I hadn’t been to the south of England yet; it didn’t occur to me that I was being taught the provincialisms of another part of the country. Received Pronunciation was the goal, with a distinct southern ring. Somewhere in the West Country perhaps, a schoolgirl like me was tripping over some other set of caltrops:
Roy’s employed in Droitwich
In a first-class oyster bar;
Moira tends to linger
As she sips her Noilly Prat…
I went to Miss Webster every term-time Tuesday for the next three years. Then after my lessons I would trail home through the darkening streets, passing other wool shops with baby clothes in their windows, and the village delicatessen with its range of pale cold meats, and the posters on the park noticeboard advertising whist drives and bring-and-buy sales. I used to pretend, to alleviate the boredom of the walk, that I was a spy in a foreign country, a woman passing for someone else in a country approaching war, where the goods in the shop windows would be vanishing soon and austerity would be the order of the day; and what fuelled my fantasy was the iron bridge over the old canal, and the pre-war cut of my school raincoat, and the fatigue on the faces of the commuters who came down the station steps, hurrying home to their thru’ lounges. When I rushed into the shops before they closed with the list my mother had given me, I pretended that I was obtaining black-market provisions, and that my schoolbag was full of atomic secrets. I don’t know why I had this daydream, though I know that the totality of the transformation was not marred by the fact that in my life as a spy I often carried, according to season, my tennis racket or hockey stick. It was a lonely sort of dream, full of ennui and distaste. There should be support groups, like a twelve-step programme, for young people who hate being young. Since I was at other people’s mercy, I did not care what I did, go to Miss Webster or whatever. It’s only later that you think about the years wasted; if I had to have a youth, I wish now it could have been misspent.
I had soon filled two notebooks with diagrams, verses and Miss Webster’s rhyming minefields. Most of it was in vain. Give me your northerner till he is seven and there are sounds that a southerner makes that he will never convincingly imitate. I’ve met closet northerners since, but they give themselves away as soon as they have to mention that black stuff that falls down chimneys, or order in a restaurant that fowl that used to come garnished with orange. Miss Webster had a rhyme that contained the words ‘push’ and ‘bull’ and later had someone in a scullery cutting bread and butter. I can’t remember the whole, because unlike the one about Roy and Moira it lacked interest and narrative drive; but I know it was possible to have a nervous breakdown between one syllable and the next. The posher northerner talks about ‘catting bread and batter’. Why does he bother? He’ll never fool anybody. Even if he crawses the road when he sees his old mother, his natural accent goes right through him, like ‘BLACKPOOL’ goes through rock. He shall not parse.
The examinations, for which we learned set pieces, were held in Manchester at the Methodist Central Hall. During my years, there were two examiners; you never knew, when you entered the room, which one it would be. The female examiner had a querulous voice, which broke off in the middle of sentences, as if she were too shocked to continue. The male examiner was seventy, or eighty perhaps, or ninety, and he wore a watch chain. He was a florid man, who stared ahead of him, and would sometimes lean forward in his chair, trembling with suppressed effort, as if he had been used to more activity in his life and did not recognise what he had come to. He looked like a man who had seen standards slip.
The ways in which the examination pieces were recited owed nothing to Miss Webster’s tuition. It was something the pupils worked out among themselves, with the unseen aid of generations of past pupils. While you were waiting to recite your piece of Shakespeare to Miss Webster, you would be listening to some other pupil who was preparing for the grade above yours. So if a short-winded child took a breath in the wrong place, or introduced through ignorance or boredom some nonsensical inflection, it would be taken up by the others, and become definitive, and hang around for years. I never knew Miss Webster to suggest a phrasing; the truth is, I think, that she didn’t understand Shakespeare, and must have learned to play Lady Macbeth by some theatrical equivalent of painting by numbers. She was not responsible for the choice of pieces; those were laid down by the examining council. For one exam – Grade VII, I think – it was necessary to perform the parts of both Oswald and Goneril, skipping about to face oneself, altering one’s voice and making, in both directions, the Gesture.
