Bill Bryson: Notes from a small Island

The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretence that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Oh, yes, I know you are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe near by and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday on the Med, but it's not near by in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is. If your concept of world geography was shaped entirely by what you read in the papers and saw on television, you would have no choice but to conclude that America must be about where Ireland is, that France and Germany lie roughly alongside the Azores, that Australia occupies a hot zone somewhere in the region of the Middle East, and that pretty much all the other sovereign states are either mythical (viz., Burundi, El Salvador, Mongolia and Bhutan) or can only be reached by spaceship. Consider how much news space in Britain is devoted to marginal American figures like Oliver North, Lorena Bobbitt, and OJ.

Simpson a man who played a sport that most Britons don't understand and then made commercials for rental cars and that was it and compare that with all the news reported in any year from Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. It's crazy really. If there's a political crisis in Italy or a nuclear spill in Karlsruhe, it gets maybe eight inches on an inside page. But if some woman in Shitkicker, West Virginia, cuts off her husband's dick and flings it out the window in a fit of pique, it's second lead on the 9 O'clock News and The Sunday Times is mobilizing the 'Insight' team. You figure it.

I can remember, after I had been living about a year in Bournemouth and bought my first car, fiddling with the car radio and being astounded at how many of the stations it picked up were in French, then looking at a map and being even more astounded to realize that I was closer to Cherbourg than I was to London. I mentioned this at work the next day and most of my colleagues refused to believe it. Even when I showed them on a map, they frowned doubtfully and said things like, 'Well, yes, it may be closer in a strict physical sense,' as if I were splitting hairs and that really a whole new concept of distance was required once you waded into the English Channel and of course to that extent they were right. Even now, I am frequently dumbfounded to realize that you can get on an airplane in London and in less time than it takes to get the foil lid off the little container of UHT milk and its contents distributed all over yourself and the man next to you (and it's amazing, isn't it, how much milk one of those little tubs holds?), you're in Paris or Brussels and everyone looks like Yves Montand or Jeanne Moreau.

I mention this because I was experiencing much the same sort of sense of wonderment as I stood on a dirty beach at Calais, on an unusually bright, clear autumn afternoon, staring at an outcrop on the horizon that was clearly and sunnily the White Cliffs of Dover. I knew, in a theoretical sort of way, that England was only a spit over 20 miles off, but I couldn't quite believe that I could stand on a foreign beach and actually see it. I was so astonished, in fact, that I sought confirmation from a man trudging past in reflective mood.

'Excusezmoi, monsieur,' I enquired in my best French. 'C'est Angleterre over there?'

He looked up from his thoughts to where I was pointing, gave a deeply gloomy nod as if to say, 'Alas, yes,' and trudged on.

'Well, fancy,' I murmured and went to see the town.

Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day. Because it was heavily bombed in the war, it fell into the hands of postwar town planners and in consequence looks like something left over from a 1957 Exposition du Cement. An alarming number of structures in the centre, particularly around the cheerless Place d'Armes, seem to have been modelled on supermarket packaging,primarily packets of Jacob's Cream Crackers. A few structures are even built across roads always a sign of 1950s planners smitten with the novel possibilities of concrete. One of the main buildings in the centre, it almost goes without saying, is a Holiday Inn/ cornflakes box.

But I didn't mind. The sun was shining in a kindly Indian summer way and this was France and I was in that happy frame of mind that always comes with the start of a long trip and the giddy prospect of spending weeks and weeks doing nothing much and calling it work. My wife and I had recently taken the decision to move back to the States for a bit, to give the kids the chance of experiencing life in another country and my wife the chance to shop until 10 p.m. seven nights a week. I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me. But I had insisted on having one last look at Britain a kind of valedictory tour round the green and kindly island that had so long been my home. I had come to Calais because I wanted to reenter England as I'd first seen it, from the sea. Tomorrow I would catch an early ferry and begin the serious business of investigating Britain, examining the nation's public face and private parts, as it were, but today I was carefree and unattached. I had nothing to do but please myself.

I was disappointed to note that nobody on the streets of Calais looked like Yves Montand or Jeanne Moreau or even the delightful Philippe Noiret. This was because they were all Britons dressed in sportswear. They all looked as if they should have whistles around their necks and be carrying footballs. Instead, they were lugging heavy carrierbags of clinking bottles and noisome cheeses and wondering why they had bought the cheese and what they were going to do with themselves until it was time to catch the four o'clock ferry home. You could hear them bickering in small, unhappy voices as they passed. 'Sixty francs for a packet of bloody goat's cheese? Well, she won't thank you for that.' They all looked as if they ached for a nice cup of tea and some real food. It occurred to me that you could make a small fortune with a hamburger stand. You could call it Burgers of Calais.

It must be said that apart from shopping and bickering quietly there isn't a great deal to do in Calais. There's the famous Rodin statue outside the Hotel de Ville and a single museum, the Musee des BeauxArts et de la Dentelle ('The Museum of Beautiful Art and of the Teeth', if my French hasn't abandoned me), but the museum was closed and the Hotel de Ville was a long slog and anyway the Rodin statue is on every postcard. I ended up, like everyone else, nosing around the souvenir shops, of which Calais has a certain amplitude.

For reasons that I have never understood, the French have a particular genius when it comes to tacky religious keepsakes, and in a gloomy shop on a corner of the Place d'Armes, I found one I liked: a plastic model of the Virgin Mary standing with beckoning arms in a kind of grotto fashioned from seashells, miniature starfish, lacy sprigs of dried seaweed and a polished lobster claw. Glued to the back of the Madonna's head was a halo made from a plastic curtain ring, and on the lobster claw the model's gifted creator had painted an oddly festivelooking 'Calais!' in neat script. I hesitated because it cost a lot of money, but when the lady of the shop showed me that it also plugged in and lit up like a funfair ride at Margate, the only question in my mind was whether one would be enough.

'C'est tres jolie,' she said in a kind of astonished hush when she realized that I was prepared to pay real money for it, and bustled off to get it wrapped and paid for before I came to my senses and cried, 'Say, where am I? And what, pray, is this tacky piece of Francomerde I see before me?'