Fair Exchange

Apparently – at least, according to a recent spot on BBC Radio 4's PM programme – school foreign exchanges are in decline, partly through concerns about health and safety, but mainly, it would seem, due to the shameful decline in the teaching of languages in British schools. A lifetime ago, when I first became an academic librarian, a command of two modern European languages was regarded as a reasonable minimum entry requirement. At my typical, small-town, state grammar school, we had all routinely studied Latin, French and either German or Spanish to what was then "O" level at age 16, and in the Sixth Form could even choose to learn a little Russian rather than endure "General Studies". How things have changed: my own children, at their Southampton state schools, only had the opportunity to study one language, fairly badly taught and with little attention to grammar, vocabulary, or oral competence, and certainly without the reinforcement of spending a few weeks living abroad with the family of a "partner" student at some lycée or Gymnasium in a twinned town. By the time I retired in 2014, we could barely recruit graduate-level staff with more than a very basic smattering of either French or, more usually, Spanish. As I say, shameful.

On the BBC radio discussion, the two guests were asked about how they had got on being housed by a family in France and Germany, respectively. One was positive – she had gone on to be a BBC correspondent in Germany – the other hilariously negative, with tales of miserable isolation in some remote and inhospitable French farm. Their stories brought back a flood of memories of my own exchange experiences. Our school actually ran two exchange programmes, one to Versailles and the other to Ingelheim am Rhein, a wine-growing area of the Rhineland and home to the Boehringer pharmaceutical giant, not far from Mainz, and although I never did do the French exchange – neither was free, and I don't think we could afford to do both – I did do two exchange rounds with my German "partner" and his family.

The way it worked was that during the Easter holiday your family would host your partner, and then in the following year you would stay with his family; it was, in effect, a four-year relationship. There was some pretence of matching students by criteria of compatibility, but essentially it was a random process, accompanied by some penpal-style correspondence. I ended up being paired with a strapping, sports-mad, not especially academic lad called Achim, whose family ran and lived above a small Spar grocery. I suspect the fact that we both lived in flats – untypical in both towns – was the main factor in our match-making. Otherwise, we had essentially nothing whatsoever in common, something that only became more apparent as the years progressed and our developing personalities diverged still further. We made a success of it, however, like any marriage of convenience, by going our separate ways during the day and, in the final years, in the evenings, too.

Despite our incompatibility those were vivid times, the weeks I spent in Ingelheim. The first year away – 1969, when I was 15 – I encountered the casual Rhineland-German attitude to alcohol consumption within the family. Now, I wouldn't say my parents were teetotal, but "drinking" was for special occasions only, and even then in moderation, and it would never have occurred to them to open a bottle of wine or two habitually with a weekday meal. Achim must have found this odd. His family's habits were very different and, living above the shop, had what amounted to a bottomless cellar of supplies to draw on. Consequently, wine and beer flowed freely at most mealtimes. Several times I became embarrassingly drunk, said and did things that provoked hilarity, and later found myself having been put to bed with a bucket tucked underneath my arm. I was taught to recite, Bier auf Wein, lass es sein! Wein auf Bier, das rat ich dir! [1]. There was no sense of blame, shame, or recrimination: we had a good time last night, nicht wahr? [2]. Although, it's true, other families could be rather less easy-going, especially if the drunkenness was not home-brewed, so to speak.

Another striking thing was the relative prosperity of West German life. My home town, Stevenage, as I have often described before, was and is an essentially working-class, post-war New Town development, artificially populated in the 1950s with young families escaping from the poorer parts of London. Economically, historically, and culturally it was a "thin" place, despite the pervasive sense of optimism: we felt fortunate, but didn't know how little we actually had, or how precarious it all might prove to be, with a change in the political wind. The English middle-classes didn't live in places like Stevenage, although some of their children were bussed in to our school from the surrounding leafy villages. Ingelheim, by contrast, was a prosperous and historic little town, typical of the post-war West German Wirtschaftswunder. It was the everyday things that were so striking: the utility cellars in most houses with an array of freezers, washing machines, tumble-dryers; the giant tubs of washing-powder and other bulk-bought household goods; the sheer quality and quantity of the food and drink in its attractively-designed, modern packaging. Most of us had never encountered simple, life-enhancing things like bottles of apple-juice, served cold from the fridge, a schnitzel and fries with a half litre of beer in the local hostelry, or real artisanal ice-cream.

But it was the parties I remember most. Other schools had exchange arrangements with Ingelheim, including our own town's girls' grammar school, but the timing of their exchange visits was often – quite possibly deliberately – different. However, like some rare conjunction of the planets, on our 1971 visit we, the girls' grammar, and a French lycée all found ourselves thrown together, aged 17, at raucous parties in large, bourgeois houses where music, drink, and congenial company combined in a heady, and occasionally explosive mix. A couple of years ago, I dug a favourite old jacket out of a wardrobe as a potential measure of my desire to lose weight. Some men gauge themselves against their wedding suit: absurdly, perhaps, I set myself the rather more extreme target of fitting the jacket I wore in Ingelheim in 1971, and on many subsequent youthful adventures. In the inner pocket, I found a slip of paper with the handwritten address and phone number of a French girl with whom I had had a brief, intense, but long-forgotten encounter at one of those parties, 45 years ago. I found it oddly moving; in those pre-internet, pre-mobile days, an exchange of pieces of paper like that was all there was, the only meaningful gesture you could make. Should you ever find yourself in Autun...

And yet, here we are – with the distances between us shrunk to virtually nothing by means of communication easier, faster, and cheaper than anything we could ever have imagined in 1971 – on the brink of turning our backs on the European project our French and German friends have put so much effort into building, as well as abandoning the teaching of foreign languages in our schools, and even, apparently, equably contemplating the break-up of the union with Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, all in pursuit of some swivel-eyed, isolationist vision of national sovereignty. Brexit at any cost! No wonder school exchanges are dying out. But the real visionaries were the ones who saw, after so much bloody conflict in Europe, that the best route to peaceful and prosperous co-existence was simply to let young people get to know each other by spending time in each others' homes, even if that did mean sometimes being imprisoned in a hostile French farm miles from nowhere, or dizzily put to bed with a bucket under your arm.

1. Literally, "beer on wine, leave it alone! Wine on beer, that's my advice to you!" There are English equivalent rhymes, none of which is quite so infallibly memorable in the relevant circumstances.
2. "Not so?" or "didn't we?" Actually, more likely than nicht wahr?, it would have been gell? or oder?  It's precisely that sort of informal, everyday usage you can only pick up "in country", and why exchanges are such a good thing. You acquire the conversational "glue" that enables you to mumble platitudes like a native.