Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
spaghetti, I decided I could live with this after seeing what the muscular, white-coated ladies of the Spa
institutes do to you if they detect so much as a twinge in your periarticulars or suspect any backsliding
among the dermals. The photographs showed a frankly worried-looking female patient being variously
covered in tar, blown around a shower stall with a high-pressure hose, forced to recline in bubbling copper
vats and otherwise subjected to a regimen that in other circumstances would bring ineluctably to mind the
expression 'war crimes'. I looked at the list of the town's approved doctors to see if Josef Mengele
appeared anywhere, but the only memorable name was a Dr Pitz. Resisting the impulse to ring him up and
say, 'Well, are you?', I went instead to a small hotel recommended to me by the man in the tourist office.
I showered, dined, had a diverting stroll through the town and repaired to a convivial little bar on the Rue
Royale for an evening with Martin Gilbert's grave and monumental
Second World War.
It is not a pub book, I
can tell you now. You read a bit and before long you find yourself staring vacantly around you and longing for
a conversation.
But hardly anyone in Wallonia speaks English. I began to regret that I didn't understand French well
enough to eavesdrop. I took three years of French in school, but learned next to nothing. The trouble was
that the textbooks were so amazingly useless. They were always written by somebody clearly out of touch
with the Francophile world - Prof. Marvis Frisbee of the Highway 68 State Teachers College at Windsock,
North Dakota, or something - and at no point did they intersect with the real world. They never told you any
of the things you would need to know in France - how to engage with a bidet, deal with a toilet matron or
kneecap a queue jumper. They were always tediously preoccupied with classroom activities: hanging up
coats in the cloakroom, cleaning the blackboard for the teacher, opening the window, shutting the window,
setting out the day's lessons. Even in the seventh grade I could see that this sort of thing would be of limited
utility in the years ahead. How often on a visit to France do you need to tell someone you want to clean a
blackboard? How frequently do you wish to say, 'It is winter. Soon it will be spring'? In my experience,
people know this already.
I could never understand why they couldn't make the textbooks more relevant to the adolescent mind
and give us chapters with topics like 'Gerard et Isabelle Engage dans some Heavy Petting' or 'Claude a
son Premier Wet Dream. C'est Magnifique!' At the very least they could have used comic books.
I woke to find rain streaming down the windows. The streets were half flooded and the cars below
whooshed as they passed. I went out to cash a traveller's cheque and window shopped along the Place
Verte, sheltering beneath awnings on which the rain drummed steadily and rather soothingly. Every shop
was filled with the most tempting foodstuffs - La Raclette Fromagerie, with cheeses the size of automobile
tyres; the Boucherie Wagener, where strings of sausages hung in the window and slices of smoked
Ardennes ham lay stacked in pink piles; La G￢terie, where the window was a delirium of marzipan fruits,
hyperventilating cream cakes and other frothy delights. How clever these continentals are with their shop
windows. Even the windows of chemists are so tidy and clean and scrupulously arranged that you find
yourself gazing longingly at corn plasters and incontinence pads.
When I reached the last shop, I stared emptily at the Place Verte, not certain what to do with myself,
and decided impulsively to push on to Durbuy in the hope that the weather would be better there. This was
unlikely, considering that Durbuy was only fifteen miles away. None the less, thanks to the bewildering
peculiarities of the Belgian railway system, to get to Durbuy took most of the morning and required three
separate (albeit short) journeys and even then I couldn't quite get there, as Durbuy has no station. The
closest I could get was Barvaux, which on the map is about half a millimetre to the left of Durbuy, but which in
reality is four kilometres away, with a monumentally steep hill in between. Even from the station I could hear
trucks straining to climb it. But at least the rain had stopped.
I thought I'd take a cab, but there were none at the station, so I walked into the town - a large village
really - looking for a bus stop or a cab office, and went into a hotel on the main street and discovered from
the dour patroness that Barvaux had neither cabs nor buses. In my best schoolboy French I asked how one
then gets to Barvaux when one is sans l'auto. I braced for the lady to put a dead beaver on the counter, but
instead she just said, ' pied, monsieur,' and gave me one of those impassive Gallic shrugs - the one
where they drop their chin to belt level and try to push their ears to the top of their head with their shoulders.
You have to be Gallic to do it. It translates roughly as 'Life is a bucket of shit, monsieur, I quite agree, and
