Thierry tapped me on the shoulder, interrupting my reverie, and said "On y va?" So I climbed back into the 4x4, relieved in a way to be out of the incinerating sun, and in the refrigerated car once more. He started the engine and gunned it out of the lay-by on to the a-road. I was always surprised when he speeded onto the right carriageway, being used to England where we drive on the left. And Thierry's driving also surprised me – much more reckless than my dad's. The French drive wildly, and their cars in general are more scratched and dented than those in England, though we're not perfect either.
We flew down the steep incline, dodging round hairpins, looking out for motorbikes and other cars driving as recklessly as us, and overtaking anything that got in our way. At 80 km/h it only took us about ten minutes to get into Propriano. The narrow streets were packed, and we spent several minutes there before escaping up a side road. We passed a rue piétonne, pedestrianised area, with a market sprawling in a square at the other end, and climbed toward a T-junction with the a-road, the other side of the U-shape it made through Propriano.
There was a sign on the far embankment of the a-road advertising St. Georges - the local brand of bottled water - depicting a massive fish swimming through the sea with two bottles of St Georges on its back, in place of scuba tanks. That made me laugh.
We only stayed on the a-road for a thousand yards or so, before turning right into what looked like a private estate. Up in the forested hillside, several large and extravagant villas were perched precariously, with expensive views and sun washed, pale fawn walls. Their windows shone dazzlingly in the rays of the setting sun; a deep blood red that was blinding if you looked at it for too long. Thierry drove the silver Nissan Touran to one of these sprawling dwellings, and parked it on the kerb next to it.
We all disembarked, and walked down an alley next to the abode to find Marie-Hélène (Thierry's wife), Louise-Marie (their ten year old daughter) and Carla-Marie (the 12 year old daughter of a French singer who was so famous I've forgotten her name) reclining on sun-loungers on the patio. All three ladies were very attractive – most of the girls in Corsica were. Thierry strode into the cool interior of the house and deposited his mobile and keys on the kitchen sideboard, as I greeted the other half of the family – old friends from my exchange visit in Marseilles when I was in year 9.
After the formalities were over and one with, we decided to go for a trip on Thierry's boat, and the girls opted to stay put and sunbathe. So we piled back in the car and drove back down to Propriano. Winding our way through back streets to avoid the traffic on the main road, we passed a knife vendor. He stood on the pavement with a beautiful selection of knives beside him – flick-knives, switch-blades, Swiss-army knives. A sight you probably wouldn't see in England.
As we drove past the humungous harbour, I took all in. Outboard motors littered the grassy stretch next to the quay, with a few beached and upturned boats strewn around here and there. Scraps of sailcloth and rope floated in the waters, along with a few plastic bags and containers, and the distinctive oily swirl of petrol. A few hardy fish were visible beneath the surface, but much more prolific were the seagulls wheeling in the skies, calling out to each other in their harsh screeches and screams, before diving on morsels of food dropped by passers by, or sitting on lofty perches and depositing their droppings everywhere.
We skidded round a bend onto a well-used gravel track that ran parallel to the waterfront, and parked at a 45° angle on the grass verge, sandwiched between Thierry's boat and a stray Mercury four-stroke outboard motor. En masse, we piled out of the car like kids out of school at the end of the day, and then piled into the boat like kids into a sweet shop, just as it opens.
The boat was impressive – just over twenty feet long, with two absolutely gigantic Mercury 250cc outboard motors trailing behind. There was a hatch to the bilges in the middle of the boat, where we lobbed our towels and trunks before pulling the fenders over the sides and fighting each other for the seat in front of the windscreen. Pierre-Marie and I, being the biggest and heaviest, won the fight and squeezed in between the plastic armrests, while the others had to make do with sitting on the hatch covers up front, which could slide back to form a table, concurrently revealing the lifejackets. The anchor was stowed in a small hole beyond the lifejackets, and beyond that was a railing that ran halfway to the stern on both sides of the boat.
Thierry plonked himself down on the driver's seat – on the right, unlike in his car – and thrust his key into the ignition. The passenger seat the other side of the hatch was empty – Marie-Hélène would sit there if she was with us. Further thoughts were abolished as Thierry started the boat's monstrous engines with a roar akin to that of a pride of lions simultaneously marking their territory. He ran them on full revs for about a minute to warm them up, before jumping ashore and untying the mooring ropes from their cleats. He jumped back in, threw the steering wheel over to port and shoved the throttle forward.
