Jacob Polley: Putting the accent on speech

Published on Thursday 18 June 2009 14:54

MY FIRST NOVEL, TALK OF THE town, began life as a short story about two lads scrumping apples in the country. That I'd written a story was the first surprise, as I was used to writing poems. The second surprise to me was the accent of the lad who was telling the story. It was a version of the vernacular of which I'd first become aware as a lad myself, growing up in a village near Carlisle.

Though I was born and bred there, I always felt like a blow-in. My family had roots elsewhere, and in the holidays we'd all pile into the car, praying it wouldn't conk out on the M6, and visit one set of grandparents in Brentwood, Essex. For many years, my brother and I had a running joke about the way people spoke down there, based on a fragment of talk we'd heard over Granddad's garden fence. A kind man – it may even have been our uncle – had warned someone to "Moiynd the netools – they're kwite hoy".

But just as we found the Essex accent strange, and delighted in exaggerating its long, burred vowels, so our way of speaking marked us out in our village school back in Cumbria. The kids I grew up with assumed my accent, because it was more southern than it was Cumbrian, was "posh". And my father, the son of a first-generation German immigrant and a rural Essex-man, had inherited an inclination towards assimilation, a key component of which was the ironing out of any accent at all.

So I grew up, if not divided in myself, then aware to an unusual degree of the concepts of dividedness and unitedness that played out in the words we use and the ways we use them. My father was trying to iron out my accent, as he believed that the "clearer" my voice was, the further I'd get in the world. I resisted this, as it divided me from my peers.

In a way, this resistance has carried me forward to the writing of my novel. The book grew ever so slowly from that apple-scrumping short story and tells the tale of a teenager's quest for his disappeared best friend. The main character, Chris Hearsey, tells the story as it happens, and it happens in a great breathless rush over a day and a night. The language Chris speaks is full of the energy of childhood linguistic invention and wry Cumbrian observation. What he sees and feels deeply about as a normal lad in 1986 are just the streets and the waste grounds, the bare landscape of the Solway Firth, the parks, arcades and phone-boxes most of us are deeply familiar with, yet his speech has the effect of transfiguring this world and making it new, rather in the way that a poem shakes and refreshes our ways of seeing and feeling.

I think my childhood taught me that accents are not only fluid and changeable, but because of that, a poor means of judging anyone. The drama that occurs in Talk of the Town is no less dramatic and surprising, I hope, because it happens to someone who feels and expresses things in what's known, rightly or wrongly, as non-standard English.

I'm pleased to say that when my dad read Talk of the Town he learned the language quickly and found himself swept along. You can't get better than your dad approving of your lifelong resistance to what is or isn't "proper".

&#149 Talk of the Town, by Jacob Polley, is published this month by Picador, priced 9.99