Am I French yet?
Even just un petit peu?
You know how little kids start up after about three minutes in the car?
‘Are we nearly there yet?’
I was never that person. Instead, from as far back as I can remember, I had this thing of, Do I seem a bit French yet?
Why this obsession? When you grew up in a tiny village in 60s/70s West Yorkshire, where the biggest thrill was a Seabrook crisp sandwich in front of On the Buses, everything French seemed so thrillingly glamorous.
No one went abroad in the 1970s. At least, no one in our village did. My parents were a little bit fancy, though. Dad had been on a school trip to France and Switzerland in the early 50s, a load of kids from the Wirral carted off in some old war plane or something. He enthused about ‘The Continent’ and demonstrated how to achieve a hint of garlicky flavour (exotique!) by rubbing a clove around the inside of a salad bowl.
That’s as near as I got to actual France. That and trying to absorb some Frenchness from Madame Cholet of The Wombles and Kiki and ZsaZsa from Hector’s House.
Even TV ads had me salivating. ‘Du pain, du vin, du Boursin…’
What did we have? Dairylea triangles and Ritz crackers! Yeah - Ritz, like they were posh or something. As if that’d fool anybody.
As puberty kicked in and hormones raged, garlic rubbed around the bowl wasn’t enough anymore. How could I get to this wondrous country where the boys had names like Gustave Portmanteau and Jean-Claude Dubois instead of Colin Hardcastle and Ron Pickles?
‘French kissing’. I didn’t know what it was. But it sounded better than Kenneth Brathwaite trying to poke his tongue in your ear round the back of Ladbroke’s.
Then, suddenly… OOH LA LA!
‘We’re taking you camping to France.’ This from the mouth of the leader of 1st Oakworth Girl Guides. You know what we normally did at Guides? Learn to set a tea tray correctly. Play Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes on the recorder. So this was MAGNIFIQUE!
Off we went, to Dinan in Brittany with an enormous trunk packed with all the food a bunch of hungry Guides would need - including bacon and UHT milk. Yes, we were going to The Continent. But our leaders would ensure that no ‘foreign food’ passed our lips.
At the camp site, having caught wind of our arrival, a cluster of alluring French boys took to loitering at the gates. Fierce, robust and full of Yorkshire no-nonsense, our leaders made it their business to shoo them away.
I was desperate to break ranks and escape. Not into the arms of a shaggy haired French boy as - faced now with the possibility of some actual smooching - it seemed a bit scary. I had this notion that France was a very, very saucy place, what with Jane Birkin’s amorous panting in Je Taime - Moi Non Plus. And I wasn’t ready for that.
We’d come to France armed with sliced Mother’s Pride loaves in waxed wrappers. What I really wanted was to get my paws on a thrillingly naked baguette.
I snuck out alone to the boulangerie. ‘Deux baguettes, s’il vous plait,’ I said breathlessly. My ‘deux’ must have come out as ‘douze’. Too embarrassed to admit my mistake, I carried twelve freshly baked loaves out of the shop.
This blunder didn’t put me off trying to be French and a few years later, aged around 21, I bought these dungarees.
D’you know why? Because Beatrice Dalle wore a similar outfit in Betty Blue (obviously we are indistinguishable!).
Much later still, in my early thirties when I had two petits pains in the oven, Jimmy and I had our last pre-parenthood holiday in Paris. Soon afterwards our twin sons were born, and then our daughter, and we hauled our young family all over France whether they liked it or not.
And now my daughter lives here in this city!
How handy is that? Maybe she can teach me how to be properly French…
Love,
Fiona xx
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With Madame Cholet and Beatrice Dalle as role models, you couldn't go wrong! Very funny, Fi. On y va!
Ah yes, that “exotique “ hint of garlic! When we lived in England in ‘74, my dad engaged a housekeeper to look after us and occasionally make dinner. She was a lovely Warwickshire woman in her sixties who had never been out of the country, and she was absolutely horrified by my father’s insistence on putting garlic in our food. (She and her husband DID go to the local Indian restaurant once a week, but they only ever ordered fish and chips there.)