by Gina Yashere
The French course I took was at a school in Touraine. It was a three-week course, but I had told my mother it was for a month so I’d have some time to go off and explore France alone afterwards. This was the first time I’d had any freedom, and I wanted to enjoy it.
I fell in love with the freedom, and this was the trip that truly sparked my love for travel and adventure. I was completely free to do what I wanted, to go to bed when I wanted, eat what I wanted, socialize with whomever I wanted, and even kiss someone if I wanted! The irony was that although I had this complete freedom, I didn’t go crazy. I enjoyed myself, but even to this day, I’ve never done drugs, I’ve never done any binge drinking, I’ve never engaged in casual sex. It turns out that all I wanted to do was be able to socialize with people and have clean, innocent fun. Which is what I did.
I even managed to have a little romance while I was in Southern France. An older guy from Cameroon was taking an English course at the same school, and we’d just kiss and hold hands, and I was able to practice my French with him. It was innocent and sweet. I mean, he was twenty-seven, so he did try to persuade me to have sex with him, but I made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, and he was very cool about it. Our time spent together meant my French improved, as did my French kissing. This was my first experience with the opposite sex, and it was a good one.
The course was attended by a mix of people from all over the world. Folks from the US, Canada, Spain, Germany, all came to this place in Touraine to do these French courses, and I was excited to meet the world through them.
There were several different classes, and each class had about twenty-five to thirty people. Although I thought I was quite fluent in French, I was placed in the intermediate class, which I was a bit peeved about. I thought my spoken French was good, but apparently it was not good enough.
I enjoyed the course, and there was plenty of free time to explore the local town with my fellow students, but after the three-week course ended, I had my sights on Paris. Never mind that I had no accommodations set up, I barely had any money, and I also had no idea how I was going to get there.
Luckily, I had made some great friends during this course, and there was a girl, Helga, who had an Interrail Pass, whereby as a sixteen-year-old she could travel around Europe for next to nothing. She lent me her card, to use with the instructions that I was to send it back to her when I was done with it. The card had her picture on it, but this being the pre-card-swiping late ’80s, nobody truly checked these things, so I was able to get to Paris by pretending to be a blond Scandinavian.
This is how I ended up at the majestic Gare du Nord alone. I had no idea where I was going to sleep, and as I stood in the middle of the station staring and looking around in awe, like the vulnerable young girl I was, a white guy strode up to me and began to converse with me in French. When I told him I had just arrived and that I didn’t know where I was going to stay, his face lit up like he’d just won the lottery. He turned and started frantically signaling for another white guy to come over, like “We’ve got one! We’ve got one!” I saw the second guy sprint over, and I was suddenly sandwiched between these two dudes telling me they could help me, that they knew all the good youth hostels, and to come with them immediately. I may have been a seventeen-year-old sheltered kid on my first trip abroad, but I still had some street smarts. My Spidey sense began tingling immediately at their obvious excitement. I told them thanks but no thanks, and they left disappointed. I never gave it another thought till years later, reading stories of young runaways being kidnapped and trafficked, and I was hit by the sudden realization of how close I had come to being one of those girls.
There were a lot of other young people, backpackers, runaways, and adventurers like me at the station, and I quickly made friends with some of them. This is how I got the scoop on how to survive in Paris with no digs. The key was to spend your days sightseeing and exploring the city, then go back to the station to sleep at night. I was advised to sleep at a certain end of the station, because the guards would come out early in the morning and hose people down in their sleep—you’d be woken up by their screams, a morning wake-up call to pack your shit up and bounce. I had a little duffel bag with my clothes that I used as a pillow, and I slept at the station for a couple of nights, washing in the train station bathrooms, while adventuring around Paris in the day. I had one of those cheap little Polaroid cameras with seven rolls of film, and I had reserved my final roll just for Paris. I skipped a meal to save my last few French francs (as this was pre-euro) to pay to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Being on top of that tower was a symbolic triumph for me. I had always wanted to visit ever since I began studying French when I was eleven. Seeing the great expanse of Paris from so high above—the River Seine, the connection of bridges, the Arc de Triomphe—was like sticking a flag on the moon and claiming the territory of my own life. It was exhilarating. While up there, I asked a stranger to take a picture of me, since I was alone and had no companion to document this moment. That picture I still have to this day as a reminder of that carefree month and my coming of age.
