by Jan Morris
This particular aesthetic was born in Trouville. It was among the earliest of the French seaside resorts, for a time it was the grandest, and at the back of our minds it is half familiar to us all.
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Not far below the Seine estuary a little river called the Touques arrives unobtrusively at the English Channel. On its right bank, almost at its mouth, there stood at the beginning of the nineteenth century the isolated village of Trouville. The artist Charles Mozin discovered it in the 1820s, and in a long series of affectionate paintings portrayed it in every detail: the horsemen plodding across the river at low tide, the brawny fisherwomen, the bright sails of the boats along the quays, the colonnaded fish market beside the waterfront, and above all the limpid hush that seems to have hovered over the little town. His pictures introduced the world to the charms of a coastline hitherto considered blighted and impossibly primitive, and presently the great caravan of fashion found its way to the Normandy shore, to make the name of Trouville synonymous, for a brief but gorgeous heyday, with the pleasures of the Second Empire. Led by the Empress Eugénie, herself a creature of infinite sensuality, the Empire fell upon Trouville like some overwhelming rich aunt, all scent and furbelows. A boardwalk was laid upon its sands; above it, beneath the bluffs, a parade of hotels and villas arose; and at the point where the river reached the sands, they built a huge casino, a regular monument of a place, with assembly rooms in the latest style, and carriage drives fit for any imperial barouche.
Trouville became a catalyst of the grand and the quaint, and so it was that when I got there I recognized it all: the sea and the sand from the painters, the style from the history books, and the very stance of the hotel manager from the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu. Trouville has not much grown since Proust’s day, or even since Eugénie’s. The countryside behind it remains delectably unspoiled, and the combination of green grass and sand, meeting at the foreshore, still makes the view from the beaches feel like one of those glimpses you get from the deck of a ship, when the passing landscape seems close but altogether unattainable, as though you are seeing it through plate glass.
Trouville was spared by the two world wars, and this impunity means that it has a curiously preserved or pickled air. It is a period piece, more perfect than most. Its balance of commerce and pleasure has been scrupulously maintained, and you can enjoy today almost the same mixture of sensations that the courtiers and the artists enjoyed a century ago. The core of the town remains the Casino. This has aged a little since its ceremonial opening, and has rather gone down in the world. Part of it is a cinema, part of it a salt water spa, part a night club, part a waxwork show, part a fire house, part a shabby kind of tenement. As an architectural whole, nevertheless, it is still imposingly snooty, and looks faintly exotic too – like a Mongol marquee, perhaps, with bobbles and domes and flagstaffs, and its own name in large and ornate letters above the entrance.
On my very first evening in Trouville I made my way to the steps of this old prodigy and leaning against a marble pillar, surveyed the town before me. The square in front of the building, dotted with trees and used as a car park, is asymmetrical, and this splaying of its form makes it look like one of those panoramic postcards popular among our great-grandmothers, in which several negatives were tacked together, and the view came out peculiarly elongated, smaller at the edges than in the middle. From this distorted apex I could see both halves of Trouville. To my left lay the beach and all it represents, the pride, the old grandeur and the space. To my right, the fishing boats were lined up beside the quay, bright awnings ornamented the shop fronts, and all was cluttered intimacy. Both styles were essential, I realized that evening, to the art form that is Trouville; and it is the confrontation of the two, set against the light and scale of the foreshore, that gives the aesthetic of the seaside its especial tangy charm.
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I looked to my right first, towards fisherman’s Trouville – still as, in the 1820s, any romantic’s delight. The tide was high, and the upper works of fishing smacks lined the river boulevard – tangled structures of rope and rigging, hung with flags, buoys, lifebelts, nets and paintpots, and undulating slightly at their moorings. Here and there a crew was unloading its catch in crates upon the quay, while the fish merchant gravely calculated the value, a huddle of housewives knowingly discussed the quality, a few tourists looked on with the glazed fascination that dead fish inspire in almost everyone, and several small boys in their blue school smocks wormed and giggled through the crowd. There were men angling, too, with heavy rods and voluminous canvas satchels. There were porters lounging around the poissonnerie, in stained overalls and nautical caps. High-wheeled carts were propped against walls, there was a noise of hammering from a boatyard, and the fish stalls down the street glistened with crabs, lobsters, jumpy things like big water fleas, twitching eels, clams, oysters and mackerel with a cold bluish tinge to their flanks. Fishiness was everywhere – fish smells, fish lore, fish skills, fish in boxes, fish in baskets, and mounds of shellfish upon the pavement tables of the restaurants.
