Raymond’s landlord came to collect his rent every Saturday morning, when most of us were out; he had a key to every room. The rent was left on our table. When we got back, the money would be gone and the amount entered and initialled in the rent book. Raymond couldn’t be sure whether he was Polish or Jewish or both. When I finally met him in my capacity as a prospective tenant, I found he was definitely not an Englishman. I later learned that he owned several houses in the Bayswater area.
After a couple of weeks sharing Raymond’s room, I had stopped my room-hunting in the evenings, as I had decided to rent one of the rooms in this house when one became vacant. My reason for this decision had nothing to do with the “services” available in the basement.
Raymond, at 25, was several years older and more street-wise than me. He had passed his Cambridge Senior Certificate, but had chosen an easier life in London and was not interested in furthering his education. We got on well and left for work together most mornings. I did what I liked after dinner and there were no tensions at home, such a welcome change from Pierre’s bedsit.
However, after a few weeks, I started to get fed up living out of a suitcase for so long, with no place of my own. Nobody had left in our house; rooms that had become available in the landlord’s other properties didn’t appeal to me. One or two I went to view I wouldn’t stay in for free. They were generally run down, dirty and I didn’t like the look of some of the tenants I saw. They looked like labourers, in dirty clothes. I was told they were probably Irish.
The idea of returning to Bradford became appealing again, despite my reason for leaving that city. I also reminded myself I had to write to Jean, as I had promised I would. The family must have been getting worried not hearing from me since I had left them. By now I had not seen a single job advert for skilled pleaters in the newspapers; I was told such factories did not exist in London. In the meantime, as I had more time in the evening, I’d started joining Raymond when he went to a house near Notting Hill Gate station. Five Chinese Mauritians had rooms there and they spent their time playing cards. Friends came and went all evening. At weekends these sessions would start on Friday when they got back from work and go on till late on Sunday.
I became a regular at the house, as it was a good way to pass the time and forget about my lodging problems. One of the card players was good at cooking and we would be treated to his Chinese or Mauritian meals. We also got through a lot of beer and smoking while gambling helped the concentration. Soon I was smoking and drinking just like the others.
***
A couple of weeks before Christmas I became aware that I was spending more than I was earning. When I examined my Post Office Savings Bank passbook I saw that all the last ten entries in it were withdrawals. At this rate I would soon have no savings left. It was the wake-up call I needed to get out of this rot.
I was working during the day, having a good time in the evening, and spending the weekends playing cards. It was here that most of my money was going. That wasn’t what I had come all the way to England for. I wanted more out of life, but I told myself until I had a place of my own I would remain in limbo and make no progress. Finding a room became my top priority. I was in London but I reminded myself again that I was hardly speaking English. Creole was the language I used the most: at work, at play, at home. In Bradford, I spoke English all the time. I was missing that city.
At about that time I discovered quite by chance that there was a YMCA at Mount Pleasant, which was only a few streets away from Gamages. I went to have a look at it after work and found it had vacancies. Once I was inside that hostel, I suddenly had this strange desire to live in a YMCA again. Without hesitation I decided to move in the following weekend. It would mean spending more on my lodging but I would be able to walk to work and thus save on fares. More importantly, I would break away from this life I had been leading in the last several weeks.
That Christmas, my second in England, I spent on my own in a room in this hostel. The alternative would have been playing cards and drinking through the festive period. Unlike my experience in Bradford, where I had to turn down all the invitations from my colleagues to spend Christmas with them, in London not a single kind soul at work took pity on me. Not even Mrs Wilson next door, who I spent hours with daily doing our English lessons. I suspected she was a widow and probably had no family and should have welcomed my company.
***
That Christmas Eve I spent by myself drinking in a pub just around the corner. The only soul I spoke to was a barman: to order more beer. At least I had a traditional festive lunch at the hostel, in the company of other residents, all complete strangers. They were not at all like those in the Bradford YMCA. Neither were they young men and most of them were probably workers, not students, and they had no time for a foreigner. How I wished I was back at Ellerton’s, being kissed under the mistletoe by lovely girls. I was sorely tempted to pay a visit to the basement at Raymond’s place. I preferred Bernadette but that day I would have gladly made do with Imelda. However, the likelihood that they might have taken the day off on Christmas Day, I changed my mind. That evening, alone in my room, I told myself I didn’t belong here – I must return to my “English family” and face the consequences.
