Authors: Maeve Binchy
Unfortunately at school when we learn English we have to take on board a great number of words, expressions and forms of speech which are not used in everyday communication. This is necessary, I think, in order to fill up the gaps in vocabulary. It would be ridiculous to leave school with whole sections of the English language unknown to us just in order to clear the mind for easy communication. The language is rich so it’s important to know the huge range of words and their shades of meaning. But, and it’s a very large but, the trouble is that just because we do have to learn so many complicated and elaborate words we are inclined to overuse them. Not in speech, mind you, unless you happen to be a very pompous and mannered talker, but certainly in writing.
Time and again, I read short stories from young people – and oddly girls are the worst offenders – which are so choked up with words and phrases which they would never in a million years use in conversation that it makes the story itself unreadable.
An example: ‘Untimely fingers of frost in what should have been the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness nipped Ann O’Leary as with furrowed mien she proceeded from the domestic portals and directed her steps to the main thoroughfare.’
She was trying to say, ‘it was a cold autumn day when a worried-looking Ann O’Leary left her house ….’ or something like that.
Now I don’t know why we should think that the more disguises and padding we put on a thought the more respectable it becomes. It must be a throw-back to the days when we crammed as many words and allusions into a school essay in order to let the English teacher know that we were at least aware of them. Fine if that’s what you’re about, letting an examiner know that you absorbed a barrel full of vocabulary. But if you are trying to tell a story simply … or get an idea or a picture out of your mind and into someone else’s then it needs to be a lot more simple, a lot less cluttered. In fact a lot more like the way you speak.
Last year in Waterford I was making this point and a girl in one of the groups asked me a question which I couldn’t answer. She said that if she was really to write as she spoke, it would be full of schoolgirl slang and local idiom and phrases that were currently fashionable but might be out of favour soon. Is that the way she should write, she wanted to know, because that was the way she talked? I’ve thought about it a lot since. She was right of course, her own school-speak was probably as unsuitable for getting her thoughts across to people outside her immediate circle as would be the awful essay-style crowded prose and jargon. Yet it would have more truth in it, and more honest attempt to say something simply. And as she grew to be aware what was in fact just the artificial group-talk that we all use at different times of our lives … she could discard it in favour of a direct and uncluttered style.
It’s not easy to do at once, not if you have been used to writing as a vehicle for other people’s thoughts and expressions. But once you start it becomes easier and easier and you will wonder how you could ever have begun a tale with some showy sentence full of words and hiding what you meant to say. It’s a bit easier also to hide the real you, and what you feel if you use the disguise of other people’s language. It’s somehow safer to say ‘within the hallowed walls of this esteemed place of learning’ instead of saying ‘here at school’ because the first one has a kind of sardonic ring to it … the second is more naked.
You could begin with a diary. Just telling it like it is. No high-sounding phrases, no wishing to impress, because in a diary you are writing to yourself. You could say what it’s like now in the winter of ’83, what you feel, what you think about. Nobody will read it but you. But when you’ve done a page or two go back over it with a red pen and hunt ruthlessly for phrases and words that are not your own, for things that would be foolish and fussy if said aloud.
I think that’s the best way to approach creative writing. To realise that it is creative, and you are the one creating it. Don’t be content with other people’s words, use your own. Don’t worry about style, if you speak like yourself for long enough the style will be there. It will be
your
style. You will be writing like yourself. You will have found your own voice.
A
cold, bright morning, and a small crowd stands outside Harrods studying the free store map which the management wisely distributes at sales.
This saves endless hours of questioning, and helps the bargain hunters to work out a flight path from the main door to Fine China in the centre of the second floor, where a Wedgwood dinner service is reduced from £1,226 to £613.
Others were planning a quick gallop up the escalators to the Fur Rooms on the first floor, over on the corner where Brompton Road joins Hans Crescent – one floor above the spot where a bomb killed six people and wounded 90 last month.
There is nothing to show what happened here in December. No wreath, no flowers, no message scrawled in hurt or rage on any wall. Not even the broken windows. The whole menswear department has been fully repaired and was trading normally during the sale.
But there are no cars parked now in the side roads, and even a private car dropping somebody off at the door has barely time for the passenger to get out before it is waved on.
And all around stand policemen and policewomen, either speaking softly into the little radios which they wear fixed to their lapels, or just looking on with watchful eyes and a hand lightly laid on the collar of equally vigilant Alsatian dogs.
Lots of other men seem to be on the lookout too. These are plain-clothes Special Branch officers and members of the Anti-Terrorist Squad. They say that some of the people inside the store who might look like assistant manager or floor supervisor are in fact Special Branch as well.
The sale began officially on Friday morning, with the usual overnight campers pitching their tents early on Thursday evening. Some are paid to go and queue for bargains. One boy was paid £100, to get a television and video set which had been reduced from £1,000 to £500. He said that the fellow who paid him would still be able to sell the goods at a profit after that, so it was worth it to everyone. Including Harrods, presumably, who have the reputation of offering really gigantic bargains.
The store’s managing director and chairman, Mr Aleck Craddock, said that the people who normally shopped in Harrods had no intention of staying away because of the bomb. In fact, he thought it had made them more determined than ever to come and buy. He announced that since the bombs, trading had not decreased at all, in fact it was 14 per cent up on the same period last year.
On the same factual note, Mr Craddock continued to express his belief that the store would be able to announce record takings of £25 million over the three-week sales period. More than 250,000 people attended the opening day. But not everyone is able to show such a calm and unruffled front.
Some of the 5,000-plus staff are very unhappy and distressed and don’t mind admitting it. A woman in the china department said that on Friday there had been a great deal of noise and crashing about while people literally struggled over bargains, breaking crockery and china. She said her nerves got very bad and she had to sit down for a long time. She kept thinking that the bombers had come back to finish them off.