For Trouville is still a working town, and behind the waterfront workaday good sense fills the tight mesh of its streets. There are shops that sell nets and tackle; shops lusciously flowing with the fruits, vegetables and cheeses of Normandy; trim cafés full of mirrors and tobacco smoke; a couple of big chain stores; and up in the grounds of the hospital, overgrown with ivy and embellished with archaic saintly figures, the original church of Trouville, thirteen paces long from door to altar, in whose reverent obscurity the fishing people worshipped for several centuries before the first tourist set eyes upon this place. All the stubborn variety of French provincial life stirs along those streets. Trouville is rich in tough twinkling old ladies, eccentrically dressed and wheeling their groceries on basket trolleys, and in those shabby but courteous old gentlemen of France who might be anything from dukes to retired milkmen, and wear high starched collars in the middle of August. But there are many laughing representatives of the new French generations, too, taller, gayer and more confident than we have ever known French people before, with beautiful children in the back seats of small family cars, and a sense of bright emancipation from a fusty past.
Fisherman’s Trouville is never torpid. It admirably illustrates those aspects of the French genius which are unalterably organic – close always to the earth, the sea, the marriage bed and the neighbour’s gossip. The Duchesse de Guermantes, the ineffably aristocratic chatelaine of Proust’s great novel, loved to tell country anecdotes in a rustic accent: and it is this ancient attachment to earthy things, so vital a part of the French artistic energy, that the right-hand view from the Casino best expresses.
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Then I looked to the left, and there lay another France in esplanade. Exuberantly the hotels and villas clustered about the beach – none of them young indeed, but all of them gay, like jolly old gentlefolk, in lace and grey toppers, out to enjoy themselves. It was an elaborate age that made Trouville famous, and the buildings of this resort are flamboyantly individualist. Some are gloriously encrusted with coils, domes and flourishes of classicism. Some are expensively faced in Normandy half-timber, and stand incongruously beside the sands like farmhouses on Fifth Avenue. Others go to wilder excess, and are built like castles, like fairy palaces, even in one case like a Persian caravanserai. The rooftops of this Trouville are punctuated with golden birds, pineapples, crescent moons, spindles, metal flowers and urns, and among the trees the mansions reside in majesty, unabashed by shifts of taste or society, and still looking, behind their ornamental gates and protective shady gardens, almost voluptuously comfortable.
Not much has changed since the great days of the resort. The bright little tents that people put up on the beach are made of nylon nowadays, but with their suggestion of eastern dalliance still recall the enthusiasms of Delacroix or Gautier. The long-celebrated boardwalk, however crowded it becomes in high summer, is still quiet and leisurely. Nobody has erected a skyscraper hotel, or built a bowl
ing alley, and severe instructions affixed to flagstaffs govern the decorum of the sands. The miniature golf course, beside the Casino, is a very model of genteel entertainment, admirably suited to the inhibitions of elastic-sided boots and bustles: with its painted wooden windmill for knocking balls through, its tricky inclines and whimsical hazards, it seems to ring perpetually with the silvery laugh of ladies-in-waiting, and the indulgent banter of colonels.
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Having inspected the urban dichotomy I walked behind the great mass of the Casino, and across the narrow river I saw another, larger, more glittering town on the other side. The Duc de Morny, half-brother of the Emperor himself, was paradoxically the originator of Trouville’s decline. In the 1860s this enterprising speculator cast his eye across the Touques, and saw that the sand on the opposite bank was just as golden, the climate just as sparkling, the sea the same stimulating sea – and the landscape entirely empty. Trouville had reached its peak of fashion; the Parisian elite was beginning to hanker for somewhere more exclusive; in a few years, upon the impetus of the duke, there arose on the left bank of the Touques the excruciatingly posh resort of Deauville. Today it is the smartest watering place in northern France, and it looked to me that evening, from the backside of Trouville’s Casino, like a vision of another age. Its clientele nowadays is richer and more cosmopolitan than Trouville’s. Its casino has a turnover twice as great. Its street lights come on fifteen minutes earlier. Its race meeting is one of the most important in Europe. No fishermen’s cafés soil its elegant promenades, and only yachts and speedboats sail into its basin. It is all resort. Today, if you want to explain where Trouville stands, you can best say that it’s over the bridge from Deauville.
