French Toilet

We watched our friend Ray stride purposefully along the long inclining road into the setting Flanders sun. From Calais, the three of us had started walking the road to Boulogne. Our quest was to hitch a lift to Paris where we would start our summer of busking. Having walked some miles we decided to split up as drivers were less likely to stop for three than they were for maybe two or one. Ray had six years army experience and volunteered to set off on his own, leaving me to stick with Rube who only weeks previously had been an inmate of Goodmayes Mental Hospital where he was diagnosed as ‘paranoid schizophrenic’.  I don’t remember his psychiatrist ever saying ‘the very best cure is to take Howard on a largely un-planned trip to the continent where he will be scared shitless by sleeping outdoors in the cold and dark in a ruined castle’ but, then maybe he did and I missed it.

The night at the ruined castle had left Rube decidedly jumpy and all day he’d been asking me what the plans were when we reached Paris, would we be able to sleep indoors, how long did we have to stay before we could go home? I lied to him as convincingly as I could. I didn’t want to tell him that I hadn’t thought of any of this and was really just taking each day as it came. I said we’d have nice rooms in Versailles paid for comfortably by the earnings we’d make from busking the metro. It was beginning to sound a bit like George telling Lenny about the alfalfa but at least it was calming him down.

We got a lift from a French bloke in a Citroën who said he was a social worker. I could tell Rube was intent on asking the man for help but his French wasn’t good enough*.

The social worker man dropped us off outside a camp-site on the outskirts of Boulogne, probably thinking we must have tents and things. Almost simultaneously, a storm of biblical proportions started. The sky opened up and the rains fell. The lightning cracked and the thunder boomed. I thought I heard it spell out the words in a Gothic ‘Hammer Horrors’ voice, ‘Take Rube home, this is very cruel. Why did his mother and father allow it?’. Actually, I’ve often wondered that myself. They must have thought it would do him some good.

Faced with the prospect of being soaked to the skin or struck by lightning, there was only one place open to us – the camp toilet. At least Rube couldn’t claim his sleeping arrangements lacked variety.

I don’t know, dear reader, if you’ve ever slept in a public toilet, but it’s not a pleasant experience. For one thing, you don’t tend to sleep as such. There tends to be a lot of human traffic and they leave fragrances that linger with you long after they’ve gone to curl up in their sleeping bags in their cosy tents. They stumble over you and swear. They ask difficult questions like “What the fuck are you doing lying around on the toilet floor?”

Next day the sun was shining and Rube and I made the instant decision to leave the hitch-hiking lark for the birds and enjoyed a luxurious train ride to Paris accompanied by a tasty continental breakfast.

As arranged, we met the intrepid Ray under the Eiffel Tower. He had hitched all night through the storm. He’d been harassed by the Parisian Gendarmes as he tried to catch some sleep on a bench in the Park du Champ de Mars. He was shivering and tired.

He doesn’t know to this day about our comfy train ride.

*The only phrase he possessed and thought was funny to ask people was ‘Voulez-vouz mangez mon pantalon?’ which wasn’t helpful at all. He could substitute with a number of words, popularly ‘derrière’ but this too provoked only antagonism.