Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 2

Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' just because he had inadvertently probed some dog s.h.i.t with the tip of his finger and with only a mumbled 'Wait here' walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo's, but he appeared to have regained his composure. 'I'm ready now,' he announced.

Almost immediately another bird s.h.i.t on his head. Only this time it really really s.h.i.t. I don't want to get too graphic, in case you're snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you'll get the picture. 'Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,' I observed helpfully. s.h.i.t. I don't want to get too graphic, in case you're snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you'll get the picture. 'Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,' I observed helpfully.

Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of pa.s.sers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. 'Just don't say a word,' he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.

With the Louvre packed I went instead to the new new to me, at any rate Musee d'Orsay, on the Left Bank opposite the Tuileries. When I had last pa.s.sed it, sixteen years before, it had been a derelict hulk, the sh.e.l.l of the old Gare d'Orsay, but some person of vision had decided to restore the old station as a museum and it is simply wonderful, both as a building and as a collection of pictures. I spent two happy hours there, and afterwards checked out the situation at the Louvre still hopelessly crowded and instead went to the Pompidou Centre, which I was determined to try to like, but I couldn't. Everything about it seemed wrong. For one thing it was a bit weathered and faded, like a child's toy that has been left out over winter, which surprised me because it is only a dozen years old and the government had just spent 40 million refurbishing it, but I guess that's what you get when you build with plastic. And it seemed much too overbearing a structure for its cramped neighbourhood. It would be an altogether different building in a park.

But what I really dislike about buildings like the Pompidou Centre, and Paris is choking on them, is that they are just showing off. Here's Richard Rogers saying to the world, 'Look, I put all the pipes on the outside. outside. Am I cute enough to kiss?' I could excuse that if some consideration were given to function. No one seems to have thought what the Pompidou Centre should do that it should be a gathering place, a haven, because inside it's just crowded and confusing. It has none of the sense of s.p.a.ce and light and majestic calm of the Musee d'Orsay. It's like a department store on the first day of a big sale. There's hardly any place to sit and no focal point no big clock or anything at which to meet someone. It has no heart. Am I cute enough to kiss?' I could excuse that if some consideration were given to function. No one seems to have thought what the Pompidou Centre should do that it should be a gathering place, a haven, because inside it's just crowded and confusing. It has none of the sense of s.p.a.ce and light and majestic calm of the Musee d'Orsay. It's like a department store on the first day of a big sale. There's hardly any place to sit and no focal point no big clock or anything at which to meet someone. It has no heart.

Outside it's no better. The main plaza on the Rue St-Martin is in the shade during the best part of the day and is built on a slope, so it's dark and the rain never dries and again there's no place to sit. If they had made the slope into a kind of amphitheatre, people could sit on the steps, but now if you sit down you feel as if you are going to slide to the bottom.

I have nothing against novelty in buildings I am quite taken with the gla.s.s pyramid at the Louvre and those buildings at La Defense that have the huge holes in the middle but I just hate the way architects and city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for half a century we have been building cities that are for almost anything else: for cars, for businesses, for developers, for people with money and bold visions who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function and get around. Why should I have to walk through a damp tunnel and negotiate two sets of stairs to get across a busy street? Why should cars be given priority over me? How can we be so rich and so stupid at the same time? It is the curse of our century too much money, too little sense and the Pompidou seems to me a kind of celebration of that in plastic.

One evening I walked over to the Place de la Republique and had a nostalgic dinner at a bistro called Le Thermometre. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in the Hotel Moderne across the way (now a Holiday Inn, alas, alas) and dined nightly at the Thermometre because it was cheap and we had next to no money. I had spent the whole of my savings, some 18, on a suit for the wedding a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn't see my legs move and had to borrow 12 spending money from my father-in-law in order, as I pointed out, to keep his daughter from starving during her first week of married life.

I expected the Thermometre to be full of happy memories, but I couldn't remember anything about it at all, except that it had the fiercest toilet attendant in Paris, a woman who looked like a Russian wrestler a male Russian wrestler and who sat at a table in the bas.e.m.e.nt with a pink dish full of small coins and craned her head to watch you while you had a pee to make sure you didn't dribble on the tiles or pocket any of the urinal cakes. It is hard enough to pee when you are aware that someone's eyes are on you, but when you fear that at any moment you will be felled by a rabbit chop to the kidneys for taking too much time, you seize up altogether. My urine turned solid. You couldn't have cleared my system with Draino. So eventually I would hoist up my zip and return unrelieved to the table, and spend the night doing a series of Niagara Falls impressions back at the hotel. The toilet attendant, I'm pleased to say, was no longer there. There was no toilet attendant at all these days. No urinal cakes either, come to that.

It took me two or three days to notice it, but the people of Paris have become polite over the last twenty years. They don't exactly rush up and embrace you and thank you for winning the war for them, but they have certainly become more patient and accommodating. The cab drivers are still complete jerks, but everyone else shopkeepers, waiters, the police seemed almost friendly. I even saw a waiter smile once. And somebody held open a door for me instead of letting it bang in my face.

It began to unsettle me. Then on my last night, as I was strolling near the Seine, a well-dressed family of two adults and two teenage children swept past me on the narrow pavement and without breaking stride or interrupting their animated conversation flicked me into the gutter. I could have hugged them.

On the morning of my departure I trudged through a grey rain to the Gare de Lyon to get a cab to the Gare du Nord and a train to Brussels. Because of the rain, there were no cabs so I stood and waited. For five minutes I was the only person there, but gradually other people came along and took places behind me.

