Before Cephalonia there was a clearing in the Normandy woods, with a spring and a clear, cold stream | Louis de Bernières
I drove my Morris Traveller down a hidden track, and felt I had come to a sacred place where I was completely at home
During my 20s, I was too poor to go abroad on holidays, as my friends did. They would go somewhere blazingly hot, and roast themselves stupid on beaches filthy with cigarette ends and beer cans. I was a landscape gardener, and my summers were spent in the Surrey Hills, building walls and terraces from stone. By the time I reached my 30s, however, I had a girlfriend – and, because I had become a teacher, a few weeks’ holiday in the summer.
Annie was from Northern Ireland, and she taught French. During half-terms and the shorter holidays, we would go to Donegal to escape the stress and horror of the Troubles. But in the summer we would pile into my home-made Morris Minor Traveller, built out of two wrecks, and cross the Channel to France. We would drive from one historic town to another, pitching our tiny camouflaged tent in the municipal campings, where the French would set up capacious awnings and drink cold white wine in folding chairs with their dignified, amused cats sitting beside them like statues of Bast.
Louis de Bernières’s fourth novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin became a worldwide bestseller in 1994
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