Lingua Franca: Return of the Daughter

I was reading about Bebo Valdés, the great Cuban pianist, who has spent half of his long life in Sweden – of all incongruous places to lodge a legend of Cuban music – and how he peppers his (very good) English with bits of Spanish and Swedish, and what a challenger it was for his biographer sometimes to make out his meaning.

Bebo Valdes - the oldest swinger in town

Not long after arriving in France, we got to know a fascinating couple with two small children. He was Mexican: a woodworker, who specialised in hard-back chairs and chopping boards such as the lute-shaped board on which we still cut our bread. She was a ceramist from Austria. Their children were given the kinds of names usually reserved for the offspring of rock stars or actors.

After a few years, they sold their beautiful home – which they turned into a kind of nouveau Art Nouveau showpiece – and sold their possessions in a yard sale (including the Dual record deck on which I spin my vinyl) and bought a camper van in which they all took off for the Americas. They came to rest on Vancouver Island.

The point is that the two small children with the eccentric names spoke a bizarre combination of four languages: their father’s Spanish, their mother’s German, the English they spoke together and the French they were learning at nursery school. Imagine the linguistic scrambling and the mixed messages rioting inside their developing brains. It was no wonder we used to find them a trifle odd. Presumably now they speak three languages fluently and have lost all traces of French.

Our daughter only had to cope with two languages while she was growing up here. People used to ask us – still do to a lesser degree – what language we used in the privacy of our own home. Well it was a combination of ancient Babylonian and medieval German, of course. After 15 years here, I still struggle to express my innermost feelings in a language that refuses to come naturally. So in our early ‘farmhouse years’ (as they’ve become known) it was even less likely that I would use an adopted language for heartfelt conversations with my wife and daughter. 

Maybe they were worried that Tilley wouldn’t learn unless we demonstrated a stilted and incorrect form of French. They shouldn’t have worried. When she went to école maternelle for the first time – when just over two and pronounced propre or clean as in out-of-nappies – she apparently sat wide-eyed, absorbing everything like a sponge, but saying nothing until the great day came when she blurted out, with great pride, her first words of French. Rather like Thomas Carlyle, perhaps, whose first and somewhat tardy words, on hearing his baby brother crying, were reputedly, ‘What ails wee Jock?’

Her epiphany triggered a golden age of franglais, when she – and, by default, we – would mix our lingos with gay abandon. Tilley would talk about ‘grimping trees’, ‘ballaying the floor with a broom’, ‘pick-nicking au bord du lac with our chien’, ‘the sun brilling brightly’ and so forth. Whenever she played with bilingual expat friends it was ‘err, quite remarkable’ (in the timeless words of David Coleman) to watch them together. They might start off in English, before suddenly changing to French – as if some coded signal had passed among them – and then, 10 minutes later, segueing seamlessly back into English.

I guess it was a period of linguistic play and exploration. Now that Tilley is almost a fully-formed adult and has read books in English, watched countless episodes of Friends and acquired a considerable English vocabulary, it happens much less. I still frequently use French bricolage (D.I.Y.) terms – should I ever find myself discussing such a manly topic with male friends – mainly because I have cause to use them more often than their English equivalents (which I sometimes find myself forgetting). But franglais is no longer quite so rampant in the household.

Interestingly, now that things have settled down somewhat, our daughter seems to have two distinct personalities according to whichever language she is speaking at the time. Although she speaks French like a native, the timbre of her voice is higher and she seems stiffer and less comfortable than she does when speaking English. In her maternal language, she seems more relaxed, more natural and, not surprisingly I suppose, more her own self.

To use a very apposite French phrase, elle est bien dans sa peau. In English 'she is comfortable in her skin'.