My first French lessons started when I was about eight years old at a preparatory school in the county of Sussex, England. The school was pretty strict and it was hard to enjoy learning, when failure could result in the application of a cane or some other instrument of punishment. I remember the canes best since they were nicknamed after volcanos. including Vesuvius, Stromboli and Etna. Etna was reputed to be the least painful, on account of that particular volcano having been dormant for some considerable time. Although I never personally experienced it, I was told by others who did, that the cane named Krakatoa was a force to be reckoned with.
Mr. Blunt the headmaster also doubled up as the French teacher. Most of the lessons consisted of learning to declare French verbs by rote, although Mr. Blunt did occasionally introduce a bit of fun, in the form of short stories to aid learning.
The most effective of these for me, was the story of a young boy who was given a bicycle for his birthday, but was forbidden by his father to ride it over a nearby steep hill. Of course this hill became an obsession, so the boy defied his father’s instructions. He rode up the acute hill ( / ) but coming down the other side he had a grave ( \ ) accident. His unsympathetic father made him bend over ( /\ ) while he circumflexed his cane against his son’s backside.
One of the books that was a text when we first joined the school at a young age, was the incredibly sad story of Madame Souris and her children. She is widowed and her children orphaned by a wicked chat who killed Papa Souris. I don’t recall if this was the first time I realised that all living things one day have to die. I do recall that I never felt very cheerful after these lessons.
Madame Souris
Due to the ill health of the headmaster, that particular school closed before my preparatory education was complete, but by this time I could reel off the Present, Perfect, Imperfect, Future, Conditional and Past Historic tenses of an impressive repertoire of French verbs. Unfortunately I could hardly string a single meaningful sentence of French together, which was particularly limiting when trying to hold a conversation with a French person.
My next school, which was also located in Sussex, stood in grounds which had witnessed the Battle of Hastings, nine hundred years before in 1066. Here Mr. Duck the French teacher took an entirely different approach.
The only rule was that for the duration of his class the only language that was used was French. If a pupil needed to speak English, he first had to ask in French for permission to speak in English. So knowing how to ask for this permission was the key to understanding everything that followed.
During the last 15 minutes of each lesson, the class stood in a row. Mr. Duck would ask the first pupil in the row a question. If he didn’t know the answer or gave an incorrect response the question passed to the next pupil and so on. When eventually someone answered correctly, he was moved up the row, to stand one place higher, than the first pupil to have failed to answer that question.
By the end of each class it was pretty clear how one was performing against ones fellow pupils. If you found yourself near the bottom for more than two lessons in succession, you would be asked to get up early the next day and attend thirty minutes of private tuition before breakfast. No one stayed near the bottom of the class for long, and our spoken French capabilities improved in leaps and bounds.
Mr. Duck was one of the few teachers from my school days who still stands out in my mind, for motivating me and greatly improving my skills, in the short spell of eighteen months, that I spent at the place where King Harold lost his eye, his kingdom and his life.
In 1966 my parents moved from Sussex, to a small village in Somerset. I was sent to a School in a nearby town as a day pupil. The school had just installed a spanking new language laboratory, of which they were very proud. There were high hopes that this would revolutionise language teaching.
I don’t think I’d be boasting too much by saying that my French language capabilities at this time were streaks ahead of my fellow pupils. Consequently the lessons seemed elementary and I became more fascinated by the technology of the language lab, than what it was trying to teach me.
Usually a lesson would start with a voice entering my headphones. The voice would be reading some passage of French text or asking some fascinating question like ‘How much do six oranges and two baguettes cost?’ I was then supposed to repeat what the ‘voice’ had said, in the hope that with time my pronunciation would improve. Of course I had the option to record my own voice so I could then listen to my efforts. Having done that I was supposed to start at the beginning again and keep on repeating the same passage until I had perfected it, or I was instructed to do something else.
The class had some 20 plus students in it and the French teacher would use his console to switch from pupil to pupil, listening to their attempts and making helpful comments into his microphone. The theory was that since you did not know when you were being listened in on, you should be on your toes at all times.
My game was to make my initial recording and then keep playing it back, while silently moving my lips, so that hopefully it looked like I was going through the repetition as instructed. I saw nothing wrong in this since I considered my pronunciation to be already perfect.
Although this was clearly a pointless thing to do, the fun came from seeing if the teacher could distinguish between the recording and live speech. If he could, he never mentioned it, neither did he ever correct my pronunciation, so the game and French lessons quickly got to be boring.
By the time I took my French O level I was still proficient enough to pass, but felt that my grade would have been better had I taken it a couple of years earlier, prior to being enriched with the language laboratory experience.
Although this School did nothing to improve my French, I was greatly inspired by my biology teacher there. He was largely responsible for my fascination with Littorina Littorea, the common periwinkle or simply winke, whose contribution to gastromony I have already described in some depth. Knowing so much about winkles helped me greatly in later years at job interviews. I doubt if any of the interviewers had a clue as to what I was talking about, but it seemed that they didn’t want to embarrass themselves, by admitting as much in front of their colleagues.
Share this