Emma Beddington - We’ll Always Have Paris: Trying and Failing to Be French

E MMA B EDDINGTON

Well Always Have
PARIS

Trying and Failing to Be French

MACMILLAN

To my mother

toujours gai

Mfiez-vous de Paris

De ses rues, dson ciel gris

Beware of Paris

Of its streets, its grey sky

Mfiez-vous de Paris by Jean Renoir

(originally performed by Lo Marjane in Elena et les Hommes)

Paris, plus vague de lOcan, miroitait donc aux yeux dEmma dans une atmosphre vermeille.

So Paris, vaster than the ocean, glittered in Emmas eyes with a rosy glow.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

At the age of sixteen, I decide what I want to be when I grow up: French.

Being sixteen has little to recommend it, other than not being fifteen any more. On Saturday lunchtimes, puffed up with our own daring, my best friend Alex and I and a group of sundry social C-listers from school can at least now go to the only pub in York that serves shifty teenagers, no questions asked. There we linger over a half of lager, watching The Bee Gees on the video jukebox, observed impassively by the elderly gentlemen who make up the remainder of the Brewers Arms clientele. This forms a significant new strand of our social life, hitherto limited to listening to Radio 1 in one or other of our bedrooms, loitering in McDonalds or Rough Trade records, trying on clothes in River Island and eating all the free samples of cake from under the plastic cloche in Bettys tearoom. Boredom hangs around us like a low mist on the River Ouse. My attempts to launch York Youth CND have foundered on a combination of ideological differences and inertia and the members of Wind Band, in which I play the clarinet badly, are even further down the school pecking order than I am. I am too chicken to go to Leeds, which we view as the acme of civilization, and even if I went, I would not know what to do when I got there.

Mainly, I mope in my bedroom reading and listening to The Smiths, much as I did at fifteen. When my moping infuriates my mother to the point where she tries to suggest unpalatably worthy occupations for me (if youre so bored, you could volunteer at the nursing home down the road? she suggests several times and I roll my eyes in disgust), I trudge down to school to sit in the library and read there instead. And it is here that I encounter French Elle for the first time.

No one has a satisfactory explanation of how a boys Quaker boarding school that has only recently admitted girls has ended up with a subscription to French Elle. Clerical error? Librarian insurrection? Its not an overtly Quaker place in some ways, though: the music teacher thumps out Hymns Ancient and Modern at the grand piano instead of silent worship on Friday mornings (Jerusalem, Dear Lord and Father, Immortal, Invisible) and most of the pupils are farmers kids from the Vale of Wetherby, not real Quakers. Whatever the reason, French Elles incongruous candy-coloured cover with a photograph of a pretty girl draws my eye one afternoon in the mock Tudor-beamed, wood-panelled library and I take a copy off the rack, and start to read. Having flicked through the first copy with growing interest, I go back, find several more, and sit down to give them my full attention.

Much of French Elle is impenetrable to me. I do not know who the people in the articles are: authors, politicians or actresses. Almost everyone the magazine interviews does something called barre au sol, which bemuses me (a bar on the ground? How is this exercise? It sounds like going over trotting poles on the fat Shetland pony at the riding school in Escrick) and everyone is panouie (blooming, says the dictionary) or becoming an grie of something (a muse?), which I dont really understand. The magazine also tends to talk about le couple as if it were a needy houseplant requiring constant attention. I concentrate initially on the make-up and fashion pages, which are full of desirable items you cannot find in Browns department store (I know because I write them down, and go and check). But my interest is piqued and I find I want to know more. Elle has stories about lipstick, sex and film stars, but also about literature and philosophy and politics. The film stars interviewed about their latest romantic comedies will discuss serious, abstract topics without any awkwardness. Sometimes they discuss facial serums, Victor Hugo and their relationship with their fathers in the same sentence and no one thinks this is unusual. Sex is ever-present, but not in the way it is ever-present in the hormonal fug of the lower sixth common room. In French Elle it is discussed seriously, and in depth. Indeed it is apparent quite quickly that pleasure of all kinds is a serious business in Elle: food, sex, culture or bath oils. The founding fathers of Quakerism would not have approved.

I fall in love with the world portrayed in French Elle over my seventeenth year, from the bche de Nol taste tests in winter to the rgime maillot diets in summer and all points in between, rushing to the library each Thursday to read the new edition. In the world French Elle presents, you are allowed to be interested, without any apparent contradiction, in books, films and politics, men, clairs and pretty bras and this is what I want; this is what, without really realizing it, I have been aspiring to. No one in French Elle is embarrassed or apologetic, while I am one or the other all the time, and often both at once. Finally, there seems to be a destination at the other side of this mortifying trudge through a North Yorkshire adolescence: France.

I am not necessarily predisposed to fall in love with France. We have a French memory card game with pictures of typically French scenes and items, so initially France for me is the frustrating search for the second picture of Nougat de Montelimar and trying to snatch the wheels of Brie before my mother on wet afternoons. We go there on holiday sometimes, long queasy hot car journeys, me vomiting in lay-bys, my father getting tetchy. On one trip my mother becomes so enraged with me and my half-brother that she orders us horse steak just so she can tell us about it years later and watch our reaction. Another time, on a tense extended family holiday, I get locked in the loo of a draughty gte in Brittany for a whole afternoon and have to be humiliatingly released by the local handyman. During another teenage summer, my father rents, very cheaply, a decaying chateau with a stuffed bear: the attic is full of relics of the German occupying officers, fly larvae wriggle under the wallpaper and the stagnant pond in the garden is full of dying frogs. Later, we go to Lot-et-Garonne and I try to sunbathe topless lying in the garden listening to awful Europop, ending up horribly burnt, while my sister gets bitten by an adder and has to go to hospital. The consolation for all our many minor disasters and disappointments in France is always the same: cake. Before I fall in love with French Elle I fall hard for French cake, pains aux raisins and pretty raspberry tartlets and wobbly, trembling flans topped with plump apricot halves.

I have also suffered under the yoke of French lessons from a friend of my mothers, a semiotics lecturer. The lessons, I am later given to understand, were less intended for my benefit than hers (she needed the extra income). This makes sense, since they were no fun at all for me. The semioticist would wait in the playground to collect me from school one afternoon a week, a thin, rather forbidding figure whose presence did not scream of roaring good times. She would escort me to a nearby caf and attempt to drill into me the basics: my name, my age, did I have any pets, colours, cheerless songs in which some chickens would go to a field and then return or puppets would turn around three times and leave. I dreaded everything about these strained and awkward afternoons it was plain even to me that her heart was not in it except the cake I was allowed to choose to accompany our conversation. A serial quitter of extra-curricular activities that inconvenienced my minutely planned schedule of reading the Famous Five and pretending to be a horse, I petitioned hard to be allowed to give up; eventually my mother acquiesced.