When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A middle-aged man in a cashmere coat who was obviously wealthy and well-educated actually laid hands on me. I maintained possession by making a series of aggrieved Gallic honking noises 'Mais non! Mais non!' and using my bulk to block the door. I leaped in, resisting the chance to catch the pushy man's tie in the door and let him trot along with us to the Gare du Nord, and just told the driver to get me the h.e.l.l out of there. He looked at me as if I were a large, imperfectly formed piece of s.h.i.t, and with a disgusted sigh engaged first gear. I was glad to see some things never change.

5. Brussels

I got off at the wrong station in Brussels, which is easy to do if you are a little bit stupid and you have been dozing and you awake with a start to see a platform sign outside the window that says BRUXELLES. BRUXELLES. I leaped up in a mild panic and hastened to the exit, knocking pa.s.sengers on the head with my rucksack as I pa.s.sed, and sprang Peter Pan-like onto the platform just as the train threw a steamy whoosh! at my legs and pulled out. I leaped up in a mild panic and hastened to the exit, knocking pa.s.sengers on the head with my rucksack as I pa.s.sed, and sprang Peter Pan-like onto the platform just as the train threw a steamy whoosh! at my legs and pulled out.

It didn't strike me as odd that I was the only pa.s.senger to alight at the station, or that the station itself was eerily deserted, until I stepped outside, into that gritty drizzle that hangs perpetually over Brussels, and realized I was in a part of the city I had never seen before: one of those anonymous neighbourhoods where the buildings are grey and every end wall has a three-storey advertis.e.m.e.nt painted on it and the shops sell things like swimming-pool pumps and signs that say NO PARKING GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE. NO PARKING GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE. I had wanted Bruxelles Centrale and would have settled for the Gare du Nord or the Gare du Midi or even the obscure Gare Josaphat, but this was none of these, and I had no idea where I was. I set my face in a dogged expression and trudged towards what I thought might be the downtown a hint of tall buildings on a distant, drizzly horizon. I had wanted Bruxelles Centrale and would have settled for the Gare du Nord or the Gare du Midi or even the obscure Gare Josaphat, but this was none of these, and I had no idea where I was. I set my face in a dogged expression and trudged towards what I thought might be the downtown a hint of tall buildings on a distant, drizzly horizon.

I had been to Brussels a couple of times before and thought I knew the city reasonably well, so I kept telling myself that any minute I would start to recognize things, and sometimes I even said, 'Say, that looks kind of familiar,' and would trudge a quarter of a mile to what I thought might be the back of the Palais de Justice but which proved in the event to be a dog-food factory. I walked and walked down long streets that never changed character or even acquired any, just endless blocks of grey sameness, which Brussels seems to possess in greater abundance than almost anywhere else in Europe.

I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, 'You want to go where where? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, Lille, you dumb s.h.i.t,' then stop other pa.s.sers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something cla.s.sic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,' and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me ('And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the Sunday papers'), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still. you dumb s.h.i.t,' then stop other pa.s.sers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something cla.s.sic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,' and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me ('And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the Sunday papers'), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in a room at the Hotel Adolphe Sax, lying on the bed with my shoes on (disintegrating into a hermitic s...o...b..ness is one of the incidental pleasures of solitary travel), breaking my teeth on the Toblerone (who invented those things?) and watching some daytime offering on BBCl a panel discussion involving people who were impotent or from Wolverhampton or suffering some other personal catastrophe, the precise nature of which eludes me now and in half an hour was feeling sufficiently refreshed to venture out into Brussels.

I always stay in the Sax because it gets BBCl on the TV and because the lifts are so interesting, a consideration that I was reminded of now as I stood in the corridor beside an illuminated Down b.u.t.ton, pa.s.sing the time, as one does, by humming the Waiting for the Elevator Song ('Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo doo') and wondering idly why hotel hallway carpet is always so so ugly. ugly.

Generally speaking, they don't understand elevators in Europe. Even in the newer buildings the elevators are almost always painfully slow and often lack certain features that are elsewhere considered essential, like an inside door, so that if you absent-mindedly lean forward you are likely to end up with one arm twenty-seven feet longer than the other. But even by these standards the lifts at the Sax are exceptional.

You get in intending to go downstairs for breakfast, but find that the lift descends without instructions past the lobby, past the underground garage and bas.e.m.e.nt and down to an unmarked sub-bas.e.m.e.nt where the doors open briefly to reveal a hall full of steam and toiling coolies. As you fiddle uselessly with the b.u.t.tons (which are obviously not connected to anything), the doors clang shut and, with a sudden burst of vigour, the elevator shoots upwards to the eleventh floor at a speed that makes your face feel as if it is melting, pauses for a tantalizing half-second, drops ten feet, pauses again and then freefalls to the lobby. You emerge, blood trickling from your ears, and walk with as much dignity as you can muster into the dining-room.

So you can perhaps conceive my relief at finding now that the lift conveyed me to my destination without incident apart from an unscheduled stop at the second floor and a brief, but not unpleasant, return trip to the fourth.

Brussels, it must be said, is not the greatest of cities for venturing. After Paris, it was a relief just to cross a street without feeling as if I had a bull's-eye painted on my b.u.t.t, but once you've done a couple of circuits of the Grand-Place and looked politely in the windows of one or two of the many thousands of shops selling chocolates or lace (and they appear to sell nothing else in Brussels), you begin to find yourself glancing at your watch and wondering if nine-forty-seven in the morning is too early to start drinking.

