1928-07-18 English Autobiography; Biography; Journals; Correspondence 21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCText-proofing of a sample of the text21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCConversion to TEI.2-conformat markup21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAdding scripted markup21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAddition of encodingDesc21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAddition of bibls21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAssembled all images21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCCreation of derivative images21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCValidation of TEI21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCValidation of names21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCConversion to Unicode (utf-8)21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCPromotion to production21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAddition of text to access control21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCHarvest into Topic Map21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCChecking of text using browser21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAddition of text to corpus21:18:06, Tuesday 7 August 2007editorialNZETCAddition of text to Library Catalogue14:47:44, Tuesday 23 September 2008editorialNZETCMake text available on NZETC website P.S. Elsie sends you her love; she thinks you might be interested to learn that she has cuthad her hair cut. Hôtel de l'Ouest Caen 18.7.28 My dear Mummy,

If you send Daddy for the atlas & turn up the map of France & study the top part of it attentively you may find that Caen is in Nor- mandy, & that as I am at Caen, I am now in Nor- mandy also. I therefore take a couple of hours off from broadening my mind to deliver a short bulletin of the latest news, lest haply I forget. — I think it was from Dinan that I wrote last. Now at Dinan the principal adventure seems to have been when the cork came out of a bottle of cider we had carried all the way from St Malo, with the most astounding ex- plosion, & deluged the room with a fountain more astonishing than a wilderness of Fontainebleaux. But there must have been more to it than that. Oh yes, after I had written my letter to you we sallied forth & found the picturesque part of the town, & very picturesque it was — principally a very steep street run- ning right down to the river & full of old 15th & 16th century houses, still inhabited, & generally thrown open to the gaze of the world in the genial French way, with the family dining inside. There were other old streets also, of varying degrees of picturesqueness, & when I send out my postcard collection you will be able to see them all. A very good omelette we had for lunch, too, if I remember aright. Curious, but we had an omelette at every meal for the first two or three days, stunner ones too, & now we don’t seem to have had one for an eternity. It may be that they are a speciality of Brittany, & that Normandy goes in for other things. Anyhow, as we go along meals are getting a bit cheaper. I much sus- pect we were being stung a bit in some of those places, but you can never tell, having nothing really to go on; 10 or 12 francs was the least we could get a meal for — 1/8 or 2/-. Still, compared to what you would get in England for the same money it was dirt cheap. In Caen you can get a meal for 8 or 8.50. In Paris I hope it will be a bit cheaper still. Prices have risen a bit in the last year, with the stabilising of the franc & so on. Still it is cheap enough. I generally get a room for 12 francs (franc = about 2d), & the girls one ditto — so that a night’s lodging costs me only 2/- & them 1/- each; which is not so bad. Of course we haven’t struck a bath yet, & running water only once; but then we are out to do things on the cheap. There are pubs where you can get every luxury, if you pay through the neck for it. If I were God, though, I should certainly turn out the French with a few more ideas on elementary sanitation. They are worse even than the English. However they can certainly make beds & omelettes, which are two very great endowments. They cannot make cider. The French cider is the vilest stuff I ever struck in my life; you generally get it at meals instead of water, & the Frenchmen lap it up like whisky. This seems to me to betoken a very vulgar palate. On the other hand you can get wine so cheap as to make this quite a small matter — especially if you buy it at the grocers. Every second night we buy in a store of provisions & go for a picnic — well you get a bottle holding about a quart of quite good vin blanc for 7d. What more do you want? I’ll bet that if you could do this in N.Z. & cut out the pubs you would hear the last of prohibition in a week. If you want to be really extravagant you can spend twice or three times as much & really enjoy yourself properly. Fair dinkum, if I lived in France or lived elsewhere as a millionaire I would start a cellar. But you go back to England & have to fork out 6d for a minute glass of stuff you would hardly notice in the bottom of the bottle here. It is very dispiriting. So there you have to confine yourself to water, tea, coffee, or cocoa, all of which are very dan- gerous drugs, the drinking of which is attended with grave risks to health. — Another thing on which I could rhapsodise at considerable length is cheese. All sorts of cheese, all cheap. I think you might do a service to your country by starting a campaign in the Post to import a few experts from France or Switzerland, to teach the farmers a bit about cheese — as distinct from turning out cheese. — no reason why they shouldn’t make something else decent beside butter & lamb. Fair dinkum, when I think what N.Z. is & what it might be, even in such a matter as the production of cheese, I blush for the divine process. We lag behind the lesser nations. I think that is all I have to say at present on the subject of food; on the whole you don’t get enough vegetables or fruit; but the salads are generally excellent.