According to Miss Webster, only one gesture was necessary or even permissible when reciting Shakespeare. It was a full sweep of the arm, palm towards the audience; three bottom fingers glued together, thumb raised and almost vertical, and the forefinger bisecting the angle. All passion, all joy, all dismay was reducible to this one gesture; it would do for Titus Andronicus, for Charmian and for Dogberry. I must have been slow, or perhaps incredulous, for Miss Webster herself took my hand in her cold age-spotted hand, and fixed my fingers into this thespian V-sign.
I usually, when I got into the exam room, said my pieces the way I liked, and it must have been that my originality grated on the examiners’ ears, because although I did well I never got the very best marks; and I was left, too, with the feeling that I was a hypocrite. I was seventeen when I went to the Central Hall for the last time, to be examined for my diploma. It was November, a cold and very wet morning, and I wore boots, and my school mackintosh, and my navy blue school skirt and my striped shirt blouse; but I took the liberty of going into the Ladies at Piccadilly station, and letting my hair out of the elastic bands to which the school rules confined it. I brushed it in front of the mirror. It was very long and straight and pale, as I was myself, and the image I presented, turning away from British Rail’s speckled glass, was a bizarre one; as if the Lady of Shalott had left the web and left the loom and turned into a traffic warden. The sodden shapes of Mancunians jostled in Oldham Street, and the building, when I scurried into its shelter, smelled of linoleum and Dettol, and thin Methodist prayer.
Miss Webster was waiting for me; anxious, rather blue around the lips. She quailed when she saw my boots. That was not proper dress, she said, the examiner would not like it, I could not go in wearing those boots. I had nothing to say, really. I took off my scarf and laid it over the back of a chair. Candidates for the various grades sat by their teachers, scuffling their feet, their scrubby little hands knotted together in fear. I had already taken my written paper; it had been very easy. Could I go in my stockinged feet, I asked, would that be better? Dim institutional lights burned in white globes. Cars splashed by outside, their headlights on, heading for Oldham Road and the sooty outer suburbs. Puddles of water had formed on the lino under my boots. I kicked them off, and shrunk an inch or two. That would certainly not do, Miss Webster said. She would lend me her shoes.
Miss Webster’s shoes were two sizes and a half bigger than mine. They were court shoes, of fake crocodile; they had ferocious points in front, and three-and-a-half-inch spike heels. They were, I suppose, the footwear of a retired actress, but I did not grasp the poignancy of the moment. I put my feet into them, and staggered a few paces, clutching at the backs of chairs. Why did I agree to it? I never, in those years, thought in the short-term. I had fallen into a habit of acquiescence; I believed that, in the long-term, I should make everyone else look a fool.
When my name was called I lurched into the examination room. It was the gentleman. Neither he nor his female colleague had ever attempted to put a candidate at her ease. They were like driving examiners, asking questions but offering no comment, hardly the bare civilities, though the man had once remarked to me gloomily that I had a lisp. Today he looked flushed, and in his usual state of arrested tension, and yet he looked ponderous, and as if he hated the young.
My set piece was an extract from Henry VIII. It was lucky I had only one character to play, because if I had tried to manoeuvre
myself about I would have fallen over. I picked my spot, I swayed about on it. I could see myself, the uniform that hung on me, the spot of ink on my cuff, my white child’s face, and Miss Webster’s mock crocs. I had not known that my performance as Queen Katharine would be most remarkable from the ankle down. It was the speech where Katharine, about to be repudiated, begs the monarch to remember their life together, and in the early stages of my rehearsals I had been unable to get through it without dissolving into tears, and I needed to stop myself crying by an act of will; the examiner would want to hear the verse. I had already decided I would not make the Gesture. If the examiner thought I did not know the Gesture, he would just have to mark me down. There were certain lines that seemed packed with emotion like high explosive; the only way to get through was to deliver the entire speech while thinking of something else.