A young woman told me that if I went past the Staff Only door, I would see that the corridors were lined with messages of sympathy to the staff from the public – people had written from everywhere to say how terrible it was. A lot of people had wanted to send sympathy to the families of those people who had been killed or injured, but they didn’t know where to write so they just wrote to Harrods. There were some letters from Ireland also, people writing to say that the Irish were upset too.
Some of the staff thought that these should be put up on a wall where the public could see them and realise the support that people gave the store, but the powers that be said no, that would be a bad idea. It would keep reminding people of the terrible thing that had happened, and really, it was best for people to forget and get on with living.
The crowds on Saturday morning seemed less than usual for the first Saturday of the sale, which is after all the first day that ordinary people who work Monday to Friday can get to it. There wasn’t the stampede and throng that has been known and some of the staff were relieved to be able to breathe a little more easily than they expected. The tight security was adding to what was the normal tension of the country’s biggest sale. But the big, silent police presence was obviously a great comfort to the shoppers, some of whom approached a little uneasily, one eye on the bargains and one eye on the big Alsatian dogs straining at their leads.
T
welve Christmases ago, when I had just come to live in Hammersmith, I was shocked at a notice which went in everyone’s door telling them to look out for signs of old people who might be dead in bedsitters upstairs. They gave handy hints such as not having heard them move around, or milk bottles piling up outside the door. Then you were to say to yourself: aha, there must be a dead person in there. The notion that in bedsitter-land you wouldn’t know who lived in the same house, or how frail they might be, was very hard to accept.
I think things have got much better. Social workers, who have got such a bad time over the deaths of children released from care back to families who were violent, also have the care of the elderly and it’s not always easy.
There’s a very cheerful social worker who has her hands full with the area round where I live. I’m not sure what her title or job strictly is, because they call her the Welfare, the Town Hall, the woman from the madhouse, Old Nosey Parker, the Labour, the Social Services, the Warder, the Warden and the Minder.
They are half-afraid of her in case she will change their lives in some unacceptable way, like giving them a Home Help or putting them into sheltered accommodation. They are half-afraid that she isn’t doing enough for them and that there might be free coal or another £2 a week if they play their cards right.
She is a marvellous woman, from Tipperary, and she is probably a saint. In her car she always has a dozen hand-knitted shawls. She gets the people in a local home to knit them; she pretends she has knitted them herself, so the old women with thin, shivering shoulders will take them because they think they’re a genuine gift. She tells me she has hours of paperwork getting the money for the bloody wool and knitting needles, and she has to disguise it very deeply because they won’t pass anything irregular or allow any hint of charity to come from public funds.
She has boxes of packet soup – she says she thinks she’s turning into an oxtail by now, she has so much of it. She tells them it was a free sample and why don’t they try it; she gets in, puts on the kettle and they all sip a mug of it and nod and say possibly, but she knows they will never stir themselves to buy it, so next week or next visit she will have another so-called free offer.
She picks up a lot of odd newspapers, anywhere – in restaurants, bus shelters. Sometimes she just swipes them from her own office. In some of the houses she visits, she thinks they would like a daily paper but it’s a bit of an extravagance, so she casually says, ‘I’ve finished with this’ and sees it pounced on eagerly. They read out bits about the royals and Joan Collins to her, and she knows it was right to give them a few stories to think about.
She says that isolation is the real killer and that many old people just turn their faces to the wall and die in the winter from no disease, from no hypothermia; just from no will to go on.
Her priority is to keep them warm this winter, to explain that gas and electricity will NOT be cut off, that there are always funds from some public purse to meet a heating bill. It’s hard to get that into the heads of people who have been brought up thrifty and in fear of authority which will punish them if they use two bars of the fire.
She thinks that the social services in England are basically very good and mean well; they have to cope with great cuts in funding, and every year there seems to be more to do and less resources to do it with. It’s no use trying to explain this to Thatcher’s government, it doesn’t listen. Not to reasoned appeals, not to strikes, not to emotional demonstration.
She thinks it’s better to get on with it; you keep more people warm by wrapping them up in shawls and giving them soup than you do by signing petitions and marching to Westminster. A lot of her colleagues disagree. They say she comes from a background where charity was acceptable, where people EXPECTED the Little Sisters, the Vincent de Paul and a dozen others to help. In the Welfare State, people don’t have that system. They pay taxes all their working lives so that they can be looked after when the time comes.
So more and more she has to disguise her kindness in case it be defined by anyone as charity. She thinks that if she ruled the world she wouldn’t give them a pension at all, she would give them free heating, get a certain amount of food delivered to their doors each day with a newspaper.
They should have vouchers for clothes, and there should be a law saying they all had to go out and eat lunch in a centre each day. That way they would meet other people. And all the pet-food manufacturers should be forced to give those tins they advertise totally free to pensioners, so that there would be no question of spending everything on the tortoiseshell cat called Margaret Rose and forgetting to buy any food for the cat’s owner.
But then she sighs and says that’s only ludicrous, you can’t play God. And she’s off again with a dozen small umbrellas. She bought them at £1 each from a man, without asking him which lorry they fell off. She will give them here and there, with some tale about having ordered too many in the office and the company refusing to take them back.
She thinks that a lot of the elderly get drenched when they go out and the damp goes into their bones. She’ll probably never get the money through for 12 black-economy umbrellas, but it’s not a fortune. She shrugs, the Tipperary Robin Hood who is the very acceptable face of the Welfare and the human side of bureaucracy, in a city which fears that its old people will die of cold this winter but hasn’t the machinery to prevent it.