Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [39]
Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies was a very reputable establishment opposite the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, “run by a bunch of scary, tweedy lesbians. Although some very noble people went there.” She shuts her eyes and counts them off on two fingers. “Prince Philip’s assistant went there, passionate about being posh. And the Dalai Lama’s sister—she went there too, passionate about the cause.”
Every morning, students at Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies were stationed behind Remington typewriters. “About two tons of steel, and they would put on records of military music and we were supposed to type in time to the Coldstream Band. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack.” Then Mum gives a rendition of herself typing. “On the other hand—pause, ping—pause, ping—pause, ping. That was my corner.” And in the afternoon shorthand practice. “Well, I could never read back what I had written—it just looked like a madwoman’s scrawl to me.”
Mum sighs. “It took me longer to complete the course than everyone else because I was not passionate about being a secretary. And I had chronic sinus problems.” She hesitates and then corrects herself. “Actually, not really. It was London in the sixties. There was so much going on. I didn’t have sinus problems at all, I had hangovers.”
“You were a hippie?” I ask.
“Hippie?” repeats Mum coldly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bobo. No, these were the years of the Cold War; lots of lovely intrigue and hanky-panky—the Profumo affair, Mandy Rice-Davies, Christine Keeler. We all confidently expected that we were going to get blown to pieces by the Russians at any moment; it was terribly exciting.” Mum shakes her head, “And I wasn’t going to die learning bloody shorthand, that’s for sure.”
Catherine Angleton offered to hold a ball so that my mother could come out. “Not out of the closet,” Mum says, as if this is what I am about to suggest. “I was supposed to creep out from behind the typewriter to be formally presented to society. But I didn’t want to be a debutante. I didn’t see the point. Anyway, the sort of Englishmen who went to those balls would have sneered at me because I was a colonial.” She sighs. “They’d all have been terribly snobbish and listened like hawks for a slip in my accent; if I made the slightest mistake with my pronunciation, they would have pounced.”
YEARS LATER, MUM TRIED TO drill proper accents into Vanessa and me. Hours and hours of BBC radio were streamed into our ears in the hope that Received Pronunciation would rub off on us. And she did what she could to bring our voices down an octave or two—our high-pitched Rhodesian accents made us sound like adenoidal chipmunks. Auntie Glug thought we sounded sweet; Mum thought we sounded appalling.
My current accent is, according to Mum, appalling too—a hybrid Southern-African-English-American patois, barely recognizable as the language of Elizabeth II. My sister isn’t much better. She came home from the time she spent in London in her late teens and early twenties with what Mum calls “a dreadful cockney twang” to complement her colonial clip. “I can never tell if Vanessa is deliberately trying to wind me up,” Mum says, “or if she just does these things because she doesn’t care.”
When I ask Vanessa which of these it is, she takes a long drag off her cigarette and says, “Both.”
In addition to being bombarded by Received Pronunciation, Vanessa and I were instructed in a bewildering list of prohibitions regarding speech and vocabulary. It was vulgar to talk about money, which suited us because we seldom had any worth mentioning. (Money was also supposed to be frivolously frittered—when Mum finally came into a small inheritance upon her mother’s death in 1993, she spent it on books, horses, Royal Ascot hats and a protracted visit to London’s West End, where she saw every