Étape 19, 428km from Canterbury, 26 walking days, 1,825km to Rome
It took me a couple of hours to leave the outskirts of Laon - the city had a rather upstairs-downstairs feel, with the privileged, myself included, at the top, and less elegant housing blocks below. Near the magnificent 12th century Église Saint-Martin, which anywhere else would be the principal sight but in Laon was not even the main place of worship, I found some graffiti; elegantly carved Germanic script left in 1914-15.
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At Bruyères-et-Montbérault I discovered my first open church since I picked up the Via in Arras at the beginning of May. France prides itself on being a secular country, and seems to like most of its churches firmly closed, even those on a pilgrimage route. I walked between the dusty pews, looking at the Stations of the Cross, and felt cobwebs breaking on my bare legs. Having trouble locating the tap in the cemetery, I asked a neighbour for help. His name was Lilien, and we chatted for a long time. “If it rains on the 8th June”, he told me, “and again on the 11th, we’ll have rain for the next forty days. It's an old dicton.” He had the memory of an elephant, but it troubled his sleep. His head won’t stop turning, he explained. He worked for the pompes-funèbres, the funeral business, and knew how to open the gravestones, place the body, and close it again. “You’re not married?” he asked me hopefully, directing the question at my hands. When I told him, no, but I have a boyfriend in Bordeaux, he sighed and said with a smile, “Ah ! Pas de chance pour moi !”
I found my second open church at Martigny-Courpierre. Two villages in a row made for a pleasingly ecclesiastical day. My second Saint-Martin of the day was a striking post-war art deco edifice, with flamboyant concrete, bright affreschi - frescoes - and a wonderfully Soviet realism-esque spire. I climbed up to the gallery, and then up into the bell tower, which was full of guano but richly decorated with stained glass.
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As I left the village on a quiet dirt track I passed a man with his penis out, pushing an empty pram full of his belongings. “Sorry - I thought I was alone!” he said, embarrassed. It wasn’t my first sighting of a free-range cock, and I told him not to worry about it. Fair’s fair, I thought. With a couple of thousand kilometres of all'apperto bathing it’s only a matter of time before someone catches me in the nip.
I stopped for the night at Neuville-sur-Ailette. The nearby artificial lake was commandeered by a vast Center Parcs, and I wondered if they had any camping spots but when I looked on the website I was offered a “cottage”, minimum stay two nights, for a total of €583. When I’d stopped laughing I headed towards my usual friends and water source in the cemetery, and found a beautiful spot right next door: a flat, manicured orchard within sight of the church, its bells chiming the hour. I knocked on the door of the adjoining house, setting off the alarm dog, and asked the man if I could plant my tent in his patch. “It belongs to the commune”. He gave a Gallic shrug. “Pourquoi pas ?”.
In the morning the man who did the gardening for my neighbours came through the hedge to visit me. He started by launching into a description of his ailments, as French country folk like to do: two bad knees, sore shins, can’t kneel down. He told me his age, 88, and gestured over the wall with an impish smile, “I’ll be in there soon”. He asked me where I was heading and when I said “Italy” he nodded, as if I’d told him I was just nipping out to the boulangerie. I admired his trees - the walnut, under which I’d slept, the cherries and peaches, and neat rows of plants, the frilly lettuces coming up. The cat came to stare at me with her strikingly verdigris irides. “We found her in a bin”, the gardener said.
At Corbeny I chatted to the landlady of the local hotel, who insisted on stamping my credential although I had just collected a pilgrim stamp from the Mairie. “Mine is better!” she said decisively, although she later admitted she hadn’t actually seen the Mairie stamp before. I gladly collected both, and then sat on the terrasse with an Orangina and the hotel dog, who pricked up his ears as a schoolgirl ran up, kissed him on the nose, and skipped away.
That night my head was turning over and over, like Lilien’s. I couldn’t work out the rain puzzle. Today was the 8th June and it had been dry all day except for a very short, light shower in the evening, which was so inconsequential I felt it must have been localised. If it rains again on the 11th June, I thought, will it then rain on me personally for forty days and forty nights? Or does the rain apply to the area? To fulfil the prophecy does the rainfall have to happen in the same place both times? What if the first rainfall happened here and the second somewhere else, but on the same person? Is the rain for the person who observes the sequence, or for the area in which it happened? If rain falls but no one sees it, has it actually rained? I tried to recall who wrote the excellent story about the man on whom it always rained. He kept meticulous records to prove his misfortune. It seemed like a Douglas Adams invention. But then I was dozing, thinking about that song by Travis, and it really was raining properly, the drops falling pitterpatter onto the roof of my home.
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See more posts here: Get in the tuktuk, no time to explain
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