Finding Your Voice

  'Daddy, please, when can we go home?' Samuel pleaded, holding his hands across his stomach in time-honoured 'starving-waif' style, his grey hospital gown adding to the put-upon nineteenth-century orphan look he was trying to cultivate.

  'We're seeing this thing through, son,' I responded strongly, though wilting myself. 'We've been here seven hours; I'm not going until you get the all-clear.'

  It's not often I get a Saturday at home, and aside from the sheer unadulterated horror of Saturday evening television, it is a wondrous thing. A 'weekend' at home feels like a holiday, in some ways it is, but its rarity makes you appreciate that weekend even more. I hadn't banked on this, though.

  The previous week Samuel had been rushed to the hospital with acute stomach pains, which turned out to be nothing more than severe constipation from a lack of fruit eating, something he gets from me, and a lack of fluid intake, which he certainly doesn't get from me. A week later the pains were back and it wasn't a blockage, something else was happening and he was in agony.

  Now, I use the term 'agony' advisedly. Samuel has two main interests, his 'théâtre' (acting lessons) and watching football on television, both of which mean he has a tendency, and the skill, to 'exaggerate' any physical complaint, but surely this was more than play acting.

  Maurice is different. It's only when he stops moving that you know something is wrong. He'd had stomach aches too the previous week and in order to rule out appendicitis we'd taken him to see the doctor.

  'It's nothing serious,' the doctor said, 'but he obviously has very fragile intestines, prone to acid build-up… exactly like you Monsieur,' he said to me over his glasses. I had my first stomach ulcer at the age of 15. I looked at Natalie who again had her 'he's taking after you' look on her face.

  There's an ongoing inquest going on at home and has been almost since our first child was born. Firstly we are trying to determine exactly what my good points are and see if any of those, should they exist, have been passed on to any of my offspring. The signs aren't good. It's not just intestinal, lack of a rounded diet or mood swings, Thérence went through a stage of over-indulging in his favourite tipple and belligerently urinating on the floor, which also – and unfairly in my opinion – got chalked up as a Moore trait.

  'So, are you in much pain?' I had asked redundantly, as Samuel flapped about on the lounge rug like a fish on dry land. His returning tears were enough confirmation. As our doctor was now on holiday one of us had to take him to casualty in the nearest local 'big' town, about half an hour away, and as the other option was lawn-mowing, horse and goat husbandry, and moving the un-ironed ironing from one room to another, it seemed like the easiest option.

  I remember the casualty departments in the UK from my time as a weekend footballer and these over-stretched, barely financed, rundown, half-forgotten hospital appendages tended just to be full of 'blokes', either suffering from some cut or sprain from ill-planned Saturday sport or just sobering up from the night before and realising they had a cut or sprain from an ill-planned Friday night. The common theme tended to be the discussion of car-parking charges, which united the room and is a clever, modern NHS tactic for distracting the patient. It helps save on anaesthetic.

  There are no car-parking charges at French hospitals, and nor were there any queues, so Samuel, still doing his 'I've been shot in the stomach at close range' thing, was ushered straight through once I'd gone through the bureaucratic necessities. 'Are you his father?' 'How old is he?' 'Where was he born?' The answers to these questions were all on the carte vitale (health card) that I'd handed over to begin with, except the parental one which had to be asked a few times as, for one thing, I couldn't hear the woman because Samuel was by now giving it the full Carmen death scene, and, for another, she mumbled.

  Everybody in the hospital seemed to mumble. Everyone. My French has improved, I've worked hard on it, but some people seem determined not to be understood, the French medical fraternity especially. Is this the result of a more litigious public? I don't know. But it's like there may be hidden cameras around and they don't want any legally qualified lip-readers literally putting words in their mouths, but it's hugely frustrating, especially as I was, rarely for me, feeling confident about my French.

  I had been working in Antibes, in the south of France, all week and though the gigs themselves were in English we, my colleague and I, stayed with the French wife of a friend and their son, and I got plenty of opportunity to show off my French skills which were, much to my surprise, complimented, boosting my fragile confidence no end to the extent that I even did a couple of well-received jokes in French during one of the shows.

  I hadn't been to Antibes since I was 21. At that time I was an unhappy person, troubled and lacking any self-belief. I'd just graduated, and I mean just, the last six months of my degree course a blur as I failed to make any lectures that coincided with pub opening hours. I had no idea what to do with myself. I wanted to work in film and television, starting off as a runner, but no-one would give me the chance because I didn't have 'experience'. 'Really?' I asked, increasingly frustrated at job interviews with what I saw as a closed world. 'But I've made tea before.'

  We were staying in La Turbie at the time, which is in the hills just behind Monte Carlo and which I've been told is now Monaco's premier dogging site, but we went to Antibes ostensibly so that my step-mother, one of thousands ripped off by the late Robert Maxwell's laissez-faire attitude to other people's pensions, could hurl abuse at his huge yacht which was still moored there. I've said before that I love a port. The sense of possibility, of another world, anonymity, of even running away always gets me, but on that holiday especially it seemed to offer a solution, a way out of my then depressing world and into a newer, more exciting one. I trawled the yachting job centres, answered adverts pinned on café walls, even walked gang planks brazenly asking for a job. Nothing. Again, I 'didn't have the experience.'

