The Comfort Zone
Robin Carson
I took six years of French from excellent teachers during my long-ago youth . Strangely , these sixty years later , I still remember most of it — vocabulary , and certainly the grammar — and thank those teachers for the gift of the language .
However , I cannot speak French and struggle with the simplest conversation . My childhood stammer returns with every word . When I learned my French , language labs were many years in the future , so we learned French from books , doing translations and writing letters to imaginary people . Worse , the French we learned was that of France along with the geography and culture of that country . There was little opportunity to actually put voice to the language we were learning , and when we did , it was never to be merci beaucoup , but always merci bien . Bienvenue ? Non , monsieur , on dit “ il n ’ y a pas de quoi !”
It was travelling in New Brunswick where I learned that lots of Canadians actually speak French . Oh , I knew that Quebecers were passionate about the language , and my own grandfather spoke a species of habitant French that was incomprehensible to me . But in the cafes of Shediac , it was different somehow . This was a gentle , conversational , comfortable French sprinkled with the odd English phrase or word . A French that friends referred to as Franglais . It was a language light-years away from the subjonctif littéraire that I ’ d needed to read Dumas .
I ’ m no world traveller , and short of a few days in Quebec where simply saying Bonjour ! was enough to switch the conversation to English , I ’ ve never been where English doesn ’ t work . So , in June of 2018 , my wife and I decided to go to the Magdalen Islands , or , more properly , Îles de la Madeleine , a little archipelago that sits an eight-hour ferry trip out in the Gulf of St . Lawrence . Although access to
the islands is through Prince Edward Island via a ferry from Souris , the islands are part of Quebec . Nor should they be confused with the islands of St . Pierre and Miquelon that are still territory claimed by France .
But the inhabitants are definitely French speakers , wonderfully patient with visitors ’ attempts at the language , but often with very little English .
We began by getting lost . Although Cap-aux-Meules , the main city , is quite small , when we arrived at the address we had for our B & B , we found a vacant lot . Driving up and down the street looking at house numbers only seemed to confirm our lostness . So , we sought help at a nearby service station . A young man of high-school age was behind the counter , and he had no English . None . As sweat formed on my forehead , I tried my broken , stammering French and his face lit up . He listened patiently , drew me a little map , then took me right out to the road to point out how to get to the street with a similar name to the one
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