social class – Passing It On

When I was little, I had a friend whose mum was forever correcting the way we spoke. There was nothing particularly unusual about our use of language – we had the pretty generic Northern accent of the town we lived in, neither Liverpool nor Manchester and neither Wigan nor Warrington, but something in between – but as far as my friend’s mum was concerned, that wasn’t good enough. She’d grown up in Liverpool, and had been trying to lose her accent ever since. She hadn’t really managed it, but it had given her a hypersensitivity to speech, a sense of being perpetually on the alert for anything that was too regionally marked. Any vowel that was a bit too flat or too long, any hint of a glottal stop or dialect word, and she’d pounce. She taught at the primary school I went to, and that seemed to give her licence to monitor my speech, as well as that of her daughter. She probably thought she was doing me a favour, but all it did was to make me wary: afraid of opening my mouth in case I was jumped on, newly self-conscious about part of me that had never been a problem before.

*Gerrout o’t’road, there’s lambs onnit. (Source: Alan Cleaver on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0)*

School language policies didn’t exist back then, but if they had been around, I’d probably have been on the wrong side of them. At university, the only state-educated Northerner in a tutorial group of RP-speakers, I was asked to demonstrate Northern vowel sounds by a linguistics tutor who generally treated me as if I’d just escaped from a zoo. So it’s not really surprising that as an A level English Language teacher, regional variation – and, in particular, the ways in which schools try to police their students’ use of language – is one of my favourite topics. Over the last few years, a stream of schools have attempted to eliminate regional speech, arguing that they are giving their students the best chance possible of succeeding in the wider world. From Colley Lane Primary School in Halesowen and Sacred Heart Primary School in Middlesbrough to Ark All Saints Academy in Camberwell, pupils have been told not to use slang, dialect forms and regional pronunciations such as ‘woz’ instead of ‘was’ and ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’. Ofsted is all het up about regional speech too, as if it’s the only thing we’ve got to worry about in schools at the moment. An absolute must-read on this topic is Ian Cushing and Julia Snell’s fantastic essay ‘The (white) ears of Ofsted: a raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate’, which examines how Ofsted upholds the language of the white bourgeoisie, its judgements about non-standard language translating into ‘systems of sonic surveillance in which the nonstandardised language practices of students and teachers are heard as impoverished, deficient, and unsuitable for school.’ It’s a vital text for anyone concerned with diversity and social justice in schools: if your school is developing any kind of language policy, then you need to wave this article in the faces of whoever is responsible for drawing up the policy, and make sure they are absolutely aware of the implications of certain kinds of beliefs about language.

All of this is a very roundabout way of introducing a poem I have loved for years, Tony Harrison’s ‘Them & [uz]’. ‘Them & [uz]’ takes the form of a pair of caudate sonnets, drawing on an incident from the poet’s adolescence. Harrison, a working-class boy who found himself at the distinctly middle-class Leeds Grammar School, was pulled up for his regional speech in the middle of a lesson on ‘Ode to a Nightingale’:

4 words only of mi ‘art aches and … ‘Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!’ He was nicely spoken.
‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’

The first of the poems is dominated by the voice of the teacher, asserting his superiority in the plummy accent of the elite: ‘We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap.’ There are images of awkwardness and inarticulacy, references to the ‘stutterer Demosthenes’ with his ‘gob full of pebbles’ and the narrator’s sense of his mouth being ‘all stuffed with glottals, great lumps to hawk up and spit out’. The use of Greek lettering and phonemic symbols adds to the feeling that there’s some kind of barrier you have to break through, a code that needs to be followed in order to make sense.

The second poem, however, is the perfect riposte to the power of RP. There’s a defiance that runs all the way through, from the opening lines – ‘So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy / Your lousy leasehold Poetry’ – to the narrator’s determination to harness the power of his own regional speech. He tells us that he

dropped the initials I’d been harried as
and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz],
ended sentences with by, with, from,
and spoke the language that I spoke at home.

Gone are the Northern stereotypes, the whippets and flat caps. Instead, there’s a reminder that regional speech is about identity, about loyalty. It’s a connection to where you’re from and the people to whom you’re most closely related. ‘[uz] can be loving as well as funny.’

The most brilliant thing about ‘Them & [uz]’, of course, is its take on the sonnet form. Both of its component poems are similar enough to a sonnet to have that sonnet feel. They have a regular rhyming pattern. The first is in rhyming couplets, and the second begins that way as well, though its final four lines have an alternating rhyme, a little twist at the end. (There’s something clever, though: Harrison’s rhyming of ‘from’ and ‘home’ only works as a full rhyme in certain Northern accents, where ‘home’ sounds more like ‘wom’. My dad, descended from generations of Lancashire miners, would, in full dialect mode, have pronounced ‘at home’ as ‘a’wom’.) But they don’t follow any of the typical sonnet patterns: they’re not Shakespearean, or Petrarchan, or Spenserian, or anything else other than themselves. There’s a fair amount of iambic pentameter in there, but not enough to make it completely regular. And, of course, the poems have sixteen lines each, not fourteen. It’s as if Harrison is sticking two fingers up to literary convention: Look. I know all about sonnets, all those rules and the things you’re supposed to do. But I’m not going to do what you tell me to do. I’m doing things my way. It’s a gorgeous, bolshy retort to all the language police out there, and I bloody love it.

