Amiens

11 September

The door to Sebastian Faulk’s epic First World War novel Birdsong, swings open to describe number 39 on the Boulevard de Gange, ‘a broad, quiet street that marked the eastern flank of the city of Amiens’.

From the descriptions of ‘a strong, formal front towards the road from behind iron railings’, ’a slate roof plunged in conflicting angles to cover the irregular shape of the house’ and ‘the stone balcony over whose balustrades the red creeper had made its way up to the roof’, there is ‘no doubt this was the property of a substantial man’.

In the novel, this is a local textile grandee who lives there with his much younger wife and teenage daughter. In 1910, a young Englishman comes to lodge with them while serving his apprenticeship. What could possibly go wrong?

River Somme at Amiens

But it’s the evocation of the interiors that set the stage for a series of charged, erotic encounters between the Englishman and Madam and the beginning of a narrative arc spanning seventy-five years: the unexpected spaces and corridors’, the creaking floorboards and ‘echoing air’ that made the house ‘always a place of unseen footsteps.’

In 2004, the house appeared to be serving as a museum which would account for how the author could get access to describe it so minutely. So we went back during business hours to have a look.

It now appears abandoned and derelict. And with modern development on either side, demolition looks imminent.

But for now, it  stands brooding and intimidating, a keeper of secrets and home now only to the ghosts of Faulk’s characters.

Amiens Cathedral