‘Do you have any hobbies, Michael?’ my father-in-law asked me, somewhat tentatively one afternoon 10 years ago. ‘Learning languages’,    I replied. ‘That’s not a hobby!’ was his response.

And to dear Charles it wasn’t. His idea of an acceptable hobby was, let’s say, buying an elderly Daimler and restoring it to its former glory or, at a pinch, visiting National Trust properties or hiking through the Lake District. Not something which involved filling your head full of alien sounds and words. After all, he had lived several winters in Tenerife in his converted truck without the need for any Spanish; and his French didn’t extend  much beyond rolling down his window and calling out ‘Oh!’ when he needed some water for his radiator.

Strangely enough, we had both attended the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe (not at the same time, of course) and he had emerged deaf to the joy of languages, while I took to learning my first language, French, with something approaching ecstasy.

This was due to the boundless enthusiasm of my first teacher: Mervyn Davies.  He believed, as I have come to believe, that the sounds of language are magical.  One of the characters in our first year book had the beautiful name of Hercule Ulysse Frangipani. That in itself was a course in French phonetics. The two wonderfully alien <r> sounds, with the uvula frantically trilling against the back of the tongue; three /i/ sounds, with the tongue-tip higher than in English and the lips wide apart; and the pursing and protruding of the lips needed for the sound represented by the <u> letters; ending up with a lovely nasal vowel in the first syllable of  Frangipani, contrasted with the nasal consonant in the third.

Not that we analysed the sounds in this way, of course. (That came 30 years later, when I did an MA in Linguistics.) He just encouraged us to use our tongue, lips and cheek muscles in very unEnglish ways, which some of us were happy to do.

I will always remember the first piece of verse he had us learn by heart, which happened to be the opening of the French national anthem, the Marseillaise.

        Allons enfants de la Patrie
        Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
        Contre nous de la tyrannie
        L'étendard sanglant est levé
        Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
        Mugir ces féroces soldats?
        Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
        Égorger vos fils, vos compagnons!

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!

He relished  giving us a more or less literal translation of this gory song, with its throat-slitting, its bellowing of ferocious soldiers and furrows running with the enemy’s impure blood.  Gosh! Who wouldn’t want to be French with a national anthem like that! ‘God Save the King’ seemed namby pamby in comparison.

Some two years later my family arranged for me to do a series of exchange visits with Jean-François Jay who, by lucky chance, lived in the city that the anthem was named after: Marseille.  What an introduction to France.  Monsieur Jay was chief engineer for the southern area of the SNCF, French railways, and lived in a big flat opposite the Gare St. Charles. ‘If you want to go down to the port’, warned Madame Jay, ‘Go straight down the Rue d’Aix, turn right into the Canebiere. Don’t go through the little side streets!’.  So, off to the little side streets I went, where the the corners were patrolled by skimpily clad women of various colours and ages, and the pavements lined with stalls piled high with to me unknown fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices: artichokes, courgettes, olives and aubergines; pomegranates, peaches and nectarines; sage, rosemary, paprika, basil and thyme.

These all found their way into the copious lunches and dinners which Monsieur Jay insisted on, meals which were a joy of discovery and delight.  While chewing a lightly grilled steak, or savouring yet another type of fish landed that very morning, I would listen intently to the conversation of the adults and children, working out what the topic was and preparing a tentative intervention, only to realise - with a sentence half formed - that they had started to talk about something entirely different.

After just a few days, however, I found myself saying things I didn’t realise that I knew. Not only that: from all that lip protrusion and spreading and general tension of the jaw and cheek areas I was suffering from quite noticeable muscular strain in my bid not to sound English.

