I was pottering around northern France yesterday on yet another WW1 genealogy trip, only this time I wasn't my usual organised self and had somehow neglected to bring a map with me. The towns and villages in this area are very pretty, in that tidy Lego-like, litter free way, but the one thing that always strikes me is the lack of people and the number of businesses which seem to be permanently closed - it's as if a nuclear bomb has gone off, or the scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when they realise there's no children to be seen. So anyway, I was getting more than a little lost (and irate); I knew the war cemetery was somewhere in this settlement they call Merville, but bugger me those Frenchies weren't making it easy to find.
The tourist information office was, naturally, closed. As were all the shops. And the town hall. That only left the police station. At this point I should add that my French is more than a little rusty, in fact my progress in learning the language ground to a halt somewhere around 1982 when I discovered that Mrs Diffy's lessons were much more fun when we concentrated on her refereeing of food fights and spent less time even pretending to learn some complicated foreign language. Unsurprisingly, the boys in bleu charged with protecting the good (yet invisible) citizens of Merville had a correspondingly inadequate command of English (and no doubt threw their food with a little 'je ne sais quoi') - cue several minutes of us all staring blankly at one another making various noises which may or may not have stemmed from one of our languages, until I grabbed a pen (un stylo, see) and scrawled '1914-1918' on the nearest piece of paper to hand.
What happened next was one of those out of the blue moments that you know you'll remember for the rest of your life yet will mean fuck all to anybody else.
They decided it was far quicker to actually show me where the cemetery was, and so within minutes I found myself trying to keep up with their car through the predictably empty streets. This was beyond the call of duty I thought, but when we got there, instead of just pointing and disappearing, as is usual when guiding someone somewhere, they got out of their car and came in with me. They showed me where the visitor book was, helped locate the grave on the map, and then spent a quarter of an hour helping me find the grave (no easy task in cemeteries this size). The language barrier came tumbling down with our enthusiasm to somehow communicate, and they asked about the grave (my great uncle's), where he was from (Southampton, and proud), his age when killed (19, as in Paul Hardcastle, millions of them). I felt like bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing' and spliff up and talk about the brotherhood of man, man.
In short, my little afternoon was fucking brilliant.
They didn't have to do that. I don't know if they thought I was particularly stupid, or if they just had even more than the usual amount of time on their hands. Maybe they help everybody who visits the war graves. I don't know, I don't know how I'd treat foreign visitors if the roles were reversed (although there's plenty of Polish graveyards near me, hey that's a point). I like to think that my town, including myself, would behave like those French policemen did yesterday, but I can't be sure. But I do hope so.
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