All Happy Families by Hervé le Tellier

Author:Hervé le Tellier [Tellier, Hervé le]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

• TEN •

THE NAKED TRUTH

Started this diary today:

eager as I am to note my very

first impressions.

Unpleasant.

RAYMOND QUENEAU, DORMI PLEURÉ

I was ten months old when my mother left for England. I have no memory of it at all, and every time I asked my mother about her time in Britain, her only reply would be, “It was only for a year, less even.”

And she hastily added, “I came to see you every weekend.”

The concept of my mother globetrotting kept me happy for quite a while. But I was a logical child and this struck me as a complicated question. When one day I asked my mother, “Every weekend?” in sudden astonishment, the defense was embellished with a more persuasive “Or you grandmother brought you over.”

“By ferry? But it takes far too long. Just getting there—”

“By plane,” my mother interjected.

I secured no further information. By plane, then.

This was the late 1950s. Roissy Airport didn’t exist; the channel tunnel was a harebrained engineers’ dream; budget airlines were yet to be invented. You had to take the plane in Le Bourget and it landed at Gatwick. The cost was exorbitant and a weekly trip would have gobbled up a teacher’s pay.

Of course, for the stalwart, there was another flight option, a cheaper and terribly exotic one. You took off from the small airport at Le Touquet in the Pas-de-Calais, and crossed the channel at low altitude to land in Dover fifteen minutes later. This shuttle service was provided by a company called Channel Air Bridge on a funny little propeller freighter, the Bristol 170 Wayfarer. This flying machine was as ugly as it was slow and as noisy as it was sturdy. It had a big round nose which cleaved in two to take in a few vehicles while about twenty passengers traveled in the uncomfortable rear cabin. Its landing gear was fixed; what was the point of retractable landing gear for such a short trip? It would hardly be folded away before it had to come out again. It was an ungainly, very rustic-looking plane, a sort of aluminum whale with wings and a parrot’s beak. A slightly merciless pilot once described it as “forty thousand rivets flying in tight formation.” The Royal Air Force had commissioned it in the early 1940s to meet the needs of the landings offensive. But the prototype didn’t manage to make its maiden flight until December 2, 1945, and the newly established state of peace meant it had to find civil applications: this aerial bridge between England and the Continent was one of them.

That being said, and however adventurous the Le Touquet option might have been, the journey was still an expedition in 1960. The A1 Paris—Lille freeway was only at the planning stage, the Nationale 1 highway was saturated with trucks, and even when you reached Dover, the drive to London was a good two hours more. Which is why my mother’s weekly trips still struck me as a spatiotemporal miracle, an exploit worthy of Star Trek’s good Mr.

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