Mr & Mrs or Madame & Monsieur....

The big day dawned and our party of guests prepared for a day which they had no idea what would happen. We hadn’t dared to ask for a rehearsal beforehand and we hadn’t even seen the room before. Jacques and I waited outside together with our best man, Matt and my best friend, Ella, and all walked down a kind of aisle, him on the left, me on the right. We met in the centre at an upholstered chaise-longue where we sat and waited. It was a lady doing the servic and she smiled. Our Hungarian friend, Anniko, translated the Hungarian for us into English and we said 'yes' in Hungarian at the right moments until she signaled to Jacques to put the ring on. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as it seemed such a familiar gesture to everyone in the room.

Then the French pushed us into the side of the room and filed past kissing us on both cheeks. My English family did the same although with some amusement. Outside my dad threw paper confetti, which mystified the French side. Should it not be rice they wondered? After a few photos in the park we went by taxi to the Marriott hotel for an afternoon tea of tea, cakes and pastries with champagne.

The evening dinner was at the top restaurant in Budapest - Gundels. We had not told anyone so they were surprised to see a private room with a Hungarian Gypsy group to play for us. We served Pineau de Charente cocktails, a drink from Jacques region in France. Then we ate. We were nervous when planning the menu, eager to please both sides of the family. The starter of a creamy soup was fine, followed by chicken with roasted vegetables. But the crunch came with the cheese. One big difference between French and English formal dining is that the French eat cheese after the main course and then end with dessert. The English choose to eat our cheese last, with a glass of port. Jacques always says the French would not want to kiss someone tasting of cheese so that’s why the sweet comes last!

After much heated discussion we went French-style for the cheese but I stuck out for the traditional two tiered English looking wedding cake that seemed essential. And we did the menu in both languages, although I have to admit that food mysteriously sounds better in French! Soupe aux legumes avec une crouton du Fromage aux Cheves is better than ‘Vegetable Soup with Melted Goat’s Cheese on Bread’, let’s face it!

My best memory is of my Dad and Jacques’ mother crooning together with the gypsy band, doing a karaoke versions of Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie Est Belle’ and The Beatles ‘When I’m 64’.
So Mr and Mrs, or is that Madame and Monsieur, became married. And three months later became a family…..

Banned by the embassies.

The British Embassy in Budapest charged me a small fortune to do my ‘bans’ which seemed silly as the likelihood of anyone popping in to see who was getting married that week and making a complaint that I was already married to him was unlikely. They joked behind my back ‘Funny one this one, English girl marrying French chap, ha ha!!!’ The French Embassy was much more serious and when they posted Jacques’ bans asked him to get his papers ready for signing the pre-nuptial agreement. French law states that you must sign either a general agreement of 50% split in the case of divorce or you can agree to a split of assets before you wed. The document covers provision for children too and shared properties and belongings. Most of my English friends found it shocking to even think about divorce, but since mixed-marriages have a high rate of divorce, it seemed prudent to at least consider it as a possibility.

We went to the local Hungarian registry office where we lived. Via a translator they said that they simply could not see why on earth an Englishwoman would want to marry a Frenchman in their office. They postponed and postponed. Meanwhile the Frenchwoman in charge was determined to stop Jacques making the biggest mistake of his life by marrying an English citizen. Her reason: ‘She doesn’t speak enough French.’ This was true as every time we met I was tongue-tied. Grilled by this sophisticated middle-aged coiffured and manicured lady I was shy and unable to answer her fast firing questions regarding assets, money to be split and what we would do in the case of divorce? But I wasn’t an imbecile and I knew what I was doing. Time dragged on and as my stomach swelled as we missed our planned summer wedding schedule. I would not fit in a white dress now I knew…

Eventually I went to moan to the British consulate and they used their diplomatic clout to convince the registry office to give permission. The registry office had only one slot free in 1996 (a cancellation perhaps?) - October 26th at 2pm. There was to be no discussion about the proposed date and we had to bring translated versions of all the relevent documents. Relieved it was at least a Saturday and before the baby was due we agreed quickly. All the documents had to be verified in Hungarian; our birth certificates, and proof of address, employment etc. Luckily I found the official English-Hungarian translators office in time and got the copies with the official red seal. So we were able to book the restaurant at last.