During the last couple of days in France, I met an old Black guy while on one of my daytime jaunts. We chatted for a while, and he discovered I was sleeping at the Gare du Nord. He said, “Why are you sleeping in this station? Come with me. I’m not gonna touch you, nothing like that, but you need a proper bed to sleep in.” Maybe he seemed fatherly, maybe the novelty of station camping had worn off, maybe I was just tired of sleeping with an ear open for water hoses, but for some reason I cannot fathom to this day, I trusted him and followed him into the unknown. I hung out with him for a day. He was quite coy about the details of his life, but I learned he was from Guadeloupe, an archipelago in the Caribbean and one of France’s many colonies, via the slave trade. He’d left the island as a young man to live and work in France. He’d worked at the airport as a luggage handler till he’d left (fired, left, or retired, I wasn’t sure). That night, when it was time to sleep, he took me to an apartment. Before he knocked on the door, he turned to me and said, “This is my friend’s daughter’s apartment. I’m gonna tell them you’re my niece and you’re visiting so that we can sleep here.” That’s when it dawned on me that he was homeless. All day I had assumed that I’d be staying with him and his family. To this day I have no idea if he even had anybody. A young woman with a toddler in tow opened the door to the apartment. She wasn’t exactly ecstatic to see this man standing at her door, but she didn’t tell us to piss off either. He spoke quickly, obviously relaying his concocted story. She raised an eyebrow at me and allowed us into the apartment. She told us we could stay one night, and we shuffled in. At this point I felt a twinge of embarrassment. This wasn’t how I had been raised. My proud mother would have had a stroke had she known I was begging to sleep in a stranger’s house with a man I didn’t know. I silently vowed to extricate myself from this situation and get my ass back to England the following day. We slept on the floor in a spare bedroom of the apartment. All that for not even a bed! In the middle of the night his hand crept over my thigh. I slapped it away so hard that he withdrew like he’d been burned, and he didn’t try that shit again for the rest of the night. Nevertheless, I did not sleep well, and I silently berated myself all night for being so stupid. Time to go home. This adventure had run its course. The next day I thanked him for everything and left to get my prepaid ferry back over the English Channel. And aside from being mistaken for a prostitute in the southeastern city of Grenoble, to which I had been able to respond in French, “Va te faire enculer!” (“Go fuck yourself!”), it was, all in all, a delightful adventure.
I passed my A-level French a year later, and Mum was none the wiser of my adventures in France. As I see it, my grandmother had already predicted, before she died, that when she came back, she would travel the world, so I was merely fulfilling that prophecy.
10
Procrastination Is the Thief of Time
When I was a kid, there was a TV s
how called Jim’ll Fix It. It was hosted by Jimmy Savile, who, years after he died, was exposed as a colossal pedophile, but at the time he had the biggest kids show on TV. The premise of the show was that you wrote him a letter with some desire or wish you wanted to come true, and if you were one of the lucky ones, he’d read your letter out on TV and invite you on the show to grant your wish. Kids got to ride roller coasters while attempting to eat pies, perform with their favorite TV actors, and one kid even got to ride on a luggage carousel at the airport, like a suitcase. Every fun wish was granted.
At eight, I casually mentioned to my mum that I’d love to write to Jimmy to get a tour around a real-life chocolate factory, because, well . . . I was eight, chocolate is delicious, and that’s the kind of shit eight-year-olds wish for. My mother became incensed. “Idiot! Why don’t you ask for something useful? Tell him to take you to a hospital and show you how to be a doctor!” My mum was able to take the fun out of a fantasy.
I have a joke in one of my stand-up routines: My mum, while pregnant with me, is approached by someone who asks her, “Are you having a boy or a girl?” To which my mother replies, “I’m having a doctor.” My mum mapped out the future professional lives of her children based on characteristics we may or may not have had when we were toddlers. My mum told me I was clever, and therefore I had to do well at school. I believed her and internalized that narrative. I assumed I was smart, but looking back, I think I was pretty average academically. I strove to achieve the grades that would match my mum’s idea of my intelligence, and win Oncle’s money, so I did better at school than I might have done otherwise. My mum had used the best kind of reverse psychology on me.
When I was thirteen, kids were meant to pick the optional school subjects they were interested in. English, math, PE, and religious education were some of the compulsory subjects. My mum picked my optional subjects: physics and biology, due to “our” doctor aspirations. I never particularly enjoyed the sciences but scraped by with manageable grades. I picked German, as I’d discovered my love of languages, and since my school didn’t teach Spanish, I added German to the French I was already learning. I again sold this option to my mum by telling her that a multilingual doctor probably earned a lot more money.
Drama was also a compulsory subject up to age thirteen, but in later years it became optional. It was dropped from my curriculum, as Mum was not having me waste time with acting. Due to my boisterous character and my penchant for telling hilarious stories in class, with full act-outs, my drama teacher had once made the mistake of trying to convince my mum to let me continue with drama classes, as I had real acting talent. “She can act like a doctor until she becomes a doctor!” That was the end of the conversation.
Halfway through studying for A levels, kids are supposed to pick the universities they want to attend and apply to degree programs pending their exam results. There were schools to visit, forms to fill out, and advance arrangements to be made. I had done none of that. The reasons were twofold: One, I’m a huge procrastinator. I leave everything to the last possible minute, including studying for exams, which I tended to cram for two weeks before. Luckily, I’ve been blessed with a knack for memorizing stuff. Any subject that included coursework to be completed throughout the year, I avoided, as I would have failed. Anything that entailed me memorizing facts and formulas, I was good at. Two, university applications were long, laborious affairs that required an organized approach. Lots of filling out forms. I hate paperwork. You hear stories about accountants stealing millions from their celebrity clients, and on the one hand you think, How could they be so stupid? I would know if someone took thirty dollars! But on the other hand, I would sign any form you put in front of me if you told me you’d already read the other fifty pages of that form and it was all good. To this day, if you want to hide anything from me, put it in an application form. I’ll never see it. My attention span is too short for that amount of detail. I could see myself getting robbed blind because of my paper phobia. Suffice to say, I didn’t do any of those applications, and since Mum didn’t know the system, I managed to get away with it for a while. She just assumed I’d pass my exams, then pick any university I wanted afterwards, based on my results. Taiwo had left school and studied accounting while working, so I would have been the first child to go to university. But Mum didn’t find out that I’d not started the process until it was too late.