Years ago, I read a poem by Susan Bassnett, then Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, called ‘Goethe’s Desk’. The narrator sees Goethe’s desk in Goethe’s house, and muses on what she could have done if she’d had Goethe’s desk to work at, rather than having to do ‘a dozen servants’ jobs’. Here’s the poem:

I was reminded of ‘Goethe’s Desk’ last week, when the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Good Housekeeping magazine launched a new scheme for women novelists under 35. Joanna Walsh, who runs the Twitter feed @noentry_arts, wrote an open letter asking for the age limit to be removed, citing the many inequalities experienced by women: access to education and free time, an excess of caring responsibilities, and intersectional obstacles stemming from social class, ethnicity, disability and illness. Age-based prizes, the letter argued, favoured ‘those with the cultural confidence, time and money to commit to a writing career while young’. How do you achieve this conviction that the world is waiting to read what you have to say? How do you get your words out there, without the knowledge of how publishing works, the connections and advice and help up the ladder? And how do you silence the voice in your head that tells you there’s something else you should be doing?

The @noentry_arts campaign really resonated with me, as a woman writer in my late 40s. I don’t write fiction – my genre is narrative non-fiction – but my journey to becoming a writer has been shaped by many of the factors that Walsh cites in her letter. The most obvious of these is the lack of free time, stemming from juggling writing with childcare and full-time work. Behind this, though, there’s also a raft of issues to do with social class, a lack of the kind of cultural confidence and connectedness that Walsh refers to, and a hefty dose of the kind of impostor syndrome that I should really have outgrown by now, but haven’t. So here’s me, and here’s how I came to be a writer, at 48.

It all started when I was four. That was when I first read a book – a whole book – all on my own. It was Five Run Away Together – the third in the Famous Five series – and I didn’t even know if I should be reading it, because it wasn’t my book. It was a hardback, with a faded red cover, and I’d found it in the sideboard in our house. I knew it must belong to one of my siblings, but I didn’t know which one. All I knew was that I’d found a book and it looked interesting. The writer had a funny name, written in a way that made it look like ‘Gnid Blyton’. I knew it probably wasn’t Gnid – that was a silly name – but I didn’t know what else it might be, and anyway, I wanted to get on with the story. So I squeezed myself into the little space between the sofa and the wall, the place where I used to hide if I didn’t want anyone to know where I was, and settled down to read. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

Enid Blyton’s got a lot to answer for. I’m not talking about the sexism, xenophobia and disdain for the working classes. They’re appalling, of course they are, but I didn’t notice them when I was four. The thing that possessed me was the idea of adventure. I wanted a boat of my own, and a torch, and a little camping stove powered by a bottle of methylated spirits. I knew I was never going to have my own island with a ruined castle and an actual dungeon, but the rest seemed reasonable. Well, perhaps not the boat. I asked for the torch and camping stove for my fifth birthday. I got the torch, but not the stove. The torch was useful, up to a point, but there wasn’t really an awful lot that I could do with it. There was an acute shortage of the key ingredients of adventure in Newton-le-Willows in 1977: no smugglers or travelling circuses with escaped jewel thieves or rogue scientists trying to steal important blueprints. So I decided that if I couldn’t actually go on any adventures, then the next best thing might be to write about them. When my sixth birthday came around, I asked for a desk so that I could be a proper writer, and that’s really when it all started.

By the time I was halfway through my second year at primary school, my Famous Five obsession was so firmly embedded that the headmistress took my mum to one side. It was getting a bit much, she suggested. Every piece of writing I did was linked to the Famous Five in some way. I’d even managed to write an imaginary interview with Julian (though, sadly, I didn’t ask him anything about his massive superiority complex). I needed something else to be interested in. So I started to go for riding lessons, and horses quickly replaced junior sleuths as my main object of interest. Inevitably, like all horse-mad little girls, I wanted my own pony. And inevitably, like most horse-mad girls, I couldn’t have one. We had nowhere to keep a pony, and anyway, ponies were expensive. If I wanted a pony, I’d have to find some way of earning some money. How could I do that? The solution, to seven-year-old me, was obvious. I’d have to write a book.

