Normandy

Spending a long weekend on the Canadian Beach at Normandy was an enlightening experience for this slightly war ignorant family . Juno Beach, near Courselles-Sur-Mer, was one of the landing sites assigned to the Canadian soldiers nearly 64 years ago. Sitting with our friends at their beach 'shackeau', sharing barbequed seabass fresh from the sea and drinking fine Pouilly Fume, the tip of the reality iceberg started to sink in slowly as our hosts recounted the destructive statistics of the time; there was one body every square metre on the beach's edge, and as you got further away it was one every 3rd or 5th square metre. Imagining the amount of lives that ended under our feet was difficult as you looked out towards the blue sea, free of warships and naval mines, and as our children played happily on the no longer blood stained beach.

A visit to Arromanches down the road, the neighbouring town designated as 'Gold Beach' during the D-Day Landings, was fascinating Still existing in this stretch of water were huge concrete blocks required to calm the waves for provisions to be transported during the war. As the children were clambering all over the huge 'memorial' tank it was hard not to feel uncomfortable somehow. The boys then went to the D-Day museum to look at models and artifacts, but the Cinema Circulaire show was much more disturbing. Purely visual, it showed scenes from the times, only with echoes of machine guns and screams to be heard, no dialogue. A bit harsh for these seven year old boys? Perhaps, but historical reality, which provoked a discussion about death that evening and then prompted them all to move in from sleeping in their independent 'bungalow' to quarters closer to comfort.

On a lighter note, we also visited Bayeux, home of the great 'tapisserie' depicting the Battle of Hastings with William The Conquerer in 1066. Impressive at over 70 metres long, the children were more interested by the final scene when King Harold gets an arrow in the eye - ouch!

At night there still evoked an eerie feel from the sea, complete with beams from a ghostly lighthouse, beams which seemed to come directly across the channel, though impossible to be all the way from Hastings in the UK, the only area of land in that direction. Every night was spent with a bottle of beer in hand trying to figure out this phenomenon, never to be discovered presumably...

Normandy is a lovely banlieue with it's glorious (though smelly) fields of yellow flowers called 'colza', the origin for 'rapeseed oil' and beautiful seaside towns with some of the best seafood in the world. However, it also carried an inescapable air of war which was felt everywhere you went. This is one history we don't want repeating itself.

Ok - history lesson over now, phew!