Yesterday, I said something about each writer working toward their own language — their own language within the language they speak.
Here’s something about how I got wherever it is I am, with words.
I was once on a panel at a British Council Seminar. I think there were nine other writers, among them Ali Smith, Sebastian Barry, Ciaran Carson, Jeanette Winterson.
And, us being writers, and being in Walberberg Kloster, in Germany, in front of an audience of well-dressed European academics and journalists and because that’s what was expected of us, we all talked about our relation to Language; specifically, our relation to the language of our early years.
I was at the far end of the line-up, which meant I’d be last to say anything. So I heard all the other answers before I got to mine.
Each of the others on the panel, without exception, spoke warmly of the rich importance of what they heard spoken around them, as a child.
For Jeanette Winterson, it was the word of God, the Bible, and her grounding as a tent-preacher — plus her adoptive mother’s way with a put-down. Sebastian Barry had the nuances and grotesqueries of deep Dublinity. Ali Smith, Invernessessity. Ciaran Carson had a linguistic background so complex it took five minutes, and a lifetime, to explain.
The answers came towards me along the line, I remember. A bit oppressively. Richness after richness of memory from the plastic chairs.
And to this, when it was my turn, I had nothing to add. No inherited authenticity or joy. So that’s what I said.
Something like this —
Bedfordshire — the Bedfordshire in which I grew up — takes no great pleasure in speech. It’s as far, linguistically, from St Petersburg or Kingston Town or Cork or West Compton as FORTRAN or C++.
I grew up in a neutrality of utterance — or an attempted neutrality.
My mother, I think, admired the way the Queen spoke, and wanted me to speak properly and say gar-ah-dje rather than garridge.
My father was at his most verbally expressive when Aunt Shirley visited, and they put on Lancashire accents they probably never had, and talked about ‘avin uz tea.
Bedfordish, as I heard it at school and on the streets of my village, is an aggressive nasal closing down, one step from a punch. It swears, repetitively and uninventively. The closest to this manner of speech I’ve heard is Derek and Clive’s LP Come Again.
Fuck can stand in for any other word, and so can cunt. Of a broken down car, you can say say: ‘The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.’
At its most monotonous, it is the language of John Major being forced to discuss something he wishes very much not to discuss.
Like Bedfordshire, or the Bedfordshire of the 1980s, it is without obvious self-pride. You can find people who love almost everywhere in England — people who are proud of estates that get called sink in towns that get called dead-end. People who will defiantly say, ‘This place is better than anywhere else.’ But Bedfordshire, when I was there, maybe it’s changed since, had no wish to be itself. What it wished, instead, was that the commute to London was slightly shorter – down the M1 motorway or on the train route known as the Bed-Pan line.
The only people who spoke with any gentleness were the old, those who had worked the land or been around before the bypasses and supermarkets. They had a rare slowness, and sounded much more East Anglian.
My idiolect, then, my language, is invented. I have no rich-speaking Uncles or Grandmothers to reanimate, no rhetoric that ever took itself seriously or found itself delightful.
At one and the same time, I hate this lack and find those with full, rich verbal backgrounds limited, often a little smug. I have never felt obliged to represent anyone other than myself — although I take more secret pride in Bedfordshire than it has ever taken, or is ever likely to take, in me.
It’s a scruffy county. Difficult to love, but worth loving — as all places are worth loving, if loved with intensity of attention, and forgiveness for flaws.
After a lifetime abroad in non-English speaking cultures, I sometimes question whether the particular language I’ve ended up with is rich or impoverished. Time has changed the language, changed me, it could be Bedfordshire or middle-Atlantic or euro speak. I enjoyed your standing up for an assumed non-richness.
That's an excellent description of Bedfordshire. My only experiences of Bedfordshire are, my best mate (who was once a big drug dealer) had an older brother lived there, a cop who was also a thief, who's wife sucked off his best mate while he fucked her, and also, Bedfordshire is where my poor brother hanged himself.