<br/->plage-de-calais<br/->

We’ve been on the road for weeks, finding shelter where we can sometimes moving on after only one night, never stopping long enough to be recognised. Often we’ve pitched camp in fields as darkness falls, with only what we’ve managed to find for supper in dirty villages charging high prices along the way. We’ve hugged the coast where we can, turning inland only when its meanderings might make us stray too far from our intended route. We’re an exhausted depleted party, weary with heat. We’ve lost children along the way. We need a swim.

Then eventually signs for our crossing become apparent up ahead, it’s route announced with names sounding like the north: Le Touquet, Wimereux, Buerk-sur-Mer. We’ll make for home tomorrow, get up late, muck around all morning, half-stuff tents back into cars and edge along the sand dunes. We’ll see houses become increasingly big with mansards to our right and pillbox remains in fields to our left. We’ll pass the crossing point of others, the nondescript landmarks of Sangatte, with its Red Cross camp and the almost invisible Eurotunnel terminal, to make Calais about teatime.

Blériot-Plage is the town beach. It’s full with people full of lunch, enjoying the late afternoon sun before it sinks grubbily into la Manche. Here there are none of the deep, even tans we enviously gazed at in the south. It’s more the peasant’s tan, weather-beaten arms up to rolled-up sleeve height, sunburnt shoulders and backs of knees. The car parks link the town proper with outsized beach huts, filled with spilling families decamped from their winter towns inland. Some huts are tightly boarded as if they’ve been that way for years, the sea air peeling paint. One is still humming with the low-point of an endless crusty party lingering on for days, big dogs, beer bottle empties in piles on the sand and juggling practice while high.

The beach is full now and will be empty by dusk. This town comes and goes like the tide. But now, down in the still knee-deep water far from the shoreline, children mock-drown each other, seemingly just yards from the passing ferries. Some give a small wave and get a big one in return.
Later, with hair crispy with salt from our last holiday swim, we drive centre-ville for moules et steak frites and other easy treats. There’s the town square filled with its permanent funfair, empty dodgems at dusk, a friendly rip-off rifle range overseen by edgy pan-European types bored to distraction with the scarcity of clientele riding on their waltzers, ignored by the groups of asylum seekers hanging around the town centre, waiting for a way to make their crossing.

This is nowheresville on a continent’s edge and I love it for its people, particularly as they’re all in motion. Or is it because I’m on holiday? Every seaside town arrived at and passed through is thronging, packed with families not-at-home, detached from their attachment, moved simply for displacement’s sake. In half-towns shared with the sea, the beach, usually made too small by a corniche, pressed up against the flotsam line of hotels, arcades and chip shops. They all have a tawdry hinterland of less-than-seafront glamour and a town centre lost and meaningless to those passing through but decorated with beach towel, bucket and spade shops.

There’s South Beach in Miami, Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai, Oyster Bay in Dar es Salaam, Promenade des Anglais in Nice, Playa de la Victoria in Cádiz, Coney Island in New York. But Calais is quietly king of this balanced look, where fun is an active decision you take against a backdrop of those ingredients of everything next to each other like a child’s drawing – smoke stacks, aggregate piles, blocks of flats – where the life of the town continues when you’re gone. Calais is also the unsung hero of Europe, gateway to Albion, with its ferry port so inappropriately vast, as if one day everyone in France may decide to sail to Britain.

My kind of town is the one you pass through, visit not live in, the one back there or the one up ahead. The one full of people moving, when I’m on the move too, having been away from the working day long enough to be able to remember, like Dickens’ Jacob Marley, that ‘Mankind is my business… the dealings of my trade are but a drop of water in the ocean of my business’.

Dominic Cullinan is director of SCABAL, whose recent work includes a sports hall at Dunraven School in Streatham, Walkers Headquarters in Grand Cayman and various school projects in London.

AT218 2011 May p96