An Education (3 page)

The other great curse of these years was my mother's elocution lessons. When we lived at Ashford, she had a part-time job at a department store in Windsor teaching shopgirls to speak posh, but when we moved to Twickenham she set up the front room as her ‘studio’ with her LAMDA certificate on the wall and gave elocution lessons at home. She would have liked to have had a board saying Elocution Lessons on the front gate, but my father and I both vetoed it – my father on the grounds that it might make us liable for business rates; me on the grounds that I would slash my wrists from embarrassment.

In those days – the Fifties – there were elocution teachers in every town; in Twickenham alone, there were at least three, and another half-dozen across the river in Richmond. They claimed to teach drama, ‘projection’, and the art of public speaking, but what they really taught was how to talk posh, or a particular version thereof. When my mother said of someone ‘She has a bit of an accent’ she meant, not a regional accent, nor even a cockney accent, but the most fearful accent of all, which was Common. Common meant saying
sumpfink
for something, or dropping your aitches or pronouncing the letter h as
haitch
. ‘I had to go to Homer-ton High Street, your honour, to acquire a hat’ was a good test of Common. The aim of elocution lessons was to eradicate Common and teach shopgirls to talk like ladies, though what they invariably ended up talking like was shopgirls with pretensions. At Windsor, my mother actually taught shopgirls to say, ‘Would Modom care to try the larger size?’

A trained speaker, my mother always told me, could recite the London telephone directory and make it interesting. (The corollary of this, I noticed in adulthood, is that many actors say their lines as if reciting the London telephone directory, as if the words have no intrinsic meaning at all.) The aim of elocution was to display a grasp of diction, enunciation, inflection, projection, chiarascuro, cadence, timbre, lightness, colour, vibrato, crescendo, diminuendo, while reciting, say,

All along the backwater,

Through the rushes tall,

Ducks are a-dabbling

Up tails all!

Ducks' tails, drakes' tails,

Yellow feet a-quiver,

Yellow bills all out of sight,

Busy in the river!

(‘Ducks’ Ditty', Kenneth Grahame)

There was much talk of labials and plosives and breathing from the diaphragm. My mother was most impressive when demonstrating breathing from the diaphragm because she had an enormous bosom, which would rise several inches when she breathed in, and slowly subside while she breathed out, all the while humming ‘Om’ for far longer than seemed possible and finishing with ‘Pah!’ She would urge her pupils to place their hands on her diaphragm while she performed this feat, much to their consternation.

Each lesson began with breathing – humming
Om
and shouting
Pah
– followed by vowel exercises such as ‘Behold he sold the old rolled gold bowl’, which was where the real war against Common was waged. Then there were the tongue twisters – An anemone, my enemy; Unique New York; Red lorry, yellow lorry; Selfish shellfish; The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick, Six thick thistle sticks, six thick thistles stick; The Leith police dismisseth us, and Three free throws, which I don't think anyone ever said correctly, even my mother. Then there was the dangerous pheasant plucker who could so easily lead one astray:

I am not the pheasant plucker,

I am the pheasant plucker's mate.

I am only plucking pheasants

'Cos the pheasant plucker's late.

And finally the exercise in consonant definition which had to be shouted while marching round the room and swinging one's arms:

Zinty tinty tuppenny bun!

The fox went out to have some fun!

He had some fun!

He banged the drum!

Zinty tinty tuppenny bun!

This was the daily Muzak of my life from the age of eight, when we moved to Twickenham, to fourteen, when my mother stopped working from home and became a schoolteacher. My mother would already have a pupil in her studio when I came back from school, and I could pretty well tell the time from whether they were at the Om and Pah stage or beholding their old rolled gold bowls. I would let myself in as quietly as possible, ignoring any pupils who were waiting in the hall, make myself a cup of tea and settle in the breakfast room to do my homework. But through the wall I could always hear the Oms and Pahs and then the ghastly moment when they started on their ‘set pieces’, which they had to learn for exams and competitions. How well I knew them all!

Dirty British steamer with a salt-caked smoke stack

Butting through the Channel in a mad March haze

With a cargo of Tyne coal, road rails, pig lead

Firewood, ironware and cheap tin trays.

(John Masefield, ‘Cargoes’)

Up the airy mountain

Down the rushy glen

We daren't go a-hunting

For fear of little men.

(William Allingham, ‘The Fairies’)

Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

And the tedding and the spreading

Of the straw for a bedding

And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees

And the wine that tasted of the tar?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

(Under the vine of the dark verandah?)

Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

(Hilaire Belloc, ‘Tarantella’)

Years later, when I read Eng Lit at Oxford, I learned many much better poems by heart – Shakespeare's sonnets, Keats' odes, miles of Yeats – but if you held a gun to my head today and said ‘Recite a poem’, it would almost certainly be ‘Cargoes’ or ‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?’ These are still the poems that flash into my mind unbidden –
unwanted!
– at odd moments of the day. ‘
Dirty
British steamer with a salt-caked smokestack,’ I mutter, crashing my trolley along the Waitrose aisles. ‘Is there anybody there, said the Traveller’ as I wait for the call centre to answer.

