Essary: Recalls agony of peacetime Channel crossing
Getting past French columns ordeal for veteran travelers
By Helen Essary, Central Press columnist
Washington –
The weather and the Channel tides timed the invasion of France, Allied chiefs explain. Crossing the English Channel is regarded by many people as the most disagreeable experience any traveler can have, said President Roosevelt the other day. The sea moves fast there. The waves roll high and the winds blow strong. There were tens of thousands of men to be got across the water and landed on enemy territory on the shores near Cherbourg, Le Havre and Calais, Mr. Roosevelt added.
I used to think I was landing on enemy territory even in those jolly old pre-war touring days when I tottered off the Channel boat at Cherbourg, Calais or Le Havre. Those fierce able-bodied French females who pushed me around the customs office – especially at Calais – made me feel unwanted on French territory (this is definitely an understatement).
There was no Parisian chic about these ladies. They wore no stays to bind their physical proportions. Their smacked back “cheveux” were not done according to the “dernier cri” of the Rue de Rivoli. Their broad denim aprons had not been created by Paguin nor any other couturière.
But how those women could wave their arms and yell and shove. I suspected them of being descendants of Madama La Farge, whom Charles Dickens pictured knitting in a Paris square as Le Guillotine lopped off the heads of the aristocrats.
When the news of the Nazi invasion of France startled the world four years ago, I wondered how Hitler’s warriors could have got past those custom house grenadier-esses. Bucking the French customs with their assistance was a trial to break the stiffest backbone. You always knew you were going to lose your luggage.
You knew the train on which you had a compartment (suspicious word) would leave without you because you were certain to be the last to escape from this landing madhouse.
You went stumbling up and down steps, across cobblestones – there always seemed to be so many cobblestones – across railroad tracks at the heels of strange, foreign characters. These characters fought over your bags and suspected you of concealed American cigarettes and typewriters, whose shouts you could not understand regardless of the opened Phrase Book for Travelers you held in one hand. With the other hand, you clutched an umbrella, a “lightweight” coat, a paper parcel of silver spoons you had “picked up, my dear, at one of those adorable, open-air markets in London,” a mile of colored tickets, your passport, your landing card, your pound note for which you were sure you were not going to be paid your francs’ worth at the ”exchange” wicket, and your Paris-Herald without which, if you were a true American, you never traveled for fear you would not know the “rate of exchange.”
The heavy fear of the things you had to have in order to land in France was sometimes more than an uncultured American could cope with. Especially if the wind over the Channel was blowing extra strong, I once saw a harried nervous lady tourist drop her purse and her passport over the side of the boat into the sea. The French authorities would not let her off the boat without identification. She may be there yet for all I know.
Those Channel tides were exciting and fun if you were not rocking about on their uncanny crests, so to speak. I spent a season at a small and elegant Channel resort – “Bexhill-on-Sea.”
Near Boulogne, where many of our soldiers landed on the French side, many of the beaches were sandy.
I spent one night at a spot where the swimmers, Gertrude Ederle and others, were in training. After a dinner of langouste (lobsters without the big claw), I had taken myself to bed in a many-windowed room facing the Channel.
All night long, a towering lighthouse twirled its beams across my poor face. When I had finally got to sleep, I was awakened by the noise of the tide rushing in. At low tide the beach had stretched out as wide as two blocks, it seemed to me, but now I could hear the sea charging about under the foundations of the inn. And I thought how sad it would be if I were washed out to sea in this unknown land without a friend to identify “body of drowned woman washed up on shore” like the captain’s little daughter in “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”