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French exchange

— Blast from the past: on the trail of a 1992 school French exchange trip to Arras.”

In the spring of 1992, I participated in an exchange between my school at the Lycée-Collège Gambetta in Arras in the Nord Pas de Calais. The Lycée-Collège today is shown in the pair of pictures below: pretty much the same but the trees have grown bigger!

I was, I think, twelve years old at the time and I had very little knowledge of French (my current French still leaves a lot to be desired, of course, despite daily use). The trip was a bit traumatic, what with the queasy ferry crossing and videos like Aliens playing on the bus telly.

It was far more traumatic for my French opposite number on the UK leg, though. Within just a few hours of being in the UK, he ended up in hospital.

I still don’t know if the poor fellow went through that windscreen because he’d momentarily forgotten to cycle on the left side of the road.

Anyway, I was back in Arras seventeen years later, slightly irritated because nothing much looked familiar. It had been the same story for J in Boulogne-sur-Mer, of course, but I thought I’d have been able to do better.

Arras is looking a bit frayed around the edges these days, like a lot of the Nord-Ch’ti towns. The old Flemish places are thronged by kebab joints and pound shops.

A top down Jaguar with Dutch plates passes through, its driver looking a bit bemused – this isn’t what he’d expected. Nor was it what we’d expected either.

Vimy Ridge

The school exchange bus brought us here too, where the struggles of 1917 are marked by a dignified monument in white Croatian stone, a rabble of boys and girls with a wide variety of levels of personal hygiene and acne affliction.

And a funny thing happened that day on Vimy Ridge, in bright sunshine and cold air. I think it started among the girls – of course it did – someone started crying and it started everyone off. They refused to get off the bus and visit the memorial.

None the wiser, the Canadian guide led a smaller group around the trenches which were and are creatively preserved using concrete cast in the shape of sandbags.

The Canadians captured the ridge over the course of three days in April 1917 in a successful attack based on good planning and considerable innovation. Since it had been the first battle in which Canadian forces had operated as a complete corps, it holds great significance for the nation.