I settled instead for another circuit of the Grand-Place. It is fetching, no doubt about it. It is the centrepiece of the city, a nicely proportioned cobbled square surrounded by grand and ornate buildings: the truly monumental Hotel de Ville and opposite it the only slightly less grand Maison du Roi (which despite its name has never been a royal palace don't say you never learned anything from me), all of them linked by narrow, ornately decorated guild houses. The ground floors of these guild houses almost all contain dark, cosy cafes, full of wooden furniture and crackling fires, where you can sit over a coffee or beer and gaze out on this most beguiling of backdrops. Many people seem to spend whole days doing little else.

I opted for De Gulden Boot, even though on a previous visit I had been shamelessly short-changed there by a waiter who mistook me for a common tourist just because I was wearing a Manneken-Pis tracksuit, and I had to put on my severest Don't-f.u.c.k-with-me-Gaston look in order to get my full complement of change. But I don't bear grudges, except against Richard Nixon, and didn't hesitate to go in there now. Besides, it's the nicest cafe on the square and I believe that a little elegance with a cup of coffee is worth paying for. But watch your change, ladies.

I spent two and a half days seeing the sights the grand and splendid Musee d'Art Ancien, the Musee d'Art Moderne, the two historical museums in the ponderously named Parc du Cinquantenaire (the museums were a bit ponderous, too), the Musee Horta, and even the gloomy and wholly forgotten Inst.i.tut des Sciences Naturelles and in between times just shuffled around among the endless office complexes in a pleasantly vacant state of mind.

Brussels is a seriously ugly place, full of wet litter, boulevards like freeways and muddy building sites. It is a city of grey offices and faceless office workers, the briefcase capital of Europe. It has fewer parks than any city I can think of, and almost no other features to commend it no castle on a hill, no mountainous cathedral, no street of singularly elegant shops, no backdrop of snowy peaks, no fairy-lighted seafront. It doesn't even have a river. How can a city not at least have a river? They did once have some city walls, but all that remains is a crumbly fragment stuck next door to a bowling alley on the Rue des Alexiens. The best thing that can be said for Brussels is that it is only three hours from Paris. If I were in charge of the EEC, and frankly you could do worse, my first move would be to transfer the capital to Dublin or Glasgow or possibly Naples, where the jobs would be appreciated and where the people still have some pride in their city, because in Brussels, alas, they simply haven't.

It would be hard to think of a place that has shown less regard for its heritage. Example: Brussels was home for thirty-five years to the father of art nouveau architecture, Victor Horta, who was so celebrated in his lifetime that they made him a baron he was to Brussels what Mackintosh was to Glasgow and Gaudi to Barcelona but even so the sliggardly city authorities over the years allowed developers to demolish almost all his finest buildings: the Ans.p.a.ch Department Store, the Maison du Peuple, the Brugmann Hospital, the Roger house. Now there is remarkably little in Brussels worth looking at. You can walk for hours and not see a single sight to lift the heart.

I am a.s.sured that things are getting better. It used to be that when you emerged from the central station your first view was looking downhill across the roofs of the old town, and in the very centre of this potentially arresting setting, in the sort of open s.p.a.ce into which other cities would have inserted a golden cathedral or baroque town hall, sat a parking lot and gas station. Now both of those have been torn down and some new brick buildings not brilliant architecturally, but certainly an improvement on the gas station have been erected in their place, and I was a.s.sured again and again by locals that the city government has at last recognized its slack att.i.tude towards development and begun to insist on buildings of some architectural distinction, but the evidence of this so far is rather less than overwhelming.

The one corner of charm in the city is a warren of narrow, pedestrian-only streets behind the Grand-Place called, with a mildly pathetic dash of hyperbole, the Sacred Isle. Here the little lanes and pa.s.sageways are packed with restaurants and crowds of people wandering around in the happy state of deciding where to eat, nosing around the ice barrows of lobsters, mussels and crayfish that stand outside each establishment. Every doorway issues a warm draught of grilled aromas and every window reveals crowds of people enjoying themselves at almost any hour of the day or night. It is remorselessly picturesque and appealing, and it has been like this since the Middle Ages, and yet even this lovable, clubby little neighbourhood came within an ace of being bulldozed in the 1960s. Wherever you go in Europe, you find yourself wondering what sort of brain-wasting disease it was that affected developers and architects in the 1960s and 70s, but nowhere is this sensation stronger than in Brussels.

Yet Brussels has its virtues. It's the friendliest big city in Europe (which may or may not have something to do with the fact that a quarter of its residents come from abroad), it has a couple of good museums, the oldest shopping arcade in Europe, the small but pleasurable Galeries St-Hubert, lots of terrific bars and the most wonderful restaurants. Eating out is the national sport in Belgium, and Brussels alone has 1,500 restaurants, twenty-three of them carrying Michelin rosettes. You can eat incredibly well there for less than almost anywhere else on the continent. I dined in the Sacred Isle every night, always trying a new restaurant and always achieving the gustatory equivalent of a multiple o.r.g.a.s.m. The restaurants are almost always tiny to reach a table at the back you have to all but climb over half a dozen diners and the tables are squeezed so tightly together that you cannot cut your steak without poking your neighbour in the cheek with an elbow or dragging your sleeve through his sauce Bearnaise, but in an odd way that's part of the enjoyment. You find that you are effectively dining with the people next to you, sharing bread rolls and little pleasantries. This is a novel pleasure for the lone traveller, who usually gets put at the darkest table, next to the gents, and spends his meal watching a procession of strangers pulling up their flies and giving their hands a shake as they pa.s.s.

