – story and acting aren’t thrown on the back burner, but it’s really all about getting an audience response. It’s a ghost story, one that makes The Veil look like a bigger piece of crap than it already was, and it’s scary.
An old dude, Arthur Kipps, is trying to tell his story, and so he gets help from an actor, who turns the monologue of his soliciting visit to the secluded Eel Marsh House into a stage show. The whole thing was a play within a play, and as the story moved on, the atmosphere got a whole lot creepier; Kipps was sent north to go over some things regarding Alice Drablow’s last will and testament, but once he gets there, he keeps having unexpected run-ins with a woman dressed in long black shawls. I won’t give anything away – even though there isn’t a hell of a lot to give away . . . I’m sure you already figured out she was a ghost – but the show relied on sudden black outs, appearances, tense atmosphere, shrilling screams, and the creepy (albeit obvious) ending, followed by the woman in black taking her bow from the very back of the veiled stage, with a light shining on her face for just a moment.
Now that I was good and terrified, it was time for the horror to get real; myself and Kayla broke off from the rest of the group at Holborn, heading to the outskirts of London with our bookbags and packed lunch from Tesco, bound for a hostel with the inventive name of Hostel 639. Located at 639 Harrow Road, earning terrible reviews on Hostelworld, and costing £6.50 a night. That’s less than the train ticket from Harlow would have been in the morning . . . so, score?
Mary gave us both a kiss goodbye, playing her odds that at least one of us was going to get shanked in Hostel 639. Thank God we were only there for about 6 hours; we set the alarm for 4:30 am, giving us enough time to get our things together and make our escape back to St. Pancras for the morning train into Paris.
And, to be fair, the rooms weren’t that bad. The shower was in the same room as the six other beds, so you’d have to hope you didn’t get stuck with any weirdos . . . we ended up with a Polish guy who’s playing the romantic role of a travelling, working vagabond that only twenty-somethings can really get away with. He didn’t steal any of our stuff, or shank us.
We made our move when most people were either asleep or still up, finding that the closest tube station was closed and trying our luck with a bus to Trafalgar Square. All eyes were on our watches when we got to Piccadilly, to take the tubes to St. Pancras – lucky for us, we made it to the station in good time, went through security, found our seats, and got comfortably positioned for a tea and a nap.
The weather leaving England was what you’d expect: foggy and dreary. I half-noticed when we went into a long stretch of darkness – the Chunnel, stretching for 50 clicks beneath the English Channel – and as we got farther into France, the sun started shining a bit brighter. By the time we got to Paris, we barely needed our heavy coats anymore.
From Hostel 639, our hotel – actually called Hotel Cheap Beds – seemed like the height of luxury. Before that, though, we had to figure out the metro system . . . which wasn’t so easy, since the nearest station, Rosny-Bois-Perrier, is actually on the train system, and not the underground. Frustration ensued, especially when we got on the right line, but a train that didn’t stop at Rosny-Bois-Perrier. Jaysus. When we got it right, we were in the slums of Paris . . . which, to be fair, is where I should have expected to find a spot called Hotel Cheap Beds.
Yup, it's real
Don’t talk to strangers. I should know that, but when the weirdos came up to me, I still made eye contact. How I didn’t get shanked at all this week, I’m still not sure.
Once we dropped off our stuff, we set out to explore Paris in a whirlwind. And we did a pretty good job of it. We went first to the Île de la Cité, an island smack dab in the middle of the Seine (smack dab in the middle of Paris) that’s home to the Gothic Notre Dame Cathedral. The cathedral was completed in 1345, houses the Crown of Thorns that Jesus wore to his crucifixion (seriously), saw the coronation of Napolean, and nearly fell in obscurity until Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1831, a novelisation based on the Disney movie from 1996.
"Your attention to historical accuracy made us so happy, we're
changing our minds -- maybe we won't all die in the end after all."
It was really cool to get to walk around inside it, even if the dark interior was a little bit underwhelming. After that, we made our way along the Seine, stopping every so often at booths selling Eiffel Tower keychains, before we came to the Louvre.
Ah, the Louvre. The place where Mary Magdalene is buried and where every painting gives you some clue about a Parisian adventure.
"This plot makes no sense! Tell the people!"
It’s also a huge art gallery, housed in the Louvre Palace from the 12th century, in addition to being the most visited art museum in the world and taking up over 60,000 square metres.
Again, it was the whirlwind tour. I’ve heard something along the lines of, if you took 4 seconds to look at everything, it would take you about 3 months to get through the whole museum. Still, we managed to see the Mona Lisa, Aphrodite of Milos (Venus de Milo), the gigantic Raft of the Medusa, and the winged Victory of Samothrace.
