ABSTRACT
The slippage began when ananas refused to equate to pineapple. It precisely expressed the relation of the author's French to the author's English. Not that the author's French is colonial, or foreign, imported as ananas is. The author was born and grew up in Marseilles, a Southern French city, and had a perfectly ordinary, i.e. riveting, middle-class childhood and youth. The writing was something precious, guarded by a carapace of secrecy against the heat - against the prying and powerful grown-ups. It was a gesture both towards and against the overbearing largely patriarchal milieu in which The author was. The author had no childhood, no youth in England. Nothing will ever make the author into a native daughter, give the author the instinctive bodily knowledge of grass and seasons and schooling and English politics that having grown up in the place would have given the author.
