The first day we went down to Yverdon, the Tuesday after we arrived in Gryon, I wasn’t in a good mood. I can’t tell you why, there was nothing in particular; I just woke up a bit dull.

 It was an unusual feeling because I’d been travelling on such a high since we’d left Australia, but you always have to come down, even when you’re in the middle of Europe about to experience your first white Christmas. I could have picked a better day for the descent though, a day that didn’t involve meeting our soon to be landlord and all the kids teachers for the first time.

 

So driving into Yverdon that morning I didn’t notice how beautiful the town we were going to be living in for the next six month was. I saw the huge power lines that ran across the ploughed dirt paddocks surrounding the villages that were dotted around Yverdon. We drove past a collection of rectangle plots of dirt down near the highway bypass, filled with dead or dying plants. Every rectangle of dirt had a ramshackle shed at the end of it which looked like it would fall over in a strong wind. Having just come from Italy where people were squashed into every spare corner of space, I thought the sheds were some sort of alternative housing for the poor. Yes I know, very naïve. All it took was a very simple conversation in French, without the use of a dictionary, for me to understand that the rectangular plots were actually part of a community garden. The plots of dirt with their sheds were very much loved and cared for, and the only reason they were full of dead plants was of course because it was freezing, and way too cold for anything to stick up a green shoot.

 

When we pulled up at the Moggy’s, the house where we were going to be living for the next six months, I noticed the power lines, the highway in the distance and the fact that we had to park in a car park three hundred metres away from the actual house. I didn’t see the snow capped Alps or the stunning Jura mountain range behind us. Didn’t notice the paddocks that spread out towards the mountains wrapping themselves around tiny villages as the need arose.

 

We followed Christine down a narrow path which ran between the houses. We could almost have been back in one of the old villages that we’d explored in Italy except that this village looked like it had only been built ten, fifteen years ago. Christine led us in through a back garden gate, across a lawn and into a back yard which shared its fence line with a vineyard. There were three plastic slippery dips set out on the slope of the grass and plastic cars ready for Poppy and Kai to ride on a blonde tiled patio area. Poppy and Kai raced towards the slippery dip before Christine had even knocked on the front door.

 

Standing outside the front door listening to Poppy and Kai squeal and giggle as they slid down the slippery dip and tumbled down the hill, I took a deep breath and tried to lift the dullness that had been in my chest since I’d got out of bed. The yard was fantastic, big and quiet, heaps of room for the kids to play. The view from the front door was spectacular, the Alps, the vineyard, the lake of Yverdon and the Jura off to the right. It looked like the centre ville would be an easy ride for Jack and Noah on their bikes. The house really was perfect for us.

 

Then the door opened and we met Madame Moggy for the first time. A heavy set woman in her mid fifties, with a dark brown orangey hair that she had died in an effort to keep the greys away. She had the olive skin that a lot Italians are blessed with but there was a hint of yellow signalling that maybe her kidneys, or liver, or something important, wasn’t working as well as it should be. When she smiled and put out her hand to shake ours, her narrow eyes almost disappeared in to her cheeks.

 

‘Bienvenue, bienvenue,’ She said over and over speaking French with a thick Italian accent. She held the door open wide for us to come in. Kai and Poppy, who’d already had enough of the slippery dip, ducked past me to go inside. I saw Madame Moggy look down at their feet and listened to her say something in French to Christine. I didn’t need to be good at French to know she was talking about their shoes.

 

‘Shoes off,’ I said calling the kids back outside while I smiled at the woman who we was going to be sharing a front door with for the next six months. The kids took their shoes off and skipped past me going inside while I was still undoing my laces.

 

The front door of the house opened onto a small tiled landing. From the landing there were four stairs going up and eight going down. It was the first time I realised that the words ‘They’ll be living underneath you’ didn’t mean there would be a separate entrance, a separate house or flat, but instead that we would be sharing a two story house with people we didn’t know.

 

There was another door at the top of the four stairs with opaque glass, that door would be our wall of privacy. I spotted a keyhole, it would be fine, the door could be locked. I walked up the stairs and into the top level of the two-story house. Blonde rectangular marble tiles on the floor, white walls and a wooden kitchen that I could have sworn was made out of a rare Tasmanian timber if we weren’t all the way on the other side of the world.

 

There was no hint in the house that we would be moving in in three weeks time. There were three bedrooms, one for Pete and me, which would be fine, and then two for the kids. One of the bedrooms for the kids had a single bed in it with drawers that slid out from underneath it plus a cot, the other bedroom had a futon couch that looked like it would probably fold out into a bed, but that still left us with two kids sleeping on the floor or one of them squeezing into a cot.