As the sun set on Paris, we strolled through the Tuileries Garden, making our way along the spectacular Avenue des Champs-Élysées, with the majestic Arc de Triomphe at the western end, lit up in twilight with rows of car headlights zooming beneath. Somewhere in the midst, just across the river, the Eiffel Tower, that signature image from the 1889 World’s Fair that was once considered an eyesore, was illuminated in a golden glow.
The subway stations may smell like piss, but this snapshot of Paris lived up to the good stereotypes of the city. If you’ve only got one night to spend with a gal at your side, you could do a whole lot worse than this.
We pointed ourselves towards the Tower on the horizon, finding a convenience store en route. Rather than go into one of the restaurants along the boulevard where the cheapest thing was some cheese for £25 (I’ll take my chunk of Black Diamond marble for $7, thank you very much), we got sandwiches and snacks, and went looking for a bench.
Somehow, we lost the Eiffel Tower. Considering that we technically right next to it before, and that there’s a limit on the acceptable height of the Parisian skyline, I think that was basically akin to being on Marine Atlantic and misplacing the ocean. Once we turned the right corner, though, there it was, a huge glowing pike. Right next to it, in a scant glade of trees quickly losing the last of their leaves, was an empty park bench. Just as we sat down, the twinkling lights of the tower that go off for five minutes at the top of every hour started up.
You don’t get to pick your moments. All you can do is decide what to do when you get lucky enough to get them.
By the time we finished our light lunch, the temperature was dropping to what you’d expect on an autumn night. No matter how many pictures you see, no matter how many times you try to picture how high 1,000 feet is, standing beneath the Eiffel Tower is still an overwhelmingly sublime moment. Just stretches of crisscrossing metal, woven into four huge supports and reaching into the night.
The lineup to get to the top was long, and as we approached, the fog started moving in. Not a big deal, we thought.
Ok, it was a big deal, and as we ascended via two separate elevators, visibility dropped. A lot. From the very top, a narrow circular platform enclosed by mesh wire, literally all we could see was a dense wall of orange-ish fog. When the wing blew, it went right to the bones. Lower levels offered a bit more of a view of the Paris night, monuments like the Arc de Triomphe and the long lawn of the Champ de Mars sticking out like a sore (but pretty) thumb.
After a long day of navigating a foreign city, I was about ready to call it quits, but we still had some wandering to do, through the area near the Tower known as Les Invalides, to get a metro line that would take us back to our beds. Give me a map of the Paris metro right now, give me time to study it, and I still won’t have a clue how it works. So, when I was that tired and sore, our first day in the city, it’s a wonder we didn’t end up in Brussels.
Once we got back to our railroad station by the hotel, we were guided by an obnoxious neon glow changing colours on the skyline, coming from a massive Saturn auto dealer. That obnoxious neon glow would save us a few nights later – but more on that soon.
Adam and Alyson had come from London later in the day, but we met up with them when we got back to Cheap Beds and had a real struggle trying to order train tickets to Albert for the next morning with a non-working Visa and an iPhone.
By the time we finally climbed into bed, we could count the number of hours left until we had to get up and do it all again. Way hey and away we go.
* * *
I don’t like European showers. In Harlow, I couldn’t figure out how to raise the shower head for a good month and a half, so I literally had to crouch every morning to get anywhere above my kneecaps wet. I still don’t have the temperature quite figured out. Anyway, in Hotel Cheap Beds, there is no fixture to attach the shower head to the wall, and the pressure is strong. So, if you drop the thing while you’re lathering yourself up, I can assure you that you will flood the bathroom and a bit of the main room, and that you will spend more time than you’d like to wringing out a drenched towel. Keep this in mind.
Bleary-eyed as usually, we trudged to the train station and went back to Gare du Nord, a fairly central station in Paris that would take us to the northern part of the country. It was early on November 11, and we expected to be at Amiens, and then Albert, well before 11 o’clock.
As a Newfoundlander, and a pretty proud one at that, the chance to be right here, right now cannot be understated. On the morning of July 1, 1916, the Newfoundland Regiment (later the Royal Newfoundland Regiment – they were the only regiment from the First World War to get the prefix addition by King George V), a hastily assembled group of young men from the tiniest outports of the overseas English dominion (remember, WWI comes before Confederation) were stationed at Beaumont-Hamel, near the British frontlines. The Battle of the Somme stretched for miles in the area, a divided battleground between British and German forces in the Somme Valley; Beaumont-Hamel was right in the midst. The plan was for the Brits to sweep the Germans in a surprise wave of attach – the so-called “Big Push” – and for the Newfoundlanders to come afterwards, bringing heavy equipment to reclaim some significant French territory. It ought to have worked, and yet things went wrong right from the get go. Wires weren’t cut. Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, the site of a timed British explosion that was meant to distract enemy forces, was set off too early. The Germans knew there would be an attack.
