By then it was Friday

I woke to another breakfast of ham, cheese and croissants and bid farewell to the coach load of nice British folk as they headed off back to Blighty via the obligatory stop at the cheap French booze outlet. From there, I was out on my own... As I said to my lovely better half, now picture the episode of Family Guy with the montage of them capering around Paris as Muppets.

We had had a bit of a crisis the night before when I realised the Internet had lied to me yet again and there was no train from the local station to the next big town.. The station was in fact only for the high speed TGV which had entertained me during the week as I watched out my window as it rocketed towards the hotel and then disappeared underground at a great rate of knots. Crisis was averted when I made a new plan and got a taxi to pick me up, and take me to the train station, where I caught a local bus driven by a Frenchman who looked like he had probably spent the 80's as lead singer in a French New Wave synth pop Alice Cooper tribute band. It was also on this bus that aforementioned Frenchman's ferret gave me the evils. 

This habit of the French to flounce around the country with various livestock in tow caught me somewhat off guard, I had kind of got used to their idea of taking dogs to restaurants, but then there was the ferret, in his little wooden travel box, and later in the day there were several people at the train station with cats, some in travel boxes but some just hanging out wandering around, or on leashes. I am not sure why the French maintain this insistence on making everything they do ridiculously and needlessly, and often classlessly, overly flamboyant. They are annoying enough as it is without constantly looking for ways to emphasise it by throwing in an added extra dash of twattery.

Anyway. I just went to listen to something on YouTube and forgot what it was. Hate that. So I put Father John Misty on instead. Not a major fan yet of what I have heard of his new album but listen to the previous two... Although have to say his live cover of NIN was awful, and I am on the fence re what he did with 'Heart Shaped Box'. Some things should never be sung by anyone else. But then again there are some covers better than the original. There is a cover of 'Mad World' going around on the radio over here with some bird singing it, but nobody should ever be allowed to sing that song again, there is nothing anyone can ever do with it that is better than the Gary Jules cover version.

But I digress. New Romantics Goth bus driver pilotd me and ferret to Amien efficiently, and I had 20 minutes or so to look around... Nice looking town, nice centre, nice cathedral, as most of them tend to have. I decided to forgo a decent lunch to walk over and take a photo of it... These are the questionable choices I make in travel mode.

I grabbed a dried out sandwich from the shop at the train station... Ham and cheese... (hey, I have eaten many dodgy things but even I am not dumb enough to opt for the 'Seafood salad' sandwich option in a train station kiosk). Then it was on the train and motoring southward, hoping to arrive in Rouen a couple of hours later. It was good to be on a train and covering countryside again. Like everywhere I had seen so far the countryside was rolling and rural and pleasant, if unremarkable. I did have the familiar moment of concern when the train slowed to a crawl on the outskirts of the big town and I wondered if it terminated at some other isolated station that I wasn't aware of, leaving me stranded miles from the centre... But we got there in the end. 

Making my way upstairs I walked outside for a few minutes and took in the sunshine and traffic and French people with cats (I am not making this up) arriving to catch trains. I paid money to use a toilet after a homeless man. Ah yes, France. Then I went back into the station to find the rental car place. Which for some reason had a queue of people outside it, although I didn't realise they were a queue at the time, I thought they were a random assortment of people waiting around in a train station, so I wandered over and tried the door. It was locked. A French lady in the queue made some resigned, apathetic comment. Of course, this is Europe.. the rental car place was closed for an hour and a half for lunch. Honestly, nothing is ever open for more than about three hours a day, no wonder the place is going down the toilet. Luckily I had arrived shortly before re-opening, as I would have been well hacked off if I made a point of arriving early to find it shut. 

Through her ok-ish English and my really very poor French the lady and I managed to negotiate our way through the car hiring process which ended with me getting an 'upgrade'.. (Ok I got upsold, but at a very reasonable rate!! Honest!!)... Which I thought was a good deal until I discovered I had ended up with a Toyota hybrid called an Aurus or some such ridiculous thing... But it was pretty much brand new and would do the job, and the thought of thrashing the life out of a hybrid was sort of appealing given anything in my price range was going to be anemic and gutless anyway.

I climbed into the wrong side of the Aurass (where the steering wheel is in France) grateful for having spent a lot of time driving left-hookers elsewhere, and cut it lose on the streets of Rouen... Which were for some reason fairly packed. I have no idea why there are so many people on the road when clearly nobody is ever at work.. I suspect they all drive round all day claiming traffic has made them several hours late and then arrive at work and leave to drive home again. My attempts to get where I needed to go were turned into something of a farce by a lack of any street name signage in any language, which turned my usual 'do a quick circuit of town to see the sights' into a series of circuits, until I eventually came to the conclusion that the place I was going was not in fact even in the area of the same name that the few rare signs I followed were pointing to, and the single sheet map the rental car lady gave me was not cutting the mustard. Once again I decided to ignore the French and just branch out in the direction I remembered it being in on the map at home, which worked remarkably well, and before long I was there. Well, almost. I arrived at the rear and then had to navigate another maze of narrow French streets to find the actual entrance.

EVENTUALLY I arrived at the gates of St Sever Cemetary, grateful to see it was in fact still open, for this was the entire reason I came to Rouen at all, and a major part of the reason for the trip. If it had been closed I would have had to stay the night. I wandered through the impressive entrance up the leafy lane dividing the huge French civilian cemetary filled with graves and tombs from through the ages, and to the huge Alled WW1 cemetary. I had seen a lot of cemetaries by this stage. But this one was large. The impact of seeing that many rowed white headstones stretching off into the distance never really gets any less.

Some of St Sever. Note wall in far distance gives some idea of scale.

The grounds were, as always, beautifully and immaculately kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Trees heavy with white and pink blossom shaded some of the graves. Spring flowers gave little bursts of colour. Large and impressively stoneworks paid tribute. In the far corner the familiar Cross of Sacrifice, bearing on it a large bronze sword, stood high overlooking the graves. Beyond the far rear wall the distant sounds of unseen children laughing and yelling on a massive football training field added a strangely poignant counterpoint to the silent stillness of the thousands of young men around me. 

Given the size of the place it took some looking to find the right area, and the right row in that area, but after walking among the 11,400 or so others, I found the headstone that bore the familiar name I had been seeking. I found Percy. Percy my great grandfathers cousin, who lived in the same house where they grew up together. In a tiny place, not far from where I was born. Percy who, with his brother and my great grandfather, and other family, and many others, set out together to do their bit and fight in this great new war. Percy who fell with my great grandfather, on the same day, in the same place, wounded, adding their blood to that of so many others who fell and bled on the fields of the Somme. Percy who didn't make it home, while my great grandfather so fortunately did. Percy who stayed there in France. Surrounded, as Taff said, by his mates. 

The Spring sun in the late afternoon was warm, the sky was a rich blue. A soft breeze scattered a few wayward blossoms. Somewhere far away children laughed. I sat down on the lush green grass next to Percy. We stayed there, quiet, for a long time.