Farming Breeds: Beatrice – the French exchange student
Join us for a funny, irreverent look at some of the characters that make the British countryside what it is. Our tongue-in-cheek guide puts characters such as the retired Major, the “perfect” next-door farmer and the young tearaway under the microscope. For now, meet Beatrice, the French exchange student, who is struggling with more than just the language…
Beatrice has just turned 17. A farmer’s daughter from Brittany, she is studying for her baccalaureat at college in Nantes.
It was her parents’ idea that she come on this exchange with the Wilkes – a “tres agreable” West Country farming family they met on a study tour last year. She would feel at home on a dairy farm, they thought, and it would really help her English.
“Allo, good moaning,” Beatrice says each day as she sidles into the kitchen.
“Allo, Allo,” says Tom, the cowman, having coffee at the table. Then, when she’s out of earshot, he adds: “I vill say dis only once.”
Beatrice’s English, although good, is still the subject of much merriment at Valley Farm.
Her eating habits have also raised a snigger or two, especially on the first day when she poured her coffee into her cereal bowl then started dunking her toast in it.
“What you need, my girl, is a nice traditional English breakfast,” said Mrs Wilkes, eager that her own children shouldn’t follow Beatrice’s example.
But the prospect of soggy fried bread, sausages and undercooked eggs “sunny side up” fills Beatrice with gloom.
She’s still slightly suspicious of Mr Wilkes’s enthusiasm for kissing her four times on each cheek every time they pass in the yard, And was it really an accident the third time he burst into the bathroom while she was having a shower?
She misses Jean Patrick, too. They’d only been going out for a few weeks before term ended. But how she longs for his easy conversation, the whiff of Pastis on his breath, the strange thrill she gets riding through the village on the back of his moped.
Instead, she has to put up with the unwanted attentions of her English host. She’s still slightly suspicious of Mr Wilkes’s enthusiasm for kissing her four times on each cheek every time they pass in the yard, And was it really an accident the third time he burst into the bathroom while she was having a shower?
Tom thinks the whole thing’s hilarious. “That won’t last long round here,” he says pointing to a snail on the ground outside the milking parlour.
Beatrice doesn’t see the funny side. She’s having problems of her own. The Devon dialect, for starters.
And as for this strange obsession with the weather, the Royal Family and something called “The Archers” – it’s beyond comprehension.
She’s always suspected the English were a little mad. Maybe it was something to do with all the beef they eat? “Our ministre says the BSE was rife here,” she says, defiantly.
Tom bites his tongue. “Bloody frogs,” he mutters under his breath. His comment doesn’t go unnoticed.
Beatrice wants to be fond of the English. Maybe work in London for a while after leaving college or perhaps tour Scotland with Jean Patrick on his moped.
But for now she just wants to go home.