Mon Sept 22. Guines. 14.3 km.

One other visit yesterday in Calais to write about. Nestled in one of the city’s parks is the longest German bunker in Europe. Built in 1941, this 94 metre long building served as a marine command centre, wasn’t a target of allied bombing, and survived intact.

Calais was an early German target because it was a landing spot for British troops. For four days in May 1940 British soldiers, hunkered behind the seventeenth-century walls of Calais, held out. Defeat was inevitable, and soon all of France fell to the Germans.

All along the coast the Germans built defenses to protect from an invasion across the channel but also, later in the war, to house guns that could fire on Dover. I’ve seen many remains of these bunkers further south, but won’t be walking along the coast this trip.

The liberation of Calais on September 30, 1944, was largely the work of Canadian troops, especially the Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the francophone Chaudière regiment, well recognized in this museum. Here are Canadian troops in front of one of the huge German guns aimed at Dover.

During a short truce, a small Canadian force entered the city, led by Commandant Mengin from de Gaulle’s Forces Françaises Libres who spoke to the citizens urging them to evacuate before the final attack. Sadly, he was killed shortly after. Here is an example of what was left of Calais.

The exhibit that hit me perhaps the hardest was this one - a gas mask for an infant.

And there is obviously no point uttering a pious wish that such horrors never reoccur.

Anyway, today I walked to Guines, about twelve kilometres south of Calais. The whole area was one massive swamp that over the centuries has been drained. Canals and water channels everywhere. Here is a lift bridge - but no boats in sight today.

As a diligent tourist I was delighted to see a field of French horses - so different from English ones! Only to see tacked on a fence… “Irish Cob colt for sale”. Oh well!

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September 5

I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds. The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford. The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors. They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.

Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place). All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train. I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London. On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum. Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...

Fri Oct 3. Lille.

I had a lovely day in Lille. In fact, all my days on this trip have been lovely! In the morning I went to the very large Palais des Beaux-Arts. This museum holds the largest collection of works of art of any French institution outside Paris. The collection started at the time of the French Revolution as the works of art of the nobility and of the church were confiscated, and continued on apace due to various enthusiastic municipal governments. By 1892 the collection was so large and important that the Palais, its current house, was constructed in the centre of town. The first fun aspect was the recent work of the Swiss artist Felice Varini who used the museum’s interior as his canvas. The oldest works of art are in the ‘basement’, beautifully displayed. Look at the marvellous three dimensionality of this (flat) marble plaque sculpted by Donatello (c 1435) showing Salomé dancing for the head of John the Baptist. And modern technology brings statues alive by giving them back t...

Celia Walks

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