When I was a child I went to school in a Derbyshire mill village, the same school where my mother and my grandmother had learned not very much and nursed their chilblains through Pennine winters. They left it to go into the cotton mill, but I was born in happier times, and when I was eleven my family moved house and I became a day girl at a Cheshire convent. I had certain playground skills, of insult and assault, and a good knowledge of the catechism, but I had never learned any history or geography, or even English grammar. And above all, I hadn’t learned to talk proper.
The distance between the two schools was only six or seven miles, but the social gulf was oceanwide. In Cheshire, people didn’t live in rows of stone terraces, but behind pebble-dash or mock-Tudor façades. They cultivated lawns and flowering trees, and kept bird tables. They had family cars, known as ‘little runabouts’. At dinner time they had their lunch, and at teatime they had their dinner. They cleaned themselves up in things called bahthrums.
It was 1963. People were very snobbish, though perhaps not more than they are now. Later, by the time I went to London, certain provincial accents had become acceptable and even smart, but those of my part of the north-west were not among them. The late sixties were an age of equality and people were not supposed to worry about their accents, but they did worry, and tried to adapt their voices – otherwise they found themselves treated with a conscious cheeriness, as if they were black, or bereaved, or slightly deformed. When I started at my new school I didn’t know that I would become a source of mirth. Groups of girls would approach me with idiot questions, their object being to get me to pronounce certain words, shibboleths; then they would prance off, hooting and giggling.
By the time I was thirteen I had modified my accent to a degree, and my voice itself had brought me a certain notoriety. I was afraid of almost everything, except speaking in public. I had never experienced the sick numbing distress of stage fright, and also, I liked arguing. I might have done well as a shop steward in some particularly noisy factory, but you were not offered these opportunities at our annual Careers Evening. People thought I ought to be a lawyer. So I was sent to Miss Webster, to learn to talk properly.
Miss Webster was not just an elocution teacher; she was also a shopkeeper. Her shop, a few minutes’ walk from school, was called Gwen & Marjorie. It sold wool and baby clothes. Miss Webster was Gwen. Marjorie was a stout woman; she moved slowly between the hanks, behind a glass counter. She wore a big cardigan, perhaps of her own composition. In wire racks the knitting-pattern models circulated, their perfect teeth always on display: svelte ladies in lacy-knit boleros, and clean-jawed gents in cable-stitch sweaters. Miss Webster had a plate by the front door, displaying her professional qualifications. At four o’clock the front door was left ajar, so that her pupils from the two local schools could pass without disturbing Marjorie down the corridor at the back of the shop and into the living room where the elocution was performed.
This room overlooked a square of garden, in which a few shrubs withered gently; a scudding, northern late-afternoon sky rushed overhead, and the gas fire flickered and popped. Children – there would be six or seven, all at different stages of their own lessons – would perch on the arms of chairs, and blow their noses, and the convent girls would have to find a corner to stack up their schoolbags and their velour hats. There were no boys. If they didn’t talk proper, they had, I suppose, other ways of getting on in life.
Miss Webster was a little sparrow-like woman with a frizz of white hair, prominent shin bones and upswept glasses. It is almost true that you can never be too rich or too thin, but Miss Webster was too thin, and I thought so even though I was thin myself, and even though in those years it was becoming fashionable to look like an habitue of the Capulets’ monument. She had only one lung, she used to tell people, and her voice was correspondingly unimpressive. Her accent was precariously genteel, Mancunian with icing. She had been an actress in northern repertory companies. When? How long ago? ‘I was playing Lady Macbeth at Oldham when Dora Bryan was sweeping the stage.’
It was Miss Webster’s business to teach us to recite poetry and passages from Shakespeare: to teach us about metre and verse forms, and the mechanics of breathing and articulation; and to enter us for examinations, so that we could get certificates. Most of her pupils had been with her since they were seven or eight, progressing with painful slowness through the various grades. As I was a beginner I was summoned with some of the tots for my first lesson; gloomily Brobdingnagian in my ribbed tights, I read out a little verse about leprechauns which she gave me for a trial run. She said I had better come back with the big girls. There were thirteen-year-olds and thirteen-year-olds, she said, and how could she know in advance which kind I would be? I fancied that as I closed my recitation a perceptible crack appeared in one of the blue glass vases on a shelf above the fireplace. I sat on the floor with my arms around my knees, waiting to be released. Miss Webster handed me a diagram of the respiratory tract: not of hers, of course, but of a more ideal one. Gwen and Marjorie’s pet entered the room, a Yorkshire terrier which ran about among our legs and satchels. There was a little pink bow in its topknot, which I transferred mentally to Miss Webster’s own head. She and the dog seemed alike: crushable, yappy, not very bright.
Miss Webster, at least, knew how one ought to sound. The weekly exercises were rhymes, incorporating every tricky vowel. Each one of them was a baited trap, laid by the governors of Miss Webster’s professional body to ensnare every kind of regional accent:
Father’s car is a Jaguar,
And Pa drives rather fast,
Castles, farms and draughty barns,
We go charging past…
My brothers and I had often been baffled, when we were first translated to Cheshire. ‘What do they mean,’ asked the youngest, now at a Church of England school, ‘when they talk about the Kingdom, the par and the glory?’ And for years I thought you could win a point at tennis with a well-executed parsing shot.
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.