In 1986, my brother and I expressed a wish to go to Donegal, for we had never been there. We’d never been to Malin Head or Bloody Foreland. My parents didn’t go for sun holidays; preferring to stay in Ireland, touring around, seeing sites of historical importance, and so it was not so difficult to persuade my mother that a trip to Donegal might be nice. I have only some memories of that holiday left; I recall going to Malin Head, in the rain. I recall going to Glenveagh National Park, in the rain. I recall driving around Letterkenny, in the rain, and I recall my mother getting up one morning and saying “We’re going back down to Cork. I can’t stand any more of this rain”. So I can recall driving most of the way from Donegal to Cork, and, horror of horrors, stopping at home for one night, on our holidays. Oh, the ignominy of it.
The following day we went down to Bantry, and that night, Hurricane Charlie hit. The rain which had fallen in Donegal was very little in comparison to the quantity of water which poured out of the skies over Cork that night. Bantry Bay was a nasty, muddy brown colour, out beyond which you could just about see a line of blue ocean, if the clouds lifted. This was an infrequent view. In every sense of the word, the holiday was a wash-out.
In 1987, my mother flatly refused to stay in Ireland, and we got the ferry from Ringaskiddy to Brittany to spend two weeks touring around, seeing sites of historical importance in Brittany, instead of in Ireland. We spent the first week in a place called Benodet. It’s not very far from the departmental capital of Finistere, Quimper.
In Benodet, there is a house. I cannot remember now what it looks like, but in 1987, it was very important to me. It was the house I wanted to live in. If I could only live in that house, I would be the happiest person in the whole wide world. So, with the wisdom of a fourteen year old, I started working out a plan for how I might go to live in that house in Benodet, and I eventually came to the conclusion it would be necessary to learn to speak French properly. Following some practical considerations, I announced that my ambition was to teach English in a secondary school in France. I knew nothing about the French secondary school system, but really, that wasn’t important. I would find that out later. French suddenly became my favourite subject at school – hitherto, it had been chemistry – and I took extra evening classes in it. I learned to write in a French style script which became the bane of my teachers. I went on French exchange. I sat in the car for hours listening to Radio Monte Carlo on long wave. I dreamed of having TV5 on our deflector multichannel system.
This project was rather a long term project for the average fourteen year old, bearing in mind that I would be stuck in school for another three years, then there would be four years of university, and then, God only knows how I would engineer the whole teaching thingy, so that I could live in that house in Benodet. But I was determined.
Time passed. Even when you are fourteen years old, seven years do have a tendency to go by, however slowly, and here I am, twenty-one years old, with a black ball point pen in my right hand, and a yellow form on the desk in front of me. It is now 1994. I nearly have that degree in languages and the yellow form on my desk is an application form to be an English language assistant in the French school system.
Of course, it is the last moment. Seven long years of waiting to get to this point have left me slightly changed, with new hopes and dreams, and a sort of special someone in Germany. I had some doubts about filling in the form. So many, in fact, that the day before the deadline, I was frantically collecting the required signatures for the yellow form.
Everyone else had already applied. If you were studying French, you just did that – the French took in lots of assistants, so you were almost guaranteed to get a job. And so the money wasn’t great, you were only going to be working ten hours, you could give private lessons. There was a lot of enthusiasm around the place, and I was strangely mute. In the end, I don’t think anyone actually knew I had applied for a place.
The form had a couple of lines where you could make special requests. Printed in bold was the information that you were not likely to be accommodated if you expressed a wish to be sent to a school somewhere popular like Paris or the French Riviera; nothing was guaranteed. I wrote that I wanted to go to Brittany, and as my good reason, I expressed a wish to learn Breton and see for myself the differences between it and Irish.
I then put the whole idea out of my head for a while.
Everyone who had applied got their letters more or less the same days. These would be the “yes or no” letters – if you were hoping for information on where you would be passing the academic year at this stage, you could forget about it. I walked into a lecture where there was much discussion of the fact that many people were on a waiting list. This surprised them. After all, pretty much everyone was supposed to get a place. It wasn’t like Austria, where there were only two or three places and loads of competition. It stunned them to hear I wasn’t on any such waiting list, particularly since none of them knew I’d applied. I had been accepted straight away. Seven years of planning were slowly coming to fruition.
Another couple of months passed and the next thing which arrived was a letter from the French Ministry of Education, explaining that I would be stationed somewhere called Auray, in Morbihan. You might not be accommodated if you wanted to go to Paris or the French Riviera, but I had asked for Brittany, and Brittany was what I got. It might not be Benodet and it wasn’t exactly right next door. But it was, all the same, the nearest thing to an ambition fulfilled.
In late September then, I packed up everything I thought might be necessary for nine months in Brittany and got on a plane to Rennes, where Aer Lingus flew every Saturday morning during the summer time. In Rennes, there were a couple of days of induction along with all the other fresh faced language assistants, many of them young English students for whom this represented their third year at university. By contrast, most of the Irish students there had already completed their degrees and were either preparing for teaching diplomas, or had also completed same.
