I mentioned that this website follows the cycle journeys of the young Lawrence of Arabia, who made several trips to France as a student between 1906 and 1910. In fact this Journal (and yes, there will be others, perhaps even a trilogy) is a combination of two of trips made by the young Lawrence: first a tour in his summer holidays of 1906, during which he cycled around Brittany for about a month and which included his 18th birthday, and second his trip in August 1907, during which he cycled through Normandy, down to the Loire and then back around Brittany, to repeat some of his 1906 rides, this time with a camera.
In 1907 the young TE Lawrence sailed with his father on the same crossing as I was to make to Le Havre, but he didn’t write anything about that ferry journey, so instead I will refer to his 1906 trip into St Malo (a town I’ll visit later on my trip).
As a 17 year old, he travelled from the family home in Oxford with some family friends, the Kerrys (who now, I’m afraid, are remembered principally for almost missing the train). Once the party arrived in Southampton, the young Lawrence himself took off:
‘…straight to Netley, and caused a spirit of eager enquiry to be manifested by the youth of Southampton. Netley (an abbey, founded in 1239 by the Cistercians and seized by Henry VIII during his dissolution of the monasteries) is as fine as if not finer than I had imagined. It is certainly the finest ruin I have seen, and much the most picturesque. I do not think the Chapter House and guest room can be equalled.’
My own departure has more in common with the Kerrys, in that I also nearly miss the train. After delivering the teenager to Maths 3, I tidy up an article - by phoning India four times, chasing recipes that mysteriously haven’t arrived overnight – and file at 6.30 pm, leaving me with just 30 minutes to pack. I race off to the train at Shepherds Bush, handlebars swinging with plastic bags like some itinerant salesman from Lawrence’s day. I can only hope that all the contents will shuffle down into the bike-packing bags that attach to the various tubes of my bicycle...
At Portsmouth train station, rather than heading for the abbey remains at Netley, I ride to the terminal and join the ferry queue, for vehicles. Yes, that’s me on my push-bike, sandwiched between a saloon car with roof pods and a twelve foot campervan festooned with deck chairs and other equipment. It seems I am in the right place though. I am on board by 1030.
The ferry is utterly massive. I climb five or six decks and dump my belongings at my reclining chair, next to an aeronautical engineer from France, and head out on deck – Deck 7 or 8 as it happens, and about 100 feet above sea level. I can see the ferry has done the rounds of the fjords – there’s a rather touching Nordic evacuation route, a sort of stocking into which you jump to descend several decks of the ferry. Fine for getting down a few decks, but not something you’d want to be caught in under water…
It is breezy, but a lovely night. The moon is nearly full and its light is glancing off the chop in a thousand spangles beneath me. Above, it is back-lighting the wispy trails of cloud in a night-time mackerel sky. The young Lawrence was similarly on the sailing to St Malo:
‘The moon was full and glorious. I cannot say whether the cloud effects or the reflection on the water were the best but the “ensemble” was perfect and left nothing to be desired. I never before understood properly Tennyson’s “Long glories of the Autumn Moon”, but I see his reasons now for mentioning it so often, it was so different from the pale moon of the land.’
Back inside, the lights are dimmed and I doze in the reclining chair. There’s a particular atmosphere about a ferry, in the linoleum floor and the aluminium strips on the window ledges and the deep thrum of the engines underpinning the noises of a public space at night; it casts me back 40 years, to the many Channel crossings I made in my own youth, before cheap flights and the Channel Tunnel. There was a lightness to those crossings, despite the slightly industrial context: a physical lightness in the tiny roll of the huge vessel of course, but also in the receptiveness, the open, eager attitude of youth. It was adventurous, curious, even romantic. I relive it on the edge of consciousness as I pass in and out of sleep.
I muse on the sort of person the young Lawrence was. He was energetic and incredibly driven. He was also very clever and for all his ambivalence with authority, he was very ambitious - didn’t he say he wanted to be a General or ennobled by the age of thirty…? I get the impression that he wasn’t that forthcoming, or sympathetic, unless he chose to be. Which might have been irritating. I don’t know if I would have liked him. Certainly I wouldn’t claim to be like him, except in a handful of ways, most importantly that we both wanted to be writers and we were both blessed with freakish physical endurance. Two things that come together in this project, of course.
In the end I manage to sleep for around an hour – for the rest, I churn. What lies ahead? Would I have liked him? Where on earth will I be by tonight?
I know I am heading east, through Seine Maritime, but I can’t even remember the departement’s capital city, let alone the suggested town where I might stop. I grind my teeth, at the lost organisation, and doze again. When the people around me begin to move and it’s time to get up, I feel as though some imp has crumpled my brain and scrubbed the back of my eyes with a cheese-grater.