Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [36]
But the current fashionable reasons for leaving London are more pedestrian in a somewhat depressing fashion. The Sunday Times featured the issue one day in its real estate supplement and focused on the families of the Wandsworth section of the city, who find it less “child-friendly” than the greener regions and are moving out of town in droves. “The thought of trying to get on the Tube with a buggy horrifies me,” one young mum complained. A far cry from the stench of evil that the shires once believed emanated from the city.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Not so long ago there was a billboard at the Hogarth roundabout on the way to the airport that had some parents in the area in a swivet. It read “Roger More” and was an advertisement for a brand of condoms. Most Americans probably thought it was a misprint and that someone had inexplicably left out the second o in the last name of the British actor who once played James Bond.
That’s because the term “roger” is nothing but a name in the United States, while in England it’s a slang expression for having sex. Condoms, however, are not also known as rubbers, as they are in America. Rubbers are the things we call erasers.
I actually know a good bit of this. I have long taken a great satisfaction in the fact that I speak English. Real English, not the tongue Americans speak. I have virtually no facility with languages—my schoolgirl French just barely enables me to get laundry sent out or a sweater purchased and paid for in Paris. But as a young reader, little by little I began to assemble a vocabulary that bore no relationship to that used by the average American child. I am proud to say that I scarcely ever used it in conversation, although occasionally I would try to use Englishisms in my writing, and my teachers would underline an exclamation like “Bollocks!” or the description of someone as “daft” and write in the margin, “What are you trying to say here?” (One old nun, I remember, once wrote, “You can read Dickens without trying to be Dickens.” As if being Dickens was even possible!)
It was a useful bit of self-education, because all of my translation had to be done from context. What precisely were elevenses, and how did they differ from tea? How was tea different from high tea, if at all? What were O levels, and how did one attain a first at Oxford or Cambridge? If fags were cigarettes and pissed was drunk, what did vulgar Brits call it when they had to urinate or wanted to mock homosexuals? A nice piece of fish—plaice, usually, which seemed to be flounder—was lovely. A day in the country was brilliant. Bonk meant having sex, too, and knickers were underpants; before I tumbled to this, I was constantly perplexed by the state in which various English heroines found themselves in the bedroom, as though they were ready to play golf before bed.
Americans don’t use Englishisms much, although, from time to time, you do pass an American bar actually named “Ye Olde English Pub.” This extends to other products and services; recently an American catalog company featured a Portobello coat, Carnaby boots, and a Savile tee shirt, the last particularly puzzling given the legendary tailoring of Savile Row suits. What could a Savile tee shirt possibly look like? Lapels? Handsewn seams and darts?
Of course, the problem with appropriating the English language from books rather than overheard life was that much of it was antiquated. Or, perhaps in some cases, invented. When Waugh describes how his madcap partygoers “all got into