The Pearls that were their Eyes [Pt.2]
Buron. Edwige. Freddy Joyce.
Margaux. Yeti. Filibuster.
Liberte. Bonne Sainte Rita. Silence II.
Peris en Mer. Disparu en Mer.
Thirty-nine years ago today the Filibuster went down with all hands, including Jean Pierre Herout and Daniel Herout, and Pierre Prie. Four years after the loss of the Filibuster, the Bonne Sainte Rita went down in a winter storm on the 29th of December, taking with her Claude Herout, Fabrice Herout, Gilbert Herout and Thierry Prie. Seven men across two families, gone within four years.
Chapelle des Marines, St-Vaast-la-Hogue
This chapel is dedicated to the memory of those from St-Vaast and the surrounding area who lost their lives at sea and a patchwork of memorial plaques has risen up the walls to tell their stories. Only if you are lost at sea and your body is never recovered can a plaque be erected to you here. Photos of the drowned stare out from the walls of the chapel, mute and uncomprehending. Though most are black and white, the most recent addition is in incongruous technicolour, a young man of 25 who died this year. Commercial fishing is not a country for old men and many of those commemorated in the chapel are in their twenties.
Half obscured behind a vase of blowsy roses: ‘A mon Epoux/A notre Papa’. The wording on the memorials is sparse, restricted to names - of men and of boats - dates of birth and of death. Some of the plaques read ‘peris en mer’ – died at sea. Others use the more uncanny ‘disparu’ – disappeared. Sometimes the sea simply keeps what she takes and does not give it back. Yet there are moments that this formula breaks down and grief howls through the chapel. The tribute to Maurice Perrotle who dies in early May, 2001 on board the Silence II, the final line of whose plaque reads:
‘la mer . . .’
It is the ellipsis that really stuns you, present again in the tribute to the crew of the Edwige, lost in January of 1969. ‘Pater . . . ave . . .’ The prayer like an afterthought, or something muttered under the breath, or said with a shrug because find me a prayer for this. Language itself unequal to the task. In some of the eulogies there is still present, even in the carefully carved letters, an obliterating loss, words which leave you with the feeling that these plaques are not in place of a body but testify instead to a perpetually painful absence. I read a tribute from the parents of Claude Meury: ‘Ta mort inattendue a dechire nos couers. Ni le temps ni l’oubline tarriront nos pleurs.’ Another from the parents of Patrick Doucet: ‘Le temps ne saura guerir a douleur de ton absence. [. . .] Tu nous manque.’ A conversational translation is painful enough – ‘we miss you’, but literally translated ‘tu nous manque’ means ‘we lack you’. You are missing from us. ‘To fill a gap insert the thing that caused it. Fill it up with other and it will yawn the more. You cannot solder an abyss with air’
As I finish what feels like a litany, reading the plaque of each boat and each man, I catch sight of a final tribute, propped on the floor next to the altar rail, a candle, recently lit, burning in front of it. The plaque is unique in more ways than one. Firstly, in a sea of ocean-going male faces, scrubbed for Sunday with heavy clerical fringes or grinning from the decks of the boats that would kill them, it is the only memorial to depict a woman. Secondly, though this woman did die at sea, she did not die in the waters off the Cotentin peninsula. You will find no vessel named on her plaque, only a flight number.
Marie-France Laisné was 49 years old when she boarded flight AF-447 from Rio De Janero to Paris in 2009. The loss of flight AF-447 was the most deadly plane crash in the history of Air France. All passengers and crew, 228 people in total, died when a failed handover between pilot and co-pilot combined with an icing incident to result in the plane’s engines stalling at high altitude. The plane was in free fall for three minutes and thirty seconds before it hit the surface of the Atlantic ocean, killing everyone on board instantly. Researching the accident later I find that Marie-France is not listed among the flight’s ‘notable passengers’, indeed, she is not listed amongst the dead at all.[1] I think about the plaques and the details of our little lives which we leave behind, and what might make them ‘notable’. Even inside the chapel, the sonorous booming of the waves against the sea defences below it are still audible, like a bell tolling underwater.
Leaving the chapel, we walk out to sea along the stone embrace of the harbour wall. As we do, a white van begins to reverse along its length, to unload empty polystyrene boxes onto a small fishing trawler. My stomach drops as we shuffle towards the sheer drop to let it pass. Below us: icy blue green chop and a lone herring gull and I am washed with vertiginous panic. The van, emptied of its load, returns the way it came, forward this time. Its progress like a film running backwards then forwards. Elastic pulled tight and released. Tidal.
It is now possible to check the boats currently at anchor at St-Vaast, and those expected in shortly. As I write fishing vessels Les Trois Lou Lou, Odessa and Dauphin are all docked. We await the arrival of the Hegoak, the Sextant[2] and the Francois Elie in the small hours of the morning. For now they are out there in the dark, buffeted by gentle north-easterlies
Buron. Edwige. Freddie Joyce.
Margaux. Yeti. Filibuster.
Liberte. Bonne Sainte Rita. Silence II.
Peris en Mer. Disparu en Mer.
[1] This connection between a small fishing town on the Cotentin peninsula and one of the worst air disasters in France’s history is even stranger than it first appears, since Marie-France Laisné is not listed on any of the passenger manifests for AF-447 I have been able to access. It may be that she was travelling under a different name or that the family members who erected the plaque knew her by a different name. In any case, she feels doubly disappeared, a phantom on a flight that never landed.
[2] In June of this year Eric Varin, crew member of the Sextant drowned, and another fisherman seriously injured, after the vessel’s fishing gear broke, pitching both men overboard.