 

I tried to explain to Christine in French that the lack of beds was going to be a problem. Either my French had dramatically improved or Christine had got very good at reading hand signals because she understood straight away and launched into a long discussion with Madame Moggy. Madame Moggy laughed and nodded her head so much that I began to wonder if there was someone somewhere pulling a string, ‘Si, si,’ she said.

 

In the end Christine turned around to me and said ‘OK, all good.’ Proving that she was still ahead of me on the number of English words she knew compared to my French.

 

Madame Moggy had us all sit down at her highly polished timber dining table, on her highly polished timber chairs, the seats of which were covered in material that is impossible to sponge. She then produced coffee and chocolates. The smell of the strong coffee filled the small upstairs area. The coffee was served in tiny espresso cups, the type that only take one swallow to empty, and was as black the dark chocolate she brought out to go with it. The kids who’d seen enough of the house and were back outside again by this stage came running back in with their shoes on when they smelt the coffee, knowing there would be biscuits or chocolate to go with it.

 

‘No, no, no,’ Madame Moggy said, waving her pointer finger at the children whilst smiling so big that her eyes couldn’t be seen at all.

 

‘Shoes off,’ I said, this time through clenched teeth.

 

The kids came back in and took handfuls of the chocolate they were offered. ‘Outside,’ I told them, imagining brown smudged streaks running across the white walls at hand height. ‘Eat the chocolate outside.’

 

Madame Moggy was not impressed that I didn’t want a coffee or a chocolate. She laughed making her eyes disappear again. ‘Si, si,’ she said and patted her stomach, ‘Si, si,’ and then something else in French that sounded more like Italian to me, she was obviously talking about how she thought I was watching my figure. The fact I didn’t like the cheap chocolate she was handing out and never drank coffee wasn’t something I was going to even attempt to try and get across to her.

 

Before we left she led me into the kitchen and showed me a red tea towel that was hanging over the wooden cupboard door under the sink.

 

‘Tres importante, tres importante. OK vous comprendrez? Oui? Vous comprendrez?’

 

I didn’t have a clue what she was going on about, but for some reason or other the red tea towel needed to stay over the door. I nodded and smiled back at, her saying, ‘Oui, oui, OK.’ Christine came up behind me and said it was ‘pour l’eau.’ The water? In case any was splashed from the sink I guessed. Family Aubort, with their motto of seek and destroy, were going to do well with this woman. She showed me another cupboard near the front door as we were leaving, the front door to the second level not the house. There was obviously some important rule that went with this cupboard too, something to so with the how the two doors should be closed together, but I couldn’t quite figure it out, so I nodded and smiled and said, ‘Oui, oui.’

 

We said Au revoir at the front door and left Madame Moggy standing there waving. I could see all the reasons why Christine had chosen the house, in so many it was perfect for us, but I couldn’t help wonder, if this Madame Moggy, had any idea of what she was in for, living underneath six Auborts.

 

The next appointment was Jack and Noah’s school. We arrived with two minutes to spare, right on bell time. There were kids everywhere dressed in everything from plain jeans and a zip up jackets, to tight black pants with silver chains looped through where a belt should have been and pink hair. There were teenage boys with arms flung around girl’s shoulders while they yelled at someone across the concrete quadrangle. There was a group of boys and girls laughing. They were watching a boy with black hair that was flattened in a sideways swoop across his forehead, shove another kid repeatedly who was walking just in front of him.

 

There we seven us, Pete and me, the two little kids, Jack and Noah and Christine. Christine didn’t seem to notice the quadrangle that was full of rebel teenagers. She made a straight line for the school office saying, ‘Excuse moi,’ as she went, clearing a path for us. It was like the parting of a sea, everyone moved slowly out of the way, stopping to look as we went past. Poppy and Kai were oblivious, playing a game where you weren’t allowed to step on the cracks, but Jack and Noah kept their eyes down, staring at the concrete, I tried to ignore the churning in my stomach and grabbed Pete’s clammy hand.

 

We were shown to a meeting room and were told the teacher who was going to talk with us wouldn’t be long. We all sat down around a large rectangle table, Jack and Noah up one end together.

 

Christine pulled a couple of folders out of her bag and started to spread paper out in front of her. Pete and I sat there without even a pen between us and Jack said, ‘Mum, they’re a bunch of rebels, I’m not going this school.’

 

Christine, who had put in so much effort, to find schools and a house for us, thankfully had no idea what Jack had said.

 

‘You don’t know that,’ I said, with my best smile stretched across my face.