***
On the first of January, which was then an ordinary working day, my luck turned unexpectedly. A colleague at work asked me if I was still looking for a bedsit, he’d heard of one going over the holiday.
‘It’s in Clapham North. A friend of mine is moving out this week and if you go and see his landlord before he advertises the room, you might be lucky.’
‘Is it near the tube station?’
‘Just down the road from one, Northern Line.’
I was not in the slightest surprised to find that the house, in Landor Road, did not belong to an English family: they either didn’t like bloody foreigners in their houses or they didn’t need the extra cash. I was greeted by an elderly Polish man. The room in question was small but compared to what I had been used to since arriving in London, it was ample. What attracted me most to it was I would finally have a place of my own, no more sharing with other people with no privacy.
The owners were a couple of pensioners whose children had flown the nest. My room, on the top floor, overlooking the back garden, was formerly their son’s. They had put a small corner sink in it and there was a gas ring on a stand next to the ubiquitous gas and electricity meters that required two-shilling coins. I moved in in the second week of the New Year. This landlord didn’t impose any conditions and I was free to come and go without any restrictions. It was mainly him I had dealings with, as his wife didn’t appear to understand anything other than Polish. This made me feel superior to her: a foreigner who knew less English than me. All I got from her when we chanced to meet on the staircase was a sweet smile. All that changed after I had learnt a few words in her language and tried them on her. She immediately assumed I spoke it and would rattle on in Polish as soon as I’d said dzien dobri, good morning, to her. I decided I had better learn some more words – perhaps it might lead to an invitation to have a Polish meal with them.
***
I had no idea what exactly Roger, my cousin, had told my family about me when he got back home. I had told him hardly anything new about my life in Bradford, despite his incessant questioning, and in the end he got fed up with asking. What he must have mentioned was my accommodation problems here and my crappy job at Gamages. Now that they knew I was in a worse situation in London, my family started asking me endless questions in their letters. They tried hard to persuade me to return North, where I had such a well-paid job, great and generous friends and my wonderful “English family”: the Starlings.
Was I glad I had stopped Roger from coming to Bradford! The first shock he would have got was the discovery that John was in fact Jean, then he might have found out that I had English girlfriends. This would have given my mother apoplexy. I decided I would have to dream up some more cheerful fabrications to keep them happy at home. It was going to be trickier in London where, unlike in Bradford, there were several Mauritians who knew people who knew my family or friends in Mauritius.
Now that I finally had a place of my own in this big city, I made a point of writing to Jean Starling. It had been a long time. The excuse I gave her for my long silence was, at best, half true: I had no fixed address. I did send the family a Christmas card but told them not to send me one, as I was about to move to another address. I didn’t want the Starlings to know what a hard time I’d had since leaving them.
I could have invented some grand jobs; told them I was earning more money than in Bradford; I hadn’t moved into my own place as I was staying for free with various friends. I was able to resist doing that. I didn’t want to start a new life of lies, which Jean would invariably find out about anyway. I hadn’t forgotten what she had told me during her tearful goodbye at the station: ‘I might join you in London one day…’ My letter was short. I told her I had an interesting job at Gamages, was very busy and involved in a lot of things, going out most evenings with friends who were from all over the world. I made no mention of evening classes, I had already told her enough lies. I promised to write again soon.
I had by now ceased writing all my letters home completely in French. It wasn’t to impress my siblings and friends in Mauritius with my “fluency” in English, but I hadn’t spoken my second language since I arrived here and was thinking less and less in it. Even my dreams were no longer in Creole. Writing letters also helped me improve my written English, as it was the only time I wrote anything substantial in it. Usually it was just shopping lists and things like that.
