Thoughts from The Bunker

 'You can tell she's a poet...'

Many people who know me are surprised to discover that I've made my living for several decades as an English teacher, and that I'm a published writer.

You see, I’m not very impressive, verbally.

            Firstly, there’s my voice. It’s unreliable and doesn’t always emerge with quite the power or melodiousness I would ideally desire, particularly if I’m nervous or it’s hay fever season. It can sound, quite randomly, thin and nasal, squeaky, croaky, harsh or too deep. I’m not saying it’s a voice that’s weird enough to make me memorable (being a female Joe Pasquale or that supermarket manager in the sitcom Superstore could be quite useful on occasion). But my vocal apparatus doesn’t have the dulcet tones I would like it to have.

            Also, I have a self-conscious accent. I was brought up in a very working-class neighbourhood and attended a very bog-standard comprehensive. At my school, being academically clever was not a route to popularity and only three things saved me from being a bully-magnet: a) my spooky ability to fade into the background; b) the fact that I had as little respect for most of my teachers or for school rules as any of the less academic pupils; and c) my refusal to modify my regional accent. In fact, for a while, in my late teens, it actually grew broader and more expletive-filled due to a particularly ‘local’ boyfriend.

Later, at university, and particularly when I moved to London, my South Yorkshire accent rubbed off to a great extent. You can’t live in a place for eleven years without the local speech patterns affecting you to some degree. It reached a point where, when we finally moved back up north and I took a job as Head of English at a local college, my new students told me I sounded ‘posh’. They were wrong and I can prove it: I was once asked for the time by a Scotsman on Sevenoaks railway station – all I said was ‘It’s ten to seven’ and, like Glasgow’s answer to Henry Higgins, he immediately responded: ‘Barnsley, right, hen?’. 

Anyway, these days my accent wobbles around a lot, depending on how I feel and who I’m talking to. It’s a nightmare when I’m faced with people from different ‘categories’ simultaneously – like when I used to talk to my very broad-accented sister on the phone while sitting in the living room of my genuinely posh landlady, or when I meet a new work colleague while out with an old school friend.

In addition to these flaws, I sometimes get tongue-tied, repeat things, mumble, get the giggles inappropriately, and occasionally manifest a mild stutter inherited from my dad. This is particularly pronounced when I am suffering from pre-menstrual – or, these days, post-menopausal – social awkwardness. Chatting to me must, at times, be like conversing with George VI (if he had a South Yorkshire accent and suffered from hot flushes).

 But it isn’t just the mechanics of pitch, tone and accent. It’s also the stuff I say. My partner often cuts me off at social gatherings just as I launch into an anecdote, which I assume is an act of mercy on behalf of the listeners (but which might, of course, actually be a chauvinistic impulse to shut the little woman up). You see, I constantly go off the point. I will begin by talking about labrador retrievers, veer off into a digression on house prices, do a quick u-turn into my opinions on the rising popularity of handicrafts during lockdown, segue into a diatribe against Boris Johnson, before ending with a description of the last time I saw the sea. Most people can’t be arsed to keep up, and who can blame them?

Another issue is that I do that ‘female-shortcut’ thing – if you’re a woman, you’ll almost certainly know what I mean. It involves referring to things, usually people, by an apparently random feature (a kind of synecdoche or metonym, I guess), and assuming your listener will understand. I used to work in an office with several other teachers, and I would often have conversations with my female colleagues that went like this:

‘I saw Spiky Hair this morning.’

‘Oh? Was he chewing his homework?’

‘No, he was with that tall woman - Three Earrings In One Ear, Teaches Drama. I expect you’ll get a visit soon. He was being told off.’

‘His problem is his mates. He hangs around with that girl – Red Face, Ripped Jeans…’

‘I know. And that awful lad – Skinny, Whiny, Skinhead?’

‘Yeah, he’s a real pain.’

As we chatted, the men in the office would stare at us in bemusement as if we were talking an obscure dialect of Middle-English.

            Then there is my propensity to simply go blank in the middle of conversations. I will be happily rolling along when suddenly I’ll experience ‘vocabulary blindness’:  ‘Oh, he was in that TV drama, you know, family on an island – no, not Swiss Family Robinson – novelist, zookeeper, mad sister…’.

And sometimes, even worse, I just coin new words.  Often ridiculous words. Often words I don’t notice immediately that I’ve invented. [I’m not alone in this. A friend of P’s (another woman, I’m afraid) once conflated ‘airhead’ and ‘space-cadet’, resulting in her referring to a gormless teenager as ‘a complete air cadet’. The same woman is also famous for claiming that ‘everything went ape-shaped’ – she was aiming for either ‘pear-shaped’ or ‘ape-shit’, but missed. So it’s not just me, ok?]

            Today, we were driving home from a shopping trip and I was giving P the benefit of my theory that car horns should be banned. This is a perfectly plausible theory, based on the fact that I can’t envisage any situation where a car horn would actually improve matters.

            ‘All horners do,’ I said, earnestly, ‘is to increase the base level of stress and irritation.’

            ‘Horners?’ he said.

            ‘Yes, people who are always horning.’

            This was followed by a moment’s silence, after which P, who was driving, burst out laughing and nearly wobbled into the wrong lane on the M1. It took me a few moments to realise what he found so funny.

            This is like when I once loudly instructed P, in a gift shop in Lyme Regis, to ‘Look at that pair of jugs’. Or recently when I told a fourteen year old male student that ‘dog’ could be used as a verb as well as a noun (I meant you could dog someone’s footsteps, not engage in the other kind of dogging). I just don’t hear myself…

            You can probably understand now why people are often surprised to learn that I’m a teacher and a writer.

And why I’m now worried about saying my vows out loud on my wedding day.