 

‘Yes I do, you saw them, they’re a bunch of rebels.’

 

‘No you don’t Jack, you can’t tell just by looking at people what they’re like.’

 

‘Emos, punks, rebels, I saw all of them, they’re all there mum.’

 

‘It’s just because they don’t have uniforms on, that’s all, because they can where what they want. That’s what teenagers do, express themselves.’

 

‘Yeah right.’

 

‘Lets just wait and see what the teacher’s got to say, this might just be the best school you’ve ever been to.’

 

Noah was sitting next to Jack with his lips closed tight over his teeth looking at the patterns his fingers were making on the desk. We had only just figured out a few days ago, with the use of dictionaries, that Noah would be going into high school, not primary school. The leap from primary school to high school in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language had seemed huge, but now, after walking through the crowded quadrangle, it seemed almost insurmountable.

 

The teacher walked into the room. She was young, maybe in her late twenties, early thirties. She was dressed in a straight skirt and fitted blouse, with a short haircut. Christine stood up as soon as she entered the room and introduced herself and us, shaking the woman’s hand.

 

‘Bonjour, Je suis Madame Rochat, et voici Monsieur et Madame Aubort, et les enfants.’

 

‘Bonjour, Je suis Madame Chatting.’ Pete and I stood up and shook her hand using the one word we knew well, ‘Bonjour.’

 

Christine and Madame Chatting chatted away in French. Pete and I tried to keep up smiling and nodding when we thought it was appropriate but it must have been obvious that we didn’t have a clue. A little way into the discussion we were asked by Madame Chatting, ‘Vous parlez Francais?’

 

The answer should have been a simple ‘no’, but we went for ‘a petit peu’, and offered ourselves up for embarrassment when we didn’t understand any of what Madame Chitigny said next. Christine valiantly came to our rescue and acted as our interpreter. Madame Chitigny would say something and then Christine would tell us in the simplest French words she could find, speaking very slowly, and then, when we still didn’t understand, Christine would say it all over again choosing different words, hopefully ones that we might know.

 

This slow process went on for about fifteen minutes before Madame Chatting, as if by magic, started speaking English. Pete and I were so stunned that there was a few seconds silence before either of us thought to answer the question she was asking.

 

When I did answer, she looked down at the papers in front of her on the desk and filled in a form. I looked sideways at Christine who looked just as dumb founded as I had been, and raised my eye brows in a question of ‘What the hell?’ Christine smiled and suppressed a giggle, turning the palms of her hands up to the ceiling and shrugging her shoulders.

 

Madame Chatting spoke again in English, having to search occasionally for the right words but otherwise seemed to have flawless English.

 

‘You speak very good English,’ I said before I answered her next question, feeling like I needed to give her some encouragement in case she decided it wasn’t a good idea after all.

 

‘Oh, no,’ she said, and to my surprise blushed.

 

‘You do, much better than my French,’ I didn’t say which wouldn’t be hard. ‘Where did you learn?’

 

‘At school. We all learn at school.’ I had to bite back the words, ‘Are you serious?’ I’d done German at school for three years and could now proudly count to twenty and say Guten Tag.

 

The rest of the meeting was carried out in English with the occasional lapse into French, when Christine and Madame Chatting would discuss something, then Madame Chatting would switch back to English as if it was something she did everyday.

 

Everything was going along fine until Madame Chatting told us that Jack and Noah would be starting in the welcome classes in their years. I asked her what a welcome class was and she told me it was a class for children who couldn’t speak French. She said the class existed primarily for the purpose of teaching French. She said Jack and Noah would go into a normal class for sport and if their maths proved to be good enough they would move into a normal maths class once they had a bit of grip on the French.

 

I asked her which countries the kids in the welcome class came from.

 

‘Mainly Portugal,’ she said, ‘But we get kids from everywhere, Brazil, Africa, Thailand, Italy and now Australia,’ she said smiling at Jack and Noah who were slowly wilting at the end of the table.

 

OK. So multi-culturalism is good, I’m all for it, but we brought our kids to Switzerland to be saturated in French, not to learn Portuguese.

 

‘What language do they speak in class?’ I asked.

 

‘French, they have to speak French.’

 

‘But if you’ve got a whole group of kids who speak Portuguese, aren’t they going to speak Portuguese to each other.’

 

‘Yes, it happens sometimes, but then they’re told that they have to speak French.’

 

‘And they do?’

 

‘Yes, most of the time.’

 

‘How long does it take these kids to get out of the welcome class and into the main stream classes?’

 

‘About eighteen months, sometimes two years. It depends how hard they want to work.’