I must get back to my travels. We had a good look round Dinan, & I bought a very charming tea- caddy in Breton pottery. I should have liked to have got a lot of stuff of this sort, plates & cups & things — it is very cheap, & I should have liked to send you a lot of it. But there is no way to carry it, & it would be too risky to send it out to N.Z. I think. So all I bought was this tea-caddy & two ash trays. The only thing about the caddy is that I’m afraid it won’t go with my Japanese tea-pot; but perhaps one could keep them at opposite end of the room. It really gives a man a pain to go away & leave such wonderfully good & cheap things behind him; mais que faire. I may be there again someday, anyhow, with an extra trunk & a hireling to carry things for me. Well, anyhow — I wanted to stay at Dinan a day or so longer, & row & bathe on & in the river, but I was argued down on various grounds, none of them convincing, & we left for Mont St. Michel. But we did not know that we had to change at Dol, & the French railway coves are quite uncommunicative on subjects like that; so after an hour’s pleasant ride — very charming the Norman country side is — while we were leaning back comfortably in the carriage waiting for the train to start again we were hauled out by a cove & found we were back at the Terminus at St Malo again. Most extraord- inary. However we got out our bathing togs & went for a bathe there, & marvellous beaches they have too. Unfortunately the Norman Breton & Norman coast is now in the full flood of develop- ment & is lousy with casinos & flash hotels & long lines of rotten shacks all along the sandhills, a very depressing sight. We got a very excellent meal f here for 50 francs too, I remember, & hot & cold water in our rooms. Next morning we tore over to the station early with bags in one hand & the other clutching a large piece of bread & butter, quite à la the trip last year. Of course the train was late, as every train we have been in in France so far has been late. They have special notice boards up in the stations to be filled in with chalk, saying why & how much the trains are en retard; but it never seems to be worth while filling them in. The train generally gets there in the end, bar accidents. Anyhow this time we arrived at Mont St. Michel in due course — a wonderful place, now organised with the greatest energy & efficiency for fleecing the tourist. It is an abbey built on a rock, as I suppose you know, with one street consisting exclusively of restaur- ants & souvenir sellers. They won’t put you up for the night unless you have dinner with them, & so on & so forth. Most of the place seems to belong to la venue Pouland, a widder lady w with an apparent genius for cutting out com- petition. So we had lunch there & went all over the abbey & the fortifications & bought a few things — I got a birthday present for Auntie & a bit of lunchlace for you — & in the evening hopped back to a little place called Pontorson, which is the jumping off place for Mont St. Michel. This has a church with one or two nice things about it, & we had charming people to stay with — had quite a lot of conversation with the daughter of the house. It was in- teresting to see a little provincial French place too, of no particular importance in any way — very dirty, very cheerful, & not quite so noisy as the bigger places. The town band was practising for the 14th July though, which was more comic than annoying. But the noise in a place like Caen is hideous & unceasing. I’m dead certain the French are not in the least insensitive to ugliness, or they’d stop the fright- ful shrieks & groans & clatter & smash & hooting that goes on from dawn well into the dark. And then they might go on to cut out a little bit of smoke & dust, let alone the grosser forms of dirt. But this, as I have remarked in another connection, is an excursus.

