Reeta Chakrabarti

Reeta Chakrabarti has reported for the BBC for nearly 20 years, as political correspondent for BBC News until 2011 and now as Education Correspondent.

Born in London, Reeta grew up Birmingham. At 15, she went to Calcutta to do her O-levels and then returned to the UK for A-levels. She describes how her year in France as part of her degree at Oxford shaped her outlook.

‘I’d always been interested in other countries and wanting to live somewhere else – perhaps it’s something to do with being Indian and having had that experience in India. I went up to Oxford to do English and I was having a gentle go at one of my tutors about how silly it was that you couldn’t do a joint degree and he said “aha, as of this year you can do a joint degree”. It was the very first year that you could, so I swapped to English and French.'

Life in a small French town

‘I went to France in my third year. I went to a little bit of Franche-Comté right over by the Swiss border. It was a little town called Montbéliard, which was about 50 miles from Besançon. Initially, I was dismayed because I was very much a city girl. I had put Paris as my first choice. I was stumped for a third choice, so I put Besançon because I’d read some Stendhal and one of his books is set there. I ended up 50 miles from Besançon. I turned up in Montbéliard, which is a small place with one main street, and I thought, “Oh gosh, how will I survive?”

‘It turned out to be terrific. I taught in two separate lycées (secondary schools). I worked with the English teachers in these two schools, so I would do conversation classes with the children aged 11 to 16. The English teachers, all of whom were French, were very hospitable. I’d get invited round for long Sunday lunches and I had a very good time.

‘Being in Montbéliard, you really were forced to speak French. It was the first time I’d been in France as a proper adult and so I was having conversations where I would start the sentence and wouldn’t quite know how to finish it, because the thought was quite sophisticated but the language wasn’t. You’ve just got to leap in and not be afraid of embarrassing yourself. People are very generous. By the end I was really pretty good.'

it opens your mind

‘French food has become a complete favourite. Although I couldn’t dream of emulating much of it, I cook a lot of French food. I love to watch French films – although I do often need subtitles, I can still get a lot of it. French literature, which was why I studied it in the first place, is still a love, and although for many years after my degree I was lazy and read in English, very recently I read a couple of classics in French and I was delighted to find I could. My degree was a long time ago but I could do it. I used a dictionary, but not too much. These things stay with you – that’s what’s so marvellous.

‘Learning to speak other languages and being with other people opens your mind and your horizons. A year is a good long time and you will come out speaking pretty much fluently. You feel so proud and you feel a richer person for it.’

As told to Ann Morgan