I didn’t want to go to university. I did pretty well at school but didn’t enjoy it. I hated studying, I was bored by most subjects, except French, but I would have put up with all of that and gone to university if I’d been able to go to school outside of London, where I would’ve been boarding on campus. I.e., away from home. I.e., freedom! My mum wasn’t having that. She wouldn’t let me go to a university that wasn’t in London, where she could keep an eye on me. That meant staying at home, which meant three more years of being financially reliant on my mum. Which meant three more years of no freedom. Nope, nopey, nope.
I’ve always been squeamish about blood. When people cut themselves and then lick or suck the wound, I am beyond disgusted, and as a teenager when I began menstruating, I could barely look down when I was changing my sanitary products, so grossed out was I by the sight of blood, even if it was my own. And yet, such was the brainwashing of my mum that I still thought I was going to make a career of dealing with people’s biological functions at probably the ooziest times of their lives. I was seventeen and studying advanced-level physics and biology when I realized this phobia was going to seriously hinder my doctoring abilities. When we had to dissect a rat—as in, cut through the flesh and watch stuff ooze out like a furry lava cake—I was too busy vomiting and fainting to complete that particular class.
A week previously, however, as fate would have it, we’d had a visit at the school from the Engineering Industry Training Board, a government-funded entity that had done a talk to encourage more girls to go into engineering. At the time, I found the idea of building things, working in different places, and not being tied to one location interesting. I briefly flirted with switching vocations but then thought of my mum’s reaction to having two engineers in the family and no doctor.
Dele was supposed to be the engineer. He’d actually had an aptitude for taking his toys apart and rebuilding them, so that kind of made sense. He was meticulous and patient at re-creating anything he saw. In fact, before the London buses and the Underground switched to digital travel cards, Dele had managed to slice individual numbers and letters off several old cards, using a razor blade, and forge his own card, therefore riding buses and trains free for years and pocketing the travel allowance Mum gave him. Talented, I tell you! (He was also a phenomenal artist. He could draw absolutely anything, but “artist” was not on the list of African careers, so my mum had no interest in that ability.)
Sheyi was to be the lawyer because he talked a lot—that was my mum’s main criteria.
At first, I thought I didn’t need the hassle of destroying Mum’s carefully thought out career formula. But after the rat incident, I knew I had no choice but to bite the bullet and inform her that I was switching from biology to math A level, and that I was now interested in engineering. Luckily for me, she was not too perturbed. It was still on the list of her preferred careers, and besides, she had a solution. Turning to Dele, she declared, “Dele, now you will be the doctor!”
If your only tool is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.
I figured that to be a good engineer, work experience was more important than being just book smart, so it would be better if I got a full-time job as a trainee engineer after finishing school, and study for my engineering degree part-time in the evenings and on weekends. I’d still be fulfilling Mum’s dream of having kids with degrees but while having money.
It was important to me to earn my own money. Money meant freedom! I would still live at home, which was a win-win for my mum since I’d be contributing to the household expenses while training as an engineer, but my fi
rst few paychecks would go towards a car. That way she wouldn’t be able to use the idea of a young woman roaming the streets at night as an excuse to stop me going out. As soon as I hit eighteen, those floodgates would be open, and I’d be out partying every weekend for the next five years till I left home for good.
Getting an engineering job after school was pretty easy. My exam results were good enough for me to get into university, and there was a dearth of female engineers, so employers were falling over themselves to recruit me. There was an abundance of employment out there for trainee technicians and engineers throughout the industry.
I applied for a trainee position in aeronautical engineering with British Airways. Repairing and maintaining planes sounded fun. I passed the initial interview and exam, and I got myself a second interview, but on discovering that the pay as a trainee was a good £3,000 per year lower than other engineering trainee positions out there and that I would have to commute an hour and a half each way to Heathrow Airport, I didn’t bother to turn up for my second interview. I had options.
I worked briefly for the Inner London Education Authority as a trainee engineer, which was basically a government job. The money and benefits for a teenager straight out of school were good. I was able to have one paid day off a week to study for my electrical/electronic qualifications at a local college, and government jobs were coveted, as they were practically jobs for life. I lasted less than three months. Their idea of a trainee engineer was someone who sat in an office filling out charts and forms all day, with the odd visit to a school or college to check that their VCRs were safe to use. My boredom level was so high that at one point I started imagining things like what it would be like to tattoo my own eyeballs with a BIC pen.