Already, as I began, the examiner’s eyes had slithered down to my body and glued themselves to my feet. ‘I am a most poor woman, and a stranger / Born out of your dominions…’ I had somehow slid forward in the shoes, so that my toes were gripped painfully in the points – ‘having here / No judge indifferent…’ and I tried to shuffle backwards a bit – ‘Alas, sir, in what have I offended you?’ I kept my voice low, the voice of a middle-aged woman, foreign and confused, under great tension and stress; I kept my hands clasped, as if trying to damp down disaster. Then abruptly the examiner lurched forward, and hunched his shoulders, and rose halfway out of his chair to peer fixedly down at my feet. Teetering, quite without intent, another few inches towards him, I tried to press on…‘What cause / Hath my behaviour given to your displeasure / That thus you should proceed to put me off / And take your good grace from me?’
‘That will be enough Shakespeare,’ the examiner said.
But I took a breath, and demanded of him, ‘When was the hour I ever contradicted your desire?’ My ankles ached. I did not know how anyone could walk in these shoes. It was like being on stilts. And why should such a small woman have such very long thin feet? ‘Sir, call to mind / That I have been your wife, in this obedience…’ He raised his face, and looked at me wonderingly. And then suddenly, when I reached the line ‘Upward of twenty years’, I was overwhelmed: by the content of the speech, by the mock crocs, by the whole business of learning to talk. I burst noisily into tears, and stood for a long moment, swaying before the examiner, and thinking with longing of those abandoned children who are suckled by wolves and who all their lives remain mute. Surely it was not necessary to talk for a living? Wouldn’t it be possible to keep your mouth shut, and perhaps write things down; perhaps write what Miss Webster would call bucks?
I found a handkerchief in the sleeve of my school sweater. The examiner motioned me to a chair. He turned to the papers before him, his eyes carefully downcast, fighting, I could see, his inclination to stare at my shoes. Perhaps afterwards he would think it all a dream. He asked me some questions, then; but not the question he wanted to ask. Did I believe, he enquired, that an ability to analyse metre contributed to one’s understanding of English poetry? I sniffed, and said, not in the least.
That was my last examination. I gave Miss Webster her shoes back and put on my boots and walked back to the station, red-eyed, in the rain. I knew that a phase of my life was coming to an end and that soon I would be able to get away. A few weeks later I received my diploma, set out in florid scrollwork. My recitations had got me certified. I had letters after my name.
A short time ago I went back home and drove by my school and by Miss Webster’s door. Nothing had changed, and yet it had changed. The wool shop was still there, selling shawls and bobble hats. The sign above just says ‘Marjorie’, and the plate has gone from the door. The shops around have come down in the world; the windows are dirty, the paint is peeling. The council houses across the road, once respectable, look seedy now; their walls are pockmarked, as if they had recently been under fire. This small town, which was prosperous, conceited and plump, has lost its prosperity now, and shares in the general decay of the north-west; and by a mysterious process of downward levelling, its vowels have grown broader, and its people more dour, and the weather, I think, is quite possibly colder than it used to be. Moira would not linger there now, to sip her Noilly Prat. The ocean that separated my childhood from my teenage years has dried up: or at least, we are all in the same boat. There is no point in being bitter. Expectations were inflated for a few years, and have now been punctured, and people’s lives have become uncomfortable and insecure, and their future has been taken away. All those places where people don’t talk proper look curiously alike; driving through the everlasting soft grey blanket of rain, it is possible to imagine oneself in the suburbs of Belfast. I am glad I don’t live there, in the nursery of my vowels. I never ironed them out, really. But I know the Gesture; and it is surprising, from time to time, how consoling that can be.
Third Floor Rising
The summer of my eighteenth birthday I had my first job. It was to fill the time between leaving school and going away to university in London. The previous summer I’d been old enough to work, but I had to stay at home and mind the children, while my mother pursued her glittering career.
For most of the years until I was sixteen, my mother had devoted herself to the care of a sick child. First it was me, until I went to senior school. Then I got abruptly better, by an act of will on my mother’s part. My high fevers ceased, or ceased to be noticed, or if they were noticed they stopped being interesting. My youngest brother, his struggles for breath and his night-time cough, were elected to my old place in the household’s economy. In my case I had been to school sporadically, but my brother didn’t go at all. He played by himself in the garden under a pewter sky, with the fugitive glitter of snow behind it. He lay on his daybed in the room with the television blaring, and turned the pages of a book. One evening we were watching the news when our whole room lit up with a sick white light, and a bolt of ball lightning ripped the lower limbs from the poplar tree and blew the glass from the window frame, whump, fist of God. The shards were strewed over his crocheted blanket, the dog howled, the rain blew into the wreckage of the room and the neighbours squeaked and gibbered in the streets.