One good thing about living in Clapham North was it kept me away from my gambling and drinking friends in West London. After work I ceased to speak Creole and went home to a part of London where I was unlikely to meet Mauritians.
I had discovered an easier and more convenient way to acquire knowledge than by going to evening classes – and it was free. I was now grateful that Carmel Keane in Bradford had been so persuasive and insistent in lending me her novels. She had been successful in banishing my reluctance to, and fear of, reading anything longer than a few pages. I borrowed books from the public library and spent a lot of my time reading them. I also read just about everything in my newspaper. By now I was reading the Daily Express, which I had been told by people who knew about these things, was “classier” than the Daily Mirror. I had now also resumed my habit of listening to The Archers on my radio every evening, something I wasn’t able to do until I moved to Landor Road. I soon caught up with what had been happening in Ambridge during my absence. Listening to the characters was like hearing old friends again – my on-air English family.
‘Clapham North!’ some Mauritians at work were horrified when they learnt that I had moved there, ‘Are you mad – that’s near Brixton!’ The road I lived in led straight to Brixton centre, a short walk away.
“Keep away from Brixton,’ I was warned, ‘It’s full of West Indians. You don’t want to go there at night.’
***
I know I’ve said before that sometimes I avoided socializing with the West Indians at work because many of them spoke Pidgin English, a version of our Creole French in English. Over time, however, I had found them such friendly people. They laughed a lot despite our conditions in this unfriendly city. They reminded me of the Creoles in Mauritius: fun-loving, happy-go-lucky individuals. Like them, they wanted to be friends with the Chinese. I got the impression they enjoyed life in London more than other foreigners: they seemed to be partying most weekends.
Ignoring all the advice I was given, I decided to investigate Brixton one Saturday afternoon. They were right. There were rather a lot of people in that suburb who appeared to be from the Caribbean, although I couldn’t tell a Jamaican from a Trinidadian, nor those from the other islands in that part of the world. Until I came to England, I didn’t even know of their existence. When I had first seen black people in the streets, I’d thought they were Africans. In the market I noticed quite a few of the stalls were run by West Indians: cheerful traders calling out their wares. For the first time since I came to England, I saw vegetables and other ingredients that were familiar to me and which I never thought I would find in this country: sweet potatoes, chillies, chow chows, aubergines, various spices, squid, dried fish, mangoes and many more. I wondered whether those Mauritians who had warned me against coming to Brixton knew these goods were on sale here. As I paused from stall to stall, deciding what I should buy, as I didn’t know how to cook them, I could smell curry being cooked somewhere near. If only I could have smelled the aroma of frying samosas and gato piment, I could have imagined myself being back in Mauritius. I felt at home in that market and planned to return there more often to do more hunting-gathering for familiar ingredients.
***
I had received a reply to my letter to Jean almost by return. She wrote how relieved they were to get my news; they had been worried sick not hearing from me for so long. She urged me to write to her more often to tell her what I was doing. I didn’t answer her straightaway but meant to do it at the first opportunity. After a couple of weeks or so, my good intention vanished. I really didn’t have anything worth writing about. My letters home had also become less frequent for the same reason.
Now that I was finally settled in my own place I could call “home”, I started to think seriously about what I wanted out of London. I was no longer happy with being a stockroom-keeper in a city where the sky was the limit. I’d read in the papers, again and again, about some foreigners who had done well in this country. They appeared to be in business of some kind. I knew nothing about running a business, let alone starting one, without any capital. How I wished Carmel was here to advise me. What I could do in the meantime was to look for another job that was better paid. But to get such a job I had to speak better English. That, I decided, would be my next objective. In the meantime one thing I could do was to get a second job, in the evenings or at weekends. I ruled out the first option in case I did decide to go to evening classes.
With nothing to do when not at work, I spent more time at my local library to borrow books on any subject that caught my attention. I read them voraciously wherever I could: on the tube to and from work, when I had nothing to do in my stockroom, at the launderette. In the first year at Gamages, I probably read an average of one book a week. I always went to work with a briefcase. I fancied it fooled other commuters into thinking that I was a professional man – I was dressed like one – or at least some sort of office worker, not a stockroom-keeper. What my case contained were the latest book I was reading and my The Little Oxford Dictionary, for looking up the meaning of new words at work.
