June 5, 2022
London and Paris, 1971: a remeniscence
I think it was over our final dinner together with Suzanne and János last week that I was telling them of the first time I was in Paris - many years ago with Carol Jo, my first wife. It’s been fifty years and I have a very faded memory of the experience. I don’t even remember any more exactly when we went, how long we were in Europe, or how we managed to get the cash together to do it. Maybe two weeks, I was thinking, and sometime between when I got out of the army in early 1971 and before our plans to join the Peace Corps fell through two years later. What I did remember though was that we were in Paris a very short time - maybe even only a single night, and then we headed straight back to London because Carol Jo didn’t like our French experience for reasons I’ve lost the memory of.
I’m always fascinated by exceptional coincidences, but here’s one: probably two days after the above conversation I received an email from Carol Jo with a question about our son. It’s probably the first communication we’ve had in over five years. We really have not kept in touch at all for decades. Surprisingly though enough time has finally passed, we’re both in a mood to reminisce a bit about those earlier years, and have started exchanging emails. One early output of this was a family portrait she sent which I think must have been in 1974, not long after we returned to the northwest from a winter in Indiana (this was the time when I biked back west as far as Montana, my first long-distance bike tour) and before we adopted Shawn. It’s a photograph I’d forgotten about and an interesting period piece. It’s poignant to see now, eight years after Vance died unexpectedly and with dad becoming increasingly frail and mother fading fast.
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The subject of the London/Paris vacation came up when she heard we were in Paris. Remarkably Carol Jo still has the spiral notebook we used to keep track of the expenses, and has a better memory than I do of the context for the trip. From her input and especially with the details from the notebook that she copied and sent to me (thanks Carol, if you’re reading this!), I’ve pieced together a clearer picture of what really happened fifty years ago. It is much different than the version that has gradually evolved in my memory of the decades. It’s really a sobering lesson on how unreliable memories can be, and reinforces the value in keeping a journal or diary.
Some memories are gradually coming back out of the fog, and I suspect more will come. Enough has jelled already though that I want to write it down so I can refer back to it. I’ll put down what I know now, and might come back and update this if anything new of significance turns up.
First, the context on how we happened to take this trip. We were married in 1968 (June 8th, a day that surprises me by sticking around in my skull all these years), and our modest wedding ceremony was conducted by Father Mighell, Carol’s pastor from her youth. Father Mighell and his wife were sophisticated, loved travel, loved Europe, enjoyed wine. Soon after we were married we stayed in the Mighell household and cared for their sons Bob and Ken and daughter Grace while they went to Europe. Carol kept in touch with them, and in 1971 they proposed to us that we ticket onto a charter flight to London they had signed up for and take a four week trip to Europe.
The small 40 page spiral notebook provides a wealth of information about the planning of this trip and what we actually did, but making sense of it is a bit of a sleuthing exercise with a lot of reading between the lines. It intermixes a planned general itinerary, reference information such as currency denominations and exchange rates, a budget, a meticulously detailed itemization of expenses for most of the trip, a calendar of days, a check-off list of sights in England we hoped to see, card game scores and miscellaneous notes.
This next image includes the notebook and the pages from it that I’d classify as planning material. They show that the general intent was that we’d spend two weeks in London, get to Paris somehow for a week in France, take a train to Amsterdam and spend three nights there, and then return to London and rent a scooter to see some of the outlying attractions, including Stonehenge.
They also reveal our budget ($6/day for everything except the flight and maybe travel between London, Paris and Amsterdam - food, lodging, entrance fees, subway tickets, gifts, post cards and stamps, tips), and the names of our lodgings. There are many things about it that surprise me as I realize how much I’ve forgotten or blurred; but maybe nothing surprises me more than the reference of a place in Paris where we could rent bicycles.
They also show the specific dates (though not the year, which I had to infer by the calendar and the day of the week we departed). We flew to London on Sunday, June 20th, 1971, and returned on Sunday, July 18th.
So how did it go? It looks like the first two weeks in London went pretty much as I’d remembered. We both loved London, saw plays, went to museums. I remember seeing or maybe we even bought a wall poster captioned “If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life”, and it really reflected how we felt about the experience.
The expense ledger fills in a lot of memory gaps about what we actually did. We went to the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, Windsor Castle, the Tower of London, Brighton, Hampton Court, the London Zoo, Charles Dicken’s home, and Madam Tussaud’s wax museum. We took a tour of the city on a double decker bus. We saw a performance of Swan Lake. We went to plays: Abelard and Heloise, the Chalk Garden, Old Times, The Great Waltz, and Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap.
And amazingly enough we really did do it for six dollars a day. At the exchange rate at the time, our daily budget in England was 4 pounds 80 (they hadn’t gone decimal yet), and 84 francs in France. You can tell from the daily expense ledgers which are remarkably detailed, showing the total for the day, and the daily and running calculations of how much over/under budget we were.
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So that was England. The real shock though was France, and how wrong I was about what happened. I remember going to Notre Dame and Saint-Chapelle, and thought maybe we went to the Eiffel Tower too. I don’t know how this gradually morphed into the idea that we returned to London in retreat a day or two after we arrived. It obviously doesn’t add up, so it’s just another lesson in how much your memory can play tricks with you.
We left London for Paris on Monday, July 5th. I don’t remember for sure but I think we took the bus to Dover and the train to Paris, but I’m certain that we crossed the channel on the Hovercraft. I was reminded of this because the notebook has a page with the word Hovercraft on the top and a list of words beneath it that can be made from the letters of hovercraft, something we apparently did to pass the time. In fact I think we were prompted to this by the tourism brochure on the ship.
We were in Paris for almost a full week, staying in a cheap hotel in the Saint Michel district on the left bank, not far from Notre Dame. We did much more in France than I’ve remembered. We went to Notre Dame and Saint-Chapelle, but we also went to the Louvre. We did go up the Eiffel Tower, because there is an expense item for the lift. We even took a day trip to Versailles and rented a row boat. Again we stayed within our austere 84 ff/day budget, even with such incidental expenses as a franc for the loo at Versailles and another for the banjo player, presumably a street musician.
So why have I come to think that we basically aborted the trip to France? It’s because we aborted on the plan to go from there on to Amsterdam. We came back to London earlier than planned, but it’s because we dropped the plan to catch the train to Amsterdam and stay three nights there. I think it just felt a little overwhelming, and the trip to Paris was as much foreign culture and language experience as either of us was prepared for at the time.
So we returned to London by the same way we came over, with roughly a week left in our visit. Here though the case turns cold because for unknown reasons there are no daily expense logs for this last week. As I remember we stayed in London with more of the same types of activities as before. Maybe we went to the Natural History Museum? The one thing I feel certain of is that we didn’t rent a scooter and take a road trip to Stonehenge. As far as I can remember I’ve never piloted a scooter in my life.
Maybe with this new information stimulating my brain though who knows what old memories will emerge from behind the door in days to come? The mind works in mysterious ways. At dinner tonight I was thinking about that plan to rent a scooter and what possessed us to think that was a good idea. And then suddenly a visual image of Father Mighell and his wife came to mind, encouraging us to travel and helping us think about what to do and how to get around once we got over there. I’m certain I haven’t thought of this man for over thirty years - so if he’s going to suddenly emerge from the fog, who knows what else might show up?
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It's so cool that you've been given a chance to let some of those long-forgotten memories roll back in again.
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This was a fascinating and very well-written entry. Kudos!
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