After dinner each night I would go for a necessarily aimless stroll there is nothing much to aim for but, like most cities, Brussels is always better at night. I walked one evening up to the ma.s.sive Palais de Justice, which broods on a small eminence overlooking the old town and looks like an American state capitol building that has been taking steroids. It is absolutely enormous it covers 280,000 square feet and was the largest building constructed anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century but the only truly memorable thing about it is its bulk. Another evening, I walked out to the headquarters of the EEC. In a city of buildings so ugly they take your breath away, the headquarters of the EEC at Rond Point Schuman manages to stand out. It was only six o'clock, but there wasn't a soul about, not a single person working late, which made me think of the old joke: Question: How many people work in the European Commission? Answer: About a third of them. You cannot look at all those long rows of windows without wondering what on earth goes on in there. I suppose there are whole wings devoted to making sure that post-office queues are of a uniform length throughout the community and that a soft-drinks machine in France dispenses the same proportion of upside-down cups as one in Italy.

As an American, it's interesting to watch the richest countries in Europe enthusiastically ceding their sovereignty to a body that appears to be out of control and answerable to no one. Did you know that because of its Byzantine structure, the European Commission does not even know 'how many staff members it has or what they all do'? (I quote from The Economist The Economist.) I find this worrying. For my part I decided to dislike the EEC when I discovered that they were taking away those smart hardback navy blue British pa.s.sports and replacing them with flimsy red books that look like the ident.i.ty papers of a Polish seaman. This is always the problem with large inst.i.tutions. They have no style.

I don't know much about how the EEC works, but I do know one interesting fact that I think gives some perspective to its achievements: in 1972 the European Conference on Post and Telecommunications called for a common international telephone code for Common Market nations, namely 00. Since then the various member states have been trying to reach agreement. So far not one of them has adopted the code, but give them another eighteen years and things may start to happen.

6. Belgium

I spent a couple of pleasantly pointless days wandering around Belgium by train. As countries go, Belgium is a curiosity. It's not one nation at all, but two, northern Dutch-speaking Flanders and southern French-speaking Wallonia. The southern half possesses the most outstanding scenery, the prettiest villages, the best gastronomy and, withal, a Gallic knack for living well, while the north has the finest cities, the most outstanding museums and churches, the ports, the coastal resorts, the bulk of the population and most of the money.

The Flemings can't stand the Walloons and the Walloons can't stand the Flemings, but when you talk to them a little you realize that what holds them together is an even deeper disdain for the French and the Dutch. I once walked around Antwerp for a day with a Dutch-speaking local and on every corner he would indicate to me with sliding eyes some innocent-looking couple and mutter disgustedly under his breath, 'Dutch.' He was astonished that I couldn't tell the difference between a Dutch person and a Fleming.

When pressed on their objections, the Flemings become a trifle vague. The most common complaint I heard was that the Dutch drop in unannounced at mealtimes and never bring gifts. 'Ah, like our own dear Scots,' I would say.

I learned much of this in Antwerp, where I stopped for an afternoon to see the cathedral and stayed on into the evening wandering among the many bars, which must be about the finest and most numerous in Europe: small, smoky places, as snug as Nigel Lawson's waistcoat, full of dark panelling and dim yellowy light and always crowded with bright, happy-looking people having a good time. It is an easy city in which to strike up conversations because the people are so open and their English is nearly always perfect. I talked for an hour to two young street sweepers who had stopped for a drink on their way home. Where else but northern Europe could an outsider talk to street sweepers in his own tongue?

It struck me again and again how much they know about us and how little we know about them. You could read the English newspapers for months, and the American newspapers for ever, and never see a single article about Belgium, and yet interesting things happen there.

Consider the Gang of Nijvel. This was a terrorist group which for a short period in the mid-1980s roamed the country (to the extent that it is possible to roam in Belgium) and from time to time would burst into supermarkets or crowded restaurants and spray the room with gunfire, killing at random women, children, anyone who happened to be in the way. Having left bodies everywhere, the gang would take a relatively small sum of money from the tills and disappear into the night. The strange thing is this: the gang never revealed its motives, never took hostages, never stole more than a few hundred pounds. It didn't even have a name that anyone knew. The Gang of Nijvel label was pinned on it by the press because its getaway cars were always Volkswagen GTi's stolen from somewhere in the Brussels suburb of Nijvel. After about six months the attacks abruptly stopped and have never been resumed. The gunmen were not caught, their weapons were never found, the police haven't the faintest idea who they were or what they wanted. Now is that strange or what? And yet you probably never read about it in your paper. I think that's pretty strange or what, too.

