This time fifty years ago I was a student at the Université de Lyon. Now I am sitting in Dublin airport waiting to take a flight to Paris and from there by train to Lyon. We're just spending a night there as a way to break the journey from Paris to Verona. It is also something of a sentimental journey for Gill as she went on a school exchange to Lyon when she was 16.

 

I was only 16 when I left school so I needed to find a way to fill in a year before starting at University. As I was going to study French it seemed a good idea to spend some time in France. My parents supported this idea, but with some trepidation I think. I was very young and immature and on top of that, I would be totally on my own. I chose Lyon myself but it was something of a random choice.

 

I can remember arriving by train at Perrache station and realising, for the first time, the enormity of the challenge I faced. I had schoolboy French and I had no dea where I was staying other than it was University accommodation. I went to the University offices and they sent me on my way to the student Village. To my great relief, there was a group of American students from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill alredy in residence. At least there were people who spoke English. They had travelled across the Atlantic on the magnificent 'Normandie', one of the last great classic ocean liners. Their lives seemed so incredibly glamorous in comparison to my sheltered Dublin upbringing. I was only too glad to tag along with them.

 

Lectures were quite a challenge. I went straight from Irish secondary school curriculum to total immersion in French language, grammar, literature and philosophy. Most of it sailed straght over my head but some has proved useful to this day. A phonetics professor drilled us in the exactitude of pronouncing French vowel sounds. We would sit and recite the phonetic alphabet vowels until he was satisfied we had mastered them. I am forever grateful for his obsessive compulsive insistence on perfection. It gave me an accent which has once or twice fooled native speakers that I was actually French. 

 

We had a rather grumpy lecturer for 'explication de texte.' She was Spanish and wore such heavy black liner around her eyes that we, rather unkindly, christened her Panda. Explication consisted of taking a brief passage from a writer and disassembling it to see how it worked. From this I learned about sentence structure, cadence and rhythm. She showed us how style wasn't accidental and that the music of language required as much thought and skill as musical composition. She would make us write original pieces mimicking the style of Camus or Flaubert. I didn't do very well at that much to her anoyance. She never knew my name but just referred to me as 'L'Irlandais'.

 

I had just about found my feet on all fronts when the Russians decided to invade Czechoslovakia. When this mementous event happened, I was blissfully unaware that I was soon to be the victim of that invasion. The French government offered to provide asylum to large numbers of university students from Czechoslovakia and they, of course, needed accommodation. I was summarily ejected from my comfortable room and offered a rather dingy bedroom in the apartment of a lady of senior years. She was, on the surface, kindness itself, but she had an odd eccentricity. When I was out and about attending to my studies she would pilfer my food. She did it almost imperceptibly in the hope I might not notice. An egg here, an apple there. I had to accept that this was a sort of taxation on my rent which she regarded as insufficient. Or she might just have been a sad old kleptomaniac.

 

I loved the whole atmosphere of France - the smell of Galoises in cafes with marble counters. I loved hearing the language and slowly realising that I could understand it. Above all I loved the boulangerie and the smell of bread. I would go out in the morning and buy my daily Baguette. The university was by the river and sometimes I would stand on a bridge looking down at the Rhone flowing beneath and savour my crusty baguette in the cold morning air.

 

To complete the idyll, I had a brief romance with a French girl. Sadly, I have no recollection of how I met her. I do remember our parting, however. It had a suitably tragic pathos. She decided that, as I was only a temporary fixture, it might be better to move on. To soften the blow she kissed me chastly on a freezing December night and presented me with a copy of Paul Éluard's poetry. French girls did that sort of thing. I went back to my cold room clutching my book and feeling very sorry for myself. 

 

I decided that the food tax in my lodgings was an annoyance I could do without. I had been tutoring the son of a family who lived in a very beautiful apartment in Place Bellecour, which was a much sought after address. They had an attic room for rent which, I assume had once been a servant's quarters. They had found my account of the pilfering landlady amusing and offered me the attic room. An added attraction was the fact that they had a beautiful daughter about my age. Sadly, she had the habit of looking right through me whenever she passed me on the stairs to the apartment. 

 

Things went swimmingly in my new abode until there was a cloudburst above Lyon early one morning. I awoke to find water dripping onto my head and pillow. Now that I had the poetry book, the leaking attic roof, the unrequited love of the landlord's daughter, I only needed to pen a few pages of introspective existential angst to become a fully paid-up member of the penniless student intellectual community. 

 

Returning to Dublin after all this took some adjustment. For one thing, yoghurt and paté were still regarded with some suspicion in Ireland. My interest in wine was interpreted as an affectation in a country where the pint of Guinness was king. Boland's bread was terrible. I put my poetry book on my bookshelf and looked at it wistfully from time to time and tried to remember what Galoises smelled like.