The summer came late to Brittany that year. Very late. Sufficiently late for the rain to have wiped out the tourist season. When I arrived, it was raining. A few days later, the sun came out, and much to the chagrin of the local tourist industry, it shone solidly until 7 December, long after the last of the tourists had gone home.
By Irish standards, Auray was what you’d call a grand town. It was fortunate enough to be a stop on the TGV network for Brittany. It had very decent shops, some good pubs to go out in. It was near Lorient, a fairly big city, and Vannes, a more than beautiful city. It had useful facilities like a swimming pool and a music school. It had a small bookshop for which I still have a great deal of affection. In many respects, I was very, very lucky. I made contact with a couple of other language assistants either through the induction week, or, in fact, one of my co-students from Dublin who had wound up on the waiting list turned up later in the first term. If I wanted to go to either Lorient or Vannes, it was a very quick and not especially expensive train ride away.
In addition to the ten hours a week or so that I spent teaching at the secondary schools in Auray, I also ran music lessons at the senior school, went on school tour in Bath with the junior school, and taught evening classes for a nearby twinning committee. I was fortunate to have access to a piano in the school of music for a few hours every week. I went to concerts in the cultural centre to which the school of music was affiliated. I did try Breton lessons as well, and I took part in the Breton dancing classes which the senior school ran during the first term. I spent a lot of time hanging out with the pions. Pions are school employees, and nearly all of them are students earning some cash while they are at college. Most of them are aiming towards some sort of career in the school system, either as a teacher and amongst their tasks are to supervise homework study rooms, or classes whose teachers are absent. I’ve always felt that it would useful to introduce it here.
There were a lot of other things I didn’t do. Or, to be more honest, a lot of places I didn’t quite get around to going to, although I am rectifying those remisses on an ongoing basis now. I had not found the time to re-visit the megaliths in Carnac, or at Locmariaquer, the boat graveyards in Le Bono and Lanester, or any of the offshore islands such as Belle-Ile-en-Mer, or Groix. Even though I understand that practicalities of time, transport, and especially money, impacted on any plans I might have had, I still have some regrets about the things I didn’t quite achieve. I failed to connect with Kevrenn Alre. I’m not sure how you’d describe this last organisation – possibly keepers of Breton culture, or something a bit like Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. They are in the premier division of the bagadou, the piping bands in Brittany. Very young bunch of people they are too. I think it would have been great fun.
It’s a nice, easy life when you are only working for ten to twelve hours a week. I liked the teaching, most of the time, although it became clear as the year wore on, that I might not be cut out for teaching in the long term. Mostly I played word games and taught the kids the words to songs. The most popular one was – at the request of two of the classes – Killing in the Name of by Rage Against the Machine. That band was huge. I mean, massively popular. I’ve never quite understood why French teenagers had such an attachment to them. I played Scrabble in English and German on a French board. You’ve no idea how hard that can be sometimes.
I got on well enough with the kids I was teaching, for want of a better word. I commanded a sufficient respect from most of them not to have any discipline problems, and they seemed to like me enough not to consider me a monster in the way that they positively disliked some of their teachers. I knew the nicknames to all the English teachers and some of them were not especially complimentary.
The youngest I taught were 14 year olds – and they surprised me sometimes with their mixture of naiveté and worldliness. The first lesson I had with most of them was supervised by their main English teacher. The single most popular question that I was asked was did I have any pet animals, closely followed by did I have a boyfriend.
As it happened, I didn’t, at that time, have a boyfriend, so I generally told them I had several. Ten, I think was the figure I used most often. Mostly that shut off any questions of a personal nature that I didn’t think my students really needed answers to but on one occasion it was far from insufficient – one girl decided to ask me if I knew what condoms were. I think she really wanted to rattle me, so I said, well of course I do, but I’m not actually sleeping with any of them so it’s not an issue at the moment. I don’t know which stunned her more – the fact that I didn’t turn a dozen shades of red or the idea that I might not be sleeping with any one of the ten boyfriends I claimed to have. At any rate, she shut up for the rest of the lesson and become a devoted fan.
One of her classmates developed a crush on me and after six months of sitting in the front row, gazing adoringly at me and complimenting me when I wore dresses instead of the regulation blue jeans that most of the teachers seemed to wear, he asked me to marry him. He was very good looking. I turned him down – I figured the odds of him still being in love with me when he was 15 years old were fairly limited. Oh to be 14 years old again. No-one that good looking was interested in me when I was 14 myself.
Although I’ve forgotten most of the names – I must have taught somewhere in the region of 80 teenagers that year – I can still remember many of the faces. I dare say the ten years since I left have made several changes to some of them though. I can still with very little difficulty remember what it was like to walk into a classroom and do a quick roll call before getting stuck into the lyrics of some chart song at the time. Sitting on my dressing table is a picture in a frame which two of the students I taught German to gave me, and at home, with all my other good things is a Babar which another class gave me to remember them by.
I still have a very strong affection for the place. I’ve gone back two or three times since, either to tour around some of the things I missed when I was there. Every time I go back there, I leave with a heavy heart. The place was home in a way that very few places I’ve lived since have touched me.