Throughout my childhood, I always spent my holidays at my grandfather’s house. He lived in Vitré, in Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany but he had a tiny cottage on the island of Noirmoutier, where we would spend the summer. These visits were always a time of celebration, bringing together the members of my mother’s family that we only saw once or twice a year – a cheery, riotous crowd comprising of my mother’s sisters; her aunts and uncles; her grandmother and, of course, my grandfather, who loved to see the family together.
I remember those holidays well: we would take the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Saint-Malo, which I loved for its battlements, cobbled streets and swashbuckling history, as well as its seafood restaurants and its many confiseries, selling chocolate seashells and patates de Saint-Malo (made from new potatoes, powdered almond and liqueur). From there we would drive (rather slowly) to my grandfather’s house in Vitré, where we would stay for a couple of days before moving on to the seaside.
Vitré is a lovely old medieval town, with a castle, an ancient church and a labyrinth of narrow, cobbled streets that make up the old quarter. I could see the turrets of the nearby château from my bedroom at night, illuminated in brilliant white. As a small child, I often confused this magical scene with the name of the nearby town of Châteaubriant (château brilliant), and for many years insisted on giving Vitré castle this inaccurate, if poetic name. On Sundays, there was a market, and my grandfather would buy me galette-saucisse (sausage wrapped in crepe) from one of the open stalls there, which we would eat in the Jardin des Plantes, the rather grand old park that runs along the side of the Boulevard de Châteaubriant.
Sometimes we would drive out to one of the nearby towns – Rennes, where we liked to sit at the terrasse of one of the cafés on what locals call the Rue de la Soif (literally, street of thirst) – or Fougères, with its spectacular castle and its ancient battlements. Sometimes, we would go walking in the magical forest of Brocéliande, or drive to the Mont Saint-Michel, which I loved for its literary associations (I was brought up on old adventure novels like Paul Féval’s La Fée des Grèves), and feared in almost equal measure for its sables mouvants – the notorious quicksand surrounding the Mont, which, according to legend, has swallowed travellers who thought that they could beat the tide.
There was an old bicycle in the garage at Vitré. It was a tandem, dating back to the second world war – old-fashioned, heavy and cumbersome. No one ever used it. But my grandfather told me that when he and my grandmother were young, they rode it all the way along the Loire from Orléans to St Nazaire, going from castle to castle and sleeping by the roadside. This story seemed to me to be both romantic and extraordinary – my grandmother died when I was small, and this was one of the very few things that I knew about her. The Noirmoutier house was bought for her, in the hope that she and my grandfather would one day retire there. Sadly, that never happened, but on our way to Noirmoutier, we often followed parts of the route that they had taken together, my parents at a steady pace, me with my grandfather, who knew every road and side-road, and often took elaborate detours to show me places of special interest.
Thus I came to know his and my grandmother’s favourite haunts: the castle of Azay-le-Rideau, on its little island on the Indre river; Orléans, and the cathedral, where he always insisted on lighting a candle to Jeanne d’Arc, even though he was no Catholic, and always claimed to despise the church; the city of Tours, with its medieval buildings and little cobbled streets.
We had friends in La Bohalle, a tiny village not far from Angers, surrounded by fields of sunflowers and sweetcorn, and we often stayed a few days there as we meandered through Brittany. The family had two boys my age, and we used to swim in the treacherous Loire and explore the islands and sandbanks there, much to my mother’s alarm (our escapades on the river eventually made it into one of my books, Five Quarters of the Orange).
Our last stop was always Noirmoutier, one of the many islands on the Atlantic coast of the Vendée. My grandparents had been coming there since the war, when my aunt, then aged seven, had become ill with pneumonia, and a doctor had recommended the island’s warm climate as a cure. Nowadays, there is a bridge linking the island to the mainland, but when I was a child, we could only reach it via the Passage du Gois, a causeway accessible only at low tide.
This causeway is still in use; a narrow road lined with balises – raised emergency shelters, for those unwary travellers who inevitably misjudge the speed of the rising tide. It’s a good place to find shellfish, and I used to go there at low tide and dig for razor clams. Even now, the strong scent of the mud-flats at low tide brings it rushing back to me – the taste of grilled clams on a barbecue; the sea wind on my face; the cries of gulls on the deserted beach.
In those days, tourists were few, and I was able to cycle or walk all over the island: now, there are more tourists, more roads, and cycling is sometimes hazardous, but there are still plenty of quiet roads from which to observe the wildlife – much of the island is a bird sanctuary, with narrow roads between the salt marshes and the dunes. I used to go sailing, too, with my grandfather in his old fishing-boat, or diving, to look for sea-horses over the wreck of an old first world war plane that still lies, swallowed up by weed, on the sandy ocean floor.
I spent the greater part of all my childhood holidays there on the island, and when my daughter was born, returned with her every year to revisit the places I had loved as a child. The past is a foreign country, but sometimes we are lucky enough to find it again as adults, through our children, our memories and the scent of the salt-flats.
Illustrations: Ella Johnston
