29 October 2015
Vive la différence
A view from the other side
by Richard Pooley
Having lived in France for 2½ years I have got used to trying to explain those habits and quirks of the French which puzzle our visitors from abroad, but I am not so used to dealing with things the other way round. So, it was with a little trepidation that I arranged to take two French friends to England during the Rugby World Cup. Neither of them had ever been to England nor speaks any English. What would they find odd about us English and how would I explain our strange ways in my less than fluent French?
Philippe is 55 and runs a panel-beating business in the grounds of the house he was brought up in and in which his mother still lives. He thought he had been to England before; he had been in Cardiff in January 1997 to watch his beloved Brive beat Leicester to win rugby’s European Cup. I had to tell him that Wales was not England, something which no French person can really get their head or language around.
Georges is 78, left school at 13 and, after pacifying (his term) the Algerians, worked for 25 years as an SNCF engine driver. He has spent the last 28 years “en retraite” in Brive, although he keeps himself busy by doing electrical work for all his neighbours, friends and family. Not only did he put in every light-fitting in our house in Brive (houses for rent in France don’t usually come with light-fittings, let alone light-bulbs), he insisted on transferring all of them when we moved to our current house 30km to the south.
Both men have been abroad several times, Georges as far as China, Philippe to Canada. But like most French people, they nearly always take their holidays in France. Why go anywhere else when your country remains the world’s top tourist destination?
What puzzled them about the England they saw? Driving on the left, of course. They took it in turns to sit in the front passenger seat when we picked up our hire car at Southampton airport. Each time they marvelled at the lack of a wheel in front of them. Georges gripped his seat every time we went “the wrong way” into a roundabout and kept his eyes firmly closed as I drove around London’s Hyde Park Corner.
Georges shook his head when he realised that he was leaning against a family tomb outside Winchester Cathedral. How could people be buried in just any old place around a church? Where was the neat, walled cemetery on the edge of each town or village?
“Où sont les Noirs?” Georges asked as we walked around Winchester. He asked it again as we travelled around central London. Even when he saw some Noirs he clearly felt they were not the Noirs he had been told about. I tried to explain where Black and Asian Britons tended to live and that most of the people we were seeing were fellow tourists anyway. But I don’t think I got through.
Phillippe wanted to track down the famous English sense of humour, even though I thought he lacked the language to do so. But as far as he was concerned, he found it in Covent Garden. The banter and antics of the street musicians, comedians and mime-artists charmed both of them. The interaction, gentle but not malicious, between audience and performers of the busking string group, Oopsie Mamushka, had all three of us in tears of laughter. And Georges wondered at the speed with which the group’s CDs were bought and donations given. There was a lot of money to be made combining music and fun, he observed.
They loved the humanity of the statues of Churchill, Lloyd-George, Gandhi and Mandela in the centre of Parliament Square. Philippe was astonished that Churchill was shown as an old, grumpy man leaning heavily on a stick. No statue of De Gaulle or any other French leader would show such vulnerability, he insisted.
The orderly queueing – to get on a bus, to add money to our Oystercards, to see the Changing of the Guard – and the way the rugby fans allowed themselves to be herded from car park to stadium impressed. “Comme des moutons”, Philippe muttered approvingly.
Much to their surprise, and mine, they found the English food they tried – e.g. Shepherd’s Pie, Apple Charlotte and, yes, Fish and Chips – to be tasty. An even greater surprise to me was that they were happy to slurp half-pints of Bitter, provided it was chilled. The lack of time that we English devote to lunch did shock them however.
It was in South Kensington that they got their biggest surprise. We were walking away from South Kensington tube station to the Natural History Museum. Suddenly, Philippe grabbed my arm. He pointed to various people walking around with Starbuck-style coffee cups in their hands; walking past cafe tables where they could have sat and drunk their coffee. Neither man could comprehend such a thing. Later they commented on people walking and eating sandwiches at the same time. Why didn’t they sit down to eat them? The only place in France where they had seen people behave in such an odd way was Paris and they had assumed they were tourists. Is this why Starbucks only has 3 outlets outside greater Paris?
Now back in France, I have returned to the easier task of explaining French culture to visitors. We took an English couple to dinner in a restaurant near us last week. The wife ordered beef and when asked how she would like it cooked said, in English, “Well done, really, …a little bit more cooked than medium.” My wife began to translate. She got no further than “Bien cuit” before the waitress repeated the words in loud astonishment. The meat would be ruined, she argued. We tried our best to get her to understand that our friend just did not want the meat oozing blood. But it was no surprise to my wife and I when the beef arrived doing exactly that.
