I first moved to France in the summer of 2001, a couple of months before my 19th birthday. I had finished my first year at University in Newcastle and arranged to spend the summer working as a receptionist on a camp site in the south west, about an hour south of Bordeaux in a sleepy little village called Gastes. The village itself was no more than a few houses and a tennis club, with about 400 inhabitants in total. There was a town about 5 miles up the road called Parentis en Born where most people worked and did their shopping. In the height of summer the camp site was home to some 4000 holiday makers, so in comparison to the local village it is fairly big. How I ended up there is a bit of a blur to be honest. In first year at University I worked at Newcastle United Football Club as a match day barman in one of the corporate bars, and did the occasional shift working evening functions or award ceremonies. One day I was working serving refreshments during a recruitment fair, and remember seeing the sign for Haven Holidays, with a big map of France on a display stand. The next think I remember is receiving an invite to an interview in Hemel Hempstead for a summer job in France. It is a good job that I was studying at the time, for getting to Hemel Hempstead from Newcastle in time for a lunchtime interview on a wet weekday in April requires a degree in itself. I remember changing at Leeds, Manchester and I think Watford too, then taking a taxi to the office where I was to have the interview. Looking back it does seem a rather complex way of doing things, but I imagine my budget was the main issue, and as such a direct train to London and then one back out to Hemel Hempstead was probably out of the question.
The interview itself was a breeze, I think they were grateful to find someone who hadn’t lied about being able to speak French on their CV (I was studying languages at the time), and after about 10 minutes they offered me a job. I say job because that is the word they used, but with a wage of £100 per week (essentially £2 per hour) I think a rethink is needed. This was after the introduction of the minimum wage in England might I add, though no such law existed in France unfortunately. So, in early June I boarded a train to London, then a Bus to Bordeaux, then a train to Ychoux where I was met and taken to the campsite in what I later learned was the Maintenance man’s repair van. Again, a rather complicated way of arriving at my destination I admit, and I wasn’t even paying for it this time. I liked France immediately, even though my first job was to make the beds of 20 caravans in 30 degree heat. In case you have never experienced what it is like to be in a metal box in the sun, let me tell you it is far from pleasant. But France in general, or at least the campsite on the first day, was altogether very pleasant, and I found myself walking around with an inane smile of my face, amazed at how French everything was. I suppose it is something of an anomaly that despite studying for a degree in Languages, 50% of which involved studying French, I had only ever spent 5 days in the country by the end of my first year at University. 5 fairly eventful days I seem to remember too, what with it being a school trip at the age of 13.
We stayed in Dieppe, which if it isn’t twinned with Bradford bloody well should be. Essentially Dieppe is famous for being the port at which all tourists who travel by ferry but want to avoid Calais arrive at, and then quickly leave by the nearest available motorway, B road or dirt track. I remember thinking something similar when the coach trundled off the ferry and into town, only the driver didn’t seem to be looking for a way out of town, but rather a place to park in town. To the dismay of about 30 13 year olds he found somewhere, conveniently opposite the world’s worst hostel. We arrived in time for tea, or the evening meal to keep things generically non-northern. The menu was simple, in that there wasn’t one. We sat down, hungry after a long coach journey as you can surely imagine, patiently waiting for our first mouthful of the famous French cuisine we had heard and read so much about. After a while the first few plates arrived, greeted with lots of mumbling and tentative fork prodding. I hold my hand up now and accept full responsibility for what happened next, even at the time I wondered why I said what I said, when to lie would have been so much easier, but even now, 12 years later I am at a loss as to explain my actions.
It is worth pointing out that all this occurred in 1995, a year when the evening news was dominated by one news story – the inhumane (inbovine?) transportation of cattle to be slaughtered for use in restaurants specialising in veal. I had never heard of veal at this point by the way, and nor I doubt had most people at my school. Certainly none of my friends were regular veal eaters, or if they were they kept it in the cupboard when I went round for tea. But in 1995 everyone in England had a rather negative view of veal, given the pictures we saw on a daily basis of calves crammed into the back of lorries to be transported hundreds of miles to slaughter. It was even on Newsround, that’s how serious it was.
Anyway, back to the meal. When my plate arrived a few people had already raised the question of what we were eating to our teacher, a perpetually overwhelmed woman by the name of Mrs Day. Personally I thought she was a great teacher and her husband would later manage the football team I played for, but that is by the by. Essentially what we had before us was a piece of meat covered in a sauce that looked like it could benefit from an ingredient other than dirty dish water. Mrs Day was fairly evasive in her answers, and people were growing slightly anxious, not to mention hungry, so I decided to ask the waiter myself.
“Excusez moi Monsieur, qu’est-ce que c’est?” I asked, using all the words I could remember.
“Escalope de Veau” he replied, without even the faintest hint of being impressed with my French.
“Veau?” I replied, flicking the vocabulary pages of my memory but coming up blank.
“Oui, Veau. Petite vache”
I admit that while at the age of thirteen I displayed an above average grasp of French, sadly my acting skills were woeful. In the seconds it took to put my jaw back together everyone on the table had turned to look at me,
“Well, what is it then?”
“Little cow. It’s veal”
I could have said anything, we were thirteen, we wouldn’t have known the difference between lamb and pork, I could even have said it was dog and the reaction would have been better. Needless to say the sound of forks being dropped was fairly deafening. That was more or less the end of meal times at the hostel; I remember eating lots of sandwiches on the bus after that.
A la prochaine mes amis...
