Flavour the flour, flower!
From the age of 14, having taken English as my third language in secondary school after French and Arabic, I spent three years being taught the Queen’s tongue by a French priest who sounded like a cross between Inspector Clouseau and René from Allo, Allo. By the end of those three years, I was honestly convinced that all Brits would sound like him. “Ze fallen madonna weez ze beeg boobies.”
At boarding school, I had a succession of colourful English teachers. The first, a dainty Essex girl, who was so pretty that she was stopped by customs at Algiers airport. Not for anything sinister but simply to be offered a part in an Algerian film, making her two months late for the start of our year. Fame must have gone to her head because she left well before the end of the second term, to be replaced by a cool American who never carried any course notes. Every day, he barged into the classroom and improvised a lesson from what he had heard on the morning news. One day he started the lesson with: “President Nasser has died!” after the Egyptian leader passed away from a heart attack.
While he did teach us a fair amount of vocabulary and grammar, I really think he enjoyed reeling out daily obituaries. And there were quite a few famous deaths that year.
“Jimi Hendrix has died!” “Janis Joplin has died!” “De Gaulle has died!”
The following year, a diminutive, impeccably dressed teacher arrived all the way from Pakistan to teach us the BBC’s English. Although his teaching of grammar was flawless, his accent was baffling. He pronounced his w’s like v’s and for a long time, I thought that “government” was supposed to sound like “garment”.
Next, I spent two years in Algiers studying IT when computers were petrol driven and programs were still being written on punchcards. There, our English teacher was a London-born expat. I cannot remember much about her apart from the fact that she loved tennis. During an oral exam, I think I used every single English word I knew to waffle on about Wimbledon for 15 minutes.
Having watched French-dubbed Westerns from an early age, I was truly taken aback on my arrival to the UK, when I heard John Wayne speak English for the first time in The Shootist.
My first port of call in the UK was Edinburgh where I spent 9 months learning English before heading down to Sunderland to study Naval Architecture. No wonder that I am able to understand Billy Connolly or Rab C Nesbitt better than Karen is. One day, my Algerian roommate decided to make pancakes. We headed for the corner shop in South Clerk Street in Edinburgh to buy the necessary ingredients. The patient Sikh shopkeeper was tickled pink with our attempts to purchase plain “flavour” to make crêpes. After a few tries using hand gestures and drawings, we did manage to buy some flour and enjoyed some beautiful pancakes a little later than we had anticipated.
Memories of my early days in the UK often make me laugh or cringe at my linguistic blunders. But that’s for another day. Nowadays, over 43 years in this country, not a week goes by when I am not suprised by a new word or expression to add to my vocabulary.