I have been ambushed by the past

The other week I turned up for the village walking club’s Monday hike. A dawn meet. Two cars. A 90-minute drive and we parked on beaten earth under umbrella pines. The line-up that day was three English, three French. I was the youngest; the others were encumbered by walking poles. We shouldered our day packs and skied through the pines to emerge on a dazzling beach next to a glittering sea. A hundred metres offshore was a steep fortified island. Fort de Brégançon is the French President’s summer residence, they said.

A spry and taciturn old Frenchwoman, dressed for any future meteorological possibility and with a whistle and lanyard strung around her neck, had assumed, I now noticed, a surprisingly well-defined role as leader, guide and timekeeper. She reluctantly allowed the group 30 seconds’ contemplation of the presidential summer house, then set off resolutely towards the west and we followed in an attenuated line.

When I first came to the South of France, the blue motorway road signs pointing the way to places with names such as Nice, Cannes, Saint-Tropez, Monaco and Menton shimmered glamorously in the mind. Passing beneath them I used to think, ‘This is living.’ But the sprawling concrete reality, when I went there, was either hideous or exclusive or both. Often when we went down to the sea we’d say to each other, ‘It must have been lovely here before the war. Now look at it.’ Or, stuck in traffic on a hot day: ‘Blimey, let’s get out of here.’

Leaving Fort Brégançon (midway on a map between Le Lavandou and Hyères) behind us, le chef led us over and around a succession of wild headlands and scalloped unspoiled beaches: Devil’s Point, Mother of God Point and Cap Léoube; and in between les plages of Cabasson, Grand Jardin, Estagnol, Patelin, Pellegrin and L’Argentière — where the hideousness resumes.