***
Mrs Wilson, my “English teacher”, had become the only reason why I was still reluctant to leave my job. Where else would I find another person kind enough to give me free, one-to-one English lessons? Granted, the time she devoted to me was not her own, but Gamages’. It was during the day when we both had nothing to do. There was only the stationery stockroom and her office in that corner of the fourth, top floor. We were seldom disturbed; our “classroom” couldn’t be more ideal.
One thing I found strange about Mrs Wilson was she kept her distance. I mean I had known her for some six months by now but she never asked me to call her by her first name, Helen. All right, I was 19 and she was … probably in her 50s, but I got the impression she didn’t want me to become more familiar with her. However, I became aware that, by and by, she had become curious about my personal life. She never asked me questions about my family directly but she got me to tell her such things during our conversations. She also started asking me what I did in my spare time and at weekends.
***
There was something else about Mrs Wilson that was still a mystery to me. Her face had looked quite familiar the first time I had met her, but several months later I still could not place her. I had been told: ‘You’ll find the English are reserved’. Could she be an example of a reserved English woman? If so, I was glad to have met one if they were all as keen as Mrs Wilson to teach bloody foreigners English.
What I did eventually discover about her, however, was what she was not: she was never a teacher of English. By now I had become aware of her limitations: she did not have answers to all my increasing number of questions. She was simply a woman whose language was English and I was a foreigner who was keen to learn that language – from anyone. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. Over time I got the impression she used to look forward to our lessons as much as I did. I had no idea about these things but I think her job, like mine, didn’t require any formal school certificates. She was a typist who did some secretarial work and things like answering the phone when her boss was out of the office.
On some days when we both had nothing to do, Mrs Wilson would give me lessons in elocution, or more precisely, in pronunciation. I would read a passage from whatever book I happened to be reading – most of which she had never heard of – and she would correct me. From these lessons I gradually discovered two things. One, however hard I tried, I was told I still spoke with a foreign accent, which most people took to be French. Two, an endless number of words, especially English names, were not pronounced as they were written. The difficulties I used to experience when buying train tickets illustrate this.
‘One ticket to Hol-bourne, please,’ I’d say to the ticket clerk in my best English.
‘Where to …?’
‘Hole-borne.’
‘Show it to me on this map.’ I pointed to Holborn. ‘Ah, you mean Ho’born!’
I had the same problem with Clap-ham (Clappam), Glou-ces-ter Road (Gloster), Lei-ces-ter Square (Lester), Totten-ham Court Road (Tottennam), South-wark (Sathzak). Even saying an ordinary word like Trafalgar I was told was wrong. I used to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable and pronounced these words as in French: Tra-fal-garre and so on and not everyone could get it first time. As for station names like Rotherhithe with two th, it took a lot of practising to satisfy my teacher that I would be understood. There are countless other words that foreigners like me must have problems with: Willesden (Wee-les-den), Greenwich (Green-which), Lewisham (Lewis-ham) and so on. And how does someone not English pronounce the following words on first encountering them: Loughton, Ruislip, Deptford, Bicester? Ordinary, everyday words to the English but not to foreigners. My conclusion even now is, however near perfect my written English may seem in places, my accent and the placing of the wrong emphasis on syllables, will always give me away as a bloody foreigner.
***
Another ordeal to be endured by foreigners is how to pronounce some English surnames. I have often wondered how even British-born people know. Is it something that comes naturally to them? Take an ordinary surname like Home, its correct pronunciation is Hume. Or is it Hume that’s pronounced Home? See what I mean! I first realised I’d never speak like an Englishman when reading Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and found that a double-barrelled name Beste-Chetwynde is pronounced Beast-Cheating. Here are a few other examples that come to mind, in case foreigners encounter them: Talconeston is Tackleston, Happisburgh is Haysborough, Lyte is Late, Wymondham is Windham. Don’t take my word for it, I’m only a bloody foreigner.
