A TIP IN TIME

Me with three of my four lads and two cousins.

Many years ago I was an au pair boy (moniteur) with a French family in St. Brévin l'Océan, in Loire Atlantique, in France.

I was looking after four young lads and was supposed to teach them sailing, tennis and English. We were in the grandma's villa while the parents had taken off for their holidays in Nice or St. Tropez or somewhere.

Well, the sailing didn't work out because I managed to persuade them that the weather was not suitable, for all of six weeks and this in the middle of Summer.

The tennis didn't work out after I trounced the eldest fellow on the court.

And none of them wanted to learn English. That had been Maman's idea.

So my job turned out to be simply to keep them occupied during the day.

There was at least one cinema there which we frequented after I had been introduced by the eldest lad to a novel way of selecting the films.

The Catholic church had a notice in the porch recommending those films which it considered suitable for people to go to during the month. At the bottom of the notice there were other films under the heading "Déconseillés". These were to be avoided because of smut or a danger to the faith or whatever. Very helpful was the church, and we made sure to eat the forbidden fruit. No flies on these lads.

My French was Leaving Cert, from the time when we didn't have any orals, so it was esssentially written French. I was a bit of a curiosity as I spoke written French, most unusual, unless you are de Gaulle. The granny of course was thrilled with it and encouraged the lads, who spoke slang and stuff, to emulate me. "Écoutez Paul" she would say. This was really ironic as I was breaking my back trying to emulate the lads and their easy and sloppy spoken French. But there you are. Probably my only time in this life serving as a role model.

I did, however, get into trouble, sort of, in the cinema one evening when my aural French reflexes, which were a bit on the slow side anyway, let me down.

The five of us had gone to the cinema. It must have been my first time, and we were shown to our seats by a young lady with a torch - much as used to be the case in Dublin then. As I was about to sit down she addressed me quizzically "Monsieur, le pourboire?"

Now I didn't immediately absorb the meaning of this, having just been startled by a foreign language in a strange land. "The what?" I thought to myself, and out the thought came in a single French interrogative. "Pourquoi?" sez I, meaning what are you asking me for?

Well, she put on her sniffiest expression, threw her head back, looked at me with pure contempt flavoured with outrage, and stalked off.

It was only a few moments later, when, with a little help from the eldest lad, my brain caught up with my tongue and I realised that not only had I asked her, as I thought "for what?" but I had actually said "why?". No wonder the lady was insulted, I'm sure nobody ever spoke to her like that before. The French know the score. But I had questioned why should I give her a tip? What had she done for me? And if she had, she clearly hadn't done it well enough.

I think I was lucky not to get slapped in the face and all of us be thrown out of the cinema.

I think this is known as the direct method in language teaching circles. And it works. I did not make the same mistake twice.

That was 57 years ago, and today my spoken French is not perfect, but it's not bad. And this is, in part at least, due to the righteous indignation of a French cinema usherette.