Magalie with Nick and Eli swopping shipping tales.
Today, Magalie of SDV‘s Le Havre office came to call. SDV is the freight company that gets palets of Tea Together jams to the States, to Singapore and all points between. Her inside view of what is going out, what coming in, what going up and what going down, makes her an effective barometer of the economic climate seen from the workface. It’s Magalie who tells us that four thousand containers of French wine sail to Japan every week, that every port in China has a different Export speciality – textile, white goods, toys, and so on around the coast – and that the incoming ships are unloaded by teams working three hours per shift, the pressure and the danger of the job being intense. They’re talking in the upstairs library where the walls are covered with photos of the Caudron brothers, the daring pioneers of flight who had their School of Aviation on the coast at Le Crotoy, not thirty minutes from St Remy au Bois. Go to the little Tourist Information office in Rue, between us and the coast, for a knock-out spread of images of the men and women who gave up their sensible lives on the local farms or in the textile mills to hurl themselves into the air alongside the Caudrons. The men slouch their flying jackets, their ear-flapped helmets, the cigs hung just so on the lower lips. The gels ooze a stylish, jaunty confidence. The most extraordinary one among them was surely Bessy Coleman, child of a dirt poor cotton picking family in the American South who made her way via Chicago and Jazz Age Paris to learn to fly with the Caudrons on the Baie de Somme.