Foreigners learning English would probably agree with me that there’s no rhyme or reason to this language. But if it was designed to deter the people whose countries the British had colonised from learning their language – they have failed. As Mrs Wilson used to say when she couldn’t answer one of my questions: ‘It’s all right for foreigners to make grammatical mistakes when speaking our language.’
It embarrassed me every time I asked her a question that she couldn’t help me with, such as when I asked her if she could give me some examples of when I should use the subjunctive mood. My G F Lamb’s English for General Certificate was proving more confusing with endless rules of the language.
‘The what?’ So I tried another question, ‘My book talks about subordinating conjunction and suspended participles. Do you use these when you write your sentences?’
‘I probably do but … at this stage, as you’re not studying for the English O-level exam I, er, I wouldn’t worry about, about knowing the technical terms of the English grammar.’
‘But I want to speak BBC English.’
‘You’re doing very well with your standard English. As I told you, we expect foreigners to make mistakes …’
Then there were words I saw which didn’t make sense, such as the sign I saw on a road: HEAVY PLANT ON THE MOVE. How could a plant move, especially a heavy one? By now I had come to the conclusion that I would never master the English language and decided not to bother my teacher with some of the questions I had got lined up for her, such as when I should use a gerund and not an infinitive. She was clearly getting out of her depth and I didn’t want to give her any excuses to end our lessons. Mrs Wilson, you see, was not what some people would call an “educated person”.
***
Among the workers from different countries who came to my stockroom to bring new stocks or collect goods for postal orders was Sooky Beeharry. He was older than most of us foreigners, perhaps over 50. After unloading the goods from his cane trolley, he would sometimes help me to put them away on the shelves. As he was never in a hurry to leave, he would then grab a chair, sit astride it and we’d chat. More than once he had made remarks such as: ‘I like your job,’ or ‘Your job would be perfect for me,’ or ‘You’re a lucky man. My job, ferrying goods all day long to all the departments is tiring and boring, but I suppose it pays the mortgage.’
I didn’t mind his visits at all, in fact I benefited from them. For a bloody foreigner he spoke good English, unlike most other Indian employees there. Nor did he have an Indian accent, his was a new one to me. I would say he preferred the company of Mauritians more than those of Indians from the Sub-continent. At least that was the impression I got. He had said so many times: ‘Back home we were neighbours; a lot of Mauritian Indians have relatives in Durban.’
During the Second World War he was in the British Army and saw action in Egypt. Unlike us Mauritians, as a South African he in fact had been speaking English all his life. From our various conversations I learnt that when he’d returned home after the war he couldn’t stand the way the white South Africans treated coloured people like him, as they were called. He had come to London with his wife and a young daughter several years ago. He came with enough money for a deposit on a small flat. One year later he was widowed, ‘The cold weather killed my wife. I’ve brought up my daughter single-handed since she was eleven.’
***
If today I speak and write English the way I do: blame Mrs Wilson! I just do it because it sounds right, it’s how I believe natives of this country write or say things. Don’t ask me to teach the language to other foreigners because I never learnt the rules properly and therefore can’t explain why we say things or write or don’t write in a certain way. Somehow I probably know when something doesn’t sound right, for example: I am not going to work today is not the same thing as I am going not to work today. Similarly ten items or less is wrong and ten or fewer items is correct. What I still have problems with is whether I should say I am going up to Reading or I am going down to Reading. A foreigner in this country would encounter thousands of such examples. If they won’t count as mistakes in an English exam and people understand what you mean, that’s all that matters as far as I’m concerned. This book is not going to be professionally edited and what you read is how I write.
Some people had remarked that I was good at spelling, it was the mark of an educated person. It’s not something I’m gifted in, like one can be gifted in painting or music. I’ve had to learn every new word I encountered by learning how it was spelt. That’s why I don’t need the help of a mnemonic to know that where a c is immediately before two vowels, the e precedes the i. I just memorise how to spell receive or receipt.