A short time after this my mother answered an advertisement for a saleswoman on the fashion floor at Affleck & Brown, which was a small, cramped, oldfashioned department store in Manchester. She had to walk to the station and then travel by train, then walk again to Oldham Street. This was a wonder to me, because I thought she’d given up going out. To do the job she had to have white blouses and black skirts. She bought some at C & A, and this amazed me too, because in our house we got our clothes by less straightforward methods than purchase: by a process of transmogrification, whereby cardigans were unravelled and reappeared as woollen berets and collars were wrenched off to extend hems and what were armholes for the stout became leg holes for the lean. When I was seven I’d had my winter coats made out of two that had belonged to my godmother. Pockets, lapels, everything was miniaturised: except the buttons, which were the originals, and stood out like banqueting plates, or targets for an arrow on my pigeon chest.
My mother had been to school in an age when most people didn’t take exams, and she hadn’t much to put on her application form. But she got the job, and soon personal disasters began to overtake the people who had appointed her; with them out of the way, she was promoted first to deputy and then to manageress of her department. She developed an airy meringue of white-blonde hair, very tall shoes – not just high heels but little boosts under the soles – and an airy way of talking and gesturing; and she began to encourage her staff to lie about their ages, which seemed to suggest she was lying about her own. She came home late and quarrelsome, with something unlikely in her crocodile bag. It might be a bag of crinkle-cut chips, which tasted of grease and air, a pack of frozen beefburgers which, under the grill, bubbled up with oily spots the grey-yellow colour of a Manchester smog. In time the chip pan got banned, to save the paintwork an
d to make a class statement, but by then I was living up the road with my friend Anne Terese, and what the others got for rations was something I preferred not to think about.
When I was seventeen I was as unprepared for life as if I had spent my childhood on a mountainside minding goats. I was given to contemplation of nature, strolling about in the woods and fields. I was given to going to Stockport library and getting seven big books at a time about Latin American revolutions; waiting for an hour in the rain for the bus home, shifting the books at my feet and sometimes picking them up in expectation of a bus and cradling them in my arms, relishing their public dirt-edged pages, and the anticipation of finding inside them urgent notes from smalltown obsessives: ‘NOT Guatemala!!!!’ pencilled in the margin, or rather incised into the page with a stub of graphite and the cedar’s ragged edge. In our house, too, we never had a pencil sharpener. If you wanted a point you went to my mother and she held the pencil in her fist and swiped chunks off it with the bread knife.
It wasn’t the fault of my education that I was so unworldly, because most of my contemporaries were normal, for their time and place and class. But they seemed to be made of a denser, plusher substance than myself. You could imagine them being women, and having upholstery and airing cupboards. There was air in the spaces between my bones, smoke between my ribs. Pavements hurt my feet. Salt sought out ulcers in my tongue. I was given to prodigious vomiting for no reason. I was cold when I woke up and I thought I would go on being it, always. So later, when I was twenty-four and I was offered a chance to migrate to the tropics, I seized on it because I thought now, now at least I will never be cold again.
My holiday job was secured before the interview; who, at Affleck & Brown, would have turned down the daughter of my ever-popular mother? But it was a formality: the mild personnel officer in his duncoloured suit, in a back office so brown that I thought I had never seen the colour before, in every variety of tobacco spit and jaundice, every texture of Bakelite and Formica. Here I entered, fresh as 1970 in my little cotton shift, and here I was drawn backwards to the fifties, to the brown world of the National Insurance Card, and the yellowed notice from the Wages Council peeling from the distempered wall. Here I was wished luck and walked out on to the carpet, into the public world. ‘Draws your feet, this carpet,’ said a voice from between the rails.
Learning to Talk Page 6