I went to Bruges for a day. It's only thirty miles from Brussels and so beautiful, so deeply, endlessly gorgeous, that it's hard to believe it could be in the same country. Everything about it is perfect its cobbled streets, its placid bottle-green ca.n.a.ls, its steep-roofed medieval houses, its market squares, its slumbering parks, everything. No city has been better favoured by decline. For 200 years Bruges I don't know why we persist in calling it this because to the locals it's spelled Brugge and p.r.o.nounced 'Brooguh' was the most prosperous city in Europe, but the silting-up of the River Zwyn and changing political circ.u.mstances made it literally a backwater, and for 500 years, while other cities grew and were endlessly transformed, Bruges remained forgotten and untouched. When Wordsworth visited in the nineteenth century he found gra.s.s growing in the streets. Antwerp, I've been told, was more beautiful still, even as late as the turn of this century, but developers moved in and pulled down everything they could get their hands on, which was pretty much everything. Bruges was saved by its obscurity.

It is a rare place. I walked for a day with my mouth open. I looked in at the Groeninge Museum and visited the beguinage, its courtyard lawns swimming in daffodils, but mostly I just walked the streets, agog at such a concentration of perfection. Even the size of the place was perfect big enough to be a city, to have bookstores and interesting restaurants, but compact enough to feel contained and friendly. You could walk every street within its encircling ca.n.a.l in a day or so. I did just that and never once saw a street I wouldn't want to live on, a pub I wouldn't like to get to know, a view I wouldn't wish to call my own. It was hard to accept that it was real that people came home to these houses every night and shopped in these shops and walked their dogs on these streets and went through life thinking that this is the way of the world. They must go into a deep reverberating shock when they first see Brussels.

An insurance claims adjuster I got talking to in a bar on St Jacobstraat told me sadly that Bruges had become insufferable for eight months of the year because of the tourists, and related to me what he clearly thought were disturbing anecdotes about visitors peeking through his letterbox and crushing his geraniums in the pursuit of snapshots. But I didn't listen to him, partly because he was the most boring fart in the bar possibly in Flanders and partly because I just didn't care to hear it. I wanted my illusions intact.

For that reason I left early in the morning, before any tour buses could arrive. I went to Dinant, a riverside town on the banks of the stately Meuse, crouched on this day beneath a steady rain. It was an attractive place and I would doubtless have been highly pleased with it if I hadn't just come from Bruges and if the weather hadn't been so dreadful. I stood on the bridge across the river and watched raindrops the size of bullets beat circles in the water. My intention had been to hike through the southern Ardennes for a couple of days to see if I could recognize any of the little villages and roads I had walked around on my first trip, but I hadn't packed for this kind of weather I was already soaked through and shivering as if I had forgotten to take my malaria tablets and instead, after only an hour in Dinant, I walked back to the station, caught the first train to Namur and travelled on to Spa. One of the virtues of Belgium is that its tininess allows you to be anywhere else within an hour or two. It takes a while to get used to the idea that the whole country is effectively a suburb of Brussels.

I had no particular reason to go to Spa, except that it always sounded to me like a nice place, and indeed it proved to be, set in a bowl of green hills, with a wooded park, the Parc de Sept Heures, a grand casino out of all proportion to the modest town and a pair of big white hotels standing around a little island of green called the Place Verte. I liked it immediately. The rain had stopped and left the town with a clean, fresh feel, vaguely reminiscent of sheets lifted warm from a tumble dryer, and it had an eerily timeless air of convalescence about it. I half expected to see limbless soldiers in brown uniforms being pushed through the park in wheelchairs.

Spa is the original spa town, the one from which all the others take their name, and for 200 years it was the haunt of Europe's royalty. Even up to the First World War it catered to aristocrats and grandees. It was from Spa that Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, a milestone that marked its decline as much as his own. Today it didn't seem to cater to anyone much, at least not at this time of year. I went to the tourist information centre in the park and, after browsing politely at the displays, asked the man behind the counter where all the kings and queens were.

'Ah, they do not come any more,' he said with a sad smile. 'Not so much since Peter the Great.'

'Why not?'

He shrugged. 'Fashions change. Now they want the sunshine, the sea. We still get the odd baron, but mostly it is wealthy Germans. There are many treatments available if you are interested.' He waved a hand over a selection of brochures and went off to help a new caller.

The brochures were all for places with no-nonsense names like The Professor Henrijean Hydrology Inst.i.tute and The Spa Therm Inst.i.tution's Department of Radiology and Gastro-Enterology. Between them they offered an array of treatments that ran from immersion in 'natural carbogazeous baths' and slathering in hot and gooey mudpacks, to being connected to a freestanding electrical sub-station and briskly electrocuted, or so it looked from the photograph. These treatments were guaranteed to do a number of things I didn't realize it was desirable to do 'dilate the dermal vessels', 'further the repose of the thermoregulatory centres' and 'ease periarticular contractures', to name but three.

I decided without hesitation that my thermoregulatory centres were reposed enough, if not actually deceased, and although I do have the occasional periarticular contracture and pitch forward into my spaghetti, I decided I could live with this after seeing what the muscular, white-coated ladies of the Spa inst.i.tutes do to you if they detect so much as a twinge in your periarticulars or suspect any backsliding among the dermals. The photographs showed a frankly worried-looking female patient being variously covered in tar, blown around a shower stall with a high-pressure hose, forced to recline in bubbling copper vats and otherwise subjected to a regimen that in other circ.u.mstances would bring ineluctably to mind the expression 'war crimes'. I looked at the list of the town's approved doctors to see if Josef Mengele appeared anywhere, but the only memorable name was a Dr Pitz. Resisting the impulse to ring him up and say, 'Well, are you?', I went instead to a small hotel recommended to me by the man in the tourist office.

