Gare du Nord Forever Friend

by Alison Kinghorn (Australia)

I didn't expect to find France

I didn’t expect to find……a new lifelong friend on the Gare du Nord platform at midnight... After paying the extra money on a shoestring budget for a TGV ticket from Lyon to Paris, we discovered we’d missed the last train to Calais anyway. The Gare du Nord gendarmerie, complete with their eager looking alsations, made it clear we couldn’t camp anywhere at the station. When he too heard the news, the interesting looking, grey-long haired character we’d seen doing brass-rubbings of grates and the like, approached us and asked if we’d like to share a hotel room. Sensing our hesitation he said he’d give us some time to think about it and come back. It wasn’t the unfamiliarity with the man but his lack of luggage which perturbed my partner more than anything. The man duly returned…with luggage…albeit a small army-issue canvas backpack. This clinched the deal and we were soon in the nearby (not so) Grand Hotel foyer with our new-found friend booking a room. What luck we had - the Englishman was even able to converse in French. A 3am stint drinking Pastis with him in the bar across the road almost negated our need for a room for the night, but finally we decided to turn in. With no private bathroom to change in, our lovely friend asked “what shall we do for modesty?” to which I replied something along the lines of “well we’ll just get it off and be done with it!” To our amazement in his tiny backpack the man had managed to fit in striped pyjamas…and a brolly. How very English! After a few hours sleep we duly caught the first train together in the morning to Calais and then the ferry to Dover. After chatting all the way with our new friend, we disembarked on English soil and duly exchanged addresses. This habit, done with the best intentions, quite often ends up futile with the people never seeing or corresponding with each other again. However we did indeed keep in touch and ended up staying with him at his home in Devon, and also at his wealthy uncle’s property just south of London, not far from the Yehudi Menuhin specialist music school, which used his uncle’s barn for concerts. My parents met him and to my father’s great surprise, when peering at a painting on our friend’s wall, discovered that our friend was related to an Admiral that had been responsible for a famous shipping disaster that my grandfather had been a part of! The Admiral’s flagship HMS Victoria had collided with HMS Camperdown during manoeuvres off the coast of Tripoli in 1893 and Tryon had gone down with his ship. Upon return to Australia we kept in touch with our friend, writing hand-written letters that filled our friend with great pleasure. A later move to France saw him renovate, with the help of friends, an old farmhouse, and also publish the vignettes that he had written. His book so aptly titled “I Drift with the Tides of Chance” sums up his life of wanderings and musings. He made it to Australia later on, and we had the pleasure of having him stay for two weeks. A non-IT person who preferred the simple things in life, our friend never had a computer or mobile phone and when asked if he had a landline connected, he replied “sometimes” - he sometimes just pulled out the plug if he didn’t want to be contacted! A truly unique individual who once retorted that if someone wore a purple suit to an interview they ought to get the job! Although our friend has passed on, we now keep in contact with one of his daughters – and so the friendship link continues. How lucky were we to stumble upon this amazing future lifelong friend at a railway station that was closing for the night.