 

Now my stomach was really churning. Our kids only had six months to try and pick up a language they’d never spoken a word of, they didn’t have eighteen months or a year, their best chances had to be saturation, surely?

 

Madame Chaatigny pulled a form out from her folder and said, ‘Have you got one of these?’ Passing the form across to me.

 

‘Ah no,’ I said hading it back.

‘No?’

 

‘No.’

 

She looked a bit confused as if we’d somehow slipped through a perfect system and then said, ‘I’ll go and get you one.’

 

As soon as she left the room I turned to Pete.

 

‘I don’t want them in a welcome class. We didn’t bring them all the way here to sit in a class with kids where they are more likely to pick up Portuguese than French.’

 

‘She did say it was compulsory to speak French in class,’ Pete said.

 

‘Yeah right, she wasn’t very convincing, it sounded like she’s always having to pull them up for speaking Portuguese.’

 

‘But it’s a special class for teaching French. They’ll teach them the grammar and structure of the language. It has to be good for them, they wouldn’t get that in one of the normal classes, they’d just have to stumble along blindly.’

 

‘But that’s how they’d learn, by being saturated in it.’

 

‘But they will be anyway, they have to speak French in class.’

 

‘That’s if they can speak French and if the rules of speaking French in class are enforced.’

 

‘She said they were. I think they will be, otherwise it wouldn’t work’ Pete said.

 

I turned to Christine for support. She’d been following our discussion in English amazingly well. She agreed with me, the kids had come to Switzerland to go to school with kids who spoke French.

 

‘I’m going to ask,’ I said turning back towards Pete. ‘See if they’ll put them in a different class.’

 

‘That’s fine, you ask. I’m not convinced either way. I can see benefits in both methods.

 

When Madame Chitigny came back into the room I jumped in before she could start on a new topic.

 

‘Is it possible for the kids to go straight into a normal class?’

 

‘Well no, the welcome class has been set up especially for kids who can’t speak French, your kids can’t speak French.’

 

‘I know that, but we’ve come here sort of like an exchange student would, so the kids can be thrown in the deep end, learn by saturation. They don’t have eighteen months to learn French; we’re only here for six months. I think they might have a better chance of picking up the language if they’re completely saturated in it.’

 

Madame Chitigny sat staring at me, I thought I was either about to get in trouble and be sent to the back of the class room or that I’d spoken too fast and she hadn’t understood what I’d said. Christine, seeing a gap, put the case forward in French.

 

After Christine had finished Madame Chitigny turned to me and said ‘I can see your point of view, and I understand that the children are only here for six months, and you could be right, it might be a better in this case. But I don’t make the decisions. I’ll have to go and talk to my boss.’

 

‘OK, great,’ I said, giving her my best encouragement smile.

 

As soon as she walked out the door Jack said, ‘I’m not going in that class with all of those rebel Portuguese kids. Don’t make me mum.’

 

‘No ones going to make you do anything,’ I said, not adding the, “Not unless we have to that is.” ‘We’ll find a different school if we have to Jack, if this one’s not right.’

 

‘I’m not going to this one, it’s not right.’

 

Noah was sitting beside Jack. He looked pale, his chin was resting down on his flat hands that were spread out on the table and his eyes were half closed.

 

Madame Chitigny came back about ten minutes latter with a woman who must have been in her mid fifties and had one of those tightly set fuzzy pumper hair dos.

 

This woman had no hesitation in speaking English. Her English was clear and careful with an accent somewhere between American and South African. She spoke loud her voice filling the room. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was the principal of the school.

 

She told us with a lovely smile on her face that it wouldn’t be possible for the children to go into a normal class. They wouldn’t be able to keep up and they’d be bored. And she was sure that we knew that bored children didn’t learn anything, they just caused trouble. The school had the welcome classes for a reason and that was so that children could learn French properly. There would of course be opportunities for our children to mix with the French speaking children, sport class and the ski camp that would be happening four weeks after school started. She said she hoped very much that our children would be going along to that.

 

Unlike with Madame Chitigny there was no room for discussion. At the end of her speech she smiled, shook our hands and said, ‘I’m sure you’re children will be very happy here.’

We left the meeting with information sheets, forms to be filled in and two timetables that at first glimpse looked horrendous and would have to be looked at more carefully later. For the first time in my life I’d had the barrier that language can create slammed down in front of me and been told, ‘don’t even think about trying to cross it until you can prove you can fit in.’

