We'll Always Have Paris (26 page)

School imposes a new, bureaucratic rhythm upon our days. The doors shut at 8:25 regardless of whether someone has decided to walk backwards only on the white paving stones or has lost an
essential soft toy or pebble; there is homework and gym kit to be remembered and a profusion of forms to be filled in every week, even for Louis’s class, most of whose members aren’t
absolutely up to speed with things like walking and peeing. Even before the boys start, we are presented with a long list of
fournitures
, school equipment, which is mind-bogglingly
specific. They both need a long-sleeved apron (I have never encountered such a thing in my life), a particular brand of crayons of a particular diameter, glue sticks, miniature whiteboards and the
accompanying pens, various lengths of rulers and a bewildering number of file dividers. I enjoy sourcing this stuff – it is like a scavenger hunt for stationery fetishists – but it sets
the tone for the school year quite precisely. Belgian school is strict: far stricter even than Am Stram Gram. Sometimes I come to pick the children up and everyone is ‘
puni
’,
heads on desks, in silence, for some minor outbreak of insubordination, and both boys are regularly punished in the schoolyard for things they don’t even understand. There are frequent
parents’ evenings at which we discuss the evolving way the boys draw stick men and written reports on their progress. ‘
Rigueur
’ is the headmaster’s favourite word
(he says it a lot at the yearly prize-giving, before we all stand and rhubarb along to the Belgian national anthem, ‘La Brabançonne’). It is not one that comes to mind when I
think of my own sons.

Louis starts school at the same time as all the other two-and-a-half-year-olds in our neighbourhood and he seems soothed by the regimented structures: nap times and snack times and gym time.
Even so, school doesn’t seem cosy or welcoming in the way I feel an infant school should and I’m spooked by the way that every drawing is identical – you must put Saint
Nicolas’s hat here, with this much silver foil, five balls of cotton wool for the beard, and his staff must go here. It’s interesting how little store is placed on individuality and how
much on conforming: it seems at odds with everything else I have seen in the city. With all the rules, the rote learning and
dictées
, the perfect looping, cursive script, practised
on repetitive daily worksheets, there’s an ink-stained echo of Truffaut’s sad, lovely film about a disaffected Parisian schoolboy,
Les Quatre Cents Coups
, without the navy
overalls.

It’s harder for Theo, who has to find his way in a class of kids who have known each other for at least two years, and he rails against it with various acts of minor mutiny. He finds the
whole business of school – sitting at a desk, doing those handwriting exercises – a tremendous bore and engages with it as little as possible. We are summoned several times to the
headmaster’s office to discuss his lack of
rigueur
and his defiance and he is rapidly despatched to speech therapy and to something called a
graphomotricienne
, which is an
elderly lady who makes him roll playdough balls for unclear reasons. He has to practise tongue twisters like ‘
en écrivant à ma maîtresse je me suis trompé
d’adresse
’ (‘while writing to my mistress I put the wrong address’) and ‘
Serge déguste une crêpe Suzette
’ (Serge samples a Crêpe
Suzette). These details tickle me, but the situation feels strange. I hate the idea of school crushing his irrepressible daftness, but there is also something about Theo not fitting in which makes
me uncomfortable. The way I adapt is to try and pass seamlessly for local, to comply and conform. By standing out, Theo is blowing my cover.

But perhaps he’s happy standing out? Either way, we persevere and try to make him love, or at least, tolerate school, because its dense programme of activities (gym, theatre and beach
trips, visits from farm animals, and cookery sessions) is so obviously what he needs. Both boys are fizzing with energy, exploding with exponential advances in language and understanding and
physical ability.

Theo – when he isn’t battling with the letter ‘z’ – is firing on all cylinders. He is a tale weaver, an imaginative player and a lover of all things scaly: lizards,
serpents and dragons. His world has become more complex: toys are embroiled in long fanciful sagas requiring much of the contents of the kitchen and ending with them lined up in dormitory
‘beds’ of tea towels and kitchen roll on the hall floor. He devises a fantasy television series called ‘Karate Lizards’ in which we must all take on the role of a lizard
super hero (Olivier is a chameleon, Theo himself is a bearded dragon, I am a skink and Louis is uncharitably given the role of ‘a small lizard’).

