My heart is like ...
How much you spend tells me what language you speak
Image:1 Guido Gezelle was one of Belgium’s finest poets. A great linguist and a great writer. He was born in 1830, the year Belgium was born.
At the shop where I work, you can tell what language people speak from how much they spend. That sounds daft but it is frequently true. Age is also a factor.
The people who come to our grocery store do so to buy stuff. Some are on their first visit ever. They might have lived in Brussels for 20 years, and never heard of our little British store out in the sticks. One day, they venture across its threshold and discover an emporium of wonder. I know, because that’s how I felt 30 years ago when Flemish friends of mine who had a vague notion of its existence led me to it (it’s three kilometres from where I live and we got to it by driving about 25 kilometres).
Or they come from afar: from the Netherlands or Germany or, like yesterday, from France. We describe ourselves as a destination store—people come for the experience, like going to the seaside for the day. And, whilst they know they will find the sea and its side, they don’t exactly know what they will do or buy there: they go to see what’s at the sea. And that’s a bit the idea behind our store as well.
Some people come for cash. Belgium has now done away with cash machines run by individual banks, and sometimes you need to go a distance to find a cash point. Some locals find it too far because they don’t have a car, so they ask to draw cash from their bank cards, and we oblige them. Some people call for a chat. We can end up in uproarious laughter, on no end of subjects (Brexit is a popular one), and we try to send our customers off into the winter weather with a smile on their face. Some come for basics and some for something special. One lady last weekend bought 30 boxes of 120 teabags. Maybe she didn’t want to run out. We certainly did after she’d been, and she certainly won’t wherever she was headed. Maybe she runs a store, like we do.
So, the final bill tells me their language. Teenagers who spend 5 to 10 euros speak Dutch. On a Sunday, they’re down from the Flurk in the village, which is a local youth club. Buying tooth rot and sodas. We should refuse to sell it to them.
People of a more advanced age who come in for sugar, flour, maybe a bar of chocolate, they speak Dutch as well.
Moving up to the 30 to 50 euro bracket, they may actually be francophone. They will hop across the language frontier, which runs west to east in our country, to buy a few special things. But we’re not so far away that they need to stock up; they may come back next week as well.
At 100 to 150 euros, they speak English. They’re over from Brussels for a regular shop, stocking up for a few meals and a few essentials, and one or two luxuries. They will say, “I only came in for one thing,” and I will say “Then, I think you got off lightly,” as if they’d just been sentenced by a court of law. And we laugh.
At 200 euros, they may speak English, Irish, Russian, American, Canadian, Lithuanian, Spanish, Mexican Spanish: then it becomes much harder, except they almost certainly don’t speak Dutch or French. But, at 200 euros, you do know one thing: whatever it is that they speak as a first language, they speak English as a second. Some people spend 300 euros and don’t even want the till receipt to check it’s correct. Some do, however. No one’s perfect.
Because I have a Scottish accent, people ask me where I’m from. And I tell them,“Scotland,” which I hope makes sense to them. And then they ask me, “Where in Scotland?” And I tell them, and if they know Glasgow they ask, “Which part of Glasgow?” which is also how they do epidemiology. Then they tell me where in Glasgow they’re from and then we exchange Glaswegianisms, which usually bemuses the rest of the queue (yesterday I quoted I was Ludgin’ wi’ Big Aggie, which the lady didn’t know (and she said she was from Glasgow, so a bit of a shibboleth there…)).
Or they ask me, “Are you British?” and I start to feel like I should be giving them a copy of my resumé. Sometimes it turns out that the customer and I could have been neighbours a few years back, like the gentleman who lived in Leeds in the 1970s, and knew the part of Leeds where I had grown up at that time.
But I have spent more of my life in Belgium than anywhere else, and I love Belgium. I really do. I always say that Belgium has, and has for nearly 200 years had (the bicentenary will be in 2030), many issues between its French-speakers and its Dutch-speakers and, on the whole, these differences are dealt with and tolerated and argued out in a civilised fashion. There is no sentiment in Belgium of an impending civil war. Unlike some other places.