But the French embassy would not give up and days before we were due to marry stated that 'Your fiancée does not understand the document' - making it invalid. On the Friday before our wedding Jacques’ French family arrived a day early and they all accompanied us to the signing, piling onto the plush leather sofas of the Consul's office and showing their support for their non-French future daughter-in-law. We roped in a Hungarian-French translator who spoke some English and she sat between us simultaneously translating from the Consul's French into Hungarian and then back to English for me. After a few paragraphs the translator frowned and it was obvious she was not sure of the legal words in English. So Jacques offered to translate and she would agree to each sentence before we signed. It was not authorized but at least it worked and we could sign on the line, just in time...

Wedding cake tiers or pyramids?

I moved to Budapest in the summer, and we put getting married as top priority. We had decided diplomatically that a traditional ‘English’ or ‘French’ wedding would not suit us. We felt since we were both the first child marrying in both families one family would hijack the wedding and possibly exclude the other family. I wanted it to be the same for both families not one family feeling out of place in the other’s country. Budapest was our temporary home and had a romantic connection so it was the perfect choice.

Weddings are very culturally specific I realized as I began to plan. English weddings are fussy, all the ladies wearing hats, the chaps in morning-suits and top hats and cute bridemaids and pageboys dressed to match the bride. Often the main aim for guests is getting as drunk as you can at the free bar. The church service is usually traditional – the well-known lines about promising to have and to hold until you die or for better or worse.

Everyone sits where they are told by the church ushers – bride’s family on one side, groom on the other. Then the couple and family pose for hours for photos by the church or in a nearby beauty spot. There is a lunch or a dinner, which is usually pretty awful, with dodgy prawns and under-cooked chicken or solid slabs of beef with silver service soggy vegetables and fussy sauces. Everyone is seated properly with a top table for the couple, close family and bridesmaids and best man. The cake is white and in tiers with rather tacky models of bride and groom or lots of sugar flowers. Early on in the night the bride throws her bouquet to a lucky girl who will marry next, and the couple disappears for their honeymoon, leaving everyone with a disco for amusement or Scottish dancing till they drop drunk or with food poisoning.

In France it starts formally, before the ceremony the couple signs a pre-nuptual legal document in front of their guests to agree on the split of assets. French weddings are usually Catholic and have long masses which I never understand except the Halleluiah and Amen bits. Hats are frowned on, and I was once asked to take mine off in church as it was blocking the view. You can sit wherever you like in church and photos are done as a group shot and over quickly.

After the service there are long dinners with ten courses (if you include all those amuse bouches or glasses of sorbet in between). The food is very good and well cooked and beautifully presented on the plate. Even in a tent it looks good. Seating is less formal and the bride and groom often sit at a table like everyone else. For a cake they usually have a pyramid of stuffed profiteroles called a piece montee literally glued in place by rock-hard caramel. You are served two or three profiteroles per person. The party lasts until 3am or 5am and includes lots of dancing and waltzing with the bride and groom taking centre stage. Sometimes friends will perform a sketch or sing a song for the couple or play games to amuse or embarrass the couple. The couple stays all night and even hangs around on the Sunday too to offer more food and another day of eating and drinking with friends and family.

We decided to invite our families and a few friends to come to Budapest and put up both families in hotels for the weekend. We were just 25 in all, which was good for me as I hated big weddings. We decided to have some parts of each wedding culture. Religion – none as he is Catholic and I am Church of England and neither of us wanted to go to the other’s ones church. Food – Posh and French-inspired food and wine in a good restaurant. Lots of wine and music from Hungarian musicians. Hats were welcomed as was an English-style tiered cake and an English afternoon tea in between wedding service and dinner. And most importantly we would stay and look after our families the whole weekend and not run off and abandon them. Once the plans were made our first action was to register with both embassies for our bans....

Babies and springtime in Paris

In 1996 I found my life busy enough to even think about getting married and having babies, although I could have quite happily adopted some of the wonderful kids I taught. However, family came rather sooner than I had planned. I had stopped taking the Pill after a health scare linked to thrombosis, and after a routine check up in England was told I had something wrong with my cervix. I had to go back to Poland and find a gynecologist there. The woman rambled on and on and then gave me a prescripion in Polish. Misunderstanding my Polish doctor, and being too shy to ask my Polish colleagues to come and translate for me I did nothing. I assumed that there was a major problem and I could not get pregnant. This was the complete opposite of what she said.

