Open Writing

My Mum had a wonderful way with the English language, partly comprising her many and inventive malapropisms, and partly the quaint old sayings she got from my grandmother (and some she invented for herself). She always saw the joke; many’s the laugh we had together about her unique vocabulary.

I could write a book (there’s a song in there somewhere) about the malapropisms – here’s just a few:

“I don’t like that UDR milk – it tastes burnt”.

“Everyone’s driving round in hunchbacks these days.” (Keeps Quasimodo off the dole, I suppose, now he’s given up the bell-ringing.)

Admiring me at the age of thirteen in my first grown-up outfit, a silver lurex mini-dress, she said: “When you have a daughter you can tell her all about your lovely silver latex dress.” I don’t think so; not at thirteen years old. Never did go for that kind of gear anyway – all that talcum powder and tugging and pulling, and that’s just to get the damned dress on!

We met for lunch while I was working in an office housed in a temporary building, so she asked: “Are you still working in that porker-bin?” Mind you, remembering that awful job, she wasn’t far wrong.

And now - the two that nearly gave me a double hernia (strangulated), I laughed so much:

We had been shopping in Chatham and popped into a jazz CD shop (long gone, alas). While I was deciding what to fritter my money away on, she remarked:

“I popped over to your place to borrow a couple of books last week. Did you know – you’ve got two copies of the Listerine Mystery?” I leaned on the CD rack (solid wood, luckily) and gave myself up to howls of laughter. (I should add for those not acquainted with Agatha Christie’s books that the real title is “The ListerDALE” mystery. I think I prefer Mum’s version.)

And Mum was visiting me and went to the loo. She came downstairs and the conversation went like this:

“Ere – what’s that old bowl of dead leaves you’ve got in your bathroom, then?”

“That’s not old dead leaves, Mum, it’s pot-pourri. Makes the room smell nice.”

Puzzled look, then: “Oh.”

A few days later: “Ere – you know that potty-poo you’ve got in your bathroom? Where do you buy it?”

Mum’s (and indirectly Nan’s) sayings also caused me a lot of amusement, and I have absorbed some myself:

When feeling tired, she’d say: “I feel ninety in the shade”. When feeling and looking tired, it was: “I look like the Wreck of the Hesperus”. A precocious little girl was “a little old maid cut short”. Anything of an unpleasing shade of brown, such as stockings (no tights in those days) was “shitty colour by moonlight”. Why by moonlight? One of life’s unsolved mysteries.

Finally, one she invented herself. She was a Transport and General Workers’ Union steward for over twenty years, so went to many meetings and had the benefit of seeing middle-class Marxists in action, speechifying. She had very little time for this kind of oratory, and when describing one orator to me, commented: “He wants to set the world on fire, but his matches are wet.” I love that one and have used it many times.

Dear old Mum – this is just a small sample. I haven’t told you about the time she sent off for a slimming garment called “Trim Jeans”. Some other time (there’s a song in there too).