Ghosting (7 page)

“Before being able to speak properly,” said Miss Menzies in very clear tones, “you have to learn to breathe properly.” I was five years old and had been breathing for all that time, but evidently I had been doing it wrong. “We have to breathe deeply, so that we can finish the sentence before taking another breath,” she said, though she didn't explain why we couldn't just take another breath. I wondered what the reason could be. We did lots of breathing exercises together, during which we stood facing one another at either end of a small rug. But even something as simple as standing had to be learned from the beginning again. My back had to be straight, my hands—not clenched—by my sides, and my feet positioned like the hands of a clock reading ten past twelve. It was a lot to remember, and that was even before I had started the proper breathing.

For the next bit, the breathing bit, Miss Menzies bellowed the instructions: “FILL your lungs! CHEST in! ABDOMEN out! HO-O-O-LD—one, two, three—and let GO-O-O-OH—four, five, six.”
Miss Menzies’ chest was enormous, and her abdomen bulged despite the corset. When she showed me how to breathe properly she became like a rolling cargo ship.

After that we tackled vowel sounds, the long vowels, the short vowels, the -oo- sound and the -igh- sound, as in
moon
and
soon
and
night
and
light.
We held each vowel for fifteen seconds on only one breath. It sounded like a strange kind of singing. We practised short nonsense sentences that I couldn't imagine ever saying to any of my friends—“My, oh my, how bright is the night.” There were also things called
diphthongs,
which Miss Menzies said were vowels that moved, since they started out as one vowel and became another halfway through. Like
few
and
loud.

As the weeks passed I discovered just how hard it was to speak properly. Apart from all the vowels and the diphthongs there was something called RISP—Rhythm, Intonation, Stress and Pronunciation. According to Miss Menzies, all four were vital for elocution, and without them you could not project your voice except by shouting—something you must never do. The hardest thing to learn was pronunciation: the way a word was meant to sound. Words like
paw
and
poor
and
pour
all sounded the same when Miss Menzies said them. I much preferred the way we said them at home—that way you could tell them apart. It seemed funny to pronounce he sawed and he soared in exactly the same way; how would you know what was meant if you just heard it? It could surely lead to all sorts of trouble.

To practise my RISP I was given little printed poems that had to be pasted into a notebook with hard covers and learned off by heart. I liked pasting them neatly into the book, but I thought the poems were silly. My very first poem, which was to help with my -ee- and -oo- sounds, went as follows:

• I'm going to sweep the dirt away
  

• I'm going to sweep the dirt away
  

• I'm going to sweep the dirt away
  

• Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
  

• If you come in with muddy feet
  

• I'll sweep you out into the street
  

• Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
  

I hated reciting it. It made me feel babyish and stupid, and Miss Menzies said she wanted much more
oomph
in my
whooshes,
which only made matters worse. And when I practised it at home, my brother sniggered in the background. It was a ridiculous poem. But it has stayed with me, painfully, all my life. Besides poems, I had to memorise and recite tongue-twisters like “The Leith police dismisseth us,” and “She sifted seven thick stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.”

Miss Menzies marked the RISP of my recitation every week and wrote a few lines in spidery letters that were hard to read. She also gave marks for what she called “deportment and carriage,” which had to do with my shoulders and feet. She never smiled, but sometimes she stuck a star in my book to show I had done well. A gold star was best, followed by silver and green. To please my mother, and because the lessons cost a lot, I tried very hard to get gold stars. There were competitions too, held once a year at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh, in front of a row of judges at a long table. I always felt terrified on these occasions and had to steel myself for the ordeal of walking onto the stage. Before the recitation I had to remember to arrange my hands and feet correctly, not to mention my head, which Miss Menzies said had to be tilted upwards slightly. When I started the poem, I always heard my voice ringing
inside me, as if something had plugged my ears and was forcing everything inwards.

Elocution was a thing apart. It was something that happened on Tuesday afternoons in Dunfermline, and it did not get mixed up with the other days. At school I knew better than to speak in my poetry voice—everyone would have laughed—and I didn't even think much about the position of my diaphragm, as Miss Menzies had told me I must. At home, too, the way we spoke was not at all the way Miss Menzies taught and my mother bought—except if the minister or the doctor or the church elder came to our house, when there would always be a marked change towards the genteel. This involved frequent use of words like “sufficient” and “require” and “partake,” as in “Have you had sufficient to eat?” or “Will you partake of another scone?” or “Will you be requiring to visit the bathroom?” I knew that I too was expected to play my part on these occasions. Sometimes, for example, I would be asked by my mother to run an errand or get some coal for the fire, after which she would make a point of asking, very precisely: “Have you
accomplished
it?” Since a one-word answer would have let the side down, I had learned to give the reply that was expected of me: “Yes, I have accomplished it”—though it always sounded terribly put-on. On the days when there was no need to behave differently, however, there were hardly any vital vowels or dangling diphthongs or high-flown words. And although my mother could readily change her voice, my father didn't seem to bother much, certainly not with the length of his vowels. I suspected he was not in favour of elocution lessons. When I asked him why my brother did not have to have them, he said with a grunt that it wasn't anything a boy needed to learn. I thought then how unlucky it was to have been born a girl.

In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances— the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets, and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.

