furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room – a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More thanthat, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles – tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant. Learning by heart, chanting at the top of my voice – ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the Nine Gods he swore, That the great House of Tarquin, Should suffer wrong no more…’ Gloating over Gordon who could not spell ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM , the longest word in the dictionary. Rhyming and blaspheming and marvelling. I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently – it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable. ‘Does anyone know all the words in the world?’ I ask Mother. ‘ Anyone? ’ ‘I expect very clever men do,’ says Mother vaguely.
Lisa, as a child, most interested me when I watched her struggling with language. I was not a good mother, in any conventional sense. Babies I find faintly repellent; young children are boring and distracting. When Lisa began to talk I listened to her. I corrected the inanities encouraged by her grandmothers. ‘Dog,’ I said. ‘Horse. Cat. There are no such things as bow-wows and gee-gees.’ ‘Horse,’ said Lisa, thoughtfully, tasting the word. For the first time we communicated. ‘Gee-gee gone?’ enquired Lisa. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Gone. Clever girl.’ And Lisa took a step towards maturity.
Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, throughlayers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.
I used to take Lisa for walks in the woods near Sotleigh when she was five and six, shedding Jasper’s mother and the bovine Swiss au pair girl. She amused and intrigued me – this small unreachable alien creature locked in her amoral preliterate condition with no knowledge of past or future, free of everything, in a state of grace. I wanted to know how it felt. I would question her, craftily, with adult sophistry, with the backing of Freud and Jung and centuries of perception and opinion. And she would slip away from me, impervious, equipped with her own powers of evasion, with Indian lore, with techniques of camouflage.
Claudia and Lisa, five foot eight inches tall and three foot seven, forty-four years old and six, wade through bluebells, wood anemones and leaf mould. The trees resound with bird-song. An old labrador shuffles ahead, nosing toadstools. Coins of sunlight fall down through the trees and lie on feet, on branches, on arms and legs, on the
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More thanthat, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles – tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant. Learning by heart, chanting at the top of my voice – ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the Nine Gods he swore, That the great House of Tarquin, Should suffer wrong no more…’ Gloating over Gordon who could not spell ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM , the longest word in the dictionary. Rhyming and blaspheming and marvelling. I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently – it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable. ‘Does anyone know all the words in the world?’ I ask Mother. ‘ Anyone? ’ ‘I expect very clever men do,’ says Mother vaguely.
Lisa, as a child, most interested me when I watched her struggling with language. I was not a good mother, in any conventional sense. Babies I find faintly repellent; young children are boring and distracting. When Lisa began to talk I listened to her. I corrected the inanities encouraged by her grandmothers. ‘Dog,’ I said. ‘Horse. Cat. There are no such things as bow-wows and gee-gees.’ ‘Horse,’ said Lisa, thoughtfully, tasting the word. For the first time we communicated. ‘Gee-gee gone?’ enquired Lisa. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Gone. Clever girl.’ And Lisa took a step towards maturity.
Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, throughlayers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.
I used to take Lisa for walks in the woods near Sotleigh when she was five and six, shedding Jasper’s mother and the bovine Swiss au pair girl. She amused and intrigued me – this small unreachable alien creature locked in her amoral preliterate condition with no knowledge of past or future, free of everything, in a state of grace. I wanted to know how it felt. I would question her, craftily, with adult sophistry, with the backing of Freud and Jung and centuries of perception and opinion. And she would slip away from me, impervious, equipped with her own powers of evasion, with Indian lore, with techniques of camouflage.
Claudia and Lisa, five foot eight inches tall and three foot seven, forty-four years old and six, wade through bluebells, wood anemones and leaf mould. The trees resound with bird-song. An old labrador shuffles ahead, nosing toadstools. Coins of sunlight fall down through the trees and lie on feet, on branches, on arms and legs, on the
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