I ought to have gone through it all in five years but in actual fact I was there for six. Those who are well disposed towards me and are generous of spirit will allow me to slot myself in to this story without further remark…. Others might want to be more brutal. And why shouldn’t they be? I have a profound affection for the school and a deep appreciation for my time there. Even if the syllabus was  inflexible at times and in certain aspects anachronistic, the quality of the teaching I found next to none and the experience left me with very solid theoretical and practical foundations that I still refer to even now. I am deeply grateful to Isabel S, Manuel B, Luisa A and Lima de C.

I slipped in to the first year of a five year course in Fine Arts at Belas Artes after having dropped out of The Bartlett after two years. I’ve covered all this, in part, in other stories I’ve written but not least to say that this transition in my life was a drama – in every sense of the term – both for my parents as well as for myself.

My apparent linguistic abilities have been as much of a blessing in my life as they have been a curse.   Just having arrived from Paris in the spring of 1982 – my spoken French being easy and loose and very colourful in a “street” Parisian sense (as “streetwise” as you can be at the age of nine when you have been living in a gilded part of Paris) –  St Julians logged me as a “native” and put me in with the “clever clogs,” two years up, with all their irregular verbs, dictations and unseens. I’d never “been there” grammatically – no one had ever thought to ask me if I had –  and although I managed to bullshit my way through the class for months on end there came a point when it was clear to Mme VC that I could not begin to spell correctly in French and those periodic report cards being sent home to my parents were beginning to say as much. I was punished for my laziness. No Karate classes any more, no this, no that. I don’t remember trying to explain it all to my parents. Whatever it was that I was supposed to be acing at in French, at St Julians, we had not yet covered at the British School of Paris by March 1982 when we, as a family, were moved to Lisbon. I was as perplexed at this state of affairs as my parents; albeit for entirely different reasons. I spoke like a native Parisian of nine…but I could not write as one.

We arrived in Paris in December of 1978 after two and a half years in Holland. Prior to that we had spent the first four years of my life in Colombia. My Spanish was excellent, my English ok  and my Dutch was native after two years at a local kindergarten in Delft. I sort of remember that transitional period, in early 1979, as I acquired French and quickly lost my Dutch. I remember playing with my toys in Dutch, in Paris, until well into the summer of 1979. My Dutch, though, was a death foretold as I had no one else to speak to in that language. The closest thing I had in that sense was a South African friend at school – who’s name I no longer remember – who was there until June of 1979. I would speak with him in Dutch and he would answer me in Afrikaans…and we pretty much understood each other. And that was the end of that. A year later, or so, on holiday with my parents, we went back to Holland to visit my aunt, and other old friends of ours, and by then I’d lost all command of my spoken Dutch and I even had trouble understanding it when it was being spoken. As I’d acquired French I had lost my Dutch. Nowadays, I think it is a shame. Back then, I didn’t give it much thought.

The transition to French wasn’t as smooth and easy as you might think. That summer of 1979, my parents – quite rightly so – thought it might be a good idea to send me off to summer camp (“colonie de vacances”) with other French kids. We were all six going on seven perhaps eight  and I was the only Brit at camp, (a bit of a dark one, at that) and moreover one who couldn’t pronounce his vowels correctly in French. Apparently I also didn’t know how to eat my cheese at lunch. One day I tucked into it with my fingers, and the next thing I knew the  “directress” of the camp took a flying lunge at me from across the refectory, slapping me hard across the back of my head, to remind me “Qu’on mange pas le frommage avec les doits!” A few weeks later, after a few more scraps and such, my French had improved quite drastically. Within a year or so, my French was audibly native.

Jumping ahead a number of years – past the move to Portugal in 1982 and other later significant events – I soon discovered I was quite casually gifted when it came to languages. Without having to bother myself too much with grammatical structures, I could pull off a good imitation of a given  language with a decent impression of a native accent. Its not so much that I’m a charlatan in linguistic terms. I suppose I have a feeling for syntax and rhythm and such that I cannot begin to explain in grammatical terms. What I mean is that I know how something should best be expressed…but I cannot explain why. Not like my father can, for example. He will break a sentence down into its constituent grammatical  parts and explain why they are thus arranged. I remember feeling worried, the summer before I went off to boarding school, about my lack of Latin. Daddy told me not to worry; after all, I spoke three latin languages. Yeah right!!! Latin, at boarding school, was taught to us as some form of abstract  intelectual exercise, completely divorced of any realistic or tangible context that might help bring the subject to life in any way. We were simply required to memorize reams of vocabulary and endless declinations of nouns that no-one seemed to think important to explain to us in any logical sense. Accusing who? Naming what? Imperative to whom? It was all so dull and utterly unimaginative and impenetrable. 13 year olds boys are still boys in so many ways. Bring it to life!!! They managed to utterly kill the subject for many of us. So much for a private education…

Years later at Belas Artes, by which time I spoke Portuguese with an almost imperceptibly native Lisbonite accent, in our first year studios I remember turning to one of my colleagues and pointing to something or other – perhaps a palette knife, I no longer recall – and asking her what that was called in Portuguese. She looked at me with disbelief and paused for a moment before retorting “what do you mean, what is that called in Portuguese?” She gave me a dirty look before snapping her head around to speak to someone else. She must have assumed I was being pretentious.