I showered, dined, had a diverting stroll through the town and repaired to a convivial little bar on the Rue Royale for an evening with Martin Gilbert's grave and monumental Second World War. Second World War. It is not a pub book, I can tell you now. You read a bit and before long you find yourself staring vacantly around you and longing for a conversation. It is not a pub book, I can tell you now. You read a bit and before long you find yourself staring vacantly around you and longing for a conversation.

But hardly anyone in Wallonia speaks English. I began to regret that I didn't understand French well enough to eavesdrop. I took three years of French in school, but learned next to nothing. The trouble was that the textbooks were so amazingly useless. They were always written by somebody clearly out of touch with the Francophile world Prof. Marvis Frisbee of the Highway 68 State Teachers College at Windsock, North Dakota, or something and at no point did they intersect with the real world. They never told you any of the things you would need to know in France how to engage with a bidet, deal with a toilet matron or kneecap a queue jumper. They were always tediously preoccupied with cla.s.sroom activities: hanging up coats in the cloakroom, cleaning the blackboard for the teacher, opening the window, shutting the window, setting out the day's lessons. Even in the seventh grade I could see that this sort of thing would be of limited utility in the years ahead. How often on a visit to France do you need to tell someone you want to clean a blackboard? How frequently do you wish to say, 'It is winter. Soon it will be spring'? In my experience, people know this already.

I could never understand why they couldn't make the textbooks more relevant to the adolescent mind and give us chapters with topics like 'Gerard et Isabelle Engage dans some Heavy Petting' or 'Claude a son Premier Wet Dream. C'est Magnifique!' At the very least they could have used comic books.

I woke to find rain streaming down the windows. The streets were half flooded and the cars below whooshed as they pa.s.sed. I went out to cash a traveller's cheque and window shopped along the Place Verte, sheltering beneath awnings on which the rain drummed steadily and rather soothingly. Every shop was filled with the most tempting foodstuffs La Raclette Fromagerie, with cheeses the size of automobile tyres; the Boucherie Wagener, where strings of sausages hung in the window and slices of smoked Ardennes ham lay stacked in pink piles; La Gaterie, where the window was a delirium of marzipan fruits, hyperventilating cream cakes and other frothy delights. How clever these continentals are with their shop windows. Even the windows of chemists are so tidy and clean and scrupulously arranged that you find yourself gazing longingly at corn plasters and incontinence pads.

When I reached the last shop, I stared emptily at the Place Verte, not certain what to do with myself, and decided impulsively to push on to Durbuy in the hope that the weather would be better there. This was unlikely, considering that Durbuy was only fifteen miles away. None the less, thanks to the bewildering peculiarities of the Belgian railway system, to get to Durbuy took most of the morning and required three separate (albeit short) journeys and even then I couldn't quite get there, as Durbuy has no station. The closest I could get was Barvaux, which on the map is about half a millimetre to the left of Durbuy, but which in reality is four kilometres away, with a monumentally steep hill in between. Even from the station I could hear trucks straining to climb it. But at least the rain had stopped.

I thought I'd take a cab, but there were none at the station, so I walked into the town a large village really looking for a bus stop or a cab office, and went into a hotel on the main street and discovered from the dour patroness that Barvaux had neither cabs nor buses. In my best schoolboy French I asked how one then gets to Barvaux when one is sans l'auto. I braced for the lady to put a dead beaver on the counter, but instead she just said, 'a pied, monsieur,' and gave me one of those impa.s.sive Gallic shrugs the one where they drop their chin to belt level and try to push their ears to the top of their head with their shoulders. You have to be Gallic to do it. It translates roughly as 'Life is a bucket of s.h.i.t, monsieur, I quite agree, and while I am prepared to acknowledge this fact, I shall offer you no sympathy because, monsieur, this is your bucket of s.h.i.t.'

Thanking her for playing such a small and pa.s.sing role in my life, I walked to the edge of town and was confronted by a feature of landscape that was more wall than hill. The road was lined by the sort of unappealing houses that get built along any busy road and always look as if they are being slowly shaken to pieces by heavy lorries. Each yard was enclosed with a chain-link fence, behind each of which dozed a dog named Spike, who would leap to life and come flying down the front path as I approached and fling himself repeatedly at the gate, barking and baring his teeth and wanting to strip the flesh from my flanks in the worst way.

I don't know why it is but something about me incites dogs to a frenzy. I would be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time a dog tried to get at the marrow in my ankle bone while the owner just stood there and said, 'Well, I don't understand it, he's never done anything like this before. You must have said something to him.' That always knocks me out. What would I say to the dog? 'h.e.l.lo, boy, like to open a vein in my leg?'

The only time a dog will not attack me with a view to putting me in a wheelchair is when I'm a guest at someone's house sitting on a deep sofa with a gla.s.s filled to the brim. In this case the dog it's always a large dog with a saliva problem will decide he doesn't want to kill me but to have s.e.x with me. 'Come on, Bill, get your pants off. I'm hot hot,' he seems to be saying. The owner always says, 'Is he bothering you?' I love that, too. 'No, Jim, I adore it when a dog gets his teeth around my b.a.l.l.s and frantically rubs the side of my head with his rear leg.'

'I can put him out if he's bothering you,' the owner always adds. 'Hey,' I want to reply, 'don't put him out, put him down down.'

It wouldn't bother me in the least (and I realize I am sounding dangerously like Bernard Levin here, which G.o.d forbid) if all the dogs in the world were placed in a sack and taken to some distant island Greenland springs attractively to mind where they could romp around and sniff each other's a.n.u.ses to their hearts' content and never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this round-up is poodles. Poodles I would shoot.