The person who came most often to our house was Uncle Bill. He wasn't a real uncle, but he was my parents’ oldest friend and had been best man at their wedding. He was a lovable, cheerful man and was always telling jokes, though he also talked a lot about death. Someone had usually just died and—this amazed me—he always knew who it was and how it had happened. We would all listen intently as he reported the grimly fascinating details: a man discovered dead in his bath, a woman lying frozen by her own coal bunker, a newly married couple run over on a Belisha crossing. The summing-up took one of two forms: people were either cut off in their prime—this was described as “a blinkin’ tragedy;” or else they had had what was called a good innings—in which case it was usually “a bloomin’ mercy.” I didn't know any dead people, and I used to wonder what it must feel like to know so many. The
main thing to notice, however, was that when Uncle Bill visited, something happened to the way we spoke.

It is difficult to describe exactly what it was that happened, but it had to do with the shape of the sentences and the words that were in them—they seemed to be just the right words in the right place. The sound of my parents chatting with Uncle Bill was a joy—they used words like
scunner
and
glaekit
and
puggled
and
wabbitlinked
together by lots of
dinnaes
and
winnaes
and
cannaes.
Uncle Bill led the way, and my parents seemed to take their cue from him. In my recollection they seemed happier at these times than at any other, laughing a lot, sharing together, not holding back or being secretive. They still argued with each other, but it wasn't serious in the way normal arguments were when Uncle Bill wasn't there. And even when they disagreed, there was still a warm feeling, as if something tight had loosened. They were relaxed in the rhythms, at ease with the words—as if they were real
owners
of this language, not just borrowers. And not pretenders either, for their conversation was real and full of rich meaning. It couldn't have been more different from elocution lessons, with all that
whooshing
the stupid dirt away. I loved joining in, and my parents seemed pleased with me when I did. It was like drinking hot cocoa. Everything felt safe when Uncle Bill was there.

When he went away, however, the mood would suddenly shift back to something less certain, less safe. Of course, I wanted it to carry on, and I would try to hold onto the magic that had bound us together only minutes before. I would repeat some of the things Uncle Bill had said, using his words and expressions, following the rhythms, trying to get my parents to respond, to be the way they had been. But everything had already fractured to bits, and there
was danger everywhere. “Don't talk like that!” my mother would say, “You know that's no way to speak!” I felt crushed by this, by the unfairness of it all, so much so that I would appeal to my father. But all he would say was “That's enough now.” He said it quite gently but firmly, in a way that made any kind of protest impossible. Sometimes it felt hot behind my eyes and I would have to breathe in the way that I knew would stop the tears coming.

That scene, repeated many times, is still sharp in my mind—I can see it as if I'm watching a sequence in a film. Yet it may not have been that way at all, and as I write it I am conscious of how differently my parents might have described it. Would there in fact have been anything for them to describe? Were they even aware of what I felt? Did they feel it too? I think not. Memory is not always to be trusted—it can make things so much worse or better than they were. But there is such a lot that is forgotten, so much that doesn't make it past the hippocampus and simply disappears into oblivion; with the result that the parts we do remember cry out to have sense made of them.

What sense do I make now of the confusion surrounding the way we spoke and the words we used? Judging by the rigidity of their rules, and the strictness with which they imposed them, my parents appeared to me to be certain about everything. I now think that I was mistaken. The sheer fluidity of their position on language was surely a sign that they were feeling their way in the dark just as much as the rest of us. Both my parents were fiercely proud of being Scottish: they felt
ipso facto
supreme in the pecking order of nations. They were fond of reciting the names of Scots inventors—a
list to make you proud, they said. Without the Scots and their inventions, so they claimed, the world would be
nothing
—no trains, no telephone, no roads, no television. And if it hadn't been for James Watt and his steam engine we'd still be getting around on donkeys. In fact, when you think of it, we'd scarcely be alive at all without all that penicillin and anaesthetic, not to mention the antibiotics. It was a subject they returned to again and again, affirming and reaffirming the peerlessness of their country. My country too. They also honoured Scots traditions—haggis on Burns night, black bun at New Year—and spoke with swollen hearts of the unparalleled beauty of the Scottish landscape. When they saw pictures of far-flung countries on television, they would scoff: “Huh! Not a patch on Bonnie Scotland!” It mattered not at all that the place where we lived was mostly unbeautiful, that we were surrounded by bings—our name for slag-heaps—and that the topographical features they praised were wholly absent—no mountains, no glens, no coastline. They were devoted to Scottish-ness, especially what is perceived by the outside world as Scottish-ness—whisky, bagpipes, kilts and Balmorality. We even had a family plaque on our front door displaying our clan tartan and coat of arms.

But when it came to language, that other potent symbol of national identity, my parents’ attitude, particularly that of my mother, was equivocal. With its colourful dialect words and distinctive accent the Scots tongue was—still is—a vigorous, vital and varied thing. And it was something my parents clearly took pleasure in. But in common with parents the world over, they wanted the best for their children. They wanted them to
get on.
And it can't have escaped them that the status of the Scots language in wider society was low. If you spoke in the way it felt natural to speak, the
way you heard spoken all around you, you were marked in the eyes of the world beyond. It was daylight snobbery, but that's the way it was. My mother was fiercely aspiring, and my father, perhaps in the interests of peace, went along with her. English was the thing; hence the elocution lessons and all that pitiful vowel management.