  All of this came flooding back to me in Antibes. The audiences were largely made up of exactly the young, yachting type that I'd so desperately wanted to be, and whereas I think once I may have resented their bronzed, smiling faces, I didn't have a sense of that at all. Maybe I'm mellowing, but I felt almost paternalistic towards them, envying their lifestyle yes but genuinely hoping that they were enjoying it too and inevitably wondering what kind of life I'd be leading now if I had had that opportunity. Of course, there's always the possibility that I wouldn't have lasted five minutes, that the first time someone had tried to insist on me wearing a 'fleece' I'd have been off, back to the world of sartorial enlightenment. I don't know, though.

  Anyway, mumbling is one of the issues I have with languages, the other is concentration and I realised that while this nurse in front of me was saying something incoherent I'd been away daydreaming again about Antibean port ramparts! The mumbling nurse gave way to a mumbling doctor and, I'll be honest, Samuel had to help me out at times not just because his French is parfait but his hearing is better. Poor Samuel. The ignominy of the arse-bearing hospital gown was bad enough, but he was prodded and poked and pulled about. Early on we went for a radiographie which revealed he had a lot of gaz.

  'On a scale of one to ten Samuel, how bad is the pain?' asked the doctor.

  'Nine and a half,' croaked Samuel, gripping his deathbed.

  'Really?!' said the doctor, for once not mumbling. 'Then we need blood tests,' he added.

  Samuel looked at me, his bottom lip wobbling, 'He says we need blood tests, Daddy! Please no!' I knew that's what the doctor had ordered, secretly I was very happy with my ability to cope linguistically thus far, what I wasn't prepared for was being told that we'd have to wait in the hospital for another three hours for the results to come back.

  'Really?' I asked. 'We wait here?'

  'Of course,' said the nurse like I was an idiot for asking, 'we don't know what the problem is yet.'

  You hear horror stories of people waiting in casualty, particularly from the British press: MADE TO WAIT ON A BED IN THE CORRIDOR! is the most often stated hyperbole. At least you're on a bed and in the right place! It's not like you've been stuck in a skip outside the library for crying out loud, and as the urgences department began to fill up it was clear that more room was needed for more urgent cases. This was lunchtime in France, one can only imagine the kitchen-based accidents taking place up and down the country as people tried to live up to their culinary heritage.

  'I've been here since five a.m.!' shouted the woman in the corridor on the trolley next to Samuel's.

  'She says she's been here since…' began Samuel.

  'I know,' I said, 'five a.m.'

  I really was beginning to feel on top of the whole thing, but boredom was setting in for both of us.

  Lunchtime passed and Samuel was refused food until they could determine his ailment, and I was refused too out of some parental solidarity, something which I was perfectly willing to forego frankly. It became clear that the old woman's conversation was limited solely to the 5 a.m. diatribe, and thankfully we were moved back into our room where boredom once again took root.

  'Let's play hangman!' I said, trying to change the mood.

  It became clear after ten minutes of pretty much a one-subject game – the answers were 'BLOOD/TESTS', 'BORING', 'STARVATION', 'SANDWICH' and 'CUTE/NURSE' – this wasn't the distraction I'd hoped it would be. Then, four hours after the blood tests the doctor and a consultant came in. This looked serious.

  'Yes, hello!' thundered the consultant, for once a non-mumbler.

  'Wrong room,' said the doctor, and off they went.

  'Daddy,' said Samuel, 'please go and find out what's going on.'

  He was right, it was time to be proactive and by now my confidence in my French was such that I felt able to do it. I found CUTE/NURSE and was told that the results had arrived and the doctor would be with us shortly.

  'Mmm…' said the disappointed doctor into his shirt collar, 'these show nothing.'

  'Great!' said Samuel, hopping off his bed. 'We'll go then.'

  The doctor, for all his mumbling and laid-back attitude was having none of it.

  'Echographie!' he declared.

  It was now 5 p.m. and we'd been there since 10.30 a.m., we were both starving and had seen numerous shift changes.

  'I'll book you an appointment!' the doctor announced triumphantly.

  We waited another hour before Samuel was finally wheeled in for his échographie, by now his stomach pain had changed he said, it was now acute malnutrition. The échographiste was an elegant lady from somewhere in Eastern Europe (seriously why people moan about an 'influx' of Eastern European immigrants is beyond me, they keep us soppy Westerners from completely falling apart). Her French was impeccable and, as a 'foreigner' she enunciated every word clearly and perfectly. I understood everything, she guided us through the whole of Samuel's stomach and intestine area, and it was a pleasure not just to listen to her but to understand her. Initially I had felt like I was the wrong parent for this hospital vigil but I didn't feel like that anymore.

  'And the problem,' she continued eloquently, 'is these ganglions here. You see these ganglions. They're ganglions.'

