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Québec
I am humbled and embarrassed, and curse my old French teacher...
August, 1997
| QUEBEC GALLERY | LA MARTRE |
Some thirty years ago, I achieved a C in French in the General Certificate of Education examination.
At Borden Grammar School, I had been "taught" this beautiful language by "Sniffer" Snelling, a teacher who had also taught my father before the Second World War. As I stammered and mangled and wrestled and failed my way
through four years of French torture, Sniffer delighted in pulling out ancient mark books, on the yellowed pages of which he would point to the fact that Mills senior always got 20 out of 20.
This of course did nothing for my self esteem. Now all I can remember about French is that one year we had a very attractive Assistante.
And that the hero of our textbook, one "Toto", had a cute elder sister. And that the view out of Sniffer's fenetres was of the trees lining Remembrance Avenue...
So it was that in Québec I was unable to communicate with a single resident in anything other than sign language and grunts. I felt humiliated and embarrassed and apologetic.
And of course most of the local people we spoke with had excellent English language skills. Ho hum!
The
Gaspé
We travelled around the Gaspé peninsula, past glittering zinc-clad church spires, alongside an estuary that gradually becomes an all-important sea and a coastline that becomes more and more emphatic and rugged until it finally draws back, as if retreating from the waves, to become quiet and marshy again.
We tire of cities
We wandered quickly through Montreal and Québec City, finding that we were quickly sated with city stuff.
Montreal is a fine place, but of course is being turned into just another city. And like Québec City, every old building is now either a gift shop or a restaurant.
Beautiful, "quaint" Old Québec is now basically a 200-year-old shopping mall, with Disneyland overtones as summer-job students don "authentic" garb to prey on grim-faced tourists.
When the last tourist has returned to their hotel and the last busboy wandered home, these places are as dead as mutton.
The Québecois
Canadians tend to regard their Québecois cousins with mixed feelings. In the Okanagan, those who arrive to pick fruit every summer are looked on as just one step up from being black, which means that they are regarded as only just human. And since the Québecois apparently want to do nothing more than withdraw from all the wonderful advantages that being Canadian brings, they are looked on as ungrateful and even treacherous.
Of course when you are actually in Québec it is basically a rather charming version of the rest of Canada, with pretty churches, characterful towns and pleasant enough people. They do tend to avoid speaking to you in English just to rub in their bilingual superiority, and since they speak French with a strong and strange accent life can be difficult sometimes, especially as you know that they are going to speak in English as soon as you are out of earshot! But since the rest of us are so nasty to them, who can blame them?
I get to dig
We passed a real, actua archaeological l excavation, and I managed to get a few hours digging.
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