A Beach Revisited - 9 April 2011
9th April 2011
On this Saturday we visit Villefranche and the beach I slept and lived on in July 1965, a few weeks before my 19th Birthday. I don’t even know where to start: that it was 46 years ago? That I was traveling, well hitching, around Europe with a friend? That I had a rucksack from the 40’s that I had sewn a Union Jack onto before leaving London – so that I wouldn’t be mistaken for an American. My money was stolen the first week and Marie gallantly agreed to lend me half of her $150. We lasted 3 months on this. Everyone once in a while we’d treat ourselves to a hostel or pension, but mainly it was beaches and fields that housed us.
I don’t know how we found our way down to Villefranche, but in some way I never left it. To be 18 and curl up in a sleeping bag on a beach, under the stars, with no fear! I can’t remember falling asleep those nights, but I remember waking up with the sun each morning, bathing in the sea – including brushing my teeth. And then, famished, we’d climb up the steep hill to a road at the top where there was a small grocery store. The same breakfast every morning: a banana, chocolate milk and a shared donut, sitting on a stone wall. Then we’d walk back down the hill to the beach and swim and sunbathe, smoke cigarettes, swim some more and gaze out to sea. I remember from where we were camped we could look along to the sea front where some ritzy boats were moored and a lone restaurant remained beyond our pocket and our reach. But apart from those few moments of longing to be “one of them” I felt both at peace and wild. It seemed perfectly natural to live like that.
Now, all these decades later, the place remains totally recognizable to me. Oh, sure, there are a few “modern” unattractive apartment buildings on the hillside where once there were only a few villas. But the sea front is unchanged, the buildings slightly shabby perhaps, yet still gay. A few more restaurants. We lunch at the one I couldn’t afford back then. Prawns with a vanilla sauce, daurade with squid and snow peas, the best tart tatin yet, deeply caramelized and accompanied by a rich vanilla ice cream. The restaurant bears what could have been my name back then – L’Orsin Bleu the blue urchin. For those five days I lived in my pale aqua bikini with its matching belt at the hip. We walk back along the bay and I see my spot on the beach. My impression is still there, my spore and my spirit. All that was wild and free is right there in the sand where those four young girls now lie.
When I get home I feel a deep urge to draw this place and what comes out is, I believe, the wild free place it must have been centuries ago.
