Speaking French in Montreal

In Montreal, if you speak French, the francophones are pleased, yet if you get stuck and speak English, they are happy to speak English. And they speak English without the accent that French people have.

English is my mother tongue, but the reason I learned French is because of Montreal, and the story goes back over a hundred years to a little Scottish village where my great grandfather became "the carpenter who drowned in the moss".

This drowned carpenter left a widow with four children, two teenage daughters and two little boys. The elder daughter, Margaret Jean, set out at the age of 16 to find a new life in Canada, at Montreal with "a pound in her pocket". When she had settled, and found work, she sent for her mother and two little brothers, while her sister, stayed in Glasgow, looked after by her grandmother's cousin.

Some ten years later, friends of my Aunty Jean visited her when their ship docked in Canada, and she asked one of them to take a parcel back to her sister in Glasgow, another port. Thus, that ship's engineer met and married my grandmother.

My grandfather was a seasick sailor whose family hailed from Liverpool. At that time, his ship often went to Le Havre, a small port on the north coast of Normandy, too small to load and unload the ships very quickly, so he tended to spend more time in France than in Liverpool. So he moved his young wife and first born child to live at Le Havre for a few years before world war I, which is how our family came to know two sisters from La famille Moulin.

Half a century later, one of these sisters and her nephew's family taught me to speak French. What goes around comes around, and now I speak French in Montreal, where my grandmother's sister spoke only English.