May Daze

And so, Dear Reader, another month has come and gone without any updates to the Historiae.  For the last three weeks your correspondent had the pleasure of an extended visit from his girlfriend, whose lovely presence permitted him to pour his burden of trivial observations and failed witticism into an actual human ear, rather than spewing it forth solipsistically into the silence of cyberspace.  Now, sadly, she has returned back across the pond and I, with apologies both for the Historiae’s cessation, and for its recommencement, turn to my recherches des billets du blog perdus.


The end of April and beginning of May saw the first coming of sustained spring warmth to Bellovacum.  Even as the giant cloud of volcanic ash cast a shadow  over Europe, the town enjoyed two weeks of unbroken sunshine and cloudy skies.  Indeed, by the time transatlantic links had been restored, it felt like Bellovacum had shot through spring into a Mediterranean summer.  Conditions inside school rapidly deteriorated, as the small French children yearned to abandon lists of English words for sandwich ingredients and return to the sunny asphalt of the cour.  My policy of celebrating good weather with outdoor games of “What Time is it Mr. Wolf?,” honed during greyness of February and March, threatened to derail the entire English-language curriculum, a problem exacerbated by the ability of my charges to manipulate the game in order to both prolong it indefinitely and drain it of any educational value.   At École Dirigeable, the students discovered that by taking miniscule steps forwards they could remain forever out of range of Messrs. Loup, while at École Rex the fastest runners in one class decided that the chase would be more exciting if they ran away from safety and taunted their chubbier pursuers.   Inside, École Rex was transformed into a greenhouse, as classrooms, their red and yellow curtains vainly shut against the sun, heated and filled with a sweaty vapour, whose remarkable extent only became apparent when one stepped back into the Alpine coolness of the hallway.  Students returned from recess panting, with glassy eyes and fevered cheeks, and wet out again rosier and damper than before.  The miasma brought with it a predictable lethargy: during one sleepy afternoon review of the words for pizza toppings, a seven year-old, without any particular surprise or interest, looked at a pair of onions on a flashcard (Figure I) and remarked “ah, un soutien-gorge.”

In a way, then, it was a relief when, by the end of the first week of May, normality, grey skies, and chilly rain had all returned.  Mental acuity also put in a renewed appearance, and the curiosity of small French children turned once again to questions of language.  “Léwon, Léwon” cried one ten year-old, her mispronunciation of my name betraying an alarming ignorance of great leaders of the Front Populaire, “how do you say ‘Michael Jackson’ in English?”  Other groups of students were fonder of pronouncements.  One class of seven year olds, confronted with the fact that only one of their number had managed to learn any of the weather vocabulary on which we’d been working for two weeks, observed that Fatima’s aptitude for English was only natural, since she was Spanish.  My own ability to speak the language of Shakespeare occasioned more interest: how, they wanted to know, had I learned English?  I parried: how had they learned French?  This response was clearly unsatisfactory: it was obvious how one learned French, the question was how one learned English.  Finally, one of the brighter students burst out: “It’s obvious: he comes from Canada where there are many people who speak English; he must have learned it there!”  Most remarkably of all, this same class finally determined, after seven months of following my instructions given in French, that I actually spoke the language.  How, they wondered, could I speak both French and English?  After much puzzlement, the same class wise man gave his judgement: “You see, he speaks English to people who speak English, and French to people who speaks French.”

This was only a passing moment of lucidity, however.  By last week the heat had returned, with its attendant neural haze.  After taking my girlfriend to the airport on Monday,ⁱ I wandered sweating through the northern arrondissements of Paris, weighed down by shopping bags full of clothes and sleeping bags, the debris of a weekend trip to Amsterdam.  As I paused before entering a small supermarket near the Gare du Nord, a middle-aged woman asked me, with an unexpected intentness, “Is this supermarket new?  I haven’t seen it before.”  Before I could finish mumbling my uncertain reply, a young man, unshaven, in a black woollen trench coat and wire-rimmed glasses stuck his thumb, green under the nail, into my face.  “A Euro?  I’m unemployed.”  As I was taking a bottle of shampoo down from the shelf, the woman reappeared. “This supermarket is very expensive,” she observed, fixing her gaze on me.  “There’s a cheaper one around the corner.  I could take you there?”  Excusing myself, I came up against a familiar coat, a familiar thumbnail.  “Give me a Euro.  I’m unemployed.”  On the stifling train, I sat next to a man who was unaccountably agitated by his failure to validate his ticket; crushed by the late-afternoon sunlight, I fell asleep on his shoulder.

Back in Bellovacum, the small French children weren’t much better.  The ten and eleven year-olds at École Rex had passed some kind of event horizon and were sliding inexorably towards the hormonal cesspool of puberty and juvenile delinquency.  One girl got up to distribute the day’s exercise, and a boy, fat and soprano, squeaked, “Ha ha, she’s wearing a soutien-gorge.”



ⁱMonday was Pentecost, one of May's four public holidays, the others being Worker's Day (May Day), V-E Day and Ascension.