So after returning from the April Easter holiday break in Budapest I felt rather odd and nauseous and after waiting a few weeks I decided to do something about it. In May Jacques and I had been invited to a wedding in France and we met at Roissy airport in Paris. I bought a test at the airport, with much embarrassment as the French woman couldn’t understand me when I mumbled ‘Enceinte?’ and finally with some gesturing sold me the blue stick test. We did the test in the hotel and it was positive straightaway.

Jacques seemed very happy and we went out for dinner in a daze, romantically deciding our first child would have the name of a street in Paris. We ate somewhere around Rue St.Denis, but in the end Dennis didn’t really seem such a good name after all! On the 1st of May he proposed as we wandered around the Jardins Publique holding the tradtional symbol of spring , a sprig of lily-of-the-valley or muguet and I, of course, said yes right away.

After the wedding we went to visit his family who seemed happy. To see if I would make the grade his mother passed me the newest member of the family. Francois was just six weeks old and the first child of Jacques brother, Phillippe and his girlfriend Gaelle. Holding this tiny doll of a baby was comforting that at least he seemed calm with me. As he looked up at me I sang the English lullaby ‘Rock a Bye Baby’ and told him how cute and handsome he was. Everyone around the kitchen table looked at me. Then Gaelle said in French with a shocked voice ‘But he doesn’t speak English!’ Not knowing whether to laugh or cry I passed him back. It occurred to me that I would have to either learn a few French lullabies and Basic French Baby Small-Talk or try to convince them that this wonderful future cousin of my baby inside me could be bilingual too…..as my baby would surely be….

Eastern Europe - so near and yet so far

Our jobs were undemanding, he was home at around five pm every night and my jobs in a Chinese Art Gallery bookshop in London and teaching English to summer school kids were easy and finished early too. Our evenings were spent cooking, walking in the summer or talking. We talked a lot, now he could speak good English and English became our language of communication together.

Our jobs were merely stepping stones and when an expatriate job came up teaching English and Art in the British School in Warsaw I accepted it straightaway, knowing that Jacques had his eyes set on a job Eastern Europe too and we both loved a new challenge.

I moved to Warsaw in September of 1995 and Jacques found a job as a Consultant in a software company in Budapest in the beginning of 1996. I loved my job, teaching English in the morning to children who needed extra support and Art in the afternoons. The kids were easy, the classes were small and I was part of the British School community which was active and busy. We celebrated all the festivals and enjoyed doing shows and putting on shows and Open Days.

Warsaw was just opening up to the western world and it was an exciting time to be there. Tourists were pouring in to enjoy the cheap food and vodka and to see what Poland was like after so many years of communism. The Jewish ghetto was still there to see along with numerous graveyards and memorials to soldiers and wars. I was deeply touched by Auschwitz and the other camps. I particularly loved Krakow which was like a film set, untouched and wonderfully medieval with its huge open market square and café and shops surrounding it. We felt rich, even as teachers, and could enjoy buffet Sunday breakfasts in the top hotels and tickets to the opera and concerts. We drank Russian Champagne in the interval. This was something I couldn’t do in London and it was fun. The winters were long and proper and snowy. You wore hats, scarves and boots all the time and when you went to the theatre you took your delicate high heels in a shoe-bag and left your boots with your coat at the entrance.

I loved taking the trains to visit Jacques in Budapest in my holidays. Old fashioned clanking noisy trains that seemed like they were from another century, full of travelers crossing Eastern Europe on overnight trips. The Budapest train left at nine at night and arrived at dawn the next day. I usually booked a sleeper carriage and liked chatting with the other people. I only slept a few hours, because customs officials would bang on the door every three hours or so as we crossed the Poland-Czech and Czech-Hungary borders. Uniformed police woke you up banging on the doors and checking for valid passports. I would hang out of the window as we arrived at Keleti station, watching the world go by and we clanked into Budapest, savouring the start of a new day.

Two, three or four kisses? French etiquette....

The long-distance relationship was romantic but I felt like we needed some time together to see if we worked in real-life. So when my contract in Japan finished in November 1994 I headed back to England and Jacques. He had changed dramatically in four years, his long hair in a pony tail was now cut short and neat and he wore suits and ties. He had a degree and was very career minded. Seeing England through his eyes was fun and we had a great time driving around England in his brown Mini car. After the mental challenge of living and working in Japan I needed a simple life and that was what he had. A few months later I got a job in London and moved into his house there. We became a couple.

