“The Good Queen’s English was good enough for Shakespeare
So why not you?” they asked at school.
“It’s your one indispensable tool,
Abandon it and any hope you have of fame will disappear.”

Hope? Now there’s a laugh, when was there ever any?
My mum and dad came from “Oop North”
To “The Home Caynties, dahling”, their accents judged funny,
Their manners wanting. To be worth
A damn down south they’d have needed to unravel half a life.
So instead they set about reshaping mine,
Acceptability for me in God’s Good Time
Their only aim; and the result, a childhood full of strife,

Of “ellowcewtion” lessons to turn “gonn” to “gorn”
And in the playground “copper bum”
And “nickel-arse” instead of Nicholas, the insult born
Of something not quite normal come
To test the tribe. Well bugger off (not “orff”), I thought,
You’ll never make me change my tune,
Where I was got the rough peasantry is hewn
From tougher rock than southern chalk.

Or so I thought, but though I won from time to time
A skirmish here, a battle there,
So far I’ve lost the war. My twang became a drawl, a crime
Against my origins, and where
Before I’d been at least beyond all doubt a “northerner”,
Quickly I became something more risible than that,
A mere outsider.

“X stands outside the current literary school.”
(Meaning, maybe, he went to the wrong one!)

“Y’s linguistic peccadilloes mean he stands alone.”
(And utterly beyond the pale, poor fool!)

Conformity, it seems, is valued above gold
Still in the ‘literary’ coterie, the prize
To sell your soul for (though when sold
You’ll keep a buy-back option on it if you’re wise).

In literature, like life, you’re told to find your place
And stay there please, and woe
Betide the renegade who dares to up and go
Beyond the norm; he’ll find his face
No longer fits. Not “one of us”, not “understood”
In the society of ‘lits’.
He’s excommunicated at a stroke.
“No good can ever come of this,” they poke,
And still that judgement holds.

But though these shits with accents like the one I’ve learned
Still rule this roost, well fook (not fuck) ‘em.
My roots are worth much more than that, my parents earned
For me the right to speak the way I choose,
And so I will because, despite their fears, for sure one day,
However long it takes, we’ll win, they’ll lose.


####

Nick Carding is a Brit who's been hiding in The Netherlands for the past ten years. Married to an itinerant Croat, he escapes south with her as often as he can - but not often enough for his liking.

These days he doesn't often submit - but in the past his work has been published in the UK, USA, Canada, Croatia, Australia and New Zealand.

You can contact him at carding@xs4all.nl

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