Hello!!!

This guest blog is written by Jenny Morrow, it’s a response to mine mentioning her: https://languageofrespect.blogspot.com/2021/01/hello-is-it-me-youre-looking-for.html

Hello! Is it me you’re looking for?

 

I had a childhood of bullying behind me when my family pulled up its roots and moved from Ottawa to a Paris suburb when I was 12 years old. I don’t really know why it was me and not someone else, but classrooms in the 70s, and I’ve no doubt still today, are dangerous places for whoever the crowd decides is different.

 

Mole remembers me walking into her classroom. I remember that moment too. A new canadienne on the first day of school, I’d let myself be buffeted around by the crowd of hundreds of middle-school-aged children in the schoolyard until the bell signalled the start of the day. The one girl I’d previously been introduced to pointed out Mole in the crows: “une anglaise.” Mole shifted the strap of her school bag and I noticed a jerkiness to the movement before she was swallowed up by the crowd. In the noise I couldn’t hear what the staff were calling. Somehow I found myself swept along in the current of students until, coincidentally, I wound up in Mole’s classroom. I noticed her in a desk a few rows ahead of me. 

 

At the front of the class, the teacher began taking attendance in rapid French. When no one answered to one of the names she called, the girl next to me poked me and whispered “c’est toi” (that’s you). I said “présente,” as I’d heard other girls say. Sometime later, the teacher again said something – the same name again – and was looking at me expectantly. I can’t remember what I said in reply. I do remember coming to the conclusion that, for now, I was going to be that person in this new classroom. Children are remarkably adaptable.

 

An hour into the morning, the school principal entered the class. I recognized her from the meeting I’d had in her office with my parents when they registered me. She had asked me if I was ready to work hard. I answered “oui” and she emphasized the question: “Very, very hard?” “Oui!” I repeated. Now, the principal and the teacher talked, the teacher pointed me out, and then the principal addressed me by my actual name and asked me to come with her. I’d blundered into the wrong class.

 

She led me down the stairs and out of the new wing of the school into an old wing to the class that would become mine for the rest of the year. I was assigned a desk next to a French girl who had lived in South Africa. Either because I was unfamiliar with South African English, or because her English was weaker than my French, after half an hour it was clear my French was stronger, and she and I never spoke English again.

 

Why did the school place me in a class with a French girl who had rusty English, instead of in a class with the one student who was in fact fully bilingual? I assume it was because they did not think that Mole would be able to provide suitable guidance or direction for me. How wrong they were.

 

Later that day I was wandering around the school during a recess from class, when I passed Mole on the stairs. “Hello!” she said brightly, and I returned the greeting. For some reason, we shook hands, and I moved on. At lunch, I followed a crowd of students into the cacophonous dining hall. Mole saw me enter and gestured emphatically to the empty chair beside her. Hers was the only friendly face I encountered on that confusing day, so to sit down beside her was a great  relief. Although we’d been classmates for only about half an hour, our friendship was cemented in that moment. Mole became my interpreter, guide, and above all, friend, in the bewildering and not always kind experience of being a foreigner in a large French school.

 

There were seven classes of our grade, each with some 25 students. How I ended up in the right wrong class, I’ll never know, but I know we were meant to meet.

 

Mole talks about our long lunchtime conversations. I too don’t remember the substance, but there was a lot of it, and we never lacked for things to say. One day, a French girl ran up to me and said something to me very rapidly. I was not used to Parisian French yet, so I politely said, “Pardon?” She laughed and ran away with her friends. Mole gestured for me to come away with her. When we were around a corner, she told me the girl had asked if I wasn’t tired of being a bastard. I didn’t even know who this girl was. Lucky for me, I had Mole to protect me. To keep me from feeling quite so alone.

 

I was aware that my friend had a disability. It’s not like I somehow didn’t notice, or was blind to her difference. When we visited on weekends and walked around town amongst people who didn’t know Mole, I’d sometimes see people rubbernecking as we passed. I wanted to yell, “Move along, there’s nothing to see!” but lacked the courage that a lifetime of daily discrimination had given my friend.

 

A year later, my family returned to Canada and I went to high school. Mole also left France to attend school in England. We both found ourselves in new schools with new peers. For myself, another year later I found myself once again the butt of crowd-mentality bullying that had dogged me throughout my childhood. Many times during the months of that campaign, I closed my eyes and reminded myself that I had one true friend, she just happened to be on the other side of the ocean. Mole mentions that my friendship taught her that she was worthy of friendship, but it was entirely both ways. I too knew that I was worthy of friendship because I had one friend who loved me as I was. Like Mole, I did eventually make other friends. But I’m grateful to her for letting me know that friendship was an option that was available to me as it was to her.

 

And the title of our blog posts? It’s from Lionel Ritchie, of course. Imagine two girls hanging out in a 1980s teenage bedroom, nail polish, make-up, current fashions, heart-throbs on the wall, and a days-long game of rummy, with Lionel Ritchie crooning his lovesick Hello, an appropriate soundtrack to the feelings of unrequited love so familiar to two teenagers. The scene is almost a stereotype of 1980s adolescence

 

Mole writes that she was in this school as a result of a fight her parents had to wage with the administration. It was one of a number of fights that were fought on her behalf as she grew up in the 1970s and 80s. Just one of the many ways that Mole, and families like Mole’s, were trail blazers, chipping away at the institutions of exclusion to make things easier for those who came after. I compare this to my own experience of acceptance at the school. I wasn’t a “shoo-in.” The principal spoke to me very sternly to assess my level of French, and whether, I suppose, that despite being Canadian I had what it took to be successful in this school. But my parents didn’t have to fight for me. I pretty much needed to say that I was prepared to work hard, and doors were opened for me.