Summat else
Yorkshire folk are proud of their native ‘tongue’. Lets face it there are still places in Yorkshire where the accent is so thick that it is somewhere between dialect and a Yorkshire language. We [the holiday four] have on occasions used this fact to no avail whatsoever, but had great fun laiking about with it.
We had planned a trip to Brittany, and as usual we drove, got the ferry and then took a steady run down through France. I had found us farmhouse lodgings from the internet, near a place called Dol De Bretagne. We had called in at Mont St Michel and so arrived at the farmhouse quite late. As we pulled up we saw the daughter of the farmer, who was about twenty sitting on the doorstep, smoking. At the side of her was a bucket containing every cigarette butt that she had discarded since she was twelve. She did not speak English, nor did her parents. We were shown our rooms.
A deeply domed, small round brass light switch illuminated a forty watt bulb, which hung in a heavy beige lampshade with brown tassels. The room was very darkly decorated, with bare floorboards stained in a dark oak colour. An ancient bed, about three feet tall with huge dark oak ends, stood in the middle of the room, adorned with sheets and dark brown hairy looking blankets, and covered with a brown candlewick bedspread. The wallpaper, which was changing colour with extreme age, was a rather fetching green and beige pattern of vertical stripes about two inches wide. Huge dark oak wardrobes stood at either side of the bed, and under the shuttered window was a dressing table with a bowl and a huge ornate water jug. I wondered for a second if there would be an ancient chamber pot under the bed, to make the room qualify for en suite, but there was a door off to the left which led into a Victorian bathroom, with a very old but at least a proper sit down lavatory. The flush was facilitated via a battered lead pipe feeding down from a wooden box. Dawn and Tim’s room was similar in décor and had a door on the right leading into an identical bathroom to ours. So identical that the battered lead pipe had identical dints in it. Clearly there would have to be a system of knocks to gain entry for late night pees.
We did not hang about, we did what we needed to do and headed off to Dol to find a pub.
In Stewarts Bar we ordered drinks and were quickly joined by a local called Jan Konit. Jan was a character, a Breton, he insisted in speaking English to us as he “Didn’t like the bloody French” and anyway he had “Learnt our bloody language very bloody well” and he was “going to make sure he damned well bloody used it” Bizarrely, Jan produced a battered photograph from his pocket of the Queen presenting him with some sort of medal. He was obviously very proud of his encounter with “your bloody Queen” but he would not explain and we did not push it. I did wonder however if he had had a conversation with her.
It was the feast of St Michael and locals were going around the bars with food and distributing it to everyone. We had a wonderful evening.
Waking the following morning we opened the shutters and found we were looking out on to a cornfield that stretched for miles. You could visualise tin-hatted Tommy’s coming out of the corn, and I wondered if the room had been redecorated since those days. I concluded that perhaps it hadn’t.
A hearty breakfast of home made jam and home made bread later we were on our way, heading for Pont Aven. Once we were booked in and installed in our caravan we went down into Pont Aven village for a Crepe. I saw something on the menu that I had never had before and so I ordered it. I did think it was a little strange when the waitress asked me if I knew what andouiette was, to which I replied that I thought it was some sort of sausage.
The crepe arrived, covered in pigs intestines. Note to self- throw away that handy little French English Pocket Dictionary.
The evening found us in the bar at the camp site we looked at was on offer, and then had a discussion about what to get, and then about how to order it. I went to the bar and in my awful French ordered three beers and a cider and then something in my head clicked and I said to the barman “Tha mun avail thissen o summat anorl”
“Na then” ,came the reply “yer English is ok, yer French is crap., and I’ll ‘av a Stella ta” I never used the French again at this bar as it was staffed entirely by Brits, all of whom could speak French (although some better than others). We nicknamed the barman who served us ‘Morley’ because that is where he was from. The fact that not a single one of the bar-staff was French was much to the disgust of the French customers, who really took exception to it. Marvellous! I did order the odd drink in broad Yorkshire just for the hell of it.