For our first Christmas together he decided to introduce me to his family in France. I arrived on the 27th, planning to spend two or three days with them before we went to Paris for a New Year’s Eve Party. Jacques met me in Poitiers at the station and we drove back. I was scared and rightly so. Jacques told me all his family was at home plus a few other friends. There would be his parents, Odile and Rene, his three brothers Pierre, Philippe and Jean and sister Lucie who made up his famille nombreus or ‘big family’.

When I arrived the door opened about eighteen people stood up simultaneously to greet me. I had to kiss them one by one two or sometimes three times. This was very daunting for an English girl who only kisses close family, which is more of a hug than the French side to side technique. I was dizzy and dazed by the end of it. Then they all sat around the huge kitchen table while his mother made some tisane or herbal tea. They all stared at me, as if expecting me to say something, which of course I could not! Jacques’ older brother, Pierre, started firing off questions on the lines of How many brothers and sisters do you have? Where does your family live? etc. They were not difficult questions but spoken fast and I was dumb-struck with fear of not understanding the question right or not having the right answer. So I blushed red and tried to drink my tea and eventually they gave up and chatted about me between themselves. It was humiliating.

I soon realized that I could speak French but only with one or maximum two people at a time, say if I was helping his mother to set the table or sat next to a family member at lunch, or saying a hello to a curious neighbour. But I couldn’t do big groups where I just froze linguistically, and I found the whole kissing thing very tricky. I was also expected to kiss the family goodnight and good-morning. But after a few days it seemed almost normal and prepared me for the Paris party where much kissing went on between total strangers and this time four kisses! When I protested at so many they laughed and said ‘In my region we kiss four times’ and kept on going! I had to remember to always take my glasses off on arriving and departing and watch the persons head, as if you both go the same way – disaster! I realised you should not bump noses or go too fast or too slow either. I told Jacques I could have done with some coaching before stepping into this social etiquette, but it was too late, I had met them now.

Lost In Translation

Even though I was living with someone else Jacques kept on writing his pages of French to me. He was still studying and traveling a lot as usual. In 1992 I planned a trip to Paris to visit an art exhibition with my sister. I sent a postcard to his home address and two days later his mother rang to inform me that Jacques was in Singapore on a student work placement. She said she was sorry we couldn’t meet and looked forward to meeting me soon. Was there more going on than I thought? What had he told his mother? Why did she make the effort to call me?

As fate had it I ended up in Asia too. After graduating from Nottingham I worked for a few years in the Hayward Art Gallery in London and did a couple of seasons as a Chalet Girl cooking in France and Austria in ski resorts over the winter. A friend of mine was applying for a TEFL course and said that teaching English was fun and let you travel the world while working. This sounded ideal for me, who liked talking to people from other countries and learning a new skill.

I trained as a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teacher in 1993. The first job I applied for, and got at the first interview, was for NOVA, a huge English Teaching company in Japan. I secretly hoped Jacques was still in Singapore, thinking maybe we could meet in the middle, in say Hong Kong? But no, he was back in France and looking for a way to avoid doing his obligatory one year of French National Service in the army. He found out that with his studies he could offer to work for a year in a Developing Country, helping with financial administration in a French company. After applying for exciting posts in Saudi Arabia and Africa to his dismay he ended up being sent to England. Meanwhile I flew out to Osaka, to start my new life in the city of Wakayama.

Jacques worked for a French pharmaceutical company, and was based in Gerrards Cross in the western suburbs of London. He had an easy life and was enjoying the cultural mix of London with time and money to spare and wrote glowing reports of England to me. However I still really couldn’t translate his letters. I would sit in the staffroom between classes in the language school ‘reading’ them. One day my American colleague and friend, Ella, asked who it was from. ‘A French ex.’ I said ‘I met him when I was a student, and I can’t seem to stop him writing to me, even though we split up.’
‘Wow' Ella said 'what does he say then?'
‘Actually I can hardly understand his letters.’ I admitted for the first time 'But to be honest I really look forward to getting his letters…'
'Ah!' Ella said 'let me have a look, I studied French at University!'

Curiosity got the better of me and I let her read them through. 'Hey!' she said when she had finished, ‘He sure likes you a lot!’
‘No, but it’s all over!’ I replied, suddenly wondering if he had ever understand that it was over, and maybe I didn't make it very clear...
‘Not what he says here…’ and she translated a very moving part about him buying a house and thinking of me….us….together one day…