Between one side and the other

When I was small my parents used school French when they didn't want us children to know what they were talking about. I was enraged beyond control at not understanding. It was a vast injustice that they would explain English words I didn't know but not these ones.

When I was 11 we went abroad for the first time to visit my aunt who lived in Paris. Somewhere on the way, in a hotel room in Normandy, my mum taught me to say 'A quelle heure est le diner?' and told me to go downstairs, say this to the person behind the counter, memorise the reply and bring it back to her. I found the hotel man and made the sounds. He understood! Elation! I listened to his reply then carefully carried the precious sounds back through the carpeted lobby, up the staircase with its cream walls, along the dark corridor to the heavy door to our room. I didn't drop them and when I repeated them to my mum she understood. I can still feel the unfolding inside me.

My French teaching at school was appalling and I was regularly banished to the coat racks for allowing my boredom and frustration to leak. A friend and I used to take turns doing the homework then copying it from each other on the train to school because actually doing it was so unbearably tedious. But one day we were reported by a train passenger we didn't know was a trainee teacher and we had to learn to be more surreptitious. At 16 I gave up school French determined to learn it properly - in France - when I could. I resented La Manche: On my bedroom wall I stuck a copy of a Victorian etching of an imagined channel tunnel - behind the horse and carriage were gas lights attached to the wooden planks that held out the sea.

Two years later I left school and went to Paris to be an au pair and enrol in college. I don't remember how I got there - probably the train from Victoria to Dover, the ferry across the channel, then the train that shocked me by running ran along the streets alongside the cars. I do remember travelling back to London for Christmas the only way I could afford: on an uncomfortable, crowded bus that took 14 hours - past the flat fields of white crosses (they preoccupied me so much that I still imagine them stretching almost all the way along that road from Paris to the coast, far larger than their real geography), into the Calais queues, released onto the ferry to stare at the marbled bow-wake, then back onto the bus through endless Kent to the London suburbs and the city traffic jams. I did that journey several times. Later, while I was a student, the route to Paris was to hitch to the coast, find someone who'd booked a car onto the ferry and ask to be temporary passengers. When the ferry companies got wise to that and stopped it the options became more expensive.

For the last 18 years, I've done the journey by Eurostar far more times than I can count and still think it's magic to climb onto a train in the middle of London and leap off it a newspaper-read later in the middle of Paris. It's quicker than going from Oxford to Manchester.

So, here I am.