What happens is this: if you speak language B (a foreign language) with the  muscular habits of language A (your familiar language) you will have a foreign accent. And, when comparing English and French, you just have to look at speakers to see (not just to hear) the difference.  As my friend Bryan Jenner put it, describing what he called the ‘look’ of English:

The lips don’t open or spread or round very much; the cheeks are loose; the jaws are close together but not tightly clenched. (Compare this with French or Italian!). If the lips do move momentarily in a particular direction they rapidly return to a neutral relaxed position. In fact ‘loose’, or ‘lax’ or ‘relaxed’ are key words here.  Compared to most other nationalities our faces lack animation [....]  In simple terms this means that one has to be relatively lazy to speak English well. (IATEFL Phonology Group Newsletter number two: April 1987).

Lazy was not the word to describe how I was spending much of the day in France, using unfamiliar muscles (or familiar muscles more intensely than usual). Small wonder that I was suffering from what the Germans call Muskelkater, the muscular pain associated with the first few days of practising an unfamiliar activity, such as skiing or horse-riding.

Jean-François, I noticed, had no such problems. Together we spoke nothing but French, even when he came to stay in England. And when he had to speak English, to my Mother and sister Jennifer, for example, his accent was straight ‘Allo allo’ French.  In fact, when he went back home after his first stay with us in High Wycombe, the only English sentence he seemed to have picked up was ‘Gor blimey I’m off!’, the catch-phrase of Sergeant Throat, one of the minor characters in the Goon Show.

The September after my first stay with the Jay family, at the age of 12, I started learning German, again with Mervyn Davies as my teacher.  (I must mention here that the RGS at this time was run by a veritable Tafia. On my very first day, when Mr Tucker - the imposing Headmaster - finally came to the Vs in his roll-call of new boys, he pronounced ‘Vaughan Rees’ with some relish, peered down from the stage at my minute 10-year-old self and announced, to my mystification, ‘You’ll do all right here, boy’.  It was some time later that I realised what he meant, having learned that the Deputy Head was Sam Morgan, the Head of French, Emlyn Jones, the Head of German, Mervyn Davies, the Head of Maths, PL Jones, and no doubt three or four others I can’t remember).

Mr Davies had the brilliant idea of allowing us to adopt German avatars for each of our lessons. I chose the name ‘Fritz’, and, for the rest of my schooldays, I was ‘Fritz’ to him as often as ‘Vaughan-Rees’.  I say this was brilliant, because it meant that he could address us entirely in German, without English (or, indeed, Welsh) names interrupting the Teutonic flow.  Later, when I was teaching EFL in London, I would find myself saying things like: ‘Ahmed and Juanita, sit next to Tanaka and Joao’, which rather spoiled things.

The sounds of German were less daunting than those of French, and my German exchange friend, Dietrich-Peter Pretschner (known as Peter), was much more studious than Jean-François.  He lived, I learned, in the Ruhr District, which I associated with heavy industry (the Krupp factories, for example). So, as my train reached Essen the first time, I assumed that I was heading towards somewhere like Bradford, which I knew from staying with my uncle Harold, a worker in a steel factory all his life.

But we transferred to a much smaller train and arrived in the little town of Witten, on the river Ruhr, where Peter’s Opa (grandfather) was waiting in his venerable Mercedes ready to drive us to number 25a Sundernstrasse on the outskirts of town in the village of Bommern.

Next morning, when I woke up and looked out of the window, I could see nothing but fields, hills and forest. To my delight Witten-Bommern turned out to be more Ikley than Bradford.

The culinary surprises awaiting me in Germany were not as dramatic as in France (nor was I warned against going into certain parts of town). But I did have a bit of a shock that first day. Oma (Peter’s grandmother) had made ‘Pflaumenkuchen’, plum tart, using plums from the garden, and asked me to go to the local baker’s to buy ‘Schlagsahne’. Now, by chance I knew that this translated as ‘whipped cream’, but this was something as alien to me as larks’ tongues in aspic or roast swan. When, 5 minutes later, I asked the assistant for a portion of Schlagsahne, I wondered if this was some kind of ritual trick they were playing on me, like the apprentice sent off to the stores for a left-handed screwdriver or a glass hammer.  But no, it turned out to be a very ordinary transaction, and - when piled on top of the plum tart straight from the oven - one of the great gustatory moments of my life.

