I have been to England and France many times always accompanied by my wife.
We have visited all the famous places in England and played Monopoly in real life terms in London.
When I come across something of interest I like to ponder it in detail.
This usually ends up with a tug on the sleeve and a word in my ear telling me “Come on. You have seen enough of that. I want to look at the shops.”
In 2008 I decided that I had copped enough of that and decided to embark on a trip to sites that I wanted to see in-depth alone. I also wanted to have a ride on the A380 which had come into service in 2007. At the time I was living in Thailand and the opportunity was too good to miss so off I went.
It was April which is the traditional holiday season in Thailand and it would also coincide with ANZAC Day. I had a list of things on my bucket list that I wanted to see and planned accordingly.
I took off and landed in London. I booked into a small hotel in Paddington just off Bayswater Road. Not a flash place but good enough to put my head down and sleep peacefully.
First target was the Imperial War Museum at Lambeth.
I set out walking across Hyde Park. A major undertaking because I never realised that it was so big and my hotel was on the opposite side of where I wanted to go to get to Lambeth but the weather was fine and the walk was pleasant. It took me about an hour to get to the IWM but I was glad to be there and enjoyed walking along the Serpentine and admiring the Royal Albert Hall.
I spent three days doing this and pored over the exhibits at the IWM at my leisure.
On the fourth day I decided to go to Lords Cricket Ground to watch the cricket. There was a match on between the English test team and the winners of the 2007 County competition. I had never been inside this famous ground before so I just took a seat and enjoyed being there. Come lunch time I had a couple of beers and lunch at the Taverners Inn, soaked up the atmosphere and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The cricket had no significance as I was unfamiliar with the County competition premiers.
The next morning I took the train to Kings Cross St. Pancras station to catch the train to France. This is the train that goes under the English Channel so another item on the bucket list was ticked off. The process was pretty simple as the EU rules had eliminated passport controls between the two countries but as a foreigner I had to go through the usual procedure. It was just like an airport but far more efficient. I got a seat on the train and settled down. The train took off and passed through London suburbia at great speed. There were several tunnels along the way then we came to one which was extraordinarily long. This was the one under the Channel but there was no signage or announcement that this is where we had come to. When the train emerged back into daylight I noticed that the traffic was moving on the other side of the road and I realised that we had arrived in France. It took about 15 minutes to cross the Channel.
The train pulled in to Gare de Nord station. I had been there before and knew the lay-out. I went down stairs, rented a car and took off for the freeway to Normandy. Being left hand drive I started off on the wrong foot going the wrong way down a one-way street but, thankfully, it was a wide street and I negotiated my way out of it without mishap. I got onto the freeway and headed for Caen in Normandy. Most of the names were unfamiliar to me as were all of the directions but I coped with it by a mixture of sheer luck and dead reckoning. The turn off to Caen was obvious but then when I tried to find a hotel I was in trouble. I had got off the freeway in a suburban area and could not find anything that looked like a hotel. I pulled into a gas station to ask directions. Thankfully the lady behind the counter spoke English, pointed me in the right direction and I booked into the first hotel that I came to. It was nice little clean and comfortable place and having got myself settled, the time of day then being around “cocktail hour”, I went downstairs to find the bar.
There was no such thing as a “bar” as we understand it. Instead there are tables and chairs where one sits in a civilised manner to consume one’s drink. There were no vacant tables but there was one where two blokes were sitting and there were two spare chairs. I asked them if it was OK for me to take one of the seats. They said no problem so I sat down and we started a conversation. It turned out to be an absolute godsend. These blokes were a couple of British ex-soldiers who made an annual excursion to Normandy to go over the D Day sites. They had come in their car by ferry to Le Havre and invited me to join them in their travels which I readily accepted.
This was their third or fourth trip to Normandy so I had a couple of free tour guides. We all got on well and had a great time. They knew all the famous and less famous places. Over three days we visited all the sites of the D Day landings. Bloody Omaha beach where there is still a not too large cliff but a significant obstacle when faced with withering fire from above. The gun emplacements behind the beaches were awesome. How the Rangers ever scaled the cliff at Pointe de Hoc I do not know. This is the highest cliff between Utah and Omaha beaches. It is backed with a series of heavy concrete fortifications and gun pits. The Rangers fought their way up the cliff and penetrated the big gun emplacements. These are still intact but obviously disarmed. They are large targets and I was amazed that they had escaped any serious damage from Allied bombing. Given that the Allies had complete control of the air on D Day and prior I could not understand how these large targets were not destroyed.