It occurs to me that most of the poems my mother taught would have seemed ‘modern’ at the time, or modernist, in that they derived more from Browning than Wordsworth. But then, if they were modern, why were they so obsessed with goblins and elves? Where did
that
come from? Was there some elvish revival, perhaps associated with the Celtic revival, in the early decades of the twentieth century? And of course as soon as I write elvish, I think, Oh yes, Tolkein, and remember that there was also a folk revival, associated with Morris dancing and Cecil Sharp, in the Thirties, which must have played a part. But still, they were bloody irritating, those elves.

For elocution competitions and exams, it wasn't enough just to
recite
a poem – all the words had to be accompanied by gestures. Thus, references to moonlight, sunlight, stars or any form of weather involved looking upwards; references to storms, rain, frost, involved pulling an imaginary shawl round one's shoulders and blowing on one's nails. (Does anyone, in real life, ever blow on their nails? I have never seen it.) Weeping or even mild regret meant wiping one's eyes with the back of one's hand; laughing meant much shaking of the shoulders, à la Edward Heath. Elves and fairies always started their speeches in a crouching position and then leapt up, spun round, and dashed madly across the stage with arms outstretched. Skipping was sometimes required. Searching for anything or even just looking necessitated a hand above the eyebrows shielding the eyes, accompanied by a pointing gesture. All this activity was tiring and of course baffling, but as nothing compared to the contortions of duologue. Duologue – as opposed to dialogue, which entailed two players – was a curious invention peculiar, I imagine, to elocution lessons. It involved playing two people (if you were lucky – unfortunately it more often entailed one person plus elf ) which demanded incredible agility because you had to make a half turn every time the speaker changed and if possible a height change too – one speaker would crouch – and adopt a different accent, or at least timbre, to differentiate the speakers.

There was a particularly horrible piece called ‘Overheard on a Salmarsh’ (
sic
– though presumably he meant saltmarsh) by Harold Munro which went as follows:

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.

No.

Give them me. Give them me.

No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,

Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so? Etc etc.

Nymph for some reason always stood on tiptoe, with arms stretched backwards at 45 degrees to suggest wings, while goblin squatted with one arm over his head denoting (I think) ugliness or physical deformity. He had a deep gruff voice whereas nymph spoke in a high flutey voice like our new Queen Elizabeth. The aim was to be able to switch voices and postures at speed, presumably before the audience dropped off with boredom. I was always so keen to get onto the next line I would be spinning, turning, crouching, like a demented acrobat, while muttering to myself and counting the seconds till it would all be over.

The most dreadful of all the set pieces was a passage from ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti which required positively dervish-like movements, viz:

Laughed every goblin

When they spied her peeping:

Came towards her hobbling,

Flying, running, leaping,

Puffing and blowing,

Chuckling, clapping, crowing,

Clucking and gobbling,

Mopping and mowing,

Full of airs and graces,

Pulling wry faces,

Demure grimaces,

Cat-like and rat-like,

Ratel- and wombat-like,

Snail-paced in a hurry.
Et bloody cetera
.

I mean what, for godsake, is a ratel, and how do you pull a demure grimace or achieve ‘snail-paced in a hurry’?

Of course it was my mother's dearest wish that I should fulfil her own lost dream and become an actress, so she started me on the zinty-tintys almost as soon as I could speak. By nine or ten, I was a veteran of LAMDA exams and poetry-reading festivals. Almost every Saturday my mother and I would set off to some faraway suburb (Wimbledon, or Surbiton, or Bromley) to spend the afternoon in an echoing hall listening to children recite ‘Up the airy mountain’. I was outwardly compliant but my body betrayed my inner rebellion: on the morning of any major competition I was guaranteed to wake with a golf-ball-sized stye on my eye. These styes were invariably blamed for my failure to win gold medals – I sometimes won bronze, and always came away with a certificate saying Commended, but I think everyone got those.

To make matters worse, my mother had a pupil called Lynn Hope who was the same age as me. Our mothers fondly referred to us as ‘the two Lynns’ and told other people that we were best friends though the most cursory observation would have shown that we loathed each other. I regarded Lynn Hope as hopelessly thick; she no doubt regarded me as stuck up, which I was. But because we were the same age, we were entered in the same competitions, where Lynn Hope would always win a gold medal to my silver or bronze to my Commended. With her foghorn voice and unshakeable confidence, her nauseating dimples, white frilly socks, black patent shoes, and yukky habit of clapping her hands excitedly and saying ‘Oh I can't
believe
it!’ every time she won, she was the Shirley Temple of the Middlesex poetry-festival circuit. And every time she won, there was a ghastly charade when my mother would rush over to Lynn Hope and hug her, and Lynn would cry ‘Oh thank you, thank you, Mrs Barber!’ and they would hold hands and do a little bow to the audience, whereby my mother asserted ownership of this prize pupil, and I would skulk and glower behind my golf-ball stye. I once overheard another elocution teacher saying, ‘It must be so sad for Mrs Barber that her daughter never wins.’ Once or twice, I noticed, my mother contrived to put me in for competitions without entering Lynn Hope. But even then I didn't win, and my mother would have to invent ever more fantastic excuses for my infallible failure.