Aitch and other stories

 I was taken by the important detail in Don Paterson's book, Smith, about Michael Donaghy, on the difference between 'aitch' and 'haitch'. I hadn't realized it was political or at least 'socio-cultural'. However, it's more or less, I think Catholic to say 'haitch' and Protestant to say 'aitch' at least in some places. 

I had always said 'aitch' because that's what we said in our house. I thought 'haitch' sounded childish but one feels pressure to fit in. On finding myself working with people who drank premium lager, having been more 'real' ale or at least bitter at university, I switched as readily as I did as I changed from disdaining the Human League's synthesizer pop to liking it, not least because I was buying more expensive drinks for others than they were buying for me, or modifying my Nottingham accent to incorporate elements of those of places I lived subsequently. Maybe some of us aren't as much who we are but what our circumstances and surroundings make us.

But, nearly 50 years on, with time to brood on things, the story of 'aitch' reminded me of an episode in school when, trying to conform to local orthodoxy, I said 'haitch' and the teacher corrected me. I knew what it was but I could hardly explain that I was only trying to sound like everybody else in the class. I burned with indignation, not unlike the times I mispronounced a word in a play by Brecht, pronounced 'liege' in a Shakespeare history play as if it was a place in Belgium because all I knew was a footbal team called Standard Liege and translated 'homme d'affaires', knowing full well it wasn't, as 'man of affairs' when I'd seen it coming but didn't have time to drag 'business man' from the outskirts of memory.

That's the least of it, really, but one little trigger can set of whole concatenations of long-nurtured sleights and injustice.

The Paying Guests has maintained its immaculate line in telling detail and various tensions which are what I re-read it for. It is a brilliant piece of sustained writing, hugely impressive and my admiration for it is undiminshed. But even in the few years since it appeared, things have moved on. I don't personally blame Keir Starmer for not knowing what a woman was although I'm told he's now made up his mind.

While political correctness was intended to be exactly what it says on the tin - correct - and 'woke' has now replaced it as a favourite target of right-wing intolerance, like so many good ideas, it gets out of hand in the wrong hands, even possibly those of feminist, all-round fine person, Sarah Waters.

I have an uneasy feeling throughout The Paying Guests that the baddies are all men and the goodies with who our sympathies lie are female. Not only that but that Leonard, the murder victim that we not encouraged to be attracted to, is gingery which makes him apparently less attractive than if he'd been, say, dark-haired. It's Sarah's story and it's a very compelling one but one wonders if the story was translated into characters of other gender or ethnic identities, say, if it would remain quite so powerful. I don't think it would but surely it ought to.

 

Omitted from the Top 6 Things it says here, below, were my chronic search for a proper 'big project' and the futility always felt not long into thinking it could be a novel. Writing a novel should by now be an ambition put aside as once and for all as opening the batting for England or writing a song that gets into the hit parade. Wanting to achieve something is no kind of place to start. Being able to do it is the place to start, wanting to comes next.

But maybe my version of C20th English Poetry in something like 10 x 5 5000 word essays is something into which I could put lots of the things I've said before, all tied up together and I'd have a 'big project' to put alongside the Collected Poems, Strange Fowl and other essays but never, I imagine, the pop music book and they could be produced as kindles once the facility to do so and the trepidation have been summoned.

The plan for the C20th book amounts to 77 words but several passages of it can be lifted from things already done. Let's hope that can stand as some sort of decision. I look forward to having a less disparate oeuvre in due course.