I have been ambushed by the past

The other week I turned up for the village walking club’s Monday hike. A dawn meet. Two cars. A 90-minute drive and we parked on beaten earth under umbrella pines. The line-up that day was three English, three French. I was the youngest; the others were encumbered by walking poles. We shouldered our day packs and skied through the pines to emerge on a dazzling beach next to a glittering sea. A hundred metres offshore was a steep fortified island. Fort de Brégançon is the French President’s summer residence, they said.

A spry and taciturn old Frenchwoman, dressed for any future meteorological possibility and with a whistle and lanyard strung around her neck, had assumed, I now noticed, a surprisingly well-defined role as leader, guide and timekeeper. She reluctantly allowed the group 30 seconds’ contemplation of the presidential summer house, then set off resolutely towards the west and we followed in an attenuated line.