Memories
Benny Green
Summer's End Archie Hill (ShepheardWelwyn, £3.95) The Winter Sparrows Mary Rose Liverani (Michael Joseph, £3.25) One day historians will look back on our epoch and marvel at the phenomenal speed at which social change suddenly began to take place, after an interminable period of evasion and vacillation. One moment there was Dickensian squalor, and the next it was all Torremolinos and television aerials, and the period separating them will become a pet preoccupation of future academics. They will publish papers on the Termination of the Great Doldrums; deliver lectures on the Effect of Welfare on the Proletarian Psychology; set questions to future benighted economists: `In the period 1940-1960 the inter-relation between industrial investment and urban morality showed a marked dependence on the Growth Index. Discuss what, if anything, you think this question means'.
The irony is that to those of us who grew Up in that odd twilight period, the transition was so gradual as to go unnoticed. And yet now, in reading the memoirs of those who grew up with us, those whose gathering maturity coincided with the Years from, say, Munich to Macmillan, it is sometimes hard to keep in mind the fact that this is not some remote tearjerker to Which we are being exposed, a tall story told by Jo the Crossing Sweeper, but the recollections of a memoirist still young, still very much alive and very much kicking. The truth of this ought to be of some interest to Politicians in need of votes, since the majority of those who bother to cast votes at all are young enough to remember the end of the Great Doldrums, and to be conditioned by the memory. And yet to gaze upon the fatuous wonders of the Party political broadcasts, you would think that nobody with political aspirations had a memory longer than six weeks.
There is another point about the reminiscences of the working class British which I find very nearly intolerable from a reader's point of view, and that is the unfortunate truth that Britain is a tiny island whose popular literary culture is fragmented by a multiplicity of regional niceties, and the even more unfortunate truth that few reminiscers will allow anyone to forget it. Both Archie Hill, who grew up in the Black Country, and Mary Rose Liverani, a child of the Glasgow slums, insist on sprinkling the salt of regional dialect over the plain fare of their chronicles, stretching the English language to the point where it very nearly snaps altogether. It is very possible that I am in a minority of one here, but I have never been able to penetrate either the meaning or the purpose of passages like this: 'Young mon, that mon's gooin' to have t'goons out o' Thursday-tomorrow-an' thot's more work for you, young mon.'
or like this: 'Weoll: e ynt petickler, lidy. E ez is chawnce of henny flegstown agin thet wall.'
The first specimen is from Kipling's The Three Musketeers, the second from Act Two of Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion, and what fractures me about them is not the typographical eczema of all those apostrophes, but the bathos of Kipling's 'Thursday', of Shaw's 'wall', for the man who is capable of `mon' and 'tidy' is never going to get 'Thursday' or 'wall' right. And yet the writer, in both instances, has suddenly switched back to conventional English, tacitly acknowledging that as it is impossible to render phonetical distinctions with the printed word, you might as well abide by the fiction of standard English. I do wish that Mr Hill and Mrs Liverani had done so, too, because the poignancy and the sprightliness of both their books are hopelessly compromised by relentless addiction to passages like this:
'How fast bist we a-going, Mister Jobb?' and like this: 'Dae ye think they're goin' tae welcome a fee-Ion intae their midst ?'
The question, which of those two extracts comes from the Black Country and which from Glasgow I leave to those better versed in phonetic subtleties than I am, but there is no doubt in my mind that if the writer's obligation is to remove from the path of the reader as many difficulties as are practicable without the sacrifice of integrity, then neither Mr Hill nor Miss Liverani have been very tactful about it. Which is a pity, because I sense that underneath all that regional bracken, behind those tangled thickets of neologism, some bright and beautiful flowers are waiting to be sniffed.
Previous page
