Dunkirk – or rather, the Dunes campsite in Gravelines – is my first stop for a few days. Apart from the first day, the weather isn’t particularly welcoming. Nevertheless, these beaches have a spellbinding effect on me. There’s the wind, blowing incessantly. On the one hand, it nips any attempt to keep my hair looking presentable in the bud. On the other hand, the constant wind makes me feel so alive. Nature is flexing its muscles a little. And with the right music in my ears – which, in this case, I naturally have to turn up very loud – I can almost fly away.
But it’s not just the wind – it’s the vastness, too. At low tide, the mudflats can stretch up to a kilometre out to the water’s edge. You almost feel as though you can see right across to England. Just round the corner, in Dunkirk, over 330,000 British and French soldiers were rescued from the Germans in May and June 1940. It’s impossible to imagine how the soldiers queuing for the ships must have felt as the German bombers flew along the beach and bombed them. The movie gives a perspective.
At low tide, as I said, the water’s edge is a long, long way from the beach. Alongside driftwood and a few shells, I also take a photo of a pair of tracksuit bottoms lying in the sand, which makes me wonder who might have lost or left them behind, and under what circumstances. I recently read that apparently thousands of migrants are fleeing from Gravelines across the English Channel to England. Immediately, the tracksuit bottoms take on a different possible context. The weather suits the place: the steady wind is occasionally interspersed with a bit of rain. Time to move on, especially as, on my last walk, I spotted the Gravelines nuclear power station about three kilometres away as the crow flies. A rather eerie feeling.
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