Chapter Twenty-two
HOME AT LAST
After a night in Nouvion-en-Thériache (where boys had cheerily called out ‘Bonne route!’ and I'd almost thought I was back in Turkey), I pushed on towards Arras through the raw cold. No longer having my eccentric gloves, my hands were bruised by the wind.
The nearer I got to England the uglier the villages became - a spreading melancholia of dingy brick. Only the poppies studding the verges and occasional neatly maintained Commonwealth cemeteries relieved the monotony.
That night I wrote:
no stench of cordite in the air
but armpit smell of elder
no blood but poppy blood splashing roadside banks
as my tired bicycle battles the west wind that would bar its path
and I struggle through sad towns with curious names
on a grey day
taking the road to Arras |
Arras was a surprise amid all this flatness, like a finely cut diamond in a cowpat. Here in the hostel on the Grande Place, whose superb seventeenth century arcade is so monumentally bourgeois, I spent the night of 3 June, having admired the ludicrous town hall from whose roof three tiers of gun ports aim at sedition and licentiousness in every generation.
 | | The Town Hall in Arras |
* * *
Fourth of June was to be my last day on the Continent. At Thérouanne, after a morning of panting ascents, my hands once more blackened by repeatedly replacing a loose chain, I entered a Jupiter bar.
Having explored the toilet, I showed the patron my hands. ‘Do you have a basin I can wash these in?’
‘Come with me,’ he said.
Out back he squeezed detergent on my hands, then trained a jet of water over them from the garden hose while I scratched at the grease. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘We're in the country here.’
‘On the contrary, this is very kind of you.’
‘On a cycling tour?’
‘Well, perhaps. More like a journey, I suppose. Done about nine thousand kilometres so far - and nearly home.’
When we returned to the bar, the patron enthusiastically told two elderly peasants of my journey; they raised their eyebrows with calm indifference.
I sat to eat my hard-boiled egg and drink my coffee. ‘Does it continue hilly like this all the way to Calais?’ I enquired.
One of the peasants looked up. ‘No hills in England, eh?’
At the Calais ferry terminal at length, I ate in the warmth of the cafeteria, somewhat apart from the others, opening a tin of ravioli with my knife and swigging wine from the bottle: I felt quite reprehensible!
The Pride of Kent moved off about seven; the sky, rent over France, threw lurid glimmers across the
grey-green.
 | | The Pride of Kent leaves Calais on the 4 June 1991 |
* * *
After a night at the Goodwin Road hostel in Dover, I climbed to cliff-height, then flew down the roads as if the bicycle knew it was going home.
At half past three that afternoon in Upchurch, Kent, my New Zealand friends Lyall and Rozena discovered me in a neighbour's garden chair. There were embraces; wine was bought; wine was drunk; we were drunk.
There followed two nights in London with my friend Stuart and three in Upchurch before I rode into Surrey and the hostel at Holmebury St Mary.
On Tuesday 11 June, drenched with rain and sweat, I reached the millhouse hostel of Winchester and was lulled to sleep by Itchin waters sluicing past the open window.
 | | The Itchin |
Next day, within ten miles of Poole, I had my last puncture and was unable to inflate the Czech tyre with a Turkish pump.
This had been 1,636 miles without a single puncture, but in spitting rain that was no consolation.
At a petrol station I inflated the tyre, and a bulbous tumour appeared close to the valve.
For ten miles this growth rubbed against the brake blocks each time it passed them. An out-of-work expatriot Scot on a bicycle guided me through Bournemouth outskirts; pedalling against the brakes, I had trouble keeping up with him; besides, his ‘fuck’ in every other sentence was getting on my nerves.
Finally he gave me his last directions and disappeared: my own lack of expletives had probably got on his nerves.
Yet my trials were all but over. I was to spend five nights in Poole, seeing my ninety-one-year-old mother and my sister and her family.
 | | A last toast from my mother |
The 13th was a date of sentimental interest to me. In 1325 on another Thursday June 13, exactly, that is to say 666 years earlier, a young Moroccan had set out on the first of many journeys that would take him seventy-five thousand miles round the world in twenty-eight hard years. What I had done was so paltry that comparison with Ibn Battuta's travels was quite unthinkable.
| Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six. |
George (Jud) Evans having informed me that I was expected at the Town Hall, Barrow, on 22 June, I had not the time to cycle all the way. In fact I rode only from Poole to Salisbury, Liverpool to Hesketh Bank, and finally Carnforth to Barrow-in-Furness.
Just east of Dalton-in-Furness on 22 June I bought a Mars bar in a general store and happened to ask the girl how far it was to Barrow.
‘How far to Barrow?’ asked the girl.
‘How far to Barrow?’ repeated the woman beside her.
‘From here?’ said a customer. Then, quite sententiously, ‘Five miles to the Town Hall.’
The machinery of Providence had since the beginning of time been quietly whirring in preparation for this man's role in my journey - those words, exact no doubt to the nearest furlong: five miles to the Town Hall.
George and John welcomed me in brilliant sunshine at the Ferry, where we ate and drank before heading for the Town Hall.
 | Well wishers outside Barrow Town Hall L to R:
First George (Jud) Evans, Councillor Park,
who'd seen me off nine months earlier; fifth,
the then Mayor of Barrow; and sixth, myself, Sylvia O'Loughlin, Nan Armour.
|
The Mayor, Councillor Hamezeian, graciously accepted the plate from Bursa, Turkey.
Indeed it was all very gracious. Over tea in the Mayor's Parlour, I was presented with the coat of arms of the city, whose motto Semper sursum (Forever upwards) is, I like to think, very vaguely apposite.
Thus six hundred and sixty-six years and nine days after Ibn Battuta began the greatest journey of all time, I ended mine. It had been ten thousand miles, 6,409 of them on an excruciating Avocet saddle.
The donkey was home at last.
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