Nina Jenkin - Writing On The Road: A Tour de France for My Father

WRITING ON THE ROAD

A Tour de France for My Father

Nina Jenkin (with Martin Dunning)

www.voyagevoyage.com

It doesnt look much, Dads diary: a thick book, bound in grey-blue imitation leather, and originally sold as a photo album. The pages are made from thick, heavy grey card, each one edged along the spine side with canvas and sporting two rivets to prevent the page pulling out of the ring binding. It is dour and serviceable, and redolent of postwar austerity, but the contents are another matter.

On the title page is glued a black and white photograph of the roofs of Heidelberg, with the words Cycling Holiday 1953 scripted in black and white across the picture. Its not the actual diary that Dad kept during the trip that has long since disappeared but an expansion of diary notes, complete with photographs and maps, which took him until 1958 to complete. The story is written out in his neat, but still slightly schoolboyish hand and runs to about 16,000 words with 150 photographs and 12 maps. The maps are hand-drawn, each one covering a section of the trip, with tiny circles marking night stops and black dots for the places through which they passed. The first page is a map of southern Britain with Dads text delineated by the outline of the land; there are gaps in his lines to accommodate the Severn estuary, for instance, and an indentation where the Thames runs inland. Further on, blocks of text are laid out around photographs (each one neatly captioned, of course), and the overall effect is akin to a newspaper or magazine but with every detail of the text lovingly rendered by hand. There are no mistakes or crossed-out words, and the text never strays from the horizontal despite the absence of rules. No wonder it took him five years to complete.

Dad was 21 and had just graduated from Exeter University. Gordon Newbery, with whom Dad had been at school in Exeter, was 20 and an undergraduate at Oxford: In January 1953, I suggested to Gordon that we might go on a cycling holiday together. At that time, I was thinking of a tour of the coast of Britain, but Gordon wanted to go abroad, and I caught his enthusiasm. During the Easter vacation, we considered routes and plans, and in fact the route we finally took was planned almost exactly with only a map in a school atlas. In June, after my final examinations, I cycled to Oxford one weekend to see Gordon, and we then returned to Exeter. We bought two maps, covering North and South France, with a scale of 16 miles to one inch ... Using these, we had no trouble with our navigation.

Starting from my grandparents home in Exeter, they had cycled to Weymouth, caught the ferry via Jersey to Saint Malo, and travelled anti-clockwise round France: through Brittany to La Rochelle, down the coast of the Bay of Biscay to Bordeaux, up the Gironde and along the Canal du Midi to the Mediterranean, and then via the valley of the Rhone and the mountains of the Vercors to Geneva. In Switzerland they cycled along the north shore of Lac Leman and over the Jura Mountains to Basel, then crossed into Germany and rode through the Black Forest and down the Rhine to Heidelberg. There, they turned east for Paris and then north for Le Touquet, where they caught a plane across the channel to Lympne in Kent, before a final leg along the south coast. On 16th August, six weeks after setting out, Roy and Gordon were back at Exeter.

We had travelled 2107 miles by bicycle, 143 by sea, and 36 by air, a total of 2286 Fares were 6-15/- each, and we had expenses of about 2 before starting. On food, accommodation, postage, presents, and everything else for 5 weeks abroad we spent 16 each that is, we lived on 3-5/- a week, or just under 10/- a day. We had 3 punctures between us, and our wheels made a total of over 6,400,000 revolutions. Our bicycles used half-a-pint of oil, and wore away two cubic inches of brake block!

I suppose I first saw the diary when I was about six. Gordon and his family dropped in on their way back from France and I remember him and my dad looking at it together over the coffee table. I saw it again when I was about 18 just after Mum died but the events it described had happened so long ago that they had no relevance for me. They came from a time in Dads life about which I knew very little, and as a result it seemed almost to have been written by a stranger.

Now, 50 years after those events, 20 years on from Dads death and ten on from Mums, the diary was occupying my every waking hour. I was thinking of retracing their footsteps or tyre tracks but unsure that I had it in me and whether, given the circumstances, it would be a sensible thing to do. I was not long back from a three month trip, by myself, to Brazil, and wasnt sure that I could cope with another six weeks solitude. On top of that I was due to start a teacher training course in September and surely the wise course of action would be to earn some money to see me through my year as a poverty-stricken student. Why, then, could I not let go of this hare-brained idea?

If I were inclined to blame somebody, it would probably be my oldest sister. Immediately before leaving for Brazil I spent a few days with Linda, her partner Luuk, and their daughter Zo at their home in Amsterdam, and Linda brought up the subject of the diary, then in the care of my other sister, Tania. Linda was struck by the fact that 2003 was the fiftieth anniversary of Dads trip, and thought it would be nice if a member of the family were to repeat the experience. Shed love to do it herself, she said, but with a three-year-old daughter and the arrival of another child imminent, it wasnt really practical. Tania had three children and an ailing father-in-law, so it was out of the question for her, too. Which left me.

During my three months in Brazil, and particularly on the five day boat voyage up the Amazon when time hung heavy for despite all that tosh about the vibrancy of the jungle theres bugger all to see apart from greenery the subject of Dads trip was never very far from my mind. At Tanias, on the day of my return, I noticed the diary on her bookshelf, but left it there. I was still tired and disorientated from all the travelling, and trying to find my feet with family and friends. I didnt have the energy or the inclination to set about organising another jaunt so soon, but the idea wouldnt go away. Three days later, babysitting for Tania and Paul and with the boys asleep upstairs, I took the diary from the shelf.

It could have been a different world: ox carts travelling the cobbled roads; the film of the queens coronation showing in village halls; sleeping in hay barns; and a Europe that was rebuilding itself after six years of war and still, in parts of Germany, under occupation by American forces. There were pictures of Daddy, fresh-faced and carefree, and I struggled to match this youth of the fifties with the older man and father I vaguely remembered. He was 45 when I was born, a fact that meant there were really two generations between us rather than one. In those two generations, and the 28 years Id been alive, the world had changed almost beyond recognition. The gap between us was vast, a terra incognita of vague, fragmented memories and unanswered questions.