Then, next morning, when faced with fresh bread rolls, unsalted butter and homemade raspberry jam,  as was usual back home I spread a little scraping of butter on the roll and was about to do the same with the jam when Oma said ‘Du muss die Butter tüchtig schmieren, Mensch!’ (Literally, ‘smear the butter powerfully!’).   This, you should realise, was 1953,  and rationing in the UK did not actually end until the following year. Butter by then was, in fact, off the ration, but old habits die hard and there was no way I would have been allowed to ’slap the butter on’ back home. ‘And these are the people who lost the war?’ I couldn’t help thinking.

I went to France and Germany the same number of times. That is, until the 6th form when Peter and I decided we would like to spend more time in each other’s countries. So, he ended up joining my class for one summer term and I went to his Gymnasium  (grammar school) the following autumn term. But there was one great difference. Whereas he, like most Europeans, was still at 17 studying a wide range of subjects, I  had been forced to choose between arts and sciences,  ending up doing nothing but English, French and German, with a few hours of Spanish on the side. This meant that Peter had to switch classes in order to keep up his work in all his subjects, while I - to my delight - found myself  once more studying History, Geography, Physics and Chemistry, but in German this time. The only subject I was allowed to miss was Maths, during which time I worked on my French set books.

Both of us enjoyed ourselves immensely. Picking up more German, almost in passing, as an offshoot of learning other things, was vastly preferable to plodding through translations and being spoon-fed the sort of information which our teachers believed, correctly, would guarantee decent A-level passes.   My accent in German improved to such an extent that, in Bavaria during a ski holiday the Pretschners took me on that Christmas, the locals somewhat quizzically asked where in the North I came from. (Back in Westphalia they weren’t fooled, however!).

As for Peter, his almost perfect English has done him no harm at all in his subsequent career as one of the pioneers of  virtual surgery, with a worldwide reputation.

Back in England it was just languages and literature, of course.  Annoyingly, I had not been able to drop Latin after my O-levels since Oxbridge still insisted on candidates doing an ‘unseen’ translation from Latin.  And since they would not allow me to take the entrance exams until I was 17 I found myself staying three years and a term in the 6th form, each term (except when I was in Germany) doing bloody Latin with the headmaster.

He, intriguingly, never seemed to realise that I was an almost permanent fixture in his study. So, by the third year, when he said, for example ‘The verb fero, ferre, tuli, latum has entered French in just one set expression. But I can’t expect any of you to know it’, I tentatively said ‘Would that, by  chance, be ‘sans coup férir’, ‘without striking a blow’, Headmaster?’ ‘Goodness me’, he spluttered. ‘Very good, my boy’.

And so it went on. ‘Do any of you boys know what a “tonsorial artist” would be?’  ‘Could it possibly refer to a barber or hairdresser, Headmaster?’  ‘Excellent, excellent lad!’. etc etc

Not only that. Each year we did the same translations which, by the time I’d seen them three or four times, had become as familiar to me as ‘Bah bah black sheep, have you any wool’. So, at Cambridge in November 1956  (the two versions of ‘Singing the Blues’, by Guy Mitchell and Tommy Steel, vying for the number one spot), when I turned over my Latin paper and saw a good old friend from Caesar’s ‘De Bello Gallico’, I muttered ‘thank you Lord!’, steamed through it in 10 minutes (throwing up ramparts, hurling javelins, repulsing the native Gauls ) and strolled nonchalantly out.

Next term I turned up at school intending to stay for a few weeks, working on my Spanish and seeing if I could persuade the teachers of Italian and Russian to get me going in those languages. But, for a reason I still don’t understand, the Headmaster of a neighbouring grammar school, Sir William Borlase at Marlow, asked if I could step in to teach  German and a little French, the main German teacher (I learned to my bemusement a few weeks later) having suffered a nervous breakdown.