So there is a certain pathos to the prospect from the Casino at Trouville – but pathos of a gentle, amused kind. Trouville does not feel humiliated. It is this small town that the artists loved, its image, variously interpreted down the generations, that has entered all our sensibilities – Trouville’s sands and sails we all dimly recognize, Trouville’s ludicrous mansions that ornament the album pages, Trouville’s bright light that gleams so often, with a tang of Channel air, from the walls of so many galleries. In Trouville the sun, the sea, the fishing folk and the high society became an inspiration, and created a tradition of art.
I did not mope that evening, then. I walked back to my hotel, accepted the bows of Proust’s pageboys, left a note inviting Whistler and De Musset to join me for a drink at Les Vapeurs, and asked the maid to clean my best shoes, in case I bumped into the Empress at the gaming tables after dinner.
I had flown to Trouville with my car on a pioneering air-ferry service from England that then operated from Lympne, in Hampshire. Waiting to board the aircraft on my return journey I fell into conversation with a fellow-motorist also bound for Lympne, but as we chatted he looked up and saw his car at that moment being loaded on to the departing flight for Dublin, which promptly took off. The aircraft was a Bristol Freighter, and a surviving specimen of the marque stands on a plinth at Yellowknife, in Canada, where it is honoured as the first wheeled aircraft ever to land at the North Pole.
17
Ex-Britannica
By the mid-1970s I was deep in the writing of a trilogy about the British Empire called Pax Britannica, so that many of my travels took me to places where the British had once been rulers, gathering impressions from the present that would illuminate my evocations of the past. I went to most of the countries that had once been dominions of the Crown, in a project that took me, all in all, the whole decade to complete. Many publications financed my journeys, by commissioning articles from around the world.
Singapore
In some ways the island colony of Singapore – ‘the Lion City’ – had been the most absolutely imperial possession of them all, because it had been created from scratch by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. It had also been one of the most tragic, because when the British surrendered the colony to the Japanese in 1942 it was the most disastrous blow to British arms in the entire history of the empire. By the 1970s Singapore was an independent republic of strikingly un-British temperament.
For the professional traveller there is nothing more agreeable than to reach a place that is altogether on its own, ramparted, defiant and sui generis. Such a place, like it or not, is undeniably the Republic of Singapore, the Lion City. It is like nowhere else. It lives adventurously. It is equally admired and detested. It glitters in the anticipation. It stands on the sea’s edge, ostentatiously. It is the last of the city-states – or perhaps, gnomically speaking, the first.
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No Florence, though, or Mantua. Flat, steamy, thickly humid, the island lies there in its hot seas, fringed with mangrove swamps, and from the air it looks a slightly desperate place that ought to be uninhabited. It looks an invented place, and so it is, for it was brought to life by the alchemy of empire.
For most Britons of a certain age, I suppose, Singapore remains Raffles’s island to this day: but it is poignantly true that although no possession of the old empire was more dashingly acquired, romantically conceived, or successfully developed, still in historical terms Singapore remains a figure of all that was fustiest and snobbish in the colonial empire, all that went with baggy shorts and ridiculous moustaches, with servant problems and Sunday sing-songs at the Seaview, with tennis clubs and beer and meeting for elevenses at Robinson’s – with everything that was most bourgeois about the declining empire, and in the end with everything that was most ineffectual. Singapore was the archetype of Somerset Maugham’s empire, Noel Coward’s empire – an empire that had lost its purpose, its confidence and its will: when it fell to the Japanese in 1942, in effect the empire fell too, and the idea of empire too.
