Last updated at 10:13, Tuesday, 27 January 2009

It was strange having three children not speaking like us, but as little Londoners. Who are they, I used to think, where have they come from?

Hunter Davies

I’m in London, but not of London. We divide our year between London and Loweswater and now we are in London mode. Despite all these years, nay decades, it still feels a pretty strange place. But then it did 50 years ago when I first came here to work, though in a different way. In l959, London was a white city, full of cheeky, cocky cockneys who seemed so smart, so quick, so confident, making me feel lumpen and provincial.
London didn’t smell like Carlisle, it seemed hotter, dustier, more exotic. And the smog, dear God that was appalling. It was so thick and mucousy I got lost every night coming home, walking into hedges. Could I ever fit in, I wondered, would I ever know my way around, how long will it take to become one of them? If ever.
In some senses it hasn’t happened. On Saturday mornings we pounce on Friday’s Cumberland News when it comes through the letter box, reading out bits to each other, studying every photo and story for places and people we know. The first result I always turn to is Carlisle United’s. Come back Fred, I shout, now that we need you, and of course my wife understands exactly what I’m on about .
“When will the scran be ready, pet?” I ask her, as I do no cooking in this house, neither here not up there. I’ll tell her about this gadgee I met on the bus or say it was a queer shan when one of the posh neighbours caught me looking through a skip
My dear wife comes from Carlisle as well, brought up in exactly the same background at the same time, though of course the St Ann’s Hill council estate was far superior to Raffles, why some of us even had doorbells not knockers, so we still use l950s Carlisle slang when talking to each other.
It came in handy when the children were young, being able to communicate in a foreign tongue. I suspect scran (meaning food) and gadgee (meaning bloke) and shan (meaning embarrassment) are probably now archaic terms even in Carlisle, for I’ve never heard young people in Scotch Street use such terms today.
It was strange having three children not speaking like us, without our accent, but as little Londoners. Who are they, I used to think, where have they come from? One of them to this day still says fink for think and fought for thought. On the other hand, I caught one of them the other day saying “I felt shanned to deeth”, so she must have listening in to us, even if she was using the expression mockingly and also, so I like to think, affectionately, as a homage to her roots.
I suppose all this wouldn’t have happened, keeping a little oasis in the Deep South that will always be Cumbria, if I had married out, say a total foreigner from some far flung place like Newcastle or Preston.
But I realise it’s only in my head today I sound Carlisle. My accent has long faded, becoming anonymously, flatly Northern, and no-one today in Carlisle ever thinks I’m local, much to my annoyance. Even when I say cushty. (That’s another word we used, which I was convinced was pure Carlisle, till I heard it on Only Fools and Horses. Probably wartime in origin.)
But the biggest difference has not been to me but to London. The smog has long gone, hurrah for that, and London today is now a foreign city. It was exotic in l959, because cockneys, to me, were exotic, but now it’s foreign because it’s full of foreigners. And hurrah for that as well.
I go on the bus and very often there is not one person speaking English – for people do speak on London buses, but not the Tube – or looking English, and I stare and wonder and am fascinated, wanting to know each of their stories. I long to go up and down the bus, interviewing every one on how they came to be here.
I often tell my brother Johnny, who still lives in Carlisle, that he needn’t go abroad for his hols, come to London. All foreign life is here.
Carlisle and all Cumbrian towns are still ethnically the same as they always were, which must make London today still seem strange for first time visitors, but visually all Cumbrian High Streets have the same chain stores, banks, supermarkets, as almost everywhere else, so local differences have gradually been eroded.
Young people are also growing much the same, in their clothes, habits, and in their speech, if not their accents. In Kentish Town or Kendal, schoolgirls on a bus will be saying whatever, yes but no but, and sounding like parodies of Little Britain or Catherine Tate characters – which of
course are not parodies but taken from real life, which then get copied and passed on.
Thank goodness some of us keep up some of the old ways, even if it’s a bit of a shan to admit it.

First published at 10:49, Monday, 26 January 2009
Published by http://www.cumbrialife.co.uk