Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [22]
Helen’s elder sister Mary, and her husband, Edward, had recently become third-part owners of Roques, a collection of dilapidated farm buildings among the wooded hills of the Lot Valley in France. This was the first of what were to become almost annual summer pilgrimages.
Saturday, August 1st, Roques
I write this by the light of the Lumogaz lamp on the round wooden table in the barn at Roques. Outside the barn it is a still, dark night, behind us a wooded hill rises steeply and, above the trees, the stars, many more than one sees in England. The crickets make a continuous background noise, like an electric fence, small insects land on the paper and have to be pushed away. It is 9.30, Mary and Helen, looking quite preggy now [she had become pregnant again in February], are cooking pork chops over an open fire.
We have been officially on holiday for a week. The last recording was Show 6 on July 23rd. Eric was the first to go, he flew to the south of France on the 24th. On that day the rest of us met Roger Hancock for lunch and formed Monty Python Productions Ltd, on the corner of Dean St and Shaftesbury Avenue, after a convivial, but expensive and badly-served meal at Quo Vadis restaurant – where you eat surrounded by photos of the stars, taken at the restaurant. Each photo seems to have caught the victim unawares.
Graham flew to Corfu on the Saturday morning, secure in the knowledge that his extraordinary gamble in trying to write Monty Python and thirteen Ronnie Corbett shows at the same time had been successful, for the simple reason that everyone had done the work for him on Monty Python. In fact on Monday, when John went off to Rome for two days’ filming prior to a holiday in Rhodes, Terry and I were, as usual, left to pick up the pieces, tie up the loose ends and make sure that Ian was happy from the writing point of view before we all vanished.
We left home in the Austin to drive the 600 miles to Roques. Apart from taking a wrong turn at Tonbridge, which caused our first momentary panic, we arrived at Lydd, on the tip of that monotonous V of reclaimed land which contains Camber Sands and Pontins Holiday Camp, Dungeness Atomic Power Station and its spider’s web of power lines, and Lydd Ferry Port.
The buildings of the Ferry Port rather unconvincingly carry the traditional airport jargon – Departure Lounge, Departure Bay, etc, etc – but, when you come to move to the plane, you leave a pleasant English tea room to find that only five cars and eight people are on your flight. A rather old and battered nose-loading plane, proudly bearing the title ‘City of Aberdeen’, stood on the tarmac. Thomas was fascinated, as he has recently taken to pointing at planes quite vociferously, and to see one at such close range, and then to get on it, and then to take off, was all too much. He kept pointing out of the window at the wing and saying ‘Plane?’.
Down below, the last sight of England I remember was a field next to Lydd Airport, which we passed just after take-off, littered with dismembered aircraft.
A delightful journey. The plane never seemed to go above 5,000 feet, it was a clear sunny day and the Palin family made up one third of the total personnel. Very homely – and only 25 minutes before we were flying over the lush dunes and neat holiday houses of Le Touquet.
Le Touquet Airport perpetuated the Trips Round the Bay atmosphere which characterised the whole flight. For some reason or another we didn’t have the green insurance card which indemnifies one against third party accidents on the Continent, so, within thirty yards of where we first set foot in France, I parted with 70 Francs (about £5 10s), an auspicious start.
With very little trouble about driving on the right-hand side – at Le Touquet they break you in easily – we drove off towards Rouen, lunched in a field near Crécy, and arrived