THERE is a joke doing the rounds at the moment about someone meeting their old French teacher on the street and stopping for a chat.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” asks the teacher.
“I went to the park and played football and then I went to the cinema with my brother,” comes the reply.
You’ll smile if you’ve ever sat through a GCSE French class. Those are stock phrases that tumble out. When I turned teacher for a few years, what pleased me most was the practicality of modern language teaching.
Here were children doing GCSE French who could arrive comfortably at a petrol station in the back end of Bordeaux and say: “Fill her up with four star please.”
This was to be admired. This was very useful French, that cut to the quick of every situation: the hotel reception – a room for two with a shower; the restaurant – a table for two; and the hospital – ne resussitez moi pas svp.
No dilly dallying in the world of the lost property office for them – I was forever losing my watch back in the days of O-levels. But it seems that we have now become so very practical that modern languages are not deemed worth the time, effort and money.
The University of Ulster is to close its school of modern languages at Coleraine. It seems not enough students are interested. In Queen’s University, they shut the Italian department some years back. What is a university when the study of a language and a civilisation at the very heart of the Renaissance is no longer possible at degree level? You can’t do a degree in German either.
Young people learn French and business or accountancy or law now, they study modern French. And yes, while I love the fact that it is all so practical, it also seems to me that we have lost something vital in the whole swing towards marketability and getting a job.
We were lucky. When I was 18, education was free and university was for what you wanted. Many of us thought no further than what we loved. So I turned my back on law (boring!) to spend four years on French and English.
Would I do it again? I would in a heartbeat.
My love affair with French began when my big sister taught me my numbers in French and voila, I was hooked. It was the music of the language – how beautiful the words sounded – the sexiness and the melody combined. I’d walk to school and talk to myself in French – j’ai onze ans, j’adore David Essex, Wizard, Andy Fairweather Low.
And we had a marvellous French teacher who made it so much fun that lessons flew by and the words came easily. She taught us so thoroughly that we sailed through – thank you from the bottom of my coeur, Mrs Thompson.
French was not my only love. There was German and Irish and Italian and even Latin. Now when my nephew says he is going to the Gaeltacht, I smile and joke “kissing college”.
Sad truth is I never got kissed there but in my dreams I can whack off a page of an essay that begins with the sun shining brightly and me heading off fishing even though I wouldn’t know one end of a currach from another.
Thanks to the day when our Irish teacher did not turn up for our third form class and we carried on and got a huge punishment homework – all the irregular verbs to be written out ten times in present and past tenses – I can chime those off in my sleep too.
As for German – it was just an A-level but it came in useful in Poland when a taxi driver swiped my 500,000 zloty note and refused to give me any change. Up to this point I had been protesting to my companion that I couldn’t remember a word of German. But once the zloty dropped that we’d been diddled, I turned fiercely fluent.
“How dare you treat visitors to your country like this. How dare you steal from us. What sort of person are you,” I shrieked in indignant Deutsch.
My friend laughed til her shoulders shook, told me my German was fluent as bedamned and even added that it was worth the 500,000 zlotys just to listen to me. We never did get any change from that taxi driver.
And now when I hear that my son has developed an interest in old Roman myths, I’m nostalgic for Latin classes and the story of the twins who founded Rome and the warrior Horatio bravely holding the bridge and chanting “Tiber, Father Tiber” before throwing himself into the arms of the river.
What a loss if today’s students miss out on Roman myth, on the sweet music of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire and on Heinrich Boll and his Irish island home.
No wonder then that I fell for a man whose passion was for languages too and who has beautiful French. Once, long ago, we were on a train in France and got chatting to a few local students. They said my French was great for an English woman. Then they turned to him and asked which part of France was he from.
At the time, I wanted to pinch him hard for being better than me. But I didn’t. I saw how his love was founded on a rock of passion and earnest study and how he had a wonderful ear for the music of the words.
And then reader, why then... I married him.
