Brian visits France 1952

My father had always enjoyed getting on a bicycle, soaking up the outdoors, no matter the country. He would often take off for a ride in the sunshine around Mornington, and encouraged my children when they were young to go on an adventure with him.

Even in his older years, when riding his bike became difficult to do, he still made time to pedal on his exercise bike in the living room while watching the French or Spanish news on TV. Proudly, he would dismount with a comment like ‘another nine kilometres today’ and jot down the total distance in a notebook.

Reading through a notebook of a different kind, I came across Dad’s notes in his unpublished autobiography. In Chapter two; aged sixteen, and living in Southampton, England, and while a student at Taunton’s Grammar School, my father worked part time for a local butcher delivering meat as a bicycle delivery boy. He was saving up to visit Paris with a school-friend for the first time, and was happy to trade his ‘grubby butcher-boy trousers’ for a cleaner, and smarter job. Let’s give Dad the stage now to take us back to 1952-53…

 ‘Early in my Sixth year I was fortunate to find a Saturday sales job in a men’s clothes shop. As luck would have it, the advertisement was spotted in the shop window by my mother. For working all day Saturday I was paid fifteen shillings which later became one pound.

With this sort of regular income I could not only buy my own clothes and pay for my modest amusements but also save enough money for the long-awaited trip to France. I therefore planned with my school friend David, who had also obtained a Saturday job, to spend a month in Paris the following summer (1953).

Meanwhile, as I served my apprenticeship in selling rather flashy American style clothes, I was beginning to learn the tactics of salesmanship. For instance, how to press someone into buying (even if it was not what they had originally asked for; or, how to pander to the wife who dictated what her husband should wear; or better still, how to take away a jacket which was allegedly too small. In this case, one would offer to try on another, obviously too large, and then bring back the first jacket, ‘This should be about right, sir.’

The customer would then admit, ‘Yes, that’s much better. I’ll take it.’

In the Easter holiday preceding our trip, David and I escorted a French boy round Southampton. Only a year older than us, Pierre was so much more mature and was totally convinced that he had film-star looks. He worked as a bellboy in a posh Paris hotel. What amazed us was his direct pursuit of girls. We were most impressed at his technique and envious of his prowess, although we consoled ourselves that Pierre did not have to study for ‘A’ levels, and he had the unfair advantage of being French.  Our film going had taught us that he was a born Don Juan.

When we told Pierre of our plans to go to France, he promised to find us somewhere inexpensive to stay in Paris. Shortly after his return he wrote to say that his English teacher would put us up and feed us for a sum within our budget of thirty pounds.

We wrote back to book our stay with Mrs Moore for three weeks the following August. We studied, we worked on Saturdays, we saved hard, and proudly acquired our first passports aged sixteen.

David and I boosted the annual profits of Thomas Cook and Son by purchasing 8 pound return boat and train tickets to Paris. The train steamed into the Gare Saint Lazare, and as we stepped through the barrier at the end of the platform, there was Pierre smiling at us and pumping our hands. The station hubbub was alarming and the station seemed to be populated almost entirely by foreigners gabbling an unknown tongue, which later turned out to be non-textbook French. Pierre took us to a pavement cafe, where we had a refreshing diabolo citron and tried to feel a little less anxious at being in such a huge and un-British city.

We eventually reached Mrs Moore’s flat in the fifteenth arrondissement and were greeted in quaint old-fashioned English by this sixty year old widow of a Frenchman. Left alone in our room, we washed, unpacked and rested for a while before rejoining Mrs Moore for lunch which included, as did every subsequent meal, a delicious tomato salad – served on a separate plate. This made us suspect that we had been cheated all our lives by what passes for a salad in England.

Our impressions of French meals were that they were lavish and that our restricted British stomachs were at a serious disadvantage – but the effort was an enjoyable one.

Mrs Moore asked us for the three weeks’ rent in advance, but prudent David negotiated (just in case we were not satisfied after a few days) on a weekly basis, and he won. Mrs Moore also told us a little about her expatriate life.

What she didn’t tell us and what shocked us much more when we accidentally found out a week later, was that, in order to accommodate us in her small flat, she had given us her own bedroom and had filled the bath with cushions and blankets, where she slept throughout our stay. We had wondered about all that stuff in the bath but had decided it must be some strange French custom.      

For a week David and I toured Paris by bus and metro, seeing the sights and dutifully photographing each other in front of, on top of or inside famous landmarks. We also met Pierre’s family and friends and slowly began to understand and speak ‘real’ French. I noted with curiosity the language spoken bore little resemblance to what we had so laboriously learned from the textbooks.

Our introduction to vin ordinaire was prior to arriving in France, I had been led to believe that I was proficient in the language but it turned out that I had learned literary French. My attitude to language teaching and learning underwent a radical change which has since guided my own teaching.

After a week our tongues were well and truly loose and we were gabbling away happily, merrily and reasonably fluently. Another major factor in our acquisition of fluency was our willingness to try to say anything we felt like saying, even if this meant making mistakes and being laughed at. In learning a language it is essential to swallow one’s pride, or one has to resign oneself to not making much real progress.

Our excitement at our new experiences induced us to commit our doings to paper and we spent hours in the evenings writing up a diary of our adventures and impressions, and reading them to each other.

One impression: we greatly appreciated the public transport system (not yet knowing the London one) and thoroughly approved of those seats reserved for disabled servicemen (mutilés  de guerre – sounds much more horrific).

We did not, however, like being bullied into tipping, even when the service had been outrageously bad.

‘N’oubliez pas le guide’, proclaimed the uniformed man who had shown us perfunctorily round the top of one of the towers of Notre Dame cathedral, as he stood blocking the tiny exit door.

An unexpected bonus, which was to provide us with a site for our next visit to France, was the week we spent with Pierre and his friends camping thirty miles east of Paris on the banks of the river Marne. The campsite was next to a holiday camp for French Railway employees and their families. There we made many friends, while Pierre and his friend Marcel made conquests.

To get from Paris to the camp-site we rode borrowed bicycles. These were alarming because they were of the ‘drop handlebar’ racing type, which neither David nor I had ever ridden before. This fact, plus riding on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and the constant jolting of French cobblestones, the discomfort of our huge rucksacks and sharing the roads unwillingly with French car drivers made the ride an experience.

The rest of our holiday was spent back in Paris, chez Mrs Moore; seeing sights, going to the cinema, visiting the homes of our newfound friends from the holiday camp, developing infatuations for the least accessible female members of the group, and in short having the most exciting and the sociable time of our young lives.

Paris, the Ville Lumiere, delighted us.

David and I were very sad when the time came to leave and face the prospect of another year’s studying, but we were already determined to return in a year’s time. It was astonishing that we had been able to stay in Paris for almost a month for just over twenty pounds. Our tastes were inexpensive, and back then the dear old pound sterling still went a long way.

Copyright © 2023 Maribel Steel

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