For a few weeks he suffers a full-on existential crisis, during which he mourns nightly the inevitability of death. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be in the dark without
you,’ he cries, inconsolable, sitting on the stairs, clutching at me convulsively with a clammy hand. ‘I want to be one of those fish from the era of the dinosaurs and never
die.’

This lasts for a few days, then he moves on to something else: growing horrible insects called triops from dried eggs, constructing an arena for snail races or dinosaurs (always dinosaurs).

Louis has changed too: a head full of new stimuli seems to have calmed his temper and he is quieter now, self-contained but utterly determined. He likes things to be orderly and domestic (his
favourite toys are a pretend toaster, washing machine and microwave) and he develops a very secretive side, hiding his possessions in boxes and locked drawers and forbidden corners. For a while he
decides to become a parrot, and he is a parrot for several weeks, answering only to ‘Rocket the parrot’ and pecking his food directly from the bowl. Later, they both decide they are
bats, and hang upside-down from the furniture, squeaking.

I love the ages they have reached. I get to listen to what they have done and how they feel, unpicking the multi-coloured jumble of snatched impressions and misunderstandings, and it’s
fascinating to have a window back into the white-hot strangeness of being small, so vivid and confusing, sometimes scary and sometimes joyous. The despatches that reach me from the front line of
childhood are weird and funny: Madame is off sick because she dropped a giant ball on her foot. Joël is my enemy. I have lost my dead moth. The boys remind me of the children in the scene in
Les Quatre Cents Coups
where Antoine and René sit in the back row of the puppet show in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Truffaut films the illuminated faces of the much younger children
around them, rapt, their expressions a magic lantern show of joy, fear, concentration. Life is so extraordinary and absorbing when you are that age and I get to share it. The only thing is, they
tell me everything in French.

This is my fault. After three moves and three countries, I am so keen to smooth their path to assimilation; I would do anything to help them fit in. Communication seems both basic and essential
to me so as soon as we arrive, we switch to French. We speak only French to them and make them watch French cartoons, and over the summer their grandparents come and take them away for an intensive
French-speaking holiday in Normandy. Of course, the boys understand French: Olivier and I speak it all the time. But until now their spoken vocabulary has been limited to a handful of nouns:
maman
,
papa, doudou, pipi,
which slot into English sentence structures.

For the first couple of months after we move, their language is a chaotic jumble of English and French, English interspersed with French school jargon for which they know no equivalent:
sieste
,
journal de classe
,
collation
. But quickly, astonishingly quickly, it takes on a more coherently French shape. It’s a shape I am simultaneously learning,
thanks to the rigours of primary school grammar: subject, direct and indirect objects, qualifying adjectives,
complement indirect du groupe sujet
. This insistence on the naming of the
parts is a long way from the ‘naming words’ and ‘doing words’ we learned at my primary school; it’s as if you need a far clearer instruction manual for French than
English. But it works: when they share a bath, or squabble over Lego together, they start, spontaneously, to fight in French, the language of the playground. ‘
C’est à
moi
. . .’ ‘
Je vais dire
. . .’ From time to time, I even get called
madame
, which I suppose is better than calling your teacher
maman
.

In the afternoons and at weekends, the TV resonates with sanity-eroding Anglo-Saxon kids’ shows mangled into French. Theo favours
Les Totally Spies
(a gang of high-pitched
crime-fighting bimbos) and Louis
Dora L’Exploratrice
. Both of them will happily watch
Les Héros d’Higglyville
(talking matryoshka dolls having soporific
community-minded ‘adventures’) or
Bob l’Éponge
who lives in an
ananas dans la mer
and whose pants don’t get a mention in the French version. I hate
all of it. The voices are astonishingly awful to my ears: high-pitched and idiotic; why, with all the reserves of beauty and poetry spoken French can command do all French voice-over artists sound
so grating? Can they not find work in any other domain due to their vocal handicap? The home-grown Francophone Belgian fare is no better, which seems a shame given the proud tradition of cartoons
in our adoptive land: there is a stupid hippopotamus and dog double act who are cruelly unfunny and Titeuf, a grotesquely unpleasant-looking cartoon child, a bit like Bart Simpson but without the
wit. The Barbapapas – those benign, shape-shifting colourful ovoids – are Truffaut in contrast, but no one at school watches the Barbapapas, who are universally rated ‘
trop
nul
’ (lame).