Our store is located in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, but the lingua franca at the store is English. It is an English experience and that’s why many of our customers come to us. But, based on how much they spend, when it comes to money matters at the end, I will switch to their language. To thank them for visiting us and to express my best wishes for a safe road home and looking forward to seeing them again, and these sentiments are well meant. I often see customers back in the store and am overjoyed to welcome them back through our portals. They are special, because they, like all our customers, belong there.
Yesterday, a Bavarian couple came to buy greetings cards. The funny sort. They told me that humour in Bavaria is different from English humour and I assured them that I was aware of this, but I told them in German and they were astonished at my excellent German (till I admitted I’d lived in the country for four years and studied at the university there).
But I’m getting fed up of being complimented on my Dutch, which is fluent. I am a certified translator of Dutch for the Belgian State. My Dutch is pretty good (at least the Minister of Justice thinks so). So, when I reply in Dutch to a customer, they will often say, “U spreekt goed Nederlands!” and that is often the cue for a long-winded explanation of how it comes that an apparent doddery old Scotsman speaks accentless Dutch (I can do Bruges, Ypres, Limburg and even Randstad accents, according to preference) but it usually includes I’ve lived in Belgium for more than half my life (34 years). Then, they become less astonished at the accentless Dutch and more astonished at the fact that anyone would come and live here for 34 years.
It’s a bit like Bob Monkhouse in the film Carry On Sergeant. He sits in class making eyes at a girl outside the window when he’s supposed to be learning how to take a rifle apart and put it back together again. The instructor calls him out for not paying attention and tells him to do the exercise, which Monkhouse does to perfection. “Oh, sorry, I thought you weren’t paying attention,” says the instructor. “I wasn’t,” replies Monkhouse, “I used to work in the factory where they make these things.” Or Dirk Bogarde in the film Once A Jolly Swagman, where he plays a speedway rider who enlists to serve in the war as a motorcycle dispatch rider. He falls asleep during the instruction, and again the instructor imperiously tells him to show everyone else how to do it. He immediately kicks the bike into action, and sets off to do a circuit of drifting. In a similar vein, this unassuming little Scotsman can recite Guido Gezelle poetry.
A French-speaking lady once told me, “C’est la première fois qu’on nous parle en français ici !” I answered, “Mais pas la dernière, j’espère—vous allez revenir bientôt, non?” She assured me she would. I felt like giving her a copy of my work roster. The chap from Lille yesterday, his bill came to something and 90 cents, and, since he was French, I said quatre-vingt dix, which he thought about and then said, “Ah oui, nonante cents.” which was interesting: they say nonante in Lille. Hm. Well, the French did steal Lille from Flanders, so maybe that’s justice. Lille in Dutch is Rijsel, and a French guy I know in the south of France would always guffaw at how the Dutch call the city by a radically different name to its genuine name, without applying too much thought to the notion that it is in fact the French who changed its name from the genuine one, probably because they hadn’t a clue how to pronounce the ij diphthong. Crétins.
So, now I tell those who compliment me on my languages, first of all, Thank you and then I add, “Taal is voor de mond. Erbij behoren is voor het hart.” Language is for the mouth, but belonging is felt in the heart. I learned the language because of what I felt in my heart.
That makes them think. They tell me, “Is waar.” It’s true. So, it must be true. But it does make them think. Because I speak all three of Belgium’s national languages fluently. And they don’t.
My heart is like a tender flower, an English translation of Guido Gezelle’s poem Mijn hert is als een blomgewas.2
By Havang(nl) (talk) 18:38, 8 January 2010 (UTC), picture taken from old photo - Picture taken from old photo in my possession, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8939251.
https://archive.org/details/PoemsOfGuidoGezelle/page/n163/mode/2up.