One morning at the crack of dawn or ‘sparrow fart’ as my father called it, Dick and I were woken up, told to dress quickly and kiss Mother and Aunt Kath goodbye. Then we were bundled into the back seat of Uncle Doug’s old black Wolesley (formerly a police car, we were told) and driven to Margate.
As Margate approached father and Doug started singing ‘Off to France we go, Off to France we go…’. They were clearly not Rogers and Hamerstein, but we got the idea and started to get quite excited. We now found out that photos that had been taken of us a couple of days earlier had been required for our temporary passports.
Due to the yellow line not having yet been invented, or at any rate it had not been deployed in Margate, the car was parked easily and we walked to the end of the pier. There waiting for us was a huge ship called “Queen of the Channel”. OK so it might have been a small ship, but I was still of a size where it could have been the Titanic.
I don’t remember exactly how long the outward trip to France took, but my guess would be about three hours, since our destination was Boulogne rather than the much nearer Calais. The excitement of going abroad on a ship, for the first time in my life was probably the only reason I did not get bored. Dick and I were kept occupied looking out for France, while father and Doug started taking advantage of the duty free facilities on board to consume cheap beer.
Queen of the Channel
When we arrived at Boulogne we were told that we had four hours before the ship would leave to return to Margate. After noting that the few cars in the vicinity were driving on the wrong side of the road, we immediately set about finding a restaurant.
We first spotted a toy shop, where I used my pocket money to purchase a catapult operated rocket, which was made of plastic. Shortly after that we were sitting at a table studying menus. I had never before smelled French cigarettes, but now I was sitting in a cloud of their smoke. It didn’t disgust me.
I don’t recall what we ate except we were required to sample frogs legs and snails. The frogs legs were ok, but despite my enthusiasm for winkles I could not muster much enthusiasm for the snails. Somehow winkles seemed clean because they lived in the sea, but escargot apart from being much larger than winkles would no doubt slide about leaving a large slimey trail of mucus in their wake.
I did my duty though and ate one. I chewed it for ages, appreciating the taste of garlic and parsley butter. Unfortunately this flavour was all too soon replaced by what I imagine was the natural flavour of slug. Through gritted teeth and half chewed snail flesh, I negotiated with my father. I was eventually allowed a couple of sips of red wine to help me swallow what remained in my mouth and purge the taste. I’ve never knowingly eaten a snail since.
The wine was accompanied by chilled sparkling Vichy water. In those days France was considered by most English people to be a strange foreign land where one definitely did not drink tap water or consume anything with ice in it. The strangeness of the French was confirmed when I visited the toilet and had my first encounter with a ‘squatter’.
Back in the restaurant the service was very leisurely and we had little time to sample the Camembert cheese before legging it post haste back to the “Queen of the Channel”.
Despite spending the journey back to Margate being posted on lookout for the white cliffs of Dover, Dick and I both became a little irritable. We were eventually subdued with a souvenir Eiffel tower each, bought from the on board gift shop. Of course we had been nowhere near Paris and had never seen the Eiffel tower. But we needed proof of our visit and we didn’t see any miniaturised Boulogne landmarks on offer in the gift shop.
It would be fair to say that this little trip had done nothing to give me any feelings of Francofilia whatsoever. I preferred to remain in Birchington exploring the caves in the chalk cliffs, searching for fossils and trying to make my box kite fly. I don’t know what it was about box kites, but I never successfully got mine aloft.
I also enjoyed catapulting my plastic rocket as high as I could make it go, and then chasing it for hundreds of yards after it’s small polythene parachute had opened and it drifted sideways and downwards in the breeze.
Over time I got through several of these rockets, the most sophisticated of which was modelled on the Gerry Anderson, television sci-fi series spacecraft, Fireball XL5. On this one, the pilot and the rocket came back down to earth on separate parachutes. Unfortunately the pilot was very light and it was not too many flights before he drifted too far out to sea to be retrieved.
In the evenings we would be regaled with tales of the demise of Smuggler Bill and also of the Dam Busters testing their bouncing bombs on the sea at nearby Reculver.
Before leaving the subject of Birchington I would like to recall one other little incident which had nothing to do with France whatsoever, except that we were probably flying over it at the time.
When I was eight years old we flew to Majorca for a holiday. The family was larger by this time, because Dick and I, had been joined by a younger sister Barbara. At the time of this holiday Barbara was two years old and this was to be our first aeroplane flight.
We took off for Majorca from Manston, which is very near Birchington. To get to the terminal we had to drive across the runway. Traffic lights informed us when it was safe to do this. Our aircraft was a propeller powered Hermese and the airline was called Silver City.
About ninety minutes into the flight darkness had fallen. Our mother who was occupying the window seat, turned to father and said ‘I don’t want to worry you, but we’ve been circling the same light house for over 20 minutes now’.
Dick and I looked at each other with worried expressions and got even more worried when we noticed that father was crying.
It eventually turned out that he was crying tears of laughter. It seems mother’s lighthouse was the flashing wing light. In the dark she could not see the wing, which attached the flashing light to the aeroplane.
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