Arriving

September 22nd

After flying into Bastia and spending a drunken evening with a very friendly English teacher there, I caught the decrepit little train to Ile Rousse. It is a lovely journey through broad valleys inland, and then out onto the coast where the track skirts the flanks of the hills in looping folds. The train stops for the beautiful cows that seem to wander freely onto the track to stare at the train through their film star lashes. They are bright chestnut orange, like mangoes in the sunshine. You can see the harbour of Ile Rousse from a long way off, with the island and its Genoese tower built from the same orange rock, so that it looks as if it’s part of the hill.

Once the train arrived, I toiled up the wrong hill in Ile Rousse with my huge case and rucksack and had to retrace my steps, eventually finding the lycée and scaring the admin staff with my copious sweating and inability to understand French. My first hint that I was on the right track for the school was some graffiti written on a wall in tippex: “Si la merde était de l’or, le collège serait un trésor.’ I’m hoping that my primary students won’t yet have reached that level of cynicism.

My room was small, damp and contained some mouse droppings, and I felt a bit lost, particularly since the secretaries left without telling me about where or when the canteen might be, or that there was a code to open the school gates at night (I ended up having to climb over a couple of times). The lycée is about a kilometre out of town up a hill, next to the college and a cemetery. In the evenings it was slightly frightening, completely empty and silent, except for a few teachers who for some reason choose to live there, and who all turn their lights off very early.

Ile Rousse has a tiny old centre with two churches, the main square, a market like a Greek temple and about six little streets. The view out to sea is lovely: receding hills and spits of land out to the east, where you can see the ridge of the Cap Corse hazy in the distance. All the rest is new blocks of flats stretching up from the sea into the hills. There is building work everywhere, and apparently most of the flats are empty all winter, waiting for the tourist crush. I went exploring out the back of the lycée in the cool of the evening, and found a dirt track alongside a field with scrawny sheep with bells on, making a noise like boats at harbour when the wind knocks the ropes against the metal masts. Not a proper country walk really – it’s a dead end and apparently well loved by fly-tippers, but there is a patch of maquis that smells of thyme and rosemary burning, where I sat and read in the sun.