Waiting for Mr Kurtz

The yellow plastic tables on the terrace outside the ferry-terminal bar faced directly into the afternoon sun. It was the last week of September and surprisingly hot. We’d been over to Roscoff for the day, from Plymouth, just for something to do, and we’d been uncomfortably hot all day, traipsing round in our sports anoraks and rucksacks. My boy said he was going for a wander, which I’m beginning to think is a euphemism for having a crafty fag.

We’d seen all we wanted to see of Roscoff, a pretty little fishing town full of sprightly old French people, with an open-air food market, very expensive, with middle-class stall-holders. And we were hot. We’d been there since sunrise and now we were lugging shopping bags full to bursting with bottles of hopefully sprightly old wine and packets of fags, as well as our rucksacks. So we tottered back to the ship at one o’clock, three hours before departure, thinking we could shower then lie on our bunks in our cabin.