On Writing

  And relax the shoulders. My teacher sets her hand down over my spine – inoutbreathing – presses on the out. There seems to be an inherent mercy about the gesture.

  Suddenly – the voice work causes these inrushes of emotion – I remember a friend, someone I love, and seeing and knowing that he was hurt. I set my hand down over his spine. Moving before I could think, I touched him.

  Here I am.

  I was perhaps trying to read whatever damage had occurred. Perhaps.

  Here you are.

  I was trying to comfort his breath. Pats, rubs, caresses to the back – they are a common way to reassure.

  Inoutbreathing. Feeling it.

  Feeling what?

  Don’t analyse.

  Remembering.

  I am remembering affection, helpless affection and being not alone.

  I am remembering that in being not alone I am helped and perhaps helpful.

  This is what happens – these sudden bursts of hot information.

  Allow it.

  And let it go.

  Inoutbreathing.

  I’m in the playground and seven, maybe eight. I was, until this second, as usual the mutterer. My nickname has been Muttley for a while, after the incoherent cartoon dog. I am the hunched-over kid in the corner, troubled parents at home, academic, indecisive. But now I have lost my temper. I don’t even know why. To be truthful, there isn’t much of a reason why. But I am yelling. This noise is ripping out of me, starting from my feet, mouth wider than it ever has been and someone – bully, taunter, accidental irritation – is standing staring at me. I have shouted them to a stop. The sound I am making is changing them, is putting me in charge. I haven’t a clue what to do with being in charge: it has, after all, never happened before. Behind me, a schoolmistress appears – my din is carrying, and has drawn her in. I know her – she used to teach me in Primary Four, making my life an even more strangled misery than I would have constructed for myself. I am distantly aware that she would like to be angry with me again, but can’t quite work out how. There is no room for her anger because of mine, and I am no longer the girl she expected me to be.

  I like this. I like the way she is almost scared.

  For the rest of my school life I am never as loud as this again.

  But I take to public speaking – competitions and debates – unlikely, but true. I paint myself into a corner and then have to make a noise.

  And inoutbreathing as my teacher – Ros Steen – good teacher – proper teacher – briskly rubs down along my side ribs when I exhale. I have the mild sensation of sinking into the floor. I am feeling rich-headed and warm.

  Even the first time we did this, I wasn’t scared. A good teacher – proper teacher – makes the scary things seem normal and necessary, small enough to breathe in and then blow away.

  I seem light, like Muttley flying: like a plump, round-shouldered dog, lifted up by his daydreams and a madly spinning tail, a triumph of hope over physics.

  Ros Steen is head of the Royal Conservatoire’s Centre for Voice in Performance. She teaches, researches and lectures internationally, writes on voice and acts as a voice consultant for theatre, film and television. She is, in fact, Professor Ros Steen, ma, dsd, ipa, frsamd. I’m glad I didn’t know this when I first met Ros – seeing so many letters after her name would have scared me. In fact, my ignorance gave me focus and permitted me to approach someone who was, in many ways, out of my league.

  I simply knew that I needed to really deal with my voice.

  I hadn’t a clue what really deal with and my voice might mean.

  Everyone I’d asked about my really dealing had told me – Ros Steen will help.

  They were right.

  My short-term goal was to prepare myself properly to perform a one-person show, ‘Words’, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2009.

  In ‘Words’ I had written a script which dealt with being a writer and what it could mean. It seemed to me that the perform-ance should be unmediated: no set, no lectern, no mike – just me and (hopefully) an audience and the words. This was intended to be a proof that, with no visible means of support, even someone as inept as me could be communicative, could live more and better by communicating, could try to jump the papery gap between the pages and the reader.

  This was more than enough to be going on with, but I knew that work on my physical voice would affect my other voices and that I couldn’t predict how. After the displacement of a cervical vertebra and more than ten years of upper back pain, stress and muscle-wasting, my voice had weakened and shrunk. The pain was finally gone and I wanted my sound back and more than back – I wanted unpredictable change. I wanted – it has to be said – to find my voice. Terrible, self-indulgent phrase. Then again, you’re nowhere and no one without a voice. And yet, from your first cry onwards – they’re glad you’re alive, but want you to be quiet – the force of imposed silences builds to hide you from yourself. Power has an audible scale: men should be louder than women, adults louder than children, the rich louder than the poor, the accepted louder than the outcasts. And, in our current media, the frightening and stupid should be louder than everyone.

