The success of my efforts in Montreal made me more committed to mastering French and so I decided to go to France. Commitment leads to success and success reinforces commitment.
In June of 1962, I quit my summer construction job and went to the Montreal docks to look for a working trip to Europe. For three days I climbed on board oceangoing freighters, asked to see the Captain and then offered to work in exchange for passage to Europe. On the third day I got lucky. A small German tramp steamer, the Gerda Schell out of Flensburg, had lost a sailor in Quebec City and needed a crewman for the return voyage. I was on my way.
Aside from the hard work and constant tossing of the small tramp ship on the North Atlantic, the voyage was an opportunity to experience just how inaccurate cultural stereotypes can be. The crew was half German and half Spanish. Contrary to what I had been conditioned to expect, the supposedly industrious Germans were laid back and often drunk, whereas the supposedly temperamental Spanish were tremendously hard working and serious.
We arrived in London after ten days at sea. I ate as much as possible of the free food on the ship in the hope that I would save money by not having to eat for the next day. In fact, that strategy was not so wise and I ended up feeling ill.
London seemed an oddly exotic place to me, since everyone spoke English and yet it was so different from home. Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park has stuck in my memory, as has the old money system of shillings and pence and quids and bobs and guineas. I also remember that I spent one night sleeping on a sidewalk to get tickets to see Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare's Othello but then had trouble staying awake during the performance. I stayed in London for one week and then pressed on for the continent to pursue my language learning adventure.
I took the ferry from Dover in the United Kingdom and arrived in Ostende in Belgium after nightfall. A Flemish Belgian on a motor scooter gave me a lift to the medieval city of Bruges. I was young and ignorant and had not read the history of Flanders during the Middle Ages. Nor did I realize that the same kinds of language tensions that existed in Quebec were also burning in Belgium between the Flemish speakers and the French speakers. I would return later to Bruges to explore the well preserved medieval atmosphere of that town. But I was a young man in a hurry then, and the following day I hitchhiked on to France.
The French have a reputation for being rude, but the people I met were friendly and hospitable. Outside of Lille in Northern France, I was picked up by two school teachers who allowed me to spend the night in a schoolroom, since this was the period of the summer vacation. Then they invited me out to dinner, where I met some people who drove me to Paris the next day. I can still remember the feeling as we drove down l'Avenue de la Grande Armée towards the Arc de Triomphe, which I had seen so often in film. I could not believe I was really there.
My French friends invited me to stay two weeks in their modest apartment in the 20th Arrondissement, a working-class district of Paris. I was given a short term job in a travel bureau doing translations. I lived and ate with these people for two delightful weeks, as I explored the city on foot and via the Metro (subway). My new friends included me on picnics to chateaux outside Paris and other social occasions. I was sorry when I finally decided to move on south.
I realized very early in my stay in France that even my less than perfect French enabled me to make friends and deal with people in a relaxed manner. I was not self-conscious nor concerned about how I sounded, I just enjoyed being able to communicate. Of course, I occasionally met Frenchmen who were not so friendly. It is true that many public employees take a particular delight in saying "Non!" Often if you inquire whether some service is available, you are treated to a litany of rejection: "Ah non, alors là, non, mais sûrement pas, mais cela va pas, non!" But the secret to survival in a foreign country or culture is to make light of the unpleasant and focus on the positive. My French was far from perfect, and it was sometimes an uneven struggle against the more arrogant and impatient French fonctionnaires (officials) and shopkeepers. But today I do not remember too many unpleasant incidents because I did not attach much importance to them. I do remember, however, a case when my lack of French got me into trouble.
At one point in my first year in France I had an American girlfriend whose parents were working in Alicante, Spain. We decided to hitchhike there during the Easter holidays. I brought along a gift, a record by Georges Brassens, a popular French chansonnier. Being a converted Francophile, I took great pleasure in listening to his songs even though I did not always understand the words. Unfortunately, I did not realize that his words can be quite spicy, if not outright pornographic. When my hosts listened to the gift that I had brought, they were shocked. I think they were concerned about the kind of company their daughter was keeping.
I stayed in France for three years. My first year was in Grenoble, an industrial city in the French Alps. Unfortunately, I never had the time to ski. If I wasn't studying, I was working. At various times I pressed bales of waste paper and drove a delivery van for a printing shop, was busboy in the Park Hotel, hawked the France Soir newspaper in the major squares and cafés of Grenoble, and taught English. I even managed to play hockey for the Grenoble University hockey team. An added attraction of Grenoble was the presence of a large contingent of Swedish girls studying French. I was able to recover quite a bit of the Swedish I had learned and forgotten as a small child.
