Help: my children are aliens

A couple of months ago, I collected my eldest son from school, asusual. Shouldering his gigantic school bag, we walkedcompanionably along the corridor to collect his younger brother.“We had horse for lunch today”, he said brightly, in French. Therewas a moment’s pause as I tried to digest that snippet of information.“Mmmm.

Cheval

”. His face took on a dreamy cast. “It’s so tender.It’s my favourite meat. I LOVE horse”. He rhapsodised for severalminutes in this vein.I was obsessed with horses as a child. A city kid, unable to convincemy mother our back yard was big enough for a pony, I spent mypocket money on Horse & Pony magazine, hairnets and Polos ‘just incase’ there was an unexpected gymkhana in York city centre. “I lovehorse” too. Just, not like that. The gulf between his childhood andmine was clearer than ever.For the last 5 years, I have lived in Brussels with my two boys: T, 9and L, 7. They attend a local Belgian school in a French speakingarea; their friends are all French speakers. This month’s schoolmenu doesn’t feature horse, the equines of Belgium can sleep safein their stables for now, but it does include braised endive (lesspopular than horse) and something called “carbonnade de boeuf aux Sirop de Liège” (a kind of stew). We’re not in Tower Hamletsany more, Toto.When their French father and I first moved, we thought Brusselswould be a good compromise. We had already lived in London

(where I felt personally responsible for NHS waiting times, ruinouschildcare costs and the Circle Line) and in Paris (where I upbraidedhim, repeatedly, about the officious park keepers, the endlesssquabbles with our neighbours and the barbed comments I regularlyreceived from passers-by about my post-partum wardrobe).Brussels, we reasoned, was neutral territory, a city where mostpeople were outsiders, where speaking two languages was notmerely commonplace, but a national obligation. Our kids would fitright in.In lots of ways, this has proved absolutely true. Brussels is, indeed,a city of migrants. When T’s class drew their family tree, only onechild of 28 had solely Belgian nationals for parents andgrandparents. When I think of my children’s friends, I realise theyare all half something, half something else – Italian, Portuguese,Algerian, Swedish. I love and value that cultural diversity. But myown children? They may be “half English half French half Belgian”(as they say, with scant regard for basic maths), but to me, theyoften feel entirely foreign. The older they get, the more pronouncedit is. When they learned to write, I was worse than useless; my “z”swere completely wrong, they said, painstakingly copying outsomething that looked for all the world to me like a pelican sittingon a washing line. When they play chase, the one who gets caughtisn’t “it”, but “the cat”, which is plainly ridiculous, because when didcats ever display any aptitude for team games? Worse still, when Isent them to school with lime jelly cubes for a special treat one day,they returned, mortified, telling me that their friends had told themit was “Martian food”.Language, is of course, a big part of that. Bilingualism is a vast andcomplex topic I can’t hope to cover here, but on a personal level, Iobserve with alarm how far English has fallen from favour, thelonger we live in Belgium. Put simply, my children’s mother’s tongue

is no longer their mother tongue. They speak French to each other,but also to me. I speak to them in English, they reply in French; I tellthem to speak English, they refuse, in French. With my UK friendsand family, they make an effort, but they don’t sound native: L’ssentence structure is right, but he sounds French, T’s accent is pureEast London, but he’s stilted, and struggles for words. Recently ittook him twenty minutes to remember the word “wheel”.He got there eventually, but it worried me. I feel responsible fortheir declining English. I am, have always been, the most devotedFrancophile. I was desperate, from the first time I picked up FrenchElle in our school library, aged 14, to replace my culture with a newone that seemed, to my uncritical gaze, to be all about make up andsex and philosophy. The four weeks I spent, aged 16, with myFrench exchange student, Aurélie, just reinforced my determination.Aurélie was – of course – a model. On the French leg of ourexchange, she took me on a photo shoot for a soft drinkcommercial; we rode horses on the beach and went clubbing. Inreturn, my parents took us to a damp self-catering cottage in theLake District for a week, where we played a lot of card games whilstAurélie learned the word “cagoule” had a different meaning inEnglish and rowed gloomily around the lake in the drizzle toenhance, she said, her “

poitrine

”. Back in York, I tried to makeamends by taking her to the Clifton Moor multiplex cinema to seeBoyz ‘n’ the Hood with my friends, who, like me, suddenly lookedlike spotty, childish losers under the cold scrutiny of Aurélie’s boredgaze. The die was cast: for me, French was the language of escape, of reinvention. I set about acquiring a French boyfriend as a matter of urgency and spent an embarrassingly large swathe of or mytwenties poncing around pretending to be Parisian, all Breton tops,Serge Gainsbourg and copies of Libération.