We cruised out of the harbour, and Thierry rammed the throttle as far forward as it would go. The bow lifted clear out of the water and we streaked forward like a cruise missile on steroids. I got out of the forward seat and was immediately replaced by Jean-Christophe. Sitting down be the side rail in the forepeak, I dangled my feet over the side and revelled in the refreshing feel of the cool seawater spraying my legs.
We sped a good distance out from shore, before Thierry stopped the boat in the middle of the bay and stripped to his swimming trunks, before catapulting himself over the side and splashing into the sea like a cannonball into mortar. The rest of us followed suit in various styles, making various noises, and at various distances and angles from the boat.
Jean-Chris belly flopped and surfaced half a minute later with a roar of pain, whereas Pierre-Marie took a run-up, but tripped over the side rail and plunged in head-first next to the boat. Jean-Mathieu gave vent to a piercing yell and hurled himself to oblivion, only to find he hit the sea instead of a death worthy of martyrdom. I did a penguin impersonation – waddling to the back of the boat and doing a pencil jump off. I broke the surface and sank about ten metres into paradise – crystal clear waters in which it was possible to see for fifty metres, although the bottom was way out of view. The water was devoid of any trace of pollution, and cool enough to be refreshing, but not unpleasantly cold.
I looked around for half a minute into the crystalline, aquamarine depths, before surfacing with a gasp as my lungs reabsorbed all the oxygen they'd missed while I was underwater. I swam back to the boat as Thierry took his second dive, and we all went through the process again. After about five turns each, we got back into the boat and towelled ourselves. We were going to get back in the water soon anyway, but speeding across the water would seriously chill you if you were wet.
We went to a sheltered cove in the side of the bay, and lobbed down the anchor. You need to let out four times the depth of the water in rope, to allow for squalls, wind, current and tide. Then Thierry got out the fishing rods and we all baited up with lugworm.
But that wasn’t good enough for me. I baited my rod and shoved it in a holder, before putting on a mask and, much to the amusement of the rest of the guys, hanging over the stern. I watched the little shoal of fish and when I saw a bite, I secured it and withdrew from the water, reeling in at the same time. I caught a load of fish this way, and together with the exploits of Jean-Chris – a local who knew his stuff – we soon caught enough fish for a decent meal.
There were two main types of fish caught: a small, eel-like fish with a red back and a silver belly that was called something like "grenade" or "grenouille" (though actually it was neither of these. A "grenade" is and Italian drink, and a "grenouille" is a frog. I've forgotten what the fish was really called thought, but it sounded similar to these words. I think.); and a thin, black fish about the size of my palm, shaped like a deflated football, but the black fish weren’t edible so we threw them back in if we caught one.
Once we had caught a sufficient haul of fish, we put the rods away and went for a swim. As before, the water was crystal clear, and shoals of the fish we had just hunted swam below. It was about thirty metres deep at this point, and I could clearly see the bottom through my mask. We'd been snorkelling for about five minutes when someone shouted "Jellyfish!" (Or, actually "Meduse!" which is jellyfish in French).Pierre-Marie immediately swam back to the boat and refused to get back in the water. I got back in the boat and fished around in the hold for a net. Thus armed, I gingerly re-entered the water and went marauding.
I caught about six jellyfish in my net, before I reached the barnacle encrusted rock where the others were sitting, surrounded by jellyfish. This species, I was told later, was pretty much unique to Corsica, and harboured a potent sting, which would throb for a day or so, before fading into a bad memory. The waters where we were had gone from being devoid of any troglodytic, gelatinous life forms, to being infested with a swarm of them, all in the space of about two minutes. I cleared the water around the rock of jellyfish, and convinced the guys to re-enter the water.
With me in front of them, wielding my net like a broadsword, we swam back to the boat. Once we were all in, I emptied my depository of jellyfish over the side, and stowed my net back in the hold. I caught about twenty of the little stingers in all. Even baby ones. They all went back into the water and we decided to call it a day in that area.
Nursing the welt I had acquired at the hands, no, tentacles, of one of the more vicious jellyfish, I clambered to the bow and hauled in the anchor. Hand over hand, all sixty fathoms*. Then we restarted the engines and slid out of the cove, leaving many live jellyfish behind us, some visible, floating in the water, as well as a wake of dead ones, which had been caught in the motors and diced up, and were now floating, tentacles limp and harmless, in several pieces behind us. The water was literally alive with jellyfish now – and even the ones that died in the engines made no dent in their numbers.
