WE WERE on the tarmac at the Montreal airport,
the vast airliner almost empty, waiting for some

300 more people to join us on the 62-hour hop
across the Atlantic to Paris.

I'd found a common
denominator with our Air
Canada stewardess, a lady
who spoke English with no
trace of accent, yet used
French as a first language.
Like me, she was half Irish,
half French-Canadian.

Unlike me, she was fluent
in both languages and said
she could get along quite

~™ well in Gérnian; Spanish and — expressing~~myself-—in-~ full -_whe—owned—the—hotel.—She —__

Italian. Me? Like, English is
enough of a struggle, eh?

I envied her. [d started
out in two languages as well.
My mother’s family lived in
St. Boniface, across the river
from Winnipeg. But during
the war, we moved around,
landing in an _  English-
speaking neighbourhood
where any French I might
have retained was quickly
forgotten. So now ['m just
old unilingual Bob.

More’s the pity. I've long
since realized that I was
cheated out of my other
mother language. Obviously,
in Canada, if you speak just
one language, you are at a
disadvantage.

But there is more to it than
that. You are at a disad-
vantage in the rest of the
world, too. A_ second
language seems to double
your chances whether in a
bar in Amsterdam or a
Shinto shrine in Tokyo.

As the 747 began to fill up,
our stewardess friend had to
leave. Her shift was ending.
A new crew was coming
aboard. She said something

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e bilingual Bob!

A2 - Sunday, November 14, 1982 - North Shore News

strictly personal —

ob y Bob Hunter_ :

amused.

I'm happy to report I was
not taken advantage of,
anywhere. On one occasion,
I tried to order three beer,
but actually ordered 13. I
was let off the hook.

In a little village in the
Loire Valley, south of Paris,
I tried to ask for some
toothpaste, pantomiming the
act of brushing my teeth.
The lady went and got me
shaving lather instead.

One night, after an in-
credible meal, we sat
chatting with the matron

hopeful to me as she stood
up to go: . '

“You'll be surprised how
quickly it will come back
once you are in France.”

Of course! Deep down in
my subconscious, the
French language has to be
imprinted for eternity on my
brain cells. All I need to do
is plunge into the task of

flight and in no time at all,
voila! Til be parlaying la
francaise to beat the band.

It didn't quite work out
that way, although not from
lack of effort on my part. It's
just that, well, as my wife
pointed out, ['m a graduate
of the Peter Sellers School of
French.

rll say this for the people
of France, they're very
tolerant. Once, while a bit
tipsy from too much
fabulous French wine

spoke absolutely no English,
but a young Frenchman who
had lived for a while in New
York joined us as translator.

We'd had chicken for
dinner. I was trying to ex-

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too, raised chickens at
home. In this regard, I was
much like the people in the

French countryside, was ¥
not?

In my eagerness in
communicate the fact that I
had many chickens, I used
the phrase, “le plus poulet”,
but it came out sounding like
“pleut poulet”, so I ended up
saying that chickens were
raining on my house. That
pretty well wiped out our
hostess and you could hear
the kitchen staff cracking up
when she told them.

I had them rolling in the
aisles. Heck, it was easy.

The Canadian Red Cross Society

(cheaper than milk), I
decided to bellow, as we
hurtied along through the
darkness in the Metro: “Vive
la Tahiti libre!” The only
person startled by that was

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