We went to Arromanches where the remains of the Mulberry Harbours still sit off shore too big to be dismantled and providing a breakwater for small craft. Arromanches is a lovely little seaside town with no scars left from the furious days of June in 1944. In fact this could be said of the entire Normandy Peninsular except those places which are now preserved for posterity. We went to Sainte-Mere-Eglise where John Steele, a paratrooper of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment was caught up on the church spire for several hours until the Germans cut him down and made him a prisoner. There is s memorial plaque to this now famous incident at the church which still stands.
From the 1962 Movie " The Longest Day "
We went to the US and German war cemeteries. The contrast was stark. The US one was bright and peaceful. The crosses all white in neat rows and beautifully maintained.
By contrast the German was gloomy and morose. All the crosses were of black stone heavily cut and there was an atmosphere of foreboding about the whole place. A reflection on my impression of the German character generally.
On the first night of my stay at Caen a group of about 15 young English men accompanied by an older man arrived at the hotel. I got to chatting with the older man and found that this was a group of junior British soldiers and he was a retired Brigadier who, as a Reserve Officer, was their chaperone. The British army recruits boys from 16 years of age as junior soldiers. They are part of the army but are restricted in what they are expected to do. They are trained to become senior NCO’s, warrant officers and sergeants, when they turn 18 and can be fully fledged members of the British Army. They generally do not become officers. These boys had come to Caen to study the battle at Pegasus Bridge, a key target on D day. It was a bridge over the Caen Canal and vital for British armour to penetrate inland from Gold beach. It was also a key route for German armour to attack the beaches. It had been the target of British glider borne troops who landed with pin point accuracy on the day and held the bridge for over a week until the British armour arrived.
We all got along famously and these boys were somewhat fascinated to have met an ex-Australian commando in the flesh. They were well informed on Australian exploits in North Africa and the Operation Jaywick raid on Singapore Harbour but beyond that had no direct experience in serving with Australian troops as junior soldiers were not permitted to serve overseas.
On the fourth day my British companions departed back to England and I then turned my attention to one of the top items on my bucket list; a visit to see the Bayeux Tapestry. This is one of the most famous and most enduring artefacts of British history. It is an embroidered cloth 70 metres long by 50 centimetres wide. It depicts the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and was put together by ladies in about 1070. It depicts the Norman Conquest from the time that William the Conqueror embarked on his mission up until the Battle of Hastings.
It has endured intact for over 900 years carefully secreted and protected in times of war or lesser conflict. It now resides in a glass case. There is some speculation as to its origin but the one I prefer is that it was created by the wife of William the Conqueror and her ladies in waiting. It is said to have been commissioned at the time of the construction of Bayeux Cathedral and completed in time for display when the cathedral was finished. The cathedral was commenced in 1070 and completed in 1077. It is one of the most fascinating things I have ever seen given its age and the superb condition that it is in.
That was the end of my visit to Normandy. I then proceeded up to Amiens where I got a room in a very tiny hostel for my visit to Villers Bretonneux on ANZAC Day. This was my third visit to VB, a place that I love to visit.
From there I drove back to Gare de Nord station and returned to England.
This time I went on to Cambridge where I got accommodation at a bed & breakfast house that turned out to be the manse of the local Anglican Church. This was to be my base for visiting Duxford. I spent three days at Duxford which is still a working aerodrome and part of the IWM series of sites. It is the original home of 19 Squadron commanded by Douglas Bader and the first squadron of the RAF to be equipped with Spitfires.
On my first day there it was raining cats and dogs. I was in the bookshop when I heard the unmistakable sound of a Spitfire. I had never seen one in the flash before but knew the sound instantly. I ran outside into the rain, tears of joy and pride mixing with the raindrops running down my face. I stood in the rain for 15 minutes at least while the plane taxied to its resting place.
Onboard footage of Peter Teichman as he flies as part of a 18 Spitfire Balbo at the Duxford Battle of Britain airshow on Saturday 22nd September 2018.
Duxford is now the centre of a large museum built by the USA as it was, after the war progressed, a base for the US 8th Army Air Force and its daylight precision bombing raids over Europe. It has many other restoration workshops where WW2 vintage aircraft are restored and maintained. One in particular that interested me was a Beaufighter which had been recovered from a disused airstrip near Geelong in Victoria. The undercarriage of the plane collapsed on landing and it was just pushed off the strip into the bush and left there. It was recovered eventually and sent to Duxford where it has been undergoing restoration for 15 years at that time and would take another 5 years to complete the delay being due to the difficulty in locating original Beaufighter parts.
After three days of sheer pleasure I caught a bus to Heathrow and caught the A380 back to Singapore. A wonderful trip in every respect and it convinced me that the only way to travel and see what you want to see is to travel alone.
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