iii. Twin Towns
The car isn’t stolen it’s just nobody bothered to report it as found. The two friendly women who we handed over £200 to were not a pair of sophisticated grifters posing as a polite mother and daughter. I can’t remember exactly how this sorry episode got resolved but we finally made it onto the ferry with our resolve now throughly chipped away. It had been two whole days and we’d not even reached Calais.
What proceeded was a hallucinatory non-stop night drive across nothern France to the Atlantic coast. I recall now that we had a schedule because I had arranged to meet someone from the school in Saint-Nazaire on the Saturday who would give us keys to the house I’d be staying in. Our delay meant we’d be arriving on a Sunday, I didn’t have any contact numbers on me, so we’d have nowhere to stay, which meant at some point a stopover in one of those identi-kit prefab Formula One motels, the ones designed to be cleaned with a hose; yellow and black signage, modular units all plastic, cheap metal and nothing removable.
It was still wintery and the whole journey reminded me of Alain Delon picking up Gian Maria Volonté in Le Circle Rouge; empty autoroutes, empty service stations, wind, sleet and lost highways. All the enthusiasm and joie de vivre of our long dreamt of road trip had ebbed away. We weren’t on the run and didn’t have trenchcoats — we did smoke a lot — talked shit, farted and listened to the world service and the hourly news bulletins with its updates about the Iraq invasion.
The midnight break-up phone call in the Caen service station felt like the last straw of an already fraught journey. We were both exhausted and I was ready to turn back. Pauly, always at hand with sage advice, convinced me it would do no good to turn back now, best carry on with the journey. The residency, the work, time and space would help me plus I would only make a melodrama out of it if I were to go back home now. The break up didn’t really sink in at the time but what the phone call marked was the start of an arduous 7 weeks bouncing around all the very best stages of loss and grief — anger, denial, bargaining, guilt and depression. Saint-Nazaire was a lonely and sad town that was amplified by the state I ended up in, a left behind place that had a miserable and tragic history. It was the sort of place, not unlike areas of the North East of England, that had experienced such a battering over the last 100 years you could almost feel it in the brickwork and concrete.
Saint-Nazaire was created by Napoleon III as a sort of bastard off-spring of it’s big city neighbour Nantes, 50km up the Loire estuary. Nantes played a prime role in the French slave trade between the 17th and 19th century and only ceased trading in people in 1831. Its other big business was food and shipbuilding and as the ships got bigger and the globalised markets started ramping up a gear it needed a better harbour and bigger docks for those incoming and outgoing ships that could no longer navigate the Loire. So Saint-Nazaire got built and post 1800 it’s population exploded. Big new docks, shipyards and harbours were constructed, the first French metal hulled ships were made there, the first transatlantic telegraph wires hit the beach on it shores. So far, so good and all a very familiar industrial northern European narrative and like many towns and cities in the North of England after the boom there was a bust.
Early 21st century Saint-Nazaire was a ghost town, the majority of shipbuilding contracts had all but dried up. Only the Chantiers de l’Atlantique remained. As one of the largest shipyards in the world it specialised (and still does) in the the construction of massive ocean cruise liners. Huge floating mega structures with fantastical names like Harmony of the Seas, Vision of the Seas and Crystal Serenity. The construction of the Queen Mary 2 was near completion during my stay and blimey did the town not want you to forget or ignore that? It had a near 3,000 passenger capacity and would go on to take the rich and pensioned of the world on luxury cruises. Sedate over 70s would sunbath on its decks untroubled and oblivious to the market dealings of their financial investments and the looming global financial crisis a few years down the line. The QM2 was officially named by Elizabeth II in January 2004, tragically a few months earlier 16 people died when a gangway collasped under a group of shipyard workers and their relatives. They’d been invited to visit the vessel before it’s formal naming and launch. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a more melancholic place than Saint-Nazaire, it felt like the end of the world.
What looms most heavy over Saint-Nazaire though is the spectre of World War II and what you cannot miss in the harbour is the huge 14 pen former German submarine base, an imposing and brutal fortified structure of reinforced concrete and machine gun bunkers. So close was it located to the main centre of Saint-Nazaire that post-war it was decided that its demolition would pose too great a risk to the surrounding area. It lay dormant for 50 years until in the 1990s, under a wave of post-industrial regeneration it was rebranded as the Ville-Port or city-harbour. Most of the pens were covered over and it housed a museum; cafes, restaurants, a 1960s French de-commisioned submarine called the Espadon and a glass tourist information office.
As one of 14 Atlantic pockets Saint-Nazaire was a strategic stronghold during World War II. It was from here and similar submarine bases like La Rochelle further south that U-Boat wolf packs would attack merchant ships and fight the Battle of the Atlantic. The docks and harbour were also home to battleships like the Tirpitz and other heavy hitters of the German fleet. As a result the town and harbour suffered from heavy and regular Allied bombing raids that pretty much levelled everything apart from the 6ft wide concrete walls of the submarine base. In 1942 a group of over 600 British commandos raided the town with the intention of blowing up the Tripitz and the Normandie Dock it rested in. They part succeeded by laying timed explosives and running amok through the town and harbour area with sten guns and grenades. Nearly 600 Germans, British and French shipyard workers were killed in one afternoon.
As we drifted around Pauly and I read about all of this on the various memorials, plaques and heritage panels that dot the town. We had arrived in Saint Nazaire very early in the morning, we had drove all through the night with a short stop in an Autoroute picnic area for Pauly to get some sleep. We checked into a motel on the outskirts and hit Saint-Nazaire and its harbour looking for breakfast. I remember it was a bright, crisp, sunny Sunday with full blue sky. We were delerious from sleep deprivation and nothing was open. The size of the submarine pens were a harsh sight, their scale and agressive lines like an anxiety dream made real. The bleak and tragic heritage of the place we found ourselves in left us feeling rubbish and hollow. It wasn’t the worst of it. We decided to take a walk along one of the long piers that enclose the harbour, look out at the ocean and think about nice things. That didn’t happen and it was at the end of pier we read about RMS Lancastria.
70 years on Britain is still banging on about Dunkirk — Their/Our Finest Hour — but one story that isn’t told and was withheld at the time is the evacuation of British and Commonwealth troops from the West Coast of France. 2 weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation thousands of troops from the British Expeditionary Force were pushed across Western France and found themselves in ports like Saint-Nazaire. The Lancastria, a former passenger liner, was commissioned to help with the evacuation. The ship, along with a flotilla of smaller vessels arrived in Saint-Nazaire on 16th June and anchored about 5 miles out from the harbour’s North Pier. The ship was built for around 1,300 passengers but they managed to pack in nearly 6,000. The ship and floatilla were dive bombed and by the end of the day on 17th June the Lancastria had sunk. It’s estimated over 6,000 people died, the largest single loss of life in British maritime history.
The emotional drain of the previous 36 hours and these tales of abject misery were too much for our tiny brains. To top it all off, as a sort of cultural political digestif, we found out Saint-Nazaire was where TinTin departed on his colonial escapades — Les Sept Boules de Cristal. Jacques Tati’s 1951 film Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was also filmed just a mile or two up the road. The pipe smoking comedian and close crop Belgian adventurer’s image proliferated. We made our way back to the motel and noticed the letters IRA in thick green chalk everywhere, mostly in large type on the tarmac of the streets. Saint-Nazaire borders Brittany and it turned out Breton Nationalism was a big deal in the area and aligned itself with the Irish Republican movement as a form of Pan-Celtic solidarity. What the fuck is this place?! — was our bleary reaction to it all.
