I was a child of about seven or eight sitting beside my maternal grandmother Denise at the dining room table where we almost never dined, preferring the more relaxed atmosphere of the kitchen for Saturday lunches or after-school goûters. The living room table was for activities. That day, she and I were keeping a record of foreign language expressions we knew, categorised by language and provenance. I realise now that my grandmother had had limited experience of international travel until my grandfather retired in his senior years. We lived in a rural French town in Eastern Picardy and there was nothing international about our lives. That day, she sat down with me and asked if I knew any basic words in any foreign languages. She showed me the notebook, made of A4 pages folded and stitched down the middle. A page per language. She already had a range of basic greetings in: Italian, Spanish, German (the languages of our immediate neighbours), but she was not fluent in any of these languages. She was compiling a list for her own record, and perhaps her enjoyment. ‘I know Chinese’, I said to her, matter-of-fact. ‘And some Russian’.

What I meant is I had recently learned a few basic greetings in a number of modern languages thanks to an educational booklet included in my subscription to Astrapi, a beloved children’s magazine whose subtle political outlook was undoubtedly more progressive than my parents’. Each double-page of that booklet was illustrated to introduce a fictional child from a different country, whose task was to represent their culture and teach a few basic words: Hello. How are you. My name is […]. I live in […]. See you later! It was set up as though these children were trying to make friends with the reader.

It was rare for Denise and me to find mutual interests. She was a history buff, belonged to the local archaeological society, which organised volunteer excavations at a number of local sites in the Aisne county. Behind us in my grandparents’ living room was a tall wooden cabinet with an imposing glass window showcasing her extensive collection of ancient Roman artefacts, rusty coins and bits of iron pots gleaned from the immediate fields surrounding our small Picardy town, along with much more recent historical artefacts: bits of bomb shell shrapnel from the First World War, whose battles had unfolded on our doorstep early in that century. I don’t remember ever having much interest in such objects, of which there seemed to be an infinite supply anyway. I thought the people who spent their lives sifting through the earth in search for bits of the broken past had it all wrong. The world of the living seemed vast and colourful enough, if one had – or intended to acquire – the (linguistic, financial) ability to travel.

But the past was practically impossible to ignore. Every year in late August, our town raised the American flag in commemoration of a distant (or not-so-distant) liberation day in 1944. The two world wars blended in my mind to a single event. Denise had lived through the Second and her father had famously survived the First without suffering any physical injuries, not even a scratch. She was de facto interested in the idea of peace, of us all getting along at last, even the Germans. In the mid-1950s, she benevolently refused to take part in the great Coca-Cola boycott led across Parisian cafés by an unlikely alliance of the wine lobby and the French Communist Party, just like she was sceptical of the wider anti-American sentiment that rose in France at the time, when it became understood that the United States were the true winners of the war.

‘Do you know how to say thank you in Chinese?’ she asked as we completed the new notebook entry. I did and said so. Then I told her that I could also contribute a few entries in Swahili, Hindi and Zulu if she’d let me consult my Astrapi booklet. When the task was complete, I went back to watching afternoon television, probably an episode of Dallas dubbed in French. Even Jean-Luc Godard rated Dallas back then, said Americans were very ‘good’ at telling a certain kind of story. ‘I just don’t understand’, he added, in the same Cannes Film Festival interview in 1982, ‘why it has to be Dallas all day, every day of the week. Storytellers from the Arab world have another point of view. Why can’t we hear other stories for a change?’

I’m trying to remember if there was a page for Arabic in my grandma’s notebook. I now cannot say for sure. Of that other, more recent, conflict in Algeria no one ever spoke.

‘You’ll obviously go to America one day’, my grandmother would tease me over French fries on my birthday, as though it was clear that my generation would be the first in the family to experience the pull of the physical journey. As a treat, she and my grandfather had offered to take me to the McDonald’s restaurant that had opened in the mid-1990s in the brand-new zone commerciale spreading over a vast expanse of concrete on the outskirts of town, itself another sign that France’s economic survival had become increasingly dependent on forces bigger than itself.

Denise was the first person I ever lost; she was a smoker and died when I was twelve. After she died, my grandfather disposed of most of her personal effects, keeping only her paintings and her books. I never saw that notebook again. But when I moved to London in the late 2000s, I began keeping a new notebook almost without thinking, keeping a record of the words I was hearing for the first time. I titled it Five Words A Day, at a time when both France and the UK obnoxiously recommended the same daily consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables based on EU guidelines. This one was a slim A6 little thing with a black cover and thin, pleasantly off-white ruled pages: the Platonic ideal of a notebook. I often passed it around at the pub as a gimmick, to encourage new British friends to teach me what they knew. Middle-class boys freshly out of some film studies seminar took this as their cue to show off that they were up to speed with the latest street lingo, which systematically involved some reference to drugs. Someone wrote that the word ‘slacker’ meant ‘consistently lazy, independent of drinking connotation of any kind’. Who on earth taught me the word ‘floozy?’ Who said to me: ‘I have been a bee of utmost business,’ then wrote ‘sketchy = something is unnerving because of drink or drugs’? Each of these phrases suggests that a shared language is a story unto itself, and of course the pages filled quickly, but the notebook remained a one-off. I did not return to France when I was supposed to at the end of that academic year and stopped keeping language notebooks thereafter.

I was raised in one language and am now writing in another. Funny to look at this homemade artifact again as evidence of a once schoolgirl-like dedication to a certain idea of fluency in English, which paved the way towards my present-day bilingualism, just as it ended up eradicating the need for most other languages in my life. Let’s just say I did not go on to learn any more Chinese, and it would be foolish to think that the choice and scope of that one second language were purely incidental, that it all happened outside the bounds of contemporary geopolitics, power plays unfolding beyond my immediate sphere of influence, to which my grandmother’s postwar idealism must have been partly blind. Unlike Denise, I have lived to see a time when English (British, American) is no longer synonymous with the safeguarding of international peace. Yet the memory of our language notebook, tentatively assembled at the dinner table where we usually played games of Monopoly and lit birthday candles, lives on as the memory of a time when I was convinced there would be infinite time to learn and make peace, infinite time to connect, which meant infinite time to listen. Envisioning this, I too was hopeful. I only ever thought of what there was to be gained in the process.