Anglo-French co-operation ended with the cane

I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the article by Lucy Oates (Yorkshire Post, September 24) about an Anglo-French love affair in York during the war. Throughout the war the Allies were somewhat uneasy bedfellows, but we did have one aim in common – the defeat of Nazi Germany.

My experience of Anglo-French co-operation came when I was aged seven in 1943 and just starting to learn French at school. Our text book was French Without Tears by Lady Bell. It was a definite misnomer as far as I was concerned – I wept hot tears over it when doing my homework. But help was at hand.

My parents kept a pub in Berkshire and, surrounded as we were by military camps of every kind – Free French, Free Czechs, Free Norwegians, Free Danes, Free Dutch, and very free Americans – one of our regulars was Jacques. Jacques was 5ft 3in tall and 3ft 5in wide, and before the war had been a fruit and vegetable porter at Les Halles, Paris.

He had a vocabulary and turn of phrase to be found in no dictionary. It was rather like a French child enlisting the aid of a Billingsgate fish porter. Next day I got the cane for getting help, and the elderly maiden lady who taught us French – she remembered the Empress Eugenie in her exile after the Franco-Prussian War – was genuinely puzzled by what Jacques had written. I think, many years later, that it was probably something obscene.

Anyway, I had no further chance of getting help from that source, because a few days later Jacques was posted as missing. That was the way it was in those days; people were quite literally here today and gone tomorrow.