 

We were late for our next meeting, fifteen minutes. I was ready for a good ticking off in French from Poppy and Kai’s teachers but the woman who came out greeted us with a big smile and handshake, saying in French that it wasn’t a problem at all that we were late. Again all the introductions were Madame and Monsieur as if none of us had a first name.

 

We went into a large room with one of those big old oval tables that you used to find in boardrooms. Poppy and Kai were given paper and coloured pencils; Jack and Noah sat slumped in their seats.

 

The meeting started off in French again. It turned out the woman we were talking to wasn’t Kai or Poppy’s teacher at all, but someone high up in the administration chain. Christine again interpreted for us in a slow simple French that we got the gist of most of the time but sometimes missed completely. This woman was probably faster than Madame Chatigny to start speaking English; I think it only took her ten minutes. Christine didn’t let it pass this time. She laughed and said to the woman in French something to the effect of, ‘you’re kidding me aren’t you? You’ve let me stumble along while you can actually understand every word they’re saying?’

 

We found out that Poppy and Kai were going to two lovely little schools. Poppy would have twenty-two kids at her school and Kai twenty-five. They both had young enthusiastic teachers that couldn’t wait to meet them. Kai’s teacher apparently spoke really good English, (but whether he would actually use it or not was another issue); he also spoke fluent German which he taught in class. His intention was for Kai to not only be able to speak French by the time he left but also German. Poppy’s teacher’s English wasn’t as good we were told, but certainly good enough to get by.

 

When we were finished talking about Kai and Poppy I took advantage of the fact that we were sitting in front of someone high up in the school hierarchy chain and asked the Madame across the oval table if she had anything to do with the high school, her response was ‘Why?’ So without even taking a breath I launched into my ‘why Jack and Noah shouldn’t be in the welcome class’ spiel. Pete sat there with a ‘go for it’ smile on his face, more like an interested spectator at the football who hadn’t quite decided which side he was barracking for yet, but was interested to know the results.

 

When I finished I was surprised to hear our friendly Madame across the table agreeing with me whole-heartedly. She said she felt exactly the same way, that yes, children learnt better by being saturated in a language rather than being isolated with a group who were all learning the language. But she said unfortunately there were some of her colleagues who didn’t agree. She finished the conversation by saying she would talk to her colleagues and see what she could do, but she said she couldn’t promise anything, after all, the welcome class had been set up especially for children like my children. My heart that had been soaring dropped a notch or two but managed to stay elevated at a level of optimism that saw the next six months with Jack and Noah sitting in a class full of kids speaking French, not Portuguese.

 

The discussion about Jack and Noah continued at Christine’s house that night when Christine’s daughter Sandrine turned up to say hello. Sandrine is a teacher who, surprise, surprise, happens to speak very good English. I couldn’t let the opportunity go by without getting another opinion of someone who was in the field. At first she was reluctant to say what she thought, saying that the decision was mine, that it really didn’t matter what she thought. But after she’d finished feeding Aurianne, her six-month-old baby and had given her to me for a cuddle she said, ‘If you really want my opinion…’

 

I nodded putting Aurianne up on my shoulder. ‘ I really want your opinion, you know the system I don’t.’

 

‘I wouldn’t put my kids anywhere near that class. I think you’re exactly right, you want them going home speaking French not Portuguese.’

 

So I was right I thought, rubbing Aurianne’s back and thinking of the principal with the fuzzy pumper hair.

 

‘But the other thing you really don’t want is for them to end up in the VGO class.’

 

‘What’s a VGO class?’

 

‘The lowest class, they’ll get nothing out of that except a couple of good fist fights.’

 

OK, so the choices were looking good.

 

‘And what if they say they have to go in this welcome class, what other choices have I got?’

 

‘I could ask at my school if you want, see if the kids could go there? It’s a smaller school and they don’t have a welcome class. It’s further away it’d be a hassle to get them there.’

 

‘We’d figure something out if it was the right place for them.’ I said, excited at the possibility of another option. ‘Have you had any kids that don’t speak French at the school?’

 

‘Yes there’s one kid I know quiet well, a kid from Brazil.’

 

‘And how did he go.’

 

‘As far as I know good, he was fluent with his French after three months and fitting in no worries.’

 

Perfect I thought, ‘So you’ll ask for me?’

 

‘Yes, if that’s what you want, I’ll ask.’

 

That night back in the chalet after the kids had asked every possible question there was to ask about the skiing expedition that would start at 8am sharp the next morning, Jack gave me a kiss on the cheek goodnight and said, ‘You won’t make me go to that school will you mum?’

 

‘No honey, I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to.’ He squeezed me tight before he ran off up the stairs to bed.

 

 

 

 

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