Yes, I’d have been twelve when I was taught this in the second year of senior school, about the time my French was beginning to outstrip my Welsh. Your ‘too’ was right,Laura. It’s a sad thing, I think, that we have in recent years had regulations imposed upon us that virtually rule out the kind of cultural interaction you took part in between schoolchildren and unknown foreign families. Parents worried a lot less then anyway,or seemed to.
You’ve reminded me also how costly it used to be for travel of any kind, especially to go abroad. Plane tickets for ‘long haul’ could cost more than a small house. At Christmas the big event in a normal British family was not to fly across the world to visit relatives, but to book a phone call to them,which itself was so relatively expensive it only happened once or twice a year. India for three weeks and then back again would have been beyond imagination.
School trips even in this country were ‘saved up for’ over several months with the pupils taking in a shilling or so every week. If we were going to France or Spain for ten days,staying in local hotels,we had start taking in our five bobs the year before. In the winter of 1958 we were asked if we wanted to go to The Olympic Games in Rome in the summer of 1960.
Christmas in France would have seemed exotic and adventurous to most children then.(,It certainly would to me who thought England was odd enough 🙂 )To people born fifteen years after us who think little of popping over to New York for Christmas shopping, that must sound strange.