Between louche and lozenge
‘I would sit at the window,’ Granny said, ‘watching for the lights of the car of the young man who was to bring her home. Mostly all I would see was the ghostly outlines of trees. When there was a car, I became very agitated, thinking that this must at last be her. It never was, but during those moments I realised how much I really …’ The word love almost leaped from her lips under these special circumstances, but even sleepless and confiding she was able to choke it back. ‘… How much fondness I had for her.’ Love was a word that had been fiercely edited out of her conversation. There was a gap in her personal dictionary somewhere between louche and lozenge.
‘Then my son Roy — your Uncle Roy — asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘Worrying,’ and he said something that was not just sweet and clever but wise. He wasn’t fully grown up himself, in some ways still a child, but he knew what he was saying. He said, “Well, why don’t you just get on up to bed and I’ll sit up and worry for you?” I really valued that in him. So I say to you now, if you have a worry that is keeping you awake, just tell Granny and she’ll do the worrying for you, while you get some sleep.’
What kept me awake was more like a disappointed appetite for events than worries of any kind. Since my life was being kept so free of content, I would have to import things to occupy me from the few people I saw. It wasn’t that people volunteered their inmost secrets, exactly, but they certainly said more than they would have to anyone else in my age group. Baby talk is a performance, even if you’re a baby. Prattling becomes a chore. Sooner or later the adults I spoke to tired of the effort it took to talk down to me.
I dare say the people around me felt a need to compensate me for my deprivation, as I floated month after month in a clumsy 1950s prototype of the isolation tank. They chatted on, and I encouraged them with every inducement I had. I didn’t always understand but I always remembered. I had nothing else to do with my time. If I was precocious, at least I was innocent of swank. It was pure survival strategy. Who else was I going to talk to, if not adults? For practical purposes I had no contemporaries. Peter was younger and unavailable, intent on exploring his surroundings in ways I no longer could. He didn’t share his discoveries, either out of innate tact or because Mum had warned him not to rub it in that our destinies had diverged so markedly.
From Mum I wanted to know if we had other ‘home’ words, like ‘siss’ and ‘tuppenny’, which I had needed to explain to Dr Duckett. I wanted to know the proper outside word for things as well. It’s the doctor-and-nurse word that really counts. Then when she said that the proper word for tuppenny was ‘fæces’, I thought it was priceless. I made up a rhyme which went ‘My sheep have got fæces in their fleeces.’
Besides ‘taily’ and ‘scallywag’ there were words for female parts. ‘Boozzie’ was the family word for ‘bosom’. There was no home word for the lady’s hole where the taily was alleged to go, which struck me as rather suspicious, but there was apparently a doctor-and-nurse word, which was ‘vagina’, which had a nice poetic sound to it.
Not all home words came from Mum and Dad — some were from me. ‘Snort’, my improvised baby-word for ‘nostril’, had passed into currency, so that Mum herself sometimes used it.
One day Mum let slip that she had been brought up with a different set of home words. I piled on the pressure till she told me what they were. At last she gave in, but she made me swear not to use them even in the house. The pleasure for me in learning this archaic vocabulary lay not only in imagining Mum having to use the words but also Granny teaching her them. Mum’s childhood word for ‘milk’ was ‘ookkies’. What we called ‘tuppenny’ was ‘jobs’.
Throbbing with ancient trauma
Jobs had been a dark word in Mum’s childhood. ‘Have you done your jobs today, Laura?’ Granny would ask her every day, and if she hadn’t the sentence was castor oil. Mum’s voice throbbed with ancient trauma. ‘That is something you never want to take, John.’ I thanked my lucky stars that however ill I seemed to be, I had never been subjected to castor oil. ‘Tuppenny’ must have been her light-hearted antidote to to the fearsome ‘jobs’. Spend a penny, spend two while you’re at it, no need to make a fuss.
In Mum’s childhood ‘sick’ was ‘ikky’, or (even better, I thought) ‘ikky-boo-ba’. If you’d been sick in the lavatory you had to say, ‘I’ve been ikky-boo-ba down the slobber-pail.’ Mum could hardly bear to say the words even as a grown-up. Now I hear an extra element in all these silly words, a posh archness and glee which reveal a younger Granny than the one I knew. Granny had been very comfortably brought up, as she told me more than once, with fruit from the glasshouse reserved for her, and a goat milked for her benefit because she had once been ikky-boo-ba after drinking cow’s. She didn’t claim to be allergic, just indulged.
By this time there was a sort of pressure differential between me and anyone who sat by me or came to visit, which made information flow in my direction almost irrespective of the character and intentions of my companions. It was a form of magnetism, or electrolysis. I learned to generate a current which would produce a transfer of microscopic anecdotal particles from them to me. I was a scavenger living on molecules of gossip.
Some of this was imitation. Mum herself was good at getting things out of people and would rise to the top of any social gathering of service wives. She was a bit of a queen bee. When she came in from the shops, if she so much as said, ‘Oh, I saw Doreen Parsons, she asked after you,’ I’d milk her for every last drop of gossip and aimless service-wife conversation. I who had no memories of ever being in a shop learned that ‘I always say you get what you pay for’ was a valid contribution to any discussion of value and price. I learned to give the proper cues myself. And what did you say? And what did she say to that?
As bad as St Peter
I tired Mum out with my talking. I exhausted her modest store of small talk, and still I wanted more. Tell me about anything. I absorbed all her prejudices. U and non-U, I suppose. Well-bred people say ‘sitting room’ not ‘lounge’. Never ‘lounge’. You can lounge about in the sitting room, John. That’s different. There were no limits to the traps that lay in store in language. When referring to weather or a room that is uncomfortably hot and airless, you must say ‘stuffy’, not ‘sultry’ or ‘close’. And I still don’t know why.
There was an etiquette for everything, even elevenses. Mum was very particular about morning coffee. A little dip of the biscuit into the coffee was acceptable, though best avoided. She showed me the way it should be done, if the temptation grew too great. The biscuit went in and out of the tea in a flash. It didn’t have the time to become soggy. That was the nightmare, the loss of texture and form. If the biscuit showed signs of bending when held at the horizontal, a point of danger was being reached. ‘Never let a dip turn into a dunk,’ she would say. ‘Don’t do what your father does. When he dunks a biscuit in public, there is absolutely nowhere I can look.’ Just because I was ill didn’t mean I was allowed to be common. She didn’t fully close her mouth while she ate the dipped biscuit, so that I could hear that it retained its crunch. She broke one rule (she whose lips closed round a mouthful as if sewn shut) so as to underline the importance of another.
If you said ‘sultry’ or ‘close’ you were something worse than common. You were suburban. Being suburban was much worse than being working-class, because suburban people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus. Suburban people were not ‘our sort’.