French Leave

I have just returned from a very wet week in Normandy, during which I was assaulted by goats and mocked by the French for my appalling grasp of their language. In both cases it was my own fault. I went into each situation with a lot of goodwill, but a lamentable absence of foresight.

On the plus side, it was a learning curve. I will never again make the mistake of walking into the middle of a herd of goats with an open bag of food, and as far as speaking French goes, I must try harder.

I had made the mistake of thinking that my recent Livemocha French course would be enough to get me through everday situations. Every time I completed an online exercise, an encouraging email would arrive within seconds saying "Great job!"

In hindsight, the positive feedback probably gave me a slightly inflated view of my abilities. When, on the first day, I confidently asked a supermarket cashier for a plastic bag, I was completely foxed by her reply:

"Souhaitezvousuneboîtepourlesbouteillesdevin?"

As the week went on, I became increasingly adept at saying "Je ne comprends pas".

I clearly need to learn some more French, but at times I'm tempted to go back to the tried and trusted method of smiling, shouting and pointing.

But it wasn't all humiliation and goats; there were magical moments too. One day I went for a drive with my mother-in-law and we ended up in a beautiful forest, near the town of Saint-Sever-Calvados:

After several miles of driving through dense woodland along empty roads, we saw a sign pointed to 'L'Hermitage'. It sounded intriguing, so I turned off and followed a rough track until we reached a group of large, granite stone buildings. A sign announced that were at a convent, which was strictly privée, but visitors were welcome to visit the chapel.

I parked the car and we got out. It was completely silent, apart from sound of birdsong and the wind roaring through the branches of the trees. A perfect place for the contemplative life.

As we walked down a dark, wooded lane to the chapel, an elderly Frenchman seemed to appear from nowhere and started talking to us. By now I was used to saying "Je ne comprends pas" and expected a characteritic shrug of resignation, but instead we received a reply in perfect, slightly aristocratic English.

When we complimented the man on his English, he explained that he'd taught the subject in Caen for over 20 years:

"I still live in Caen, but every year I come here for a retreat for a few days, to enjoy the silence. Would you like me to show you around the chapel?"

The chapel was beautiful, with an austerity that reminded me of a 6th century church that I'd visited last year. It belonged to this order of nuns and although a sign asked vistors not to disturb the residents, I was a little confused to learn that they had a gift shop that sold greetings cards, books and CDs.

After the well-spoken stranger had finished giving a tour of the chapel, he invited us into the convent for a cup of tea. He confessed that as much as he loved the contemplative life, he was quite relieved when strangers turned up.

We were led to a simply-furnished room with bare stone walls and served tea and brioche, accompanied by some gorgeous jam that had been made by the nuns.

After exchanging a few pleasantries, we asked the man about his life. He was called Father Yves and belonged to a religious order called the Salesians, who are known for their work in educating underprivilged children. He had been associated with the order since he was a child.

Born in Paris, Yves' father died shortly before the War and his mother, unable to cope with raising four children on her own, sent him to an orphange in Normandy. It sounded like the beginning of a tragic story, but Father Yves was quick to dismiss any suggestions that he'd had a tough childhood:

"No, no! It was a very good orphanage. I had a much better life being there than I would have done otherwise."

We went on to talk about the persecution of the Catholic church after the Revolution and I mentioned how much French history I'd learned from reading novels. My mother-in-law agreed, saying how much she loved Zola. There was a slightly awkward silence (somehow I don't think that Father Yves was a Zola fan) before he asked if we'd read Stevenson's 'Travels With a Donkey'. When we shook our heads, he seemed shocked:

"It is a wonderful book and I have done the same journey myself three times. But without the donkey."

Later, as we walked back to the car, my mother-in-law and I agreed that it had been worth coming to Normandy just to meet Father Yves. Anything else was a bonus.

Sadly, the rest of the week was spent dodging showery squalls and our suntan lotions and beachwear never saw the light of day. However, in between downpours we did manage to go on a few excursions.

Here are a few of my favourite moments:

1. A trip to Dinan:

I wanted to visit Brittany and the town of Dinan, with its largely unspoilt medieval centre, is well worth a visit. However, I wish that the owners of the house below hadn't filled their hanging baskets with plastic flowers. Très vulgaire!

2. Encounters with lemurs:

During a brief spell of sunshine, we visited a superb zoo that had recreated a Madagascan forest environment - minus any logging companies - where lemurs could wander freely. Most of the time, they seemed to be content to laze on the grass and lick their genitals, but occasionally they liked to investigate the visitors and seemed happy to pose for photographs.

3. Sandstone saint

At a church in Granville, this sandstone figure of a saint has become so weathered that it now looks like an abstract contemporary sculpture. I'm not sure if this picture will appeal to anyone else, but I liked it.