Because now my children have peers whose opinions are important to them and we live in the slipstream of playground crazes, bright, hard-edged things with their own TV tie-ins and Anglo-Saxon
sounding names: Pogs and Bakugans and Beyblades. A lot of English words are bandied around, but they are so distorted you can’t even tell they are English any more. Dark Wolf becomes
‘Dar Kweulf’. Battle, ‘Batteule’. I don’t think the children recognize their mother’s tongue in them; they occupy another part of their brains. I play along
– I like a practical way to further the assimilation process – and we trail to the local toyshop to stock up on whichever piece of Japanese-inspired plastic is the essential must-have
item of the month.

The greatest, the most enduring of all these enthusiasms, is Pokemon, the world-dominating Japanese cute creature battle universe. My house is full of Pokemons: our lives are filled with powers
(
pouvoirs
) and life points (
points vie
). Back in London I used to work for a client who produced Pokemon products, so I know more about Pikachu and Ash and Jigglypuff than any
thirtysomething should, but now I have to relearn everything and the names are all different. It’s Rondoudou, not Jigglypuff, Salamèche not Charizard; I sometimes wonder who on earth
sat down and found appropriate French names for several thousand fictional creatures. What a job. We watch the TV series endlessly, singing along with the theme tune: ‘
Un jour je serai le
meilleur dresseur
,’ the boys bellow. ‘
Je me battrai sans répit
.’ It sounds far more poetic in French (I still believe almost everything does). For a while it
feels as if we live in a brightly coloured Franco-Japanese bubble of cartoon violence.

Far better are the picture books. I buy armfuls of them, because in my mind, the way to love anything is through books, of course. If you avoid the dull ‘here are some things and their
names’ books, which French publishing seems inexplicably to favour (
Les Insectes
,
Les Plantes
), they are beautifully illustrated and terribly dark. Louis falls for an
intricately drawn book in which a snail grows a shell so gigantic and decorative it can no longer move and starves to death. We acquire another book with accompanying rock opera CD called
Moitié de Coq
(Half a Cock), in which a cockerel on a quest shoves a wolf, a fox and a river up its arsehole. This is exactly what it says: ‘arsehole’ (
trou du
cul
), which seems startlingly rude in a book aimed at six- or seven-year-olds: ‘
rentre dans mon trou du cul
’ (go up my arsehole), the cockerel instructs everyone
.
Perhaps most surreally terrifying of all is
Monstres Chéris
, a sort of picture book family tree for a group of monsters. The father monster is called Papadamour, which makes him
sound like a Haitian dictator, and he terrorizes the family with an axe (he cuts off mother monster’s toe when they first meet). There is also Tante Andrée la Fumée, who is just
a curling ball of smoke. She gets dismembered too.

My very favourite picture book, however, is
Les Larmes de Crocodile
, Crocodile Tears, by André François. This 1956 classic is long and thin like a crocodile and it
explains how to go and catch a crocodile by going to Egypt with a long wooden box (‘
UNE LONGUE CAISSE A CROCODILE
’), acquiring a fez and a dromedary and sitting
on the banks of the Nile pretending not to watch as all the crocodiles try the
LONGUE CAISSE A CROCODILE
. The little bird that cleans the crocodile’s teeth comes back
in the boat and sits in a glass in the bathroom next to the other toothbrushes (‘
Les crocodiles ont de drôles de brosses à dents
’, crocodiles have strange
toothbrushes). It’s vivid and elegant and funny: it’s everything I fell for in French culture.

In all this ebb and flow of cultural enthusiasm, I take the lead: Olivier doesn’t really get involved. He seems sort of semi-detached at the moment; present but not entirely there. Some
combination of the stress of another move, job uncertainty (he’s been left in a sort of semi-freelance position which is perilous) and impending global financial meltdown is keeping him
preoccupied. He worries about money and security, constantly, and he seems to have little time for the boys. When he comes home in the evenings, I often hear him sigh at the mess, before he says
hello. The detritus of life with two small boys seems to be wearing him down and I think he feels like I just facilitate the creation of more chaos, that I’m not capable of behaving like a
responsible adult. His role, more and more, with the boys is telling them to tidy things away, and to behave. It’s sad and strange, because he’s always been so playful, so full of joy
at the basic nuts and bolts of being a dad. We still see flashes of it, but more often than not it gets submerged in fatigue and irritation.