Home life
So to speak
Alice Thomas Ellis
One of our sons, who does a bit of acting on the side, was recently re- quired to portray a juvenile delinquent for a TV series and one of the ladies organising the thing telephoned to arrange the details. Unfortunately the phone was answered by someone whose accent is what used to be described as 'cultured' and the lady rang the agent in a panic to inquire whether the son spoke like the father because if .so he would be absolutely no use to them. The agent was able to reassure her on this point.
One Sunday I was preparing lunch and listening to the -wireless when I suddenly
heard a perfectly awful woman yapping away and it was me. I knew I was going to be on at tea time but they did a sort of trailer which took me by surprise and put me off my lunch I can tell you. I kept whimpering, 'I don't talk like that do I?' And everyone said cruelly, 'Yes, you do.' But I know I don't always because I find some accents fatally catching and return from Wales talking chi chi and going, 'look you!' When I'm talking to Alfred I say, 'gor blimey' and things and drop my aitches which doesn't matter when it's him but can be embarrassing if it's the gas man.
can't help it. German and Swedish are catching too but not Arab or Russian and the two worst accents in the world are Basle and Birmingham. The fourth son had trouble in the States trying to order some- thing to put on his bread. It was no use saying bu--er or even butter. What he wanted is called buddre and unless you say it like that your bread stays dry.
I find it odd that accents can change in a lifetime. In American Forties films the actors sound the way English actors sound now trying to impersonate Americans. The Bronx has given way to California. An admirer of the fourth son rang one night from LA and woke up someone in the small hours. She said, 'Gee your accent is so wonderful, go on talking, just say anything.' Which was clever of her because normally when someone is woken up in the small hours what he says is strangely ineompatible with the Oxford accent. The oddest thing of all is what happened to the Rank (Renk) starlet accent (eccent). Brit- ish Forties films are full of gels in hets dencing with cheps in pents and while a lot of those starlets must still be around (though they're probably white dwarflets or collapsars by now) I bet they don't talk like that any more. I met a man the other evening who had a double-barrelled name and sounded as though he'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and never bothered to take it out, but while he talked more far back than anyone I can recall his 'a's stayed in place.
French too has changed. I don't meet all that many French people but when I do I get the impression that the 'r' has ceased to roll. Someone who learned French in France when he was a little boy and spoke it better than English was recently declaim- ing something in that language in the way he had been taught when the 'r's positively corkscrewed on the back of the tongue, and the daughter said, 'Ergh, do you mind. I'm eating my dinner.' She herself has adopted the all-purpose uni-class way of speech that all the kiddos seem to go in for now and also has a pretty hair-raising vocabulary. Sometimes her language would make a bosun blench, but I don't worry too much because I think it's just a phase, though I still find some of the things the children say to their teachers fairly astonishing. If I'd called any of mine anything more than 'Miss' I'd have been expelled.
Still, all these things get ironed out in the
end. The older boys are now perfectly comprehensible and seldom rude to peo- ple. The eldest son was even polite to a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses who called the other day to save his soul. One-was little and meek and the other was big and aggressive. The little one inquired whether the eldest son read the Bible much. The answer being in the negative the big one asked threateningly whether Armageddon meant anything to him and of course when the son told his friend Mark about it, Mark, said he hoped the response had been, 'It sure does. Armageddon out of here.'
Too late, too late. Oh the pity of it.
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