I don't like most animals, to tell you the truth. Even goldfish daunt me. Their whole existence seems a kind of reproach. 'What's it all about?' they seem to be saying. 'I swim here, I swim there. What for?' I can't look at a goldfish for more than ten seconds without feeling like killing myself, or at least reading a French novel.

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to c.r.a.p in, they keep the gra.s.s down and they are so trusting and stupid that you cannot help but lose your heart to them. Where I live there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends for ever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.

Durbuy lay, at the foot of a startlingly steep road, on the other side of the hill. It looked to be about a half a mile below me. It was the kind of hill that, once you started down it, you couldn't guarantee to stop. I walked with an increasing loss of control, my legs moving beneath me as if on stilts. By the last bend I was really just a pa.s.senger on a pair of alien stumps which were frantically scissoring me towards a stone barn at the foot of the road. I could see myself going through it like a character in a cartoon, leaving a body-shaped hole, but instead I did a more interesting thing. I stepped heavily into a wobbly drain, spectacularly spraining my ankle I'm sure I heard a crack as of splintering wood did a series of graceless pirouettes which even as they were occurring put me in mind of the Frankenstein monster on roller skates, spun across the road, smacked face-first into the barn wall and, after teetering theatrically for a moment, fell backwards.

I lay still in the tall gra.s.s, taking a minute to accommodate the idea that down at the bottom of my right leg there was an unusual measure of agony going on. At intervals I raised my chin to my chest and gazed down the length of my body to see if my right foot was facing backwards or otherwise composed in a way that would account for the vividness of the pain, but it looked normal enough. From where I lay I could also see back up the hill and I spent some time wondering, in a curiously abstract way, how I was going to get back up there with no buses or cabs to call on.

Eventually, I hauled myself upright, using the barn as support, and hobbled erratically to a cafe, where I fell into a chair near the door and ordered a Coca-Cola. I took off my boot and sock and examined my ankle, expecting and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping to find some splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But it was just faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to a mercy flight by helicopter and a fussing-over by young nurses in erotically starched uniforms. I sat glumly sipping my c.o.ke for half an hour and discovered upon rising that the worst of the pain had subsided and I was able to walk after a fashion.

So I had a limping look round Durbuy. It was exceptionally pretty, with narrow back streets and houses built of stone beneath slate roofs. At one end stood a chateau lifted wholesale from a fairy tale and beneath it was a shallow, racing river, the Ourthe. All around were the strangely overbearing green hills that had for centuries kept the outside world out. I gathered from the size of the car parks that this was a popular spot with trippers, but there was hardly anyone about now and most of the shops were shut. I spent a couple of hours in the town, mostly sitting on a bench by the river, absorbed by scenery and birdsong. It was impossible to imagine in any sensible way that this perpetually tranquil place had, almost within my lifetime, been the epicentre, more or less, of the Battle of the Bulge. I lugged out Gilbert's magisterial history of the Second World War and skimmed through the index. Durbuy and Barvaux didn't get a mention, but many of the other neighbouring towns and villages did Malmedy, where seventy-two captured American soldiers were taken into a field by an SS unit and machine-gunned rather than be kept as prisoners; Stavelot, where two days later the ever-busy sub-humans of the SS killed 130 Belgian civilians, including twenty-three children; Bastogne, where American forces were besieged for a month and hundreds lost their lives; and many others. I simply couldn't take it in that these terrible, savage things had happened here, in these hills and woods, to people as close to me in time as my father. And yet now it was as if it had never happened. Germans who had once slaughtered women and children in these villages could now return as tourists, with cameras around their necks and wives on their arms, as if it had all just been a Hollywood movie. I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.

At about three o'clock it occurred to me that I had better head back to Barvaux. It took me until just after six to reach the station because of the pained slowness of my walking and the frequent rests I took along the way. The station was dark and untended when I arrived. No other pa.s.sengers were about and the walls were without timetables. I sat on the platform on the opposite side from which I had arrived, not knowing when the next train might come along, not knowing indeed if there might be a next train. It was as lonely a station as you could imagine in such a small and crowded country as Belgium. The tracks stretched in a straight line for two or three miles in either direction. I was cold and tired and my ankle throbbed. Even more than this, I was hungry. I hadn't eaten all day.

In my lonely, enfeebled state I began to think longingly about my old home-town diner. It was called the Y Not Grill, which everyone a.s.sumed was short for Y Not Come In and Get Food Poisoning. It was a strange place. I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one's adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time. The food was terrible, the waitresses notoriously testy and stupid, and the cooks were always escaped convicts of doubtful hygiene. They always had one of those permanent, snuffly colds that mark a dissolute lifestyle, and there was invariably a droplet of moisture suspended from the tip of their nose. You always knew, with a sense of stoic doom, that when the chef turned around and put your food before you, the drip would be gone from his nose and glistening on the top of your hamburger bun, like a bead of morning dew.

The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most disagreeable person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look at you as if you had asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend.

'You want what what?' she would say.

'A pork tenderloin and onion rings,' you would repeat apologetically. 'Please, Shirley. If it's not too much trouble. When you get a minute.'

Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl your order on a pad and shout out to the cook in that curious dopey lingo they always used in diners, 'Two loose stools and a dead dog's s.c.h.l.o.n.g,' or whatever.