  'Ganglions,' I said to Samuel knowingly. 'You know what ganglions are?'

  'No,' he said, mesmerised by the screen like an expectant mother.

  And that's the thing – neither did I. We'd been there nearly eight hours and the whole crux, the entire raison d'être boiled down to this one piece of vocabulary.

  Ganglions.

  'Ah,' said the doctor, the length of his shift and certainty of diagnosis bringing him out of himself. 'Ganglions.'

  Armed with a prescription that was now useless until Monday morning, Samuel and I made our way home via the boulangerie.

  'Well…' Natalie said on our return, desperate for news as I'd accidently left my phone at home and Samuel's had run out of battery. 'Is it serious? How is he?'

  'Ganglions,' we both said in unison.

  'Ganglions?' she asked. 'What's that?' Frankly we were rather banking on her knowing the answer to that.

  I was trying my best with French, I was 'making the effort' as they say, but when an entire day is reduced to one bloody word that even someone fluent in the language hasn't heard before, what sweet chance in the name of buggery do I have? I thought I had the situation licked, I thought I was in control, but in the end it was just one missed word and I felt deflated.

  Ganglions, it turns out, are lymph glands, and Samuel's were infected and swollen in his stomach, like an internal glandular fever. It's not terribly serious, though, it may flare up at any time. But I took the whole thing as a bit of a blow. Just the one word I kept repeating to myself needlessly, 'I'll never be fluent in French.' It was a self-pitying whine really and Samuel was having none of it, 'You don't know all the words in English, doesn't mean you're not fluent.' He was right of course, and self-assured enough to say so too; and it did help, especially when I found out ganglions means pretty much the same in English!

  Samuel, now 12, seemed to have pretty strong ideas about most things already, and he wasn't afraid to express them. People who know me may be surprised to learn that actually I don't like confrontation all that much, unless it's a battle I actually want to fight; most of the time I'm just nodding at what people say to me, not through tacit agreement but because I'm probably not actually listening. Maybe it's an age thing, but I just don't have the energy to jump all over every statement that I disagree with – and I disagree with a lot – but then, I'm not 12.

  'He needs to find his voice' is one of those comedian sayings that old hands come out with in the dressing room when confronted by the threat of a talented open spot, or newcomer. In short, it means you have to work out your 'stage persona' so that your performance is consistent. It sounds like utter nonsense, but there is a ring of truth to it even though it only really crops up when old hacks, like me, are asked for advice by newcomers – which we hate.

  'You've got some nice stuff,' we'll say sagely, 'but you need to find your voice.' It's our way of saying 'Please leave me alone.'

  I always found that the best comedians were those who knew who they were off stage, they'd 'found their voice' in life and so the performance was just an extension of that, and it showed in how natural their stand-up was. Some people have a natural confidence, most comedians certainly do not.

  Samuel's confidence was causing problems though, not at home where open discussion is actively encouraged (unless I'm tired), but at school, where articulate and enthusiastic debate apparently needs to be quashed before it can turn into dangerous intellectualism. I know, in France of all places!

  Samuel had just had his second-term school reports and, while the marks were very good, his comportement (behaviour) had been called into question. The teachers, and it seemed to be pretty much all of them, were full of praise for his willingness to help others but he also had, they chorused, a cocky streak; he doesn't suffer fools gladly, he has a sharp tongue and can be quite moody. Natalie read all this out and peered at me over the damning document, again the 'Moore' traits being held responsible.

  'I wonder where he gets that from?!' she snorted.

  The teachers' main gripe though wasn't this side to his behaviour at all but his enthusiasm, which he certainly didn't get from me. He's always putting his hand up, one said. He's always got the answer, said another. The maths teacher was apparently so exasperated that he'd threatened to ban Samuel from his class unless he stopped calling out the answers. Yeah, it must be really hard having pupils take an interest in class, what you really want as a teacher is a bunch of violent crayon-chewers at the back who'll just let you get on with your job and not worry too much about being educated. What an absurd complaint! What am I supposed to do, tell him off?

  'What's all this, Samuel? Good marks, intelligence, taking an active interest in the learning process – I'm really disappointed in you, son.'

  He has opinions and he's not afraid to share them, but by far his biggest bugbear is languages and he's become something of a purist.

  We were watching the lunchtime news and in a report on something or other, I can't remember what exactly, it's French lunchtime news though so it would have been food related, the correspondent used terms like 'le packaging' and 'le marketing'. Samuel went apoplectic, a full-on meltdown railing against the laziness and stupidity of using Franglais. I've pointed out to him on numerous occasions just how many French words there are in English, 'nuance', 'gaffe', 'suave' and so on, but no, the lad insists on very clear linguistic demarcation lines and is prepared to throw a right old wobbly to argue his case. It was magnificent stuff and I felt quite proud of him, actually. Passion for language in one so young is a good thing in my opinion, a full-on hissy fit is even better, but as the tantrum went on Natalie just peered at me again with her 'he's taking after you again' look on her face.

 

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