Good pals, or not?

THERE'S something very odd about the love/ hate relationship between the English and the French. We're neighbours, we've been at peace for a hundred years, and we've fought side-by-side in two world wars: but boy do we manage to get under each other's skin.

To the English, the French are supercilious foreigners with a funny accent, a fondness for garlic and an exaggerated sense of their country's importance.

To the French, the English are up-tight islanders who can't express their emotions, eat nothing but roast beef with soggy vegetables and don't have any culture.

Even the two languages are filled with subtle insults about the neighbours across the channel.

The English, for example, call a condom a 'French Letter' - and the French reciprocate by calling it a 'Capot Anglaise'.

The mutual animosity probably dates right back to 1066 and all that - even though William the Conqueror wasn't really a Frenchman at all, but more a displaced Viking.

Sadly, the Queen's visit to France this week to celebrate 100 years of peace between the two nations is unlikely to dispel it, not all at once, anyway.

There is, of course, far more to France and the French than the garlic-eating clich. There's French food, French wine, French style, and that wonderful attitude to life perhaps best expressed by the Gallic shrug.

In fact, when you think about it, there is plenty to be grateful to our French neighbours for. So what are the French really like? What do they actually think of us Brits? And, most important of all, should we ever forgive them for beating us in the Six Nations Championship?

To answer these questions and others, who better than a York couple, the husband English and the wife French, who have been married for more than 50 years?

An Englishman

on the French:

Retired York history professor Norman Hampson first fell in love with the French during the war. He was serving in the Royal Navy under a captain who, he says, reminded him of Captain Bligh.

"He was an absolutely appalling man," says the octogenarian, 82 tomorrow. Desperate to escape, he applied for a transfer - and was assigned as liaison officer to the Free French ship La Moqueuse (it means, he says delightedly, 'The Mocking Woman'). He found the Free French sailors refreshingly free of "naval bull****" and a little anarchic - and despite speaking nothing but the most basic schoolboy French, soon felt completely at home.

"My war aim very quickly became to stay on the ship until the end of the conflict!" he says.

He succeeded, spending two years on the ship, first in the Eastern Mediterranean and then supporting the Normandy landings in 1944.

He met Jacqueline, the sister of one of the French officers on La Moqueuse, in Paris in 1945, and within three years they were married.

Now fluent in French, and having been married to a Frenchwoman for more than 50 years, he must surely qualify as a Francophile.

So what is it about the French he likes so much?

What is the secret of the French character?

And why are the English so ambivalent about the French?

Last questions first. "The most violent anti-semites are people who have never met a Jew," he says, "and the most violent Francophobes are people who have never been to France."

Englishmen who have been to France only once and were treated a bit rudely by a ticket collector can easily jump to the wrong conclusion about the French, he says. "But if he was a bit off-hand, it's possible his wife was in a bad mood that morning."

Which leads him to the first difference between the French and the English. "The English ticket inspector will be very polite, but will not necessarily give you what you want!

"The Frenchman may get very worked up about it, but in the end he will give you what you want!"

It is not really very useful to talk about 'national character', he stresses, because people are all different. But he's great at putting his finger on some of the differences between the English and the French.

The English, he says, are always worried that the French are laughing at them: but at the same time feel superior because they see Britain as the land of Liberty.

The French made a mess of the French revolution, but nevertheless feel culturally superior. "French people rather despise Shakespeare because he was an uneducated man," he says. "He was chaotic and anarchic and he made up his own rules. The French feel that if he was educated, he would have observed the rules like Racine!"

There are many things he loves about the French. Not their food, especially. "I'm not a great gourmet," he says. But their wine, certainly; their language - it's more precise than English, he says, and less poetic - and their love of culture.

He says ordinary French people, he says, are probably better educated and more culturally aware than ordinary English people.

He gives an example from his naval days. "On my English ship, if the radio happened to be playing classical music, it would be switched off. The French would say 'there's some Beethoven on tonight, let's listen to that!'"

A Frenchwoman

on the English:

Jacqueline Hampson admits that her heart lies somewhere in the middle of the English Channel, half way between England and France.

"I'm equally at home in both countries," she says, with a scarcely discernible French accent.

Nevertheless, as a Frenchwoman who has lived in England for more than 50 years - 27 of them spent teaching French in secondary school - she must have an interesting perspective on the Brits.

So what does she make of us? There are many qualities in the English she admires, she says.

The first that really impressed her was the stiff-upper-lip, 'spirit of the Blitz' quality that prevailed in London when she first came to the country in 1945.

In fact many French people of her generation, she says, still feel grateful to the British for holding the line against the Nazis early in the war, before the Americans joined in.

She also loves the English way of understating things, our sense of modesty, and the British self-help spirit - the way in which, if we want something doing, we'll form a committee and get on and do it.

The French tend to rely on the state to do things for them instead, she says.

Then there is the English sense of humour. "It is based on self-deprecation," she says. "French humour is very different, very intellectual and witty."

She even claims to admire English cooking. All right, when she first came to Britain, she admits, she was shocked by the quantity of boiled vegetables everywhere.

But English cuisine has improved greatly since then, and while British food is still perhaps a little less diverse than French, the gap is far smaller than it was.

"Many English people are very, very good cooks!" she says.

She does have one thing to take us to task over, however - our apparent complete lack of appreciation for visual art. She finds it difficult to understand, she says, why so few English people ever visit an art gallery.

Easy to answer, that one. She's obviously never seen Tracey Emin's bed.

An Englishman and a Frenchman are walking along the beach.

They find a lantern and a genie pops out. "I will give you each one wish" he says.

The Frenchman thinks for a while. "I want a wall around France, so that no one can come into our precious country," he says.

With a wave of his hand, the genie grants the wish - and the whole of France is surrounded by a giant wall.

The Englishman scratches his head then asks the genie: "I'm very curious. Can you tell me more about this wall?"

"Well, it's about 150 feet high, 50 feet thick and nothing can get in or out," the genie explains.

"In that case," says the Englishman, "my wish is that you fill it up with water."

Updated: 10:12 Wednesday, April 07, 2004