From Pontorson, on the strength of a glowing des- cription in our guide-book, we went to Coutances, but did not think much of it — I mean the town itself. It is on a hill & the surroundings are beautiful. Every- thing about the Norman countryside indeed is beauti- ful. The cathedral looks fine up on the top of the hill dominating the town, & there is an avenue of limes most of the way round it. We had a good look round; then went down to the sea for a bathe & a sun-bath — I am tying desperately to brown up a bit again — missed the only train back & started to walk the 12 kilometres. After about 3 miles a cove in a little two seater car stopped & asked us the way, so we cadged a lift from him for the rest of the way, arriving just in time to see the rockets going up, all blue & yellow & red in stars & streaks, for the 14, & the Hôtel de Ville illuminated in candles, all very splendid & flash; also there was a performance by the bugle-band & drums. Pity we weren’t in Paris for these celebrations, but it couldn’t be helped. That was Saturday. Next day we looked in at the Cathedral & one or two other churches to listen to the services but were bored & left in about 5 minutes — fearful full organ in the cathedral, completely out of tune — had an early lunch, & spent the rest of the day & evening bathing in the river & sunbathing in adja- cent paddocks. I really should like to see this coun- tryside in spring — it must be magnificent. In the absence of coconut oil I had to cadge some olive oil off our landlady to help in the browning process — you would be surprised to hear how expert I am becoming in cadging things in French. We left early next morning, 10 to 7 train in fact (though it was late) & landed at Bayeux about 9. Bayeux is notable mainly for four things — cathedral, tapestry, fleas & smells. All of these are of their kind very fine. I shall send you postcards of the cathedral & the tapestry; the other things would probably perish in transit, so you’ll have to take them on trust. The tapestry is really very interesting, & far better than I thought it could be; it is really embroidery, & full of life & colour, some of the massing of horses & men really extraordinarily skilful. Bayeux has also some interesting old houses, a very bad collection of pic- tures, some good 18th century tapestries, & a lace-factory; but the lace is very expensive. Day intensely hot. Been good. The weather is holding out miraculously; I see that in England several people have passed out owing to the heat wave, & that some of those who have gone into the water to escape it have been drowned. So it seems an unfortunate country either way. Of course the heat-wave doesn’t happen till I get out of the country; when I get back it will be raining again & the winter will have set in, I suppose.

In the evening of our Bayeux day we came on to Caen. For noise & dirt this is the equal of any French town I have been in, & beats anything in any other country — until you have been in France you have no conception what noise & dirt can be. There go a collection of dogs barking uproariously now, an engine has just shrieked, a tram clangs, in a minute a motor lorry will hurtle up the hill & then a sporting car with the throttle out, here comes a train with appropriate piercing whine, & soon there will be a street row; let alone the perpetual motor horns, used with enthusiasm & persistency on every possible occasion. We went down to the sea again this afternoon, for a final bathe before turning completely inland; it was by steam train, & a filthier & slower mode of conveyance I have never tried. A most extraordinary race. There go the dogs again, & a loose cycle rattling over cobbles. Caen has some fine churches, the Abbaye aux Hommes & the Abbaye aux Femmes, founded by Wm the Conqueror & Matilda his wife, to appease the papal wrath at their having married within the forbidden degrees, as the guide-books repeat ad nauseam, St Pierre, & Lord knows what else. The abbeys are mostly fine plain Norman work, the men’s very dignified, the women’s full of a delicate & beautiful sobriety, which manages to make its impression even over the efforts of the Micks to ruin it. Really these Micks do not deserve to have fine churches — they have a positive genius for vul- garity which can be equalled by few non-conformist sects, however half-witted. And the way these two abbeys are built in! Compare the English cathedrals! — the C of E may be only fit for the dust-bin, but at least it has some dignity in it its dissolution. But the Catholics go wallowing in the desecration of beauty to the world’s end. — St. Pierre’s has some fine Renaissance work, & there are some good secular buildings scattered about the town. There is a good river also, up which I rowed the party last night; we disem- barked & had rolls & cream cheese & cakes & grapes & wine under a haystack — a meal of the premiere classe for about 9d each. Then rowed down again in the sunset. A great country, apart from the disadvan- tages retailed above. So much to date.