We continued further out of the bay, and rounded a point, about five minutes or so after the jellyfish encounter, to see a quaint little village, whose name I forget. After loitering around in the town harbour for a while doing the square root of nothing, we hunted about in the hold for a body board and, when we found one, drilled a hole through the nose with a hand-drill from Thierry's toolkit. After using two sail eyelets that we also found in the hold to line the two holes with metal, we threaded some strong rope through them and attached the rope to the anchor cleat on the bow. We ran it over the cockpit and attached it to the top of a pole we found below, which we then stuck in a hole in the deck, so the belly board floated behind us, with the rope clear of the engines.
Then we all took turns on the wakeboard, wearing a mask and snorkel so we could see and breathe through the spray coming off the front of the board.
We had to wear lifejackets because the experience was so thrilling that the adrenaline left you incapable for a few seconds afterwards. But the boat went quite fast, and it was impossible to hold on for too long without your arms being ripped out of their sockets.
Thoroughly exhilarated, after two or three turns each, we retired to the boat and decided it was time to go back to the villa for lunch. All that excitement, and it was only halfway through my first day of fourteen in Corsica. But the journey back to the harbour was exciting too, if a little painful. Thierry's boat did have cushions to fit the seats, but at the speed we boys liked to travel, so much spray was kicked up they would get wet, and rot, so we couldn’t use them.
And, unfortunately for us, the wind had picked up, in addition to the tide turning. So the tide and currents were going in, and, with the onshore wind behind them, a sizeable chop developed – going our way. The keel of the boat cuts through water to an extent, but not when there's a lot of chop. We ploughed in to them and the bow lifted up. Passing the crest, the bow dipped slightly, but our speed was sufficient to ensure that instead of driving down the leeward side of the wave, we jumped off the crest, and the hull smashed down into the trough. Though it was easily strong enough to withstand the impact, we weren't.
Up and down and up and down and up and down in a protracted monotony. The "ups" were dizzying and the "downs" were painful smacks back onto the deck. Our momentum lifted us up at the wave-crest, when the boat levelled out, and our mass tried to keep on going, but then the boat came down into the trough, each and every trough, with a sickening smash, moments before we came down with a sickening thud. Then it started all over again. Up and down and up and down and up and down in prolonged uniformity.
By the time Thierry (who was standing, so as not to break his tail-bone, like us [stupid] men up the front did) loosened off the throttle to coast into the harbour, we were all (except him) rolling around on the deck in agony, clutching our behinds with both hands. But there was work to be done yet, so we got up, groaning, and threw the fenders over the side, as Thierry floated us in, pretty as you like, next to the same jetty we'd left two and a half hours ago.
I jumped, or rather, limped ashore, and fastened the forward mooring rope to a cleat on the jetty. Then, still groping both our injured bottoms and our injured dignity, we retrieved our towels and clothes from the hold and trooped back into the car, throwing the towels on the seats so as not to get the leather too wet. This time, we re-entered the car like a flock old ladies on shopping day, bent double and devoid of the energy that had fuelled the kids in the sweet shop earlier that day. With a great deal less pace than earlier, we drove to the bakery and bought some fresh bread for lunch, before continuing back to the villa, where we promptly ate the bread we had just bought with the rest of the family.
My first, exhausting day in Corsica (out of fourteen) was half over, and I had learnt just one thing: next time I went on Thierry's boat, I'd ask for a cushion.
Nb: Corsica has been heavily affected with Italian language and custom throughout its recent history, though it has largely remained under the government of France. It follows that the language of Corsica is a separate dialect of French, and follows many Italian patterns. In this extract, it might be useful for the reader to note that, in pronouncing many Corsican words, if an "o" follows a consonant at the end of a word, it is not spoken. For example: "Propriano" is actually pronounced "Proprian" or with a longer "n" sound, like "Proprianne." However, as with most languages, there are exceptions to this rule, and also a few examples that nearly fall under the rule. For example, one could generalise and say if any vowel follows a consonant at the end of a word, but it is much less likely to be true. Also, if two vowels are grouped at the end of a word, they are pronounced. For example, "Bonifacio" (a beautiful little town set precariously on a cliff edge, the southernmost town in France, with a glorious collection of caves in the cliff-face [one of which has a hole in its roof the shape of Corsica], from where it was possible to see Sardinia – a group of Italian-governed islands to the south) is still pronounced "Bonifacio."
*1 fathom ≈ 1.8288 metres.
