OOh ee Aah

"French. Who knows anything about French?" he said abruptly, just after he'd walked into the classroom.

We stopped messing around and looked up. There was this large, florid-faced man with baggy trousers clenching and unclenching his hands as he stood in front of us.

"They live in France," said some bright student in the front row.

"And where's France?" asked the florid-faced man, smiling sweetly.

"Just below England," said somebody on the other side of the room.

"Oh, really." The French teacher looked a little surprised. He peered under the desk. "You mean it's under the floor?" he asked.

Everybody laughed as he unrolled a map of Europe and pinned it to the board.

"No sir, just below on the map.

"Ah, you mean about here, on the wall?

I could see French was going to be a difficult language to learn.

After finally establishing where France actually was we went on to the important matter of how to speak French. "You'll find it very different from English. The whole of the pronunciation is different, so we will start by learning the pronunciation." We settled in for a long haul. "We have words like 'accueil', 'eleve', 'printemps', and many more which are pronounced using vowel sounds we don't have in English.

I suddenly woke up. The French teacher was making noises like a donkey braying. What was happening

"All right, all together: EEOOII.

The class joined in, most of them enthusiastically, but there were a few giggles, and some not very well concealed sniggers.

"Again. EEOOII.

Everybody roared this ridiculous noise across the room.

"Now. ANHH.

What was that? There were a few oink-oinks from the back of the class. "Same as that? Anh? Didn't hear you. Anh?"

"Stop being silly," bellowed the florid French master.

Silly? Us being silly? We didn't start this ridiculous business of farmyard impressions. The whole thing was idiotic. But we spent the next thirty minutes going oink, anhk, aah, ooh, ooii, until the bell went ding-a-ling and we all packed up.

The following day we did it all again.

I began to have serious doubts about this school. There was something fundamentally unsound about everything we did. Were all the staff patients who had escaped from the local loony bin?