In a Hollywood movie Shirley would have been played by Marjorie Main. She would have been gruff and bossy, but you would have seen in an instant that inside her ample bosom there beat a heart of pure gold. If you unexpectedly gave her a birthday present she would blush and say, 'Aw, ya shouldana oughtana done it, ya big palooka.' If you gave Shirley a birthday present she would just say, 'What the f.u.c.k's this?' Shirley, alas, didn't have a heart of gold. I don't think she had a heart at all, or indeed any redeeming features. She couldn't even put her lipstick on straight.

Yet the Y Not had its virtues. For one thing, it was open all night, which meant that it was always there if you found yourself having a grease crisis or just wanted to be among other people in the small hours. It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper's painting 'The Nighthawks'.

The Y Not is long gone, alas. The owner, it was said, ate some of his own food and died. But even now I can see it: the steam on the windows, the huddled cl.u.s.ters of night workers, Shirley lifting a pa.s.sed-out customer's head up by his hair to give the counter a wipe with a damp cloth, a lone man in a cowboy hat lost in daydreams with a cup of coffee and an untipped Camel. And I still think of it from time to time, especially in places like southern Belgium, when it's dark and chilly and an empty railway line stretches out to the horizon in two directions.

7. Aachen and Cologne

I took a train to Aachen. I hadn't been there before, but it was only a short journey from Liege, where I had spent the night, and I had always wanted to see Aachen Cathedral. This is an odd and pleasantly neglected corner of Europe. Aachen, Maastricht and Liege are practically neighbours only about twenty miles separate them but they are in three countries, speaking three distinct languages (namely Dutch, French and German), yet the people of the region employ a private dialect that means they can understand each other better than they can understand their fellow countrymen.

I got a room in a small hotel across from the station, dumped my rucksack and went straight out. I had a lunch of burger and fries in a hamburger chain called Quick (short for 'Quick a bucket'), then set off to see the town.

My eagerness surprised me a little, but I hadn't been to Germany in seventeen years and I wanted to see if it had changed. It had. It had grown even richer. It was rich enough in 1973, but now golly. Even prosperous Flanders paled beside this. Here, almost every store looked rich and busy and was full of stylish and expensive goods like Mont Blanc pens and Audemars Piguet watches. Even the stores selling mundane items were riveting J. von der Driesel, for instance, a stockist of kitchenware and other household goods at the top of a hill near the old market square. Its large windows displayed nothing more exciting than ironing boards, laundry baskets and pots and pans, but every pan gleamed, every piece of plastic shone. A little further on I pa.s.sed not one but two shops selling coffins, which seemed a bit chillingly Germanic to me, but even they looked sleek and inviting and I found myself staring in admiration at the quality of the linings and the shine on the handles.

I couldn't get used to it. I still had the American habit of thinking of Europe as one place and Europeans as essentially one people. For all that you read that Denmark's per capita gross domestic product is forty per cent higher than Britain's, the Danes don't look forty per cent richer than the British, they don't wear forty per cent shinier shoes or drive forty per cent bigger cars. But here people did did look rich and different, and by a factor of much more than forty per cent. Everyone was dressed in clothes that looked as if they had been purchased that morning. Even the children's trainers weren't scuffed. Every car had a showroom shine on it. Even the taxis were all Mercedes. It was like Beverly Hills. And this was just an obscure little city on the edge of the country. The Germans were leaving the rest of us standing. look rich and different, and by a factor of much more than forty per cent. Everyone was dressed in clothes that looked as if they had been purchased that morning. Even the children's trainers weren't scuffed. Every car had a showroom shine on it. Even the taxis were all Mercedes. It was like Beverly Hills. And this was just an obscure little city on the edge of the country. The Germans were leaving the rest of us standing.

Not everything was perfect. Much of the architecture in the city centre was blatantly undistinguished, especially the modern shopping precinct, and the bars and restaurants didn't have the snug and convivial air of those in Holland and Belgium. But then I found my way to the calm of the cathedral close and warmed to Aachen anew. I went first to the Schatzkammer, the treasury, which contained the finest a.s.sortment of reliquaries I ever expect to see, including the famous life-size golden bust of Charlemagne, looking like a G.o.d; a carved sixteenth-century triptych depicting Pope Gregory's ma.s.s, which I think I could look at almost for ever; and a.s.sorted other baubles of extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship.

The whole collection is displayed in three small, plain, feebly lit rooms, but what a collection. Next door was the octagonal cathedral, modelled on the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, and all that remains of a palace complex mostly destroyed during the Second World War. The cathedral was small and dark but exquisite, with its domed roof, its striped bands of contrasting marble and its stained gla.s.s, so rich that it seemed almost liquid. It must have been cramped even in Charlemagne's day it couldn't seat more than a hundred or so but every inch of it was superb. It was one of those buildings that you don't so much look at as bathe in. I would go to Aachen tomorrow to see it again.

Afterwards I pa.s.sed the closing hours of the afternoon with a gentle stroll around the town, still favouring my sore ankle. I looked at the large cobbled Marktplatz and tottered out to the preternaturally quiet residential streets around the Lousberg park. It was curious to think that this pleasant backwater was once one of the great cities of Europe, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne's capital. I didn't realize until I turned again to Gilbert's history of the Second World War a day or so later that Aachen was the first German city to fall to the Allies, after a seven-day street battle in 1944 that left almost the whole of it in ruins. You would never guess it now.