My English is like playing music by ear. I can play a tune, people recognise it, but they don’t need to know that I can’t write or read music. Professional musicians may notice one or two flaws, but most people won’t. Similarly, non-English-speaking foreigners probably won’t notice my mistakes and think I speak “good” English. I hope, despite sounding foreign in parts, my writing makes sense despite it being cliché-ridden, of which see later.
What Mrs Wilson was good at in our early lessons was correcting me when I made common mistakes without realising it, such as adding ed to a verb to turn it into the past tense. I would say: ‘I hided it in my pocket,’ and she would immediately say, ‘I hid it’; or ‘The glass was breaked,’ she corrected to ‘The glass was broken’. I used to add ves to turn words ending in f into plural, such as loaf. I would say ‘I like eating a lot of beeves,’ and she would correct me, ‘No, beef remains beef in plural, like deer’ and feet was the plural of foot not foots. She could not always explain why eat becomes ate and not eated but read remains read but is pronounced red, or why shambles and crossroads, ending in an s, are singular. Other mistakes she pointed out to me were when I said things like ‘My bag is fullest.’ She would look puzzled, ‘That’s not correct.’
‘But you say, “long, longer, longest or big, bigger, biggest. What is the superlative of full? ‘
She had to think about it before saying, ‘I would say “completely full” or “full to the brim”. Whenever this happened and she didn’t have an answer to such anomalies, she gave me her famous: ‘these are exceptions to the rules,’ or ‘foreigners are not expected to speak grammatically correct English.’ I later read in a book that the ‘est’ in big, bigger and biggest can’t be used in words of more than two syllables, so the superlative of beautiful cannot be beautifullest. Instead ‘more’ and ‘most’ are placed in front of it: this dress is more beautiful but that one is the most beautiful.
After several months of our almost daily lessons, Mrs Wilson suggested I wrote some stories, so that she could help me with my written English, instead of just correcting my homework from my textbook. I found written English and spoken English were two quite different things. When writing something, I had all the time to think of the right words, to re-write a sentence several times, until I felt I had got it right. This was not always possible when speaking.
***
After writing several so-called compositions, Mrs Wilson suggested: ‘Why don’t you write about the place where you live, your bedsit, whether you’re happy or otherwise there, about living with Polish people, your family, your hobbies, you know, people you like to socialise with, erm, and so on.’
So I did. I found it easy to write about these things and over a period of months I think I had written about everything possible about my life in London. It was while writing these that familiar contractions such as ‘don’t’ for do not, ‘you’re’ for you are, ‘won’t’ for will not that I became aware that they should not be used in formal writing. Also apostrophes exist only in written English: my teacher’s book, but not when spoken: my teacher apostrophe book. Similarly with hyphenated words, Mrs Wilson could not tell me why some have a hyphen and not others. Another oddity I had hoped she could enlighten me on was the guinea; she said she had never wondered why. I still don’t know why in speech we say the date as the fifteenth of June but in writing it’s simply 15th June, without the ‘of’. A contradiction or just another exception to the rule?
It was from these written exercises, which we now called essays, that Mrs Wilson discovered I was making some common spelling mistakes without being aware of them. Not the kinds that some “uneducated” English people tend to make, such as ‘write’ for right, ‘licence’ for license, ‘mussel’ for muscle. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of English words that sound exactly like their equivalents in French. But in their written forms there are slight differences in the spelling, such as one letter fewer as in marriage, baggage in English. In French they are spelt mariage and bagage. Some have an additional letter in French: plant, liquid, salad, literature in English are: plante, liquide, salade, litterature in French. Other French words I was using as English ones included: idyllique, leçon, machinerie, paquet, remarque. In English they are, of course: idyllic, lesson, machinery, packet, remark respectively. Some literal translations baffled her. I had translated filer à l’anglaise into ‘run like the English’.
‘What do you mean by “run like the English”?’ Mrs Wilson queried. We both discovered that it should be: to take French leave. Another discovery was that French letter, capote anglaise in French, had nothing to do with the kind delivered by the postman, but I decided not to discuss it in case my teacher got the wrong idea. I gradually realised that some idioms didn’t translate from one language to another and looking up the words in my dictionary didn’t always help.