I tried to write lots of books, over the years. To begin with, most of them featured ponies. I was good at drawing and decided that if I could illustrate my own books as well, I’d earn even more money to put towards a pony. The problem was that I didn’t have a lot of staying power. I’d come up with a good idea but didn’t know how to carry it through. I tried to write a book about British native pony breeds with pictures in biro of Shetlands and Exmoors and all the different sections of Welsh (there are four; I knew my stuff) but never managed to finish it. I spent the summer between primary and secondary school writing a book called One Jump Ahead, about a girl called Rebecca who gets a pony called King and turns him into a champion showjumper, and filled an entire Woolworths notebook which I’ve still got somewhere. As a teenager, I went through a phase of wanting to write scripts for soap operas, but had no idea how you’d actually get involved in that for real, so Brookside and EastEnders had to suffer my loss. And that, actually, was the problem. I spent a lot of time in my room, writing, or walking the streets, thinking of things to write about, but I didn’t have the first clue how you went about becoming an actual writer with your work published and your name in print. Pretty much all of my writing went completely unread by anyone except me: stored away meticulously, paper-clipped and treasury-tagged, then filed away for some mysterious day when Somebody would want to read it.

*Story of my life. (Card by Rosie Made A Thing)*

I was the first person in my family to go to university. I went to Oxford to do English, with vague ideas of staying on to do a doctorate and become an academic, fuelled by reading too much David Lodge. On my first day there, waiting in the porter’s lodge to get the key to my room, I had my first real-life encounter with a lacrosse stick, the first time I’d seen one outside the pages of Enid Blyton. On my second day, standing in the front quad, I talked to a boy on my course about the essay on nineteenth-century literature that we’d had to do over the summer. We’d been told to write about either the presentation of women or the presentation of the working class. ‘Well, I’m not a woman and I’m not working-class,’ he explained, all bright eyes and floppy hair. ‘I wasn’t sure which one I should do.’ I remembered earnest conversations in the sixth form common room when we’d tried to decide which social class we belonged to. We were, almost universally, the children of people who’d started at the bottom and worked their way up: my own parents had both left school at 14, and my friends’ parents were nurses and schoolteachers, skilled tradespeople and the owners of small businesses. Nobody – not even Catherine, whose mum and dad read the Guardian – was confident enough to plonk themselves wholeheartedly in with the middle classes. My floppy-haired new friend at Oxford had no doubts whatsoever. His uncle was a senior QC; his family was right up there at the heart of the Establishment. He himself aspired to be a barrister. To me, this spoke of a lack of commitment to English. It seemed disloyal. All I wanted to do, by that stage, was to spend my life reading books and writing about books and eventually – I hoped – end up writing books myself. I’d stopped riding by then, and given up on the idea of a pony, but getting my name in print was still there, hovering like a distant dream.

As it was, I didn’t apply to do postgraduate work immediately after my degree. I wasn’t sure I’d get the funding. I knew that my family wouldn’t be able to pay, and they certainly wouldn’t be able to help with my living expenses. I wouldn’t have asked them to: why should they, when my siblings had all supported themselves from leaving school? I also knew that jobs in academia were few and far between, and that I’d have to be prepared to move to wherever the jobs happened to be, scraping by on temporary contracts in the hope that I’d manage to get something permanent eventually. This was so far outside my family’s experience that I didn’t have the confidence to take the risk. I could have headed into journalism, but again, it was something I knew nothing about. I’d done a tiny bit of writing for student publications, but had been put off by the number of people who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to say and were absolutely confident that people would want to hear it. My elbows didn’t feel sharp enough. Instead, I played it safe, like so many first-generation university students from non-traditional backgrounds, and did a PGCE. I got a job at a school in south Lincolnshire, a part of the country I knew nothing about but that sounded nice, and that’s where I still am, twenty-five years later.

I did do a PhD eventually, but I did it a different way, part-time, while teaching full-time. I wrote a book – the snappily-titled Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge 1880-2002 – and co-wrote two others. Then I became an adoptive parent, and started to think, a lot, about the ideas people have about adoption, the way adoption is depicted in the media and in popular culture, and how far removed these images are from the reality of adoption today. I wanted to explore these perceptions, to tell this story. And so I started to write, again.

It’s not easy, combining writing with working full-time – I’m now a Head of English – and being a parent. I write in whatever gaps I can open up around the rest of my life. There are frantic bursts during school holidays and then weeks during term-time when I can barely write at all. It takes a huge amount of self-discipline, and there’s always something else demanding my attention. But I wouldn’t be me, without it.

I need to be the age I am to write what I do. I couldn’t have written about adoption without becoming an adoptive parent, without living that particular reality and having to tackle the complexities that adoption brings. It took me a long time, and hours of redrafting, to get my work to the stage where I felt ready to submit it to an agent, and I had to give myself a stern talking-to before I pressed Send.

I don’t have any hopes of grandeur, but I do want to get my writing out there. I have an agent, but no publisher. I know it takes time. So I am working on an idea for another book, and being patient and trying to build a platform. The struggle with impostor syndrome is still there: that lurking, constant feeling that at some point, someone will give me a polite nudge and tell me to get back in my box. But maybe, one day, I’ll get lucky. And now that I’ve started horse riding again, maybe one day there will be a pony, after all.