4. A typically French solution to a rattling window shutter:


5. Frog Prison:

By sheer coincidence our next door neighbour was also in Normandy last week, staying at her parents' house, so we drove over to have lunch with her. Although we had a lovely time, it was a small house and my sons soon started to get restless, so our neighbour asked them if they'd like to see something unusual.

She led the boys out into the small backyard, turned a hose tap on and started firing a jet of water at a small drain, that was covered with a metal grill.

Suddenly, a frog appeared, holding onto the bars like a prisoner looking through a cell window:

Apparently the frog lives in the drain. How he got there and the question of whether he has a secret exit or not is unknown, but he clearly has enough to eat. Our neighbour said that he'd been there for years, but I didn't think frogs lived that long. Is he the same frog, trapped in solitary confinement for years, or one of a family of subterranean amphibians?

6. French supermarkets:

French supermarkets are wonderful. Anywhere where you can buy a decent bottle of wine for £3 and choose from a huge selection of cheeses can't be bad, but I was particularly interested in the books. For all their supposed cultural chauvinism, the French had a far wider selection of Anglophone authors in translation than I expected.

I was particularly intrigued to find a number of English-sounding names that I'd never heard of. Were these authors who'd found more success abroad than they had in their own countries, or were they American authors who'd never been published in Britain?

When I worked at Waterstone's in Richmond, I was often asked by German customers for novels by Noah Gordon. The first time I was asked for a copy of Gordon's novel 'The Physician', I confessed that I'd never heard of him. The German customer exploded: "But he is a bestselling English author in Germany! You MUST have his books!"

After a quick check on the microfiche, I explained to the woman that there were no Noah Gordon novels in print in Britain and asked if he was, by any chance, American? "Yes, he is American, but if he is a bestseller in America and Germany, why not Britain?"

It was a question I couldn't answer. For whatever reason, some American authors fail to take off in Britain and vice versa - I'm told that Lisa Scottoline is a perefctly good crime writer, but in spite of several marketing campaigns and jacket redesigns, her novels have never become popular on this side of the Atlantic. A similar attempt was made with Noah Gordon. Perhaps he's better in translation.

Browsing through the large selection of French novels (a far wider selection than any British supermarket would stock), I was frustrated to see so many intriguing-looking titles that would probably never be translated into English.

That, of course, is another reason for learning French. I may never become a fluent speaker and will continue to be baffled by a language that sounds like a non-stop succession of vowels and soft consonants, but if I could read books in French, that alone would make it worthwhile.

More Victorians

Yesterday another Victorian photograph album appeared on my desk at work, rescued by someone in the warehouse. Sadly, it wasn't as fascinating as this album, which I found last year, but there were a few portraits which I thought were worth sharing:

I'm not quite sure why this photograph of a Spike Milligan lookalike and his wife was taken at such a jaunty angle.


The boy's face is slightly blurred because he didn't remain still, but the dog was clearly an experienced sitter.

A wonderful, strong face

The husband in this couple from Oban looks like a formidable character

The one intriguing thing about this album is the variety of locations that these photographs were taken in: Cardiff, London, Oban, Birmingham, Aberdeen and Leamington Spa - if this is a family album, they were clearly a product of the huge migration that took place during the early Victorian age, when people left their largely rural homes in search of work.

When he retired, my father traced our family tree and got back as far as the 1740s. The death certificates showed that when they lived in the rural Kentish village that had been their home for generations, my ancestors lived to a ripe old age. Then one of them moved to London and became a cab driver.

Both he and his son died in their early 50s.

The Problem of Evil

One of the strangest publications I've come across recently is a 1939 pamphlet called 'Tom, Dick and Harry', produced by the Mansfield House University Settlement - not a name I was familiar with.

A quick search a Google produced this result:

"The Mansfield House University Settlement was founded in 1889 and was intended to give students of Mansfield College Oxford first hand experience of living and working with working-class people. The Settlement wanted to bring ‘culture’ to the people of the East End, and to provide people with opportunities for leisure, recreation and self-improvement. (The idea was partly to encourage people to take up respectable pursuits, rather than spend all their time and money in the public house.)"

So far so good: a group of well-intentioned Oxford undergraduates helping the poor.

As for the pamphlet, its main purpose seemed to be to raise money for the boys clubs that the Settlement had established in the East End. Once again, a laudible cause.

But when I saw the subtitle 'A Calendar of Good and Evil', my alarm bells started to ring. For example, the young man below may be a bit of a ruffian, but is evil really the right word?

Apparently this is what he should be doing:

Quite right too. A bracing 12-mile ride to find the nearest stretch of countryside will do this young man a world of good. Away from the temptations of the city, he will discover new pleasures: medieval churches, brass rubbing, butterfly collecting and bird spotting.

The whole pamphlet consists of pairs of contrasting photographs: one showing a youth being 'good' at a boys' club; the other depicting 'evil' in the streets:

These two tearaways are behaving like savages, not subjects of His Majesty King George VI. The Marquess of Queensbury would be turning in his grave.

