When I posted a photo on
my Facebook page the other day, posing alongside a Cloudesley Square sign I
noted that it was harking back to the past and it evoked precise comment from
one reader. In the mid1970s we lived at
No 6B, five of us crammed into a tiny basement flat. At least three of us were
under the age of ten and therefore took up little room but the remaining duo
were definite space users. Even I had become accustomed to occupying
large areas after several years of New Zealand living of course and the little
London apartments that once seemed not only normal but desirable were suddenly
cramped and miniscule.
But it’s not space that’s
under discussion at the moment, but language and specifically that language we
have lost. And we discard and eliminate
words and phrases effortlessly over time without giving too much thought to the
process. Hark, Harken, Harking peppered
the conversation of my mother and aunts, undoubtedly passed down to them by
their own mother. When observing the
early speech of my own daughter during those Cloudesley Square days when she
was still a one year old infant intent upon understanding the intricacies of
confining straps and escaping from her push chair, everything that she disliked
she loudly described as being Bum! My own
mother commented somewhat disapprovingly that my own first words in 1941 had
been the more genteel Hark Whatz Dat? In response to the approach up the Thames
of a terrifying drone of bombers. She
managed to make it sound as if I had cleverly chosen from a random vocabulary I
had somehow been born knowing rather than responding to her own World War 2 anxiety.
It was a time when the Constants, young and old rarely used the word Listen.
Not only did they Hark
and Harken, but they often went Abroad when simply leaving the house, were
Afeared, Learned someone something rather than taught them, were up and about
Betimes rather than early and frequently gave Short Shrift when they deemed it
necessary. A broken cup might be
described as Asunder and stolen goods definitely Fell Off the Back of Trucks.
Old Nan, always reliably
profane, described those she judged to be lacking in intelligence as Thick As
Pigshit and those with a streak of meanness as reluctant to Give Their Shit to
the Crows, and when in a less disrespectful mood relatives and neighbours might
be Slippery as Eels, Blind as Bats or Eating like Pigs.
Uncle Edgar was often
Sold a Dog, found situations preposterous enough to make Stuffed Birds Laugh,
Made Tracks when he was about to Make Himself Scarce and once or twice
Smothered a Parrot when rapidly downing a glass of alcohol. Less colourfully his daughter Daphne as late
as 1980 Killed Two Birds With One Stone, Let the Cat out of the Bag and
frequently felt Under The Weather.
The lad my cousin Pat
married when she was only sixteen because she turned out to be No Better Than
She Ought to Have Been, was described as being decidedly Thin On Top by the time
he was in his late twenties. Meanwhile
my more sophisticated cousin Margaret who Did Well For Herself and therefore dropped
a great deal of the vocabulary she was familiar with in her earliest youth
except for describing those who had recently died as Having Passed Away.
Exposure to years of BBC
radio and later a great many hours of TV, my own mother slowly began to
relinquish the old speech idioms of her North Kent youth and my brother was
less likely to be Bootless and I was no longer in danger of Driving Her to
Bedlam or Colney Hatch though she always hung onto the fact that both of us
were Economical With the Truth which at least was accurate.
Old Nan, however, even in
her dotage often was guilty of doing things Thrice because she had become a Blithering
Fool and a Laughing Stock and she always preferred the term Eventide to
evening.