Other than August 9, 1945, the first day of the Somme Offensive was the bloodiest day in military history, with tens of thousands of casualties from all along the battle lines. For the Newfoundlanders, however, they lost over 90% of their battalion strength on the fields of Beaumont Hamel. Imagine being in Newfoundland a hundred years ago, being in a community of 200 people, and having to deal with that kind of loss of young people, the kind that affects everyone. It was only last year that Brian Pinksen, a young man from Corner Brook, was killed in Afghanistan, and just about everyone on the west coast of the island knew something about it and was shook up over it. Trying to put yourself into the shoes of the crowd back home on the morning after July 1, 1916 is next to impossible.
“It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further” – so said Major-General Sir Beauvoir De Lisle on the Newfoundlanders' contribution shortly afterwards. Pretty big words.
That was the context going to Beaumont-Hamel that morning. It was a bitterly cold morning – colder even than the boat in Stockholm – a cold that was damp and heavy and somehow fitting for the occasion. We had an hour wait in Amiens, and just about froze in the station.
When we got to Albert, a tiny village a few kilometres from the battle site, the fog still lay heavy on everything, and the town was deathly quiet. A cab left with a group of English students, and we had a good wait for her to come back for us.
It was at this point that a solitary English guy remarked on how long we’d actually have to wait for the cab to get back – about half an hour – and asked where we were headed. “Oh, Beaumont-Hamel?” says he. “I’m getting picked up by some friends, going right by there – maybe they can give you a ride.”
When the van pulled up, the elderly couple who owned a bed and breakfast – if you’re ever in Albert, stay in Ocean Villas. They deserve this plug – not only let us squeeze into their backseat and offered us a ride back in the evening, but Dickie, the English guy who gave us the hookup in the first place, volunteered to lie in the trunk until we got to where we were going.
Say what you will about the people in France, but you’d be hard pressed to find people anywhere who would do that for you.
I already said it bone-chilling cold, and I wasn’t exaggerating. Still, once you wandered along the green fields of France that had been the site of a battle you’ve grown up hearing about, it’s easy enough to forget the chill that rocks your shoulders or the mud soaking your shoes. After a ceremony at the Caribou monument – an exact replica stands in Bowring Park – we set off on our own, walking along the very same trenches that were once the English front lines, into No Man’s Land, and towards a replica of the Danger Tree, a solitary landmark on the battle field that, when the artillery onslaught began on that terrible morning, the Newfoundlanders flocked to in hopes of avoiding certain death. As such, it provided a target for the Germans, and became a virtual Newfoundland graveyard in a matter of moments.
There was a visitor’s centre at the edge of the site, a collection playing traditional music from home and a true validation of the calibre of the people from this province, and how being an underdog doesn’t mean that you’re not important. Sometimes it takes leaving home to realize what you have.
Two graveyards stood on the site, as many graves unmarked as were personalised. More than that, we were told that there were still hundreds of undiscovered bodies buried throughout the site – the Beaumont-Hamel site is thus regarded as a graveyard as well as a historic site. We spent some time weaving through the close-packed white tombstones.
When I was 19, I was worried about not being near my cell phone and missing a text. What about this guy? I’ve tried to picture the evening of June 30 before, tried to imagine what I would have thought a few years ago if I was in that position, but I can’t do it. I could never quite get there, but standing there on Remembrance Day, looking out over the quiet fields that were once alive with death and destruction, I might have finally figured it out.
They were thinking about home. How they couldn’t wait to get out of the miserable trenches and get back to St. John’s, to Gambo, to Burin, to whatever little nook of that island meant the world to them. And most of them never got that chance.
You definitely don’t get to pick your moments. Life takes care of that for you. But, you can take them in your hands as soon as they come, hang on to them as tight as you can so they don’t slip through your fingers. Because no matter how many times, following a military conflict, people shake their heads and say never again, it happens again, and there will always be people who give up their special moments so someone else can have them. That’s why my trip to Beaumont-Hamel was in the midst of a vacation, why I’m halfway around the world right now, living in a dream world but, at the same time, listening to Christmas music that puts me right in my basement in Pasadena on December 24, watching It’s A Wonderful Life with some pretty important people.
Lest we forget that, and just how important that is.
The rest of the story comes later – the volta, the move from the fog-drenched barrows of Beaumont-Hamel to the overcrowded cartoon world of Disneyland Paris. It’s all important, all a part of the story – all a part of making the most of what you’ve got. All a part of a weekend to remember.
Cheers,
rb
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