***
Mrs Wilson did not know French and just assumed I didn’t know how to spell these words, until I pointed out some of the above similarities to her. Later she was even to praise me: ‘I must say your spelling is very good; I’d say better than mine.’ It was not unknown for me to correct her spelling. In one of my essays, for example, I had written: ‘I landed in Marseille and went through Lyon by train to get to Paris.’
‘Marseilles and Lyons are spelt with an s,’ she said. I told her she was wrong, I had been there. ‘In that case you may be right but we spell them with an s,’ but she couldn’t explain why that was so.
One day when we were discussing one of my essays, she said: ‘I think you’re using too many clichés.’
‘What’s a cliché? It sounds French.’
‘It means the use of familiar phrases, those not your own original thought.’
‘Oh, where?’
‘Look … here, you’ve written “a pack of lies”, somewhere else … there, you’ve written “razor sharp”. These are clichés.’
‘Are they mistakes?’
‘Well, not mistakes exactly, but, erm, you mustn’t use them. Try to think of another ways of saying the same thing, something original instead.’
I wasn’t sure I got what she was trying to say. To me these so-called clichés “improved” my written English, I had read about them somewhere, some in books written by well-educated, authoritative writers. I had hoped to impress Mrs Wilson when I wrote phrases such as ‘quick as a flash’, ‘burn the midnight oil’. I thought not many foreigners in Gamages could write like that. It showed how well read I was. I disagreed with Mrs Wilson and told her if they weren’t mistakes, then I intended to go on using them. I asked her to give me a good reason why I shouldn’t use them, especially as famous authors used them in their books. My opinion of her then was that she didn’t always know what she was talking about.
‘The …’ she mentioned the title of a book, which I can no longer remember now, ‘says you must avoid using clichés. It’s a sign of, it’s not original, erm, you’re using other writers’ thinking.’
She was quoting from a textbook. Was she learning about English grammar herself in order to teach me? As readers who have read this book from the beginning would have noticed, I do use a lot of clichés. As far as I’m concerned (is that a cliché?), they are a convenient way to make a point, to express an idea. I’m sure many foreigners would not even realise they are clichés, but would think I must be one of those “educated” bloody foreigners to write like that. So what if they’re other writers’ thoughts? Every sentence in English must have already been written by some other people before me. Readers understand them. They are so English. They express something better than I can. All I have to do is remember them and use them in the right places. I would urge foreigners learning to write English not to give up using them, as was my own intention. If I have the time one day, I might even compile a book of clichés. Grammatical mistakes put people off from reading something, not good clichés written a long time ago by some respected writers.
***
At other times we had had the same arguments about my using metaphors, simile, idioms and other figures of speech. I had recently bought A Book of English Proverbs by V. H. Collins and was learning those I liked by heart and incorporated them, such as ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, in my writing to impress my teacher. I once caught her out when she didn’t recognise something I had written was a simile.
‘There’s another cliché: “as brave as a lion”’ she pointed out as she went through what I had given her.
‘But my book says that’s a simile.’
‘A simile?...’
At least she agreed these were not grammatical mistakes. I couldn’t blame my teacher if I was not able to speak like a native speaker, or if my writing appeared designed more to impress other foreigners than the British. But my English was grammatically correct.
Among the Mauritians in England, at least, I can claim to be one of a few, if not the only, “graduate of Gamages University”. For me, it was the “university” where I learnt a lot of my English, where I was the only student and Mrs Wilson the only “lecturer”, so far as I knew. It was she who encouraged me to write more with praises such as: ‘I think you’re good at writing; you express yourself well in your writing; I like your style; perhaps you should become a writer one day; you’re obviously good at languages. You know what, Alan – she’d never tried to call me Alain, like most English people – you’ve got me writing myself. I’ve started writing down my early life … just out of interest.’
‘Will you let me read it?’
‘Erm … I don’t think it will interest you.’
The two of us could be said to have got on well as teacher and student, but I wouldn’t say we were, at that stage in our relationship, other than that. Before too long, however, it was to change.