When I landed in Singapore a homing instinct led me direct to the core of this dead colony, the downtown expanse of green called the Padang, and there without surprise I discovered that the imperial ghosts lived on. The last post-prandial members of the Singapore Cricket Club were still sitting with their gin-slings on the veranda, white linen hats over their eyes. There stood the spire of the Anglican cathedral, fretted but still handsome in its close, with small Anglican-looking cars parked outside its offices, and large Anglican-looking ladies coordinating arrangements in its porch. Ineffably conceited barristers, direct from Lincoln’s Inn, adjusted their wing-collars or tilted their wigs beneath the colonnade of the Supreme Court: civil servants with briefcases hurried preoccupied into the great offices of government from whose windows, during a century of British rule, expatriate administrators looked out with pride or loathing across the tropic green.
Away to the west, over Anderson Bridge, the lumpish structures of imperial capitalism still breathed the spirit of the thirties, so that I half-expected to see Oxford bags and monocles emerging from revolving doors, or wives in pink cloche hats dropping in on Reggie. Away to the east stood the glorious palms of Raffles Hotel, that grand caravanserai of empire, the Shepheard’s of the East, where the Maughams used to drink and the Cowards fizz; where the gin-sling was invented, where there was a Free Dark Room for Amateur Photographers, and Hotel Runners Boarded All Incoming Steamers, where Admiral Skrydloff and the Duke of Newcastle stayed, where generations of Malayan planters intrigued their leaves away, and not a few planters’ wives began their tearful journeys home to mother. It is all there still, and the ethos of the dying empire, threadbare, raffish, gone to seed, well-meaning, lingers there forlornly.
It was from the Padang in 1942 that the humiliated colonialists and their wives, mustered by the Japanese, began their cruel march to Changi Prison and often to death: and if I closed my eyes, I thought, I could still hear their voices in the sunshine, courageous or querulous, insisting upon water for the dogs or bursting bravely into ‘There’ll Always Be An England’. The British Empire went out with a whimper, assiduously though we have disguised the fact even to ourselves, and in Singapore especially it faded away in pathos – or worse still, bathos, for the generals were second-r
ate, the songs were banal, the policies were ineffectual and even the courage was less than universal.
I find this mixture very moving – the imperial energies debased and enervated, like a very exclusive sport when the masses take it over. The good of empire, like the bad, depended upon force and the will to use it: by 1945 the British had lost that will for ever, and for that matter the force too.
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On a masochistic impulse I determined to visit the exact spot where, on 15 February 1942, was sealed the fate of Singapore and thus of the British Empire – which Churchill himself, only a year or two before, had conjectured might last a thousand years. The Japanese had by then captured most of the island, but had only penetrated the outskirts of Singapore City. Short of fuel and ammunition, they were exerting their will upon the hapless British more by bluff than by superior power. They were on a winning streak, the British unmistakably upon a losing one: at seven o’clock that evening General Arthur Percival, wearing his steel helmet and long shorts, walked along the Bukit Timah road to meet General Tomoyuki Yamashita at the Ford Motor Company factory, and surrender Raffles’s island to the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The factory has not much changed since then. The buildings are still modest, low and rather drab, and the man at the gate still raises his barrier with that faintly military manner so characteristic of lesser functionaries under British colonial rule. Inside, the offices have been shifted around somewhat, and separated with glass partitions, and the room in which the surrender was signed has been divided into two. Nevertheless, they said, as they showed me into a fairly gloomy, wood-panelled and teak-furnished executive chamber, this was the very place where the surrender was signed. Even the furniture was the same. There sat Percival and his three staff officers, hangdog and exhausted, hopelessly, almost obsequiously asking for more time. Here sat the bullish Yamashita in his medal ribbons and open-necked shirt – ‘All I want to know is, do you surrender unconditionally or not? Yes or no?’ The fans whirred heavily above their heads, and as the sun began to set the dim electric lights came on: in the long silences Percival stared helpless at his papers, Yamashita’s fingers drummed the table-top. Japanese war correspondents and military photographers jostled all around the table, Yamashita’s commanders sat impassive beside him. I could see the tired eyes of the British officers, flinching in the flare of the flashbulbs, as Percival accepted the terms with a limp ‘Yes’, and the papers were signed – Yamashita in a bold flourish, Percival in a cramped schoolboyish hand with what I would surmise to be a 2s 6d fountain pen.
