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Sunday 22 November 2009

Diary

Beryl Bainbridge puts on a Liverpudlian accent and goes searching for St George

I got a funny phone call last night, at eight o’clock, from the Gas Board. A young woman asked me to read the meter. I said I couldn’t, it was too high up on the wall. She was very nice and suggested I got help. I told her that my sometimes cleaner was coming the next day, at which she said, ‘Fine, get her to do it. I’ll ring you back in the afternoon.’ That was three days ago. I’m beginning to wonder if this wasn’t a sophisticated prelude to robbery. I’m comforted by the fact that once thieves encounter the stuffed buffalo in my hall, horns lowered to charge, they’ll back off.

I spoke to my grandson Inigo yesterday to ask him if he’d been told anything at school about St George. He’s a very polite boy and wanted to be helpful. No, he said, he hadn’t, apart from the fact that George had a friend who was a dragon.

The reason I went to Liverpool was because I had written a short story for radio called ‘Claire Has Fair Hair’ about a boy who, just after the war, was having elocution lessons at Crane Hall. If you come from Liverpool, you inevitably pronounce a’s as e’s — Clere has Fer Her. I read the story and thought my scouse accent was pretty good, but when I listened to the tape I was astonished at how false I sounded. I too went to Crane Hall, where Mrs Ackerly taught me to speak proper. So I just went for an hour or so to stand outside the building where my voice had been changed. I couldn’t go inside because it’s no longer a place where blind men once tuned pianos. It’s boarded up, probably about to be knocked down. On the way back I asked a man sitting in a doorway what he thought of St George. He were bloody brilliant, he said. My son suggested he was probably referring to a footballer named Best.

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