As a result of my lamentable inability to concentrate in school classrooms, I do not have any grasp of the rules of grammar. I must have known some of them once because I got English, Latin and French O levels, I think, but they no longer reside in my memory. I rely entirely on whether something ‘sounds’ right (by which I also mean ‘reads’ right), like a musician who can’t read music and is forced to play by ear.
If it doesn’t sound right then I am able to put it right but I am not able to find any of the technical terms needed to describe most of the types of words or grammatical constructions that I have used. I can identify nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and I might be able to name a few tenses, but after that I have to resort to the dictionary every time someone mistakes me for an expert and asks me what a subjunctive or a subordinate clause might be. I can only identify a split infinitive because of Star Trek’s ‘to boldly go’ catchphrase.
I write and read as instinctively as I talk, with none of the scaffolding of knowledge that I would probably need if I were ever to be asked to teach creative writing. Those instincts, I believe, came from being talked to like an adult from as early as I can remember (I was an only child and my mother did not find childish talk interesting), being read to and being given well-written books to read so that their written language seeped into my head as surreptitiously as spoken languages seep into the mouth of every infant.
My mother tempted me into reading for myself by agreeing to read alternate chapters of A Bear Called Paddington to me as long as I read the others for myself. The urge to follow the polite bear’s adventures was enough to get me hooked and soon I was making my own way, reading everything I could find in the local library and on my mother’s bookshelves – which meant I had read virtually every one of Georgette Heyer’s regency romances by the time I was 12 and was deep into saving foppish aristocrats from the guillotine with the Scarlet Pimpernel.
I use language much as a well-trained gun-dog might use his nose and ears. When it works well it is a triumph of habit and practice and nothing to do with intellectual rigour, powers of deconstruction or analysis.
I never managed to learn my multiplication tables either, but at least I’m not trying to earn my living as a mathematician.