  Ros wasn’t the first practitioner I’d asked to address my vocal difficulties. When I stumbled away from university and into the life of a jobbing arts worker and evening scribbler, I made a living by leading workshops. Ultimately I was giving two or three workshops a day – permanently travelling to a succession of different bacterial micro-climates, in hospitals, day-care centres, elderly care-homes, prisons. I succumbed to a succession of respiratory and sinus infections and still had to keep talking and talking and talking. I also gave lectures to social workers, care workers and community care workers, pointedly without notes: Here I am, with no visible means of support, to prove that working with words can make you more coherent. I am shy and easily folded, but I am also standing up while you stare at me and making this noise. The various pressures – to be coherent, to be brave, to be functional while tired, energetic while ill – were wearing me down. I found it difficult to apply what little I’d taken on board at university when it came to speaking. I vaguely knew how to deal with theatre spaces, but was only ever in a range of dry-aired and often mayhem-filled rooms. By the end of most days, my throat was sore. Right at the beginning of what I always feel uncomfortable referring to as my career, I was deep in the joy of discovering writing’s power – for myself and in others, in so many side-lined and patronised others. But I was also literally losing my voice.

  So I went to a Lady Who Taught Elocution. (Why are so many practitioners in this area women? We’ll get to that . . .) I was given taxing sentences about rugged rocks and ragged rascals and taken right back to my school days and the speech and drama lessons which were supposed to render me confident and plain-speaking, but which mainly folded me even tighter. At school there had been more rocks and rascals and colours of leather and Peter Piper getting on my wick while I jammed – can this be true? – a plastic prop between my front teeth to keep my jaws open. The prop made me feel crippled, a muscle-spasmed cause for concern.

  I didn’t sound like that first school speech specialist and I didn’t want to. I remember her saying once, with puzzled distaste, something along the lines of, ‘You seem to like your voice the way it is . . .’ This didn’t seem helpful, or relaxing. And I do remember her name, I’m just not going to pass it on.

  When I submitted myself – shamefaced, or more accurately tongue-tied – to the Lady Who Taught Elocution, I paid money I barely had to practise the same old tongue-twisters. I said things no one would ever say, or want to.

  I also had to read out passages from various books. One week, I was presented with a section from some Russian novel. It was a remarkably featureless description of a corridor. I could do nothing with it. The elocutionist asked me what sense I found most stimulating. Although I had never formally considered this, I was immediately able to answer that smell was my key sense. For example, I recognise people more
by smell than sight. She asked me what the paragraph smelled like. When I focused on the piece, I discovered that it did indeed have a real and complex smell: wet plaster, neglect, old cabbage . . . If I held on to that information, I could then read the words as if they had an emotional and visual depth, which I couldn’t find by simply poking them with my intellect. I may not have liked her teaching style, but this was gold. If I reverse-engineered the process with the Russian paragraph, if I tried analysing my own writing in terms of my senses and clarity of voice, then I might be able to increase my efficacy as a writer. I also noticed that a very minimal improvement in my ability to say one word after another led to a much larger improvement in my willingness to take risks on the page, to push the prose forward to its next stage. I walked away from my lessons and their expense with advice to avoid dairy produce for the sake of my sinuses and to set down a saucer of water in rooms for the sake of lubricated speaking. As if my voice were a thirsty pet. Mainly, I was still aware that I wasn’t in charge of the sounds I was making, or even happily out of control.

  Keep relaxing, sinking, inoutbreathing.

  On the out-breath, Ros presses at the base of my spine, buttocks – suitably ridiculous word – thighs. More emotional history unreels lightly in the background – all those leg-trembling childhood days, wanting to run – adult tensions – an adolescent accident: the Leabrook Methodist Chapel Christmas party when I was thirteen and over-excited and fell from standing to sitting in less than a thought – incredible pain at the time and my grandmother worried by the way my face changed when I landed. Gran invited half the chapel to visit me as I sat in the bath and soaked my, as it turned out, broken arse – heads round the door and good lucks, for God’s sake . . . Then from my late twenties onwards I have the pain that comes from owning a sacrum that healed oddly and now tends to the left. Like me. And then there’s typing, hunching, compressing – my body gathering its strength to kick out a disc and make me stop, reassess.

  And is it a coincidence that all the people who have tried to work with my voice have been women, that lists of recommendations have only comprised women? Is this because women are quieter, quietened, more in need?

  My maternal grandmother – she of the Leabrook Methodists – was loud and awkward, wore above-the-knee skirts in her sixties, had been a flapper, owned a laugh so loud it could fill a theatre, would be up on stage to volunteer in any and every end-of-the-pier show. She was tempestuous – with her own mother, her own daughter and with her second husband: the grandpop I knew. To be frank, she could be suddenly and inexplicably scalding with anyone. Her first husband and, as they say, the love of her life, died suddenly soon after their marriage. She broke and then healed oddly and definitely tended to the left. I increasingly suspect that I resemble her.