I had a little trouble with the 13-14 year olds, though ’trouble‘ in 1957 would register about 8 on a 21st century trouble scale going from 1 to 100.  When I walked into the German A-level course for the first time, by contrast, three of the sixth-formers chorused. ‘Christ, it’s Mike!’.

These were guys I’d become friends with the previous Easter during a so-called ‘study break’ in Paris, during which time we gave the Sorbonne a serious miss, preferring to leer our way through the dodgier quarters or spend afternoons smoking gauloises and playing billiards in student bars.  One evening we reeled our way back to our dorm in the Lycee Stanislas, where one of us decided  that it would be a good idea to steal the French tricolour flag which hung proudly from the pole over the main entrance.  Once that was done we were not sure what to do with it, and it ended up in a corner of the karzy.

Next morning, hungover and chastened, we all decided to cough up rather than prolong the agony.

Reaction of the British:  handwringing, accusatory looks ,‘What if L'Humanité (the Communist Party newspaper) hears of this!’;  ‘International incident’; ‘Don’t panic!’

Reaction of the French: shoulder shrugging, ‘beuf’,  ‘You’re only young once’; ‘c’est un tour de gosse’ (a childish prank).

So there was to be no punishment. ‘But one of you should apologise. You! (pointing to me). Not in English, in French’. And that was a better test of my knowledge of the language than anything I encountered whether at school or at university.

After my term at Borlase, I crossed to Calais and hitchhiked down to Marseille to spend a few days over Easter with the Jay family.  Monsieur Jay then dropped me off at a road heading west and I set off for Spain, arriving in San Sebastian with the equivalent of a fiver in my pockets.

Nowadays, gap-year students arrive in Thailand, or wherever, equipped with credit cards and mobile phones, never more than a mouse-click away from their parents.  Franco’s mediaeval Spain in 1957, now that was remote.  Luckily, I’d been given the address of a friendly family, who couldn’t have been more helpful.  They arranged to put an ad in the local paper (Cambridge student gives private English lessons), while the rest of my five pounds found me full board and lodging (pension completa) for 35 pesetas a day, the equivalent of four shillings and six pence, or 23 pence. 

Potential pupils were to phone the Spanish family; and it took 4 days before there was an answer. A businessman wanted 5 one-hour lessons a week and was prepared to pay me 50 pesetas an hour. Weekly income:250 pesetas.  Weekly outgoings: 35 pesetas x 7 = 245 pesetas. Result: happiness.

Spain has always, for me, represented freedom. It evokes the time when I set off with enough to live on for a week and kept myself for over 4 months. The teaching, in fact, didn’t last all that long. With my Spanish improving by the day, I was able to make easier money by acting as intermediary between local people (who rarely spoke anything beyond Spanish and Basque) and tourists. Money flowed in from coach companies, offering excursions, and restaurants, where they were happy to give me 5 or 10% of a bill, when I steered a whole group their way. In fact, I made so much that I even paid for my parents and sister to come down and stay in a nice little hotel for a week.

I’m off to Spain next week, as it happens, to stay with my daughter Celine and grandson Lucas (who is trilingual in Spanish, English and Valenciano, the local form of Catalan). Celine has lived in Valencia for many years now, and her Spanish is much better than mine by now, unsurprisingly. My Spanish has hardly changed since I left Spain in July 1957.  It’s good enough for my needs; I can go out with a bunch of Spanish-speakers and hold my own.  

One day, a year or so back, Celine said, ‘I’ve been intending to ask you this for some time, Daddy. When you speak Spanish, you seem to change personality completely. You sound like those old guys who hang around the bars, smoking Ducados and drinking carajillos (black coffee with a shot)!’

‘Hey’, I said. ‘When I lived in Spain 50 years ago, how old do you think those guys were?  They were my age, 18, 19. So who do you think I wanted to sound like?  Think about it.’