Our Man in Paris by John Lichfield

Author:John Lichfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: France, Paris, Englishman abroad, man, woman, Iraq, Ireland
ISBN: 9781908493569
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Sic Transit…

June 2004

My theme is classical education, in the French style.

At academically demanding schools in France, it is fashionable to study Latin or German, as well as English. When Charles, aged fourteen, changed schools last autumn, we were informed that he would not be taken seriously unless he studied all three.

A few weeks ago Charles’s Latin class was told by their teacher—a rigid woman of a certain age—that they had to extend their knowledge of ancient culture by making, individually or in groups, a model of something Roman: a house, a fort, a ship, a chariot. Models that scored more than ten out of twenty would be placed on display at the school.

What an excellent idea, I thought. The French education system, although admirable in many ways, does not always prize initiative or creativity. Here was a teacher who wanted to expand her pupils’ minds.

Charles chose to make a model of a Roman baths, on his own. He preferred not to join a group, having had awkward experiences working in groups with French children in the past. (He had the, perhaps unfair, impression that the others let him do all the work but managed to snatch all the credit.) Charles did the research, finding ground plans and pictures of a Roman baths in Pompeii on the internet. That must have taken at least ten minutes.

Would I help him with the model? I was trained on Airfix spitfires from the age of seven and constructed one of the finest model railways in east Fulham in the 1990s. He knew that I would jump at the chance to get glue on my fingers.

I spent a sunny day indoors cutting up cereals packets to make the walls of the baths and, ingeniously, snipping the ends off cotton buds to use the plastic sticks as marble columns. We found lichens on an oak tree to simulate the Mediterranean flora in the baths’ garden. I used real sand to make a sand pit for the gymnasium and—with the help of my ten-year-old daughter, Clare—simulated mosaic floors with felt-tip pens. I finished the walls in a pleasant shade of pink, which we happened to have left in one of those stub- ended samples jars which you can buy in decorating shops.

The finished model was, though I say it myself, not bad. It looked like a cross between an adobe supermarket in Albuquerque and a second home near Avignon. It had, however, the correct layout, with separate cold and hot pools for both men and women. (Mixed bathing was frowned upon in ancient times.)

I even made a little statue by cutting the head of a plastic cowboy, sticking it to a child’s bead and painting the whole white. I waited confidently for my high mark from the teacher.

She rejected the model as “trop bricolé” (too home-made). Wasn’t that the point? She objected to the pink walls as un-historical. The walls of Roman swimming pools were grey. How did she know? She held my miniature statue up to ridicule before the entire class.

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