A Month in Rouen, by Lionel Ashcombe

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

I was sixteen in the summer of 1926, and I had been sent to Rouen for a month to improve my French, which my father described as fit for ordering soup in a crisis. I was determined to prove him wrong. On the boat from Newhaven I learned two hundred words from a phrasebook, and by the time I reached the Lebruns’ tall grey house near the cathedral I had decided to speak nothing but French for the entire month, whatever the cost.

The cost fell mainly on the Lebruns.

On the first evening I told Madame Lebrun that she was very well cooked. On the second, meaning to say that I had eaten enough, I announced to the whole table that I was expecting a baby. The grandfather, a retired magistrate with a white beard, congratulated me gravely. I spent the rest of the week avoiding any subject that involved food, which in that house left very little.

And through all of it, at the end of the table, sat Solange.

Solange was seventeen, with dark hair cut short and a way of looking at me over her glass as though I were a play she had paid to see. She never laughed at my French. She never corrected it either. She simply listened, with her chin on her hand, and answered me in slow, clear French, and I believed that I was making a tremendous impression.

In the third week I asked her to come rowing on the Seine. I had rehearsed the invitation for two days. I told her, I thought, that I was an experienced oarsman who had rowed for my school. In fact I had rowed once, on the boating lake at Eastbourne, and been towed back by the attendant.

It was a hot, still afternoon. I hired a boat by the bridge and rowed out with tremendous style, and for perhaps four minutes it went well. Then a barge came by, and its wash slapped the side of the boat, and I caught the water so badly with my blade that I went over backwards into the bottom, and the left oar slid out of its rowlock and drifted away towards the sea.

I lay in the bilge water looking up at the sky. Solange looked down at me.

‘Move up,’ she said, in perfect English. ‘You’re in my way.’

She took the remaining oar, stood in the stern and sculled us back to the bridge over her shoulder, the way the fishermen do, without apparently trying. On the way she explained that her mother came from Bristol, that she had spoken English since she could talk, and that she had not had so much fun in years.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.

‘You wanted so much to speak French,’ said Solange. ‘It seemed unkind to stop you.’

I went home at the end of August. My father met me at Victoria and asked how my French had come on. I told him, in English, that it had come on enormously. I did not mention the boat. But I wrote to Solange every week for the next three years, in French, and she wrote back every week in English, and corrected my mistakes in red ink, and I have kept every one of the letters.

“The narrator is presented as a vain young man who learns nothing from his time in France.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how the narrator is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.