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Gervase Phinn: French without tears
When the children were little, we camped in France. Each year I would drive down to the south coast in the early morning and we would take the ferry to San Malo. Then I drove to the campsite at La Tranch in the Vendee where a friendly courier from Eurocamp would greet us and show us to our tent.
There was always a get-together the first evening when the courier introduced all the happy campers to each other, described the facilities on offer and took us through a few golden rules. My wife and I were both teachers at the time but never revealed this. I did once and then I had to listen to a diatribe from one red-faced parent in khaki shorts about his son's failing school, sympathise with another whose daughter was dyslexic and try to give some advice to a mother whose son was being bullied by his classmates. After this experience I told people I was a systems analyst and thankfully was left pretty much alone.
One summer our tent was sandwiched between a miserable know-it-all and his ever complaining wife on one side and a very pleasant and good humoured couple and their teenage daughter on the other. The girl, Melanie, a very capable and articulate young woman, was only too happy to baby-sit for us on a few evenings and we got to know her quite well.
One morning Melanie rushed over to our tent beaming widely. "I've just got my GCSE results," she told us excitedly. "I can't believe it. I've got five As, three Bs and an A star in French." "Congratulations!" I said. "Very well done. That's brilliant." When the girl had gone, the miserable know-it-all in the next tent who had been eavesdropping, shared with me his considered opinion. "Hardly brilliant," he commented. "Exams these days aren't anywhere near as hard as they were in the past. A monkey could pass some of them."
"Oh," I said, "you work in education do you?" "No," he replied. "You mark examination papers then?" "'No, I fit double glazing," he told me. "I'm just saying that standards in school have declined and that the exams are easier. Kids these days don't know half as much as what we did at school."
The following day I came across the "educational expert" in the supermarket. "Do you speak the lingo?" he asked me. "Pardon?"
"French. Do you speak French?"
"A little," I replied.
"Well, the wife wants to know the name of this cheese we've been eating. She wants to see if they have it back home. Can you come and ask the fellow at the charcuterie what it's called?"
I accompanied him to the counter to find "the wife" was pointing and nodding and mouthing something volubly in a sort of pigeon English.
"May I help?" I asked.
"No thank you," she said, "I can manage."
"If you would like me to ask –" I started.
"No thank you," she interrupted sharply. "I said I can manage."
At the check out the couple were ahead of me. "Did you discover what sort of cheese it was?" I asked.
"Oh yes," said the man holding up a large wedge in greaseproof paper. "The wife's going to ask for it back home at Sainsbury's. It's called fromage."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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