Luckily, the Boys' Club provides Cockney lads with a more constructive outlet for their innate cunning and pent-up aggression:

"This is good, and I say, isn't that WH Auden in the background? Apparently nobody turned up to the poetry class. Philistines!"

In addition to promoting physical health, the Mansfield House Settlement was also concerned about the mental and spiritual well-being of their boys - a young man should not be filling his head with lurid tales of murder and adultery (at least he's reading a newspaper!):

Instead, he should be in the library, brushing up his Latin and memorising Ozymandias for the Christmas concert:

But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Supposing our lads become susceptible to the lure of political extremism:

"We have happily no need in this country to beat the big drum; nor to regiment youth into a hectic nationalism; the right spirit is there and only needs to be fostered to grow unconsciously and naturally."

Given that the year is 1939 and this is the East End of London, where Blackshirts and Communists had fought fierce battles in the streets, the words of this pamphlet are rather pointed.

As for the 'right spirit' that needs to be fostered, this photo is given as an illustration:

Here, our young wastrels are enjoying a four-part arrangement of 'Linden Lea', with the inspiring figure of Lord Nelson in the background. No nationalism here - that's too foreign.

But these boys cannot exist purely on a diet of Shelley, Vaughan Williams and vigorous exercise. During the interludes between world wars, they need to be gainfully employed:

The alternative, as 'Tom, Dick and Harry' subtly points out, is this:

"Not so fast now, you young good-for-nothing!"

But if one of the members of the Boys' Club does revert to his dissolute ways of old, he can be certain that his former partners in crime will hunt him down like a dog, until he is bought to justice:

I wonder what happened to the boys' clubs fundraising drive? Was it quickly eclipsed by the advent of war, or did the Mansfield House University Settlement come into its own during the Blitz? It has been difficult to find out, although this website gives a brief history of the charity up to the year 2000.

From a modern perspective, the 'Tom, Dick and Harry' pamphlet seems absurd. We shy away from using the word evil these days and I think that there are times when we shouldn't be afraid to use it, but if we apply it to feckless teenage boys, then what word do we have left for people like Ratko Mladic?

As for the idea of privileged university graduates trying to bring 'culture' to the East End, it might seem ridiculous - who would dare to do that today? But if the alternative is doing nothing, condemning people to live their whole lives without having a choice, I'd rather have some naive, well-intentioned undergraduate patronise me with high art and adult education classes.

My grandfather was a Cockney and fought in the First World War. He never had a chance to learn a trade before the War and when he returned, opprtunities were limited. He spent his entire working life in a succession of badly paid jobs as an 'unskilled labourer'.

My father seemed destined to follow the same path, leaving school at the age of 14 to work in a factory. But things had changed. A spell of National Service in the RAF at the end of the Second World War seemed to open new horizons and my father wasn't willing to meekly return to his old life. Instead, he went to night school and prepared for the Civil Service Entrance Exam which, in many ways, was an IQ test. He passed.

My father never became truly middle class, but he was a world away from his father's life, with its limited choices and low expectations.

By the time I was an 'A' Level student, in the 1980s, it felt as if class and background were completely irrelevant. But at university I learned how wrong I was.

The people at the Mansfield House University Settlement knew that lives were limited by social background and we should salute them for their efforts, even if their attempts at fundraising were a little overzealous!

The Nature Cure

Several news items caught my eye this week, from VS Naipul's absurd rant about the inferiority of women writers, to the surprising revelation that there is a sub-genre of porn films based on Star Trek:

An impressive attention to detail, but those badges don't look quite right

However, the story that interested me most concerned the publication of a new independent report about the financial value of nature. According to the 'UK National Ecosystem Assessment', nature is worth £50 billion and the health benefit of living close to a green landscape is £300 per person per year.

Of course, that's putting it very crudely. This report is a complex survey that involved hundreds of scientists, but newspapers need headlines and 'Nature worth £50billion to Britain's economy' has to compete with the latest update on Ryan Giggs' love life.

I thought about this report yesterday, when I took my sons to the Lewes Railway Land project - a nature reserve created out of waste ground that used to be railway sidings. Twenty years ago, there was talk of turning the land into a retail park, with space for several hundred cars. In Crawley they would have had the JVCs out before the ink was dry on the contract, but in Lewes it was a different story.

Here's what could have been the 873rd branch of Sainbury's:



Hopefully there will be fewer retail parks in the future and more places like this.

The other benefit of going to the Railway Land is that it was completely free. My sons spent a couple of hours having far more fun than they would have done manically charging around a softplay centre, bouncing off the walls.

As we left I congratulated myself for not spending any money. But then I went and completely blew it by visiting the Lewes farmers' market.

That was a big mistake: