Rachael Mogan McIntosh - Pardon My French: Food, faux pas and Franglish - one familys riotous year in the south of France

First published by Affirm Press in 2023
Boon Wurrung Country
28 Thistlethwaite Street
South Melbourne VIC 3205
affirmpress.com.au

Text copyright Rachael Mogan McIntosh, 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the publisher.

Parts of the following chapters are edited versions of articles previously published in media outlets: Schedule unfolding, first published in Good Weekend magazine; The Calade, first published in The Saturday Paper ; Sommires market, first published in Sunday Life magazine; French food, first published in news.com.au/ and the New York Post ; Snow and pierogis, first published in Sunday Life magazine; Grand tour, first published in Sunday Life magazine.

ISBN: 9781922848390 (paperback)

Cover design and illustration by Louisa Maggio Affirm Press
Typeset in 12/17 pt Garamond Premier Pro by Post Pre-press Group

For my darling Keith

Contents

The worst life a child has ever had

All landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper:

I am watching you are you watching yourself in me?

Lawrence Durrell

I ts lunchtime in the south of France and my family and I are enjoying some wholesome and educational together-time, making fun of pigeon sex. Its become something of a ritual. Terracotta-tint rooftops sprawl down the hill below our sunroom and most days we sit at the table and watch a bird we call Larry hop across them as he clumsily attempts and fails to mount his uninterested partners.

Go, Larry! cries my six-year-old daughter, Mabel, as the poor bastard hops about awkwardly, trying to get purchase. After a time his partner shakes him off and flies away to sit, unmolested, on another rooftop. Larry looks sad, we agree. Sweet little avian incel. But is Larry sad? I dont know. More likely pigeon sex is often this awkward and unsuccessful, and were just wrongly ascribing character traits and motivations for Larry, like we do for every aspect of our strange and confusing new life.

When we planned this family adventure in France I didnt imagine us sitting around cracking gags about the saddo sex lives of animals, but then again, nothing so far has unfolded exactly as expected. Go to France, they said! Life will be sophisticated, they said!

Sophisticated? Non . But it is splendid. The bright sunroom from which we poke fun at Larry sits at the very top of our narrow terrace house in Sommires, a small village in southern France halfway between the large cities of Nmes and Montpellier. Just over the border from Provence, its a town marinated in history. Settlement dates back to Roman times, and behind our house on Rue Canard, or Duck Street, soars a twelfth-century tower. Long ago, unruly women were denounced as prostitutes and locked up in its damp stone rooms.

The River Vidourle is visible in glimpses between the plane trees, which now, as autumn begins, are starting to shed golden leaves, and somewhere on it is the pair of swans we call Charles and Camilla. Between the buildings, a higgledy-piggledy tapestry of narrow lanes weave in and out of tunnels and archways and overhangs. They are paved with uneven cobbles that get slippery with pigeon shit in the rain.

The five of us sit in mismatched chairs around the battered old wooden dining table. Its littered with lunchtime debris, and were all a bit shattered. The midday break is here two hours off school for the children and a welcome pause for my husband, Keith, whos been working since 5am, catching the end of the Australian business day. For me, its a break from my full-time occupation: making a tit of myself in public as I scramble my way through the cultural and social norms of small-town France.

Flaky crumbs are everywhere. On our walk home from school we picked up baguettes at the boulangerie called Farine. With these I made our standard lunch: long open sandwiches of fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, baby spinach, mustard and mayonnaise. These are always followed by lunch dessert, where almond croissants, pain au chocolat or custardy ParisBrest are fished out of their warm paper bags and shared. We drink gallons of lemon sirop (cordial) and fizzy water.

Mabel is in kindergarten here at cole Albert Camus, her nine-year-old brother Alex (we call him Biggles) in CM-un or Year 4, and ten-year old Tabitha in CM-deux or Year 5, the final class of the primary-school system. Theyll spend the European school year there, and then well all return to real life back on the south coast of New South Wales in Australia.

Larry flies away, having failed, again, to get lucky at lunchtime. I look at my phone to check the time. The school run requires me to set several daily alarms. Many children stay at school for the midday meal at the cantine , but our kids are far from being able to cope with a three-course sit-down lunch. We need that two-hour break to put them together emotionally for their afternoon shift in class, so we must trek back and forth to school four times a day.

The only English spoken by their classmates comes at break time in the lively schoolyard, when they sing Allo dakness my ol frenn to any child who cries, drawing an imaginary tear down their cheek with a finger. Folk sarcasm, it burns. Home in Rue Canard at lunch is the only part of the day in which the children can talk.

Its one way that this year-long French adventure is proving more difficult than we had anticipated. Like Larry, were just giving things an awkward, hopeful go, and its quite possible that strangers are laughing behind their hands at us, the very same way we mock Larry. That optimistic, horny little loser.

The screen-time debate commences. Usually we allow the children little access to soul-sucking blue lights, but here in these early weeks of our France life we are all about trying to ease the transition. After a morning at school the children need to decompress. Distribution of screens between the three, however, is a finely tuned negotiation. One child scores my laptop, another the slow and glitchy kids computer and the last gets the TV with the French cartoon channel. Mabel is not happy with todays outcome.

But I want to watch the gymnastics girl! she says. Mabel loves talent-show clips on YouTube. Biggles and Tabitha are unwavering. Biggles is playing the world-building game Civilization with Dad, and its Tabithas turn for Netflix sitcoms. Its Mr. Bean in French for Mabel today, and no arguments. This latest indignity lands on top of her stresses of the morning. Its all just too much.

This is the worst life a child has ever had! wails Mabel. I look at her. She has half a chocolate croissant in one grubby little fist and the remnants of the other half smeared across her face. Above, swallows dive and soar in the cloudless sky, while scraps of music and French conversation float up to us from the streets beneath the window.