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OF COURSE I KNEW SHE WAS MARRIED, I'M ITALIAN

The reasons why people study English at a language school in a foreign country are many and various, and they don’t always have a whole lot to do with improving language skills. Parents send daughters abroad to try to separate them from unsuitable suitors, children are hastily dispatched in the unlikely hope that the experience may cure psychological disturbances, couples imagine that a crumbling marriage may be saved by that long-dreamed-of holiday abroad. Seldom are these artifices successful, and sometimes the results can be alarming, sometimes plain absurd.

At a certain school where I worked there was a small cottage in the grounds surrounded by a walled courtyard with a gate, which was kept locked for security reasons when the building wasn’t in use as a secluded, executive classroom for one-to-one Business English students. One evening at a school barbecue, staff became alarmed by cries for help emanating from behind the wall, and on trying to open the gate, as expected, they found it to be locked. After a frantic search of the school, the key was found, the gate opened and H, a German student, was found rolling on the ground in agony with a broken leg. Her husband, W, who was at the school studying with her, was naturally concerned to know how she had ended up inside a locked courtyard with a fractured femur - indeed, we were all quite intrigued. H’s version was, to say the least, implausible. According to her, she had scaled the wall in a desperate attempt to escape unidentified persons who were chasing her and trying to force her into performing in a blue movie.

As a poignant illustration of just how deeply human beings can deceive themselves, the only person who actually bought the tale of the lupine pornographers was hubby W, the very person one would have expected to have been the biggest skeptic. He simply couldn’t face dealing with a shattered leg and a shattered relationship all in one evening.

Events were clarified as she was being loaded into the ambulance. An Italian student, V, evidently accustomed to these kinds of shenanigans, casually confessed to a member of staff that H had persuaded him to meet her in the courtyard for some extra-marital kicks while her husband was preoccupied with helping scorch the beefburgers. Common sense prevailing, confronted by a locked gate, he had decided to call off the gig, or at least find her and suggest they relocate to a less physically challenging rendezvous. H, on the other hand, wasn’t going to let a locked gate and a seven-foot wall come between her and some Latin jiggery-pokery.

I'm not sure how much H learned about phrasal verbs during her stay in England, but she certainly thoroughly explored every possible meaning of "to get one's leg over"...

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