  My mother was much quieter, a murmuring soft presence, a storyteller by stealth, low phrases slipping in, a hand around mine, all those soundless hugs. While I was growing up she was unconversational, shy and nervy – a woman in a punishing marriage, a woman with an RP accent in post-industrial Dundee, a woman who’d been brought up by her grandparents who had remained very Welsh, although they lived near Birmingham. She had developed a North Welsh accent as a child. She went RP during her teacher training – ‘You can’t sound like that, people will laugh.’ Now she’s happily long divorced, happily back in the Midlands and – seven years after her move – is garrulous, expansive, confabulating, dramatic, a musical presence. Something of her always dances, the way she did on good days when I was a kid: simply dancing for the joy of it. She won a gold medal for both ballroom and Latin when she was younger and single, when she was at home.

  She kept that quiet.

  These days, it’s louder. One word at a time she has returned to herself, come back to full, and fully audible, life.

  And I think of all those women I’ve met who can’t quite say, ‘Yes.’ They make do with a little gasped inhalation and a nod, as if stating a preference might in some way expose or betray them. And ‘No’ doesn’t even seem to arise, only the words that compromise, avoid it.

  And why, when I do stand-up comedy – apparently when any woman does stand-up comedy – is ‘You’ve got a big mouth’ the most common heckle? The standard unimaginative heckle for guys is, ‘You’re shit.’ But we get ‘You’ve got a big mouth.’ The simple act of talking while female is apparently, for some audiences, wrong, wrong, wrong. The standard female comeback is, of course, tediously simple, ‘No, love, I don’t have a big mouth – you just have a tiny cock.’ Which is also, in a way, wrong, wrong, wrong. But also, in way, right, right, right.

  I remember telling this to Cicely Berry – grand, scary, famous Cicely Berry, who haunted my student days with her authoritative books and the tail end of the RSC’s golden years: productions that woke up the lines and made them happen here, in this moment, new. She’s slightly frail now, if still wiry, and perhaps mildly deaf, although there is every chance that simply being in the same room with her made me crumple internally and therefore lapse into mumbling – back to Muttley again. When I quoted, ‘You’ve got a big mouth’, the air changed around her and someone who might have been mistaken for a little old lady tensed and thrummed with a deep and righteous fury. It’s her belief that we speak to save our lives. I do not disagree. Preventing someone from speaking is therefore a kind of murder – and too often a rehearsal for the real thing. Try telling Dame Cicely she’s got a big mouth – things would not go well with you, I feel.

  Almost at the end of this stage in the preparation. Ros rubs down and presses on my stockinged feet – I have to breathe right into my feet – inoutbreathing – plumb my depth.

  When I started out with Ros I remembered how good it is to talk in stockinged feet, bared feet, to root into something solid and see where it leads. The old-style elocutionists favour shoes, restraint. When I write, I prefer to have bare feet, and when I speak, also. How could I have forgotten that?

  It became clear that when I performed my show, I should have bare feet. This would hopefully connect me to the ground and one of my voices to another – the one in my head to the one that should reach to my feet, plumb my depth, see what’s in there. This sounds like the sort of arty gibberish that usually leaves me nauseous. Even so, it makes sense. It feels like making sense.

  It also meant I would spend a number of gigs wondering what I’d stepped on and if I was bleeding, asking stage managers and all manner of men who knew where brooms were kept if they would mind just sweeping the stage, please. This became one of the ways to know how the technical parts of an evening would go – was the Stage Manager/Technician/Person with Keys to the Lighting Box understanding about my feet? Understanding: lighting cues would be on time and probably intuitively tweaked for the venue. Not Understanding: I couldn’t rely on anything being lit as I’d expected and should sweep the stage myself, if I could find a broom.

  I would usually unwind after a performance by washing in whatever facilities were available. My feet would almost always be happily filthy, as if I’d been playing outside. Remembering my mother dancing barefoot – Steeleye Span on the telly – ‘All Around My Hat’ – difficult for dancing . . .

  I don’t dance, not really. Can’t remember when I stopped playing outside, stopped shouting, discovered I can’t scream.

  Remembering that evening in Edinburgh – nice gig, nice crowd. Other comedy gigs had gone well before, but this was different – this time I sounded like myself. I was saying what I wanted to, the way I wanted to. My voice found me. And we shouted and said bad words and had a laugh. We played outside.

  The show had an early outing in a Glasgow arts centre. Our start was slightly delayed: people had difficulty finding their way through the building, and outside someone was threatening to commit suicide by jumping off a roof. At the time, I only knew about the first of those problems. I was inside trying to be the opposite of killing myself.

  As it worked out, the guy didn’t jump. Only talked about jumping – th
e story of it being enough.

  The day was oppressively hot and the space I’d been given was additionally warmed by vast areas of window. I and the audience broiled. At about fifty minutes in, the script tries to illustrate the power of language and so, as planned, I talked about toothache in a slightly hypnotic way. A woman at the front – latecomer and therefore less heat-exhausted – dropped immediately into manifest dental torment. I was both delighted it had worked and worried she wouldn’t emerge from her pain.