It happened on Sunday as we walked across Clapham Common towards the Old Town. My 10-year-old daughter asked if we might go to a shop to get something called a “baw-tool of wah-taah”.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
“A what?”
“A baw-tool of wah-taah. Dad, I’m thuh-stee,” she said, raising the intonation on the final word as if asking me a disbelieving question.
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Stupid Dad. Is he deaf?
My mouth drew the grin of a smug Irish father who had just been handed fresh ammunition to tease his tweenage girl. After her 2½ years here, she was actually speaking in a halfway-posh London accent.
I had heard subtle shifts before in the speech patterns of my daughters. Tiny inflections here, little shifts in vocabulary there. Usually it was when they were talking around their new school friends. Understandable, I thought, they just want to fit in.
Then one day, the youngest asked if I’d reach up to the high “cupboard” to get her a glass. “It’s a press,” I shot back. “Daaaaaad!” she said, rolling her eyes. She must have wanted wah-taah.
Now here she was on Sunday, walking in one of London’s most famous parks and speaking to her Wicklow father as if she had been born 500 yards away. I wasn’t about to let the opportunity slide. I ribbed her mercilessly.
“Well how would you say it?” she said.
“A bottle of water.”
My daughter, who was born in the Coombe and lived three-quarters of her life in Dublin, ran off across the park while imitating my accent: “Waaa-tur! Waaa-tur! Waaa-tur!”
Accents can be sensitive for the Irish in Britain. A few of the long-term Irish expatriates whom I know living here jokingly bemoan their children’s English accents. I’ve always enjoyed hearing this as a facetious in-joke. In Ireland, we know that the definition of self-deprecation extends to slagging off your own family.
Some other long-term Irish expatriates get understandably exasperated by all of this. “What’s wrong with my children having English accents? They are English, after all. There’s nothing wrong with that,” some will say, half-defensively.
And, of course, they are right. Their children are English and, despite our occasional historical hang-ups about the place, England remains one of the most charming nations on Earth. But while their kids are English, they are also half-Irish. I reckon they ought to be able to take a good slagging.
The sensitivity can manifest in a different, more serious way among Irish adults born and raised in Britain who identify more closely with the culture of their parents’ land. They feel Irish, are Irish, but just have English accents.
Among this cohort there is little fondness in their recollections of being teased by homegrown Irish for the way that they speak. For them, it could be hurtful.
Author Morag Prunty, who writes as Kate Kerrigan, speaks eloquently of how she felt othered when she moved from London, where she was raised, back to her ancestral home of Mayo. Her accent was part of it.
“There is kind of a derision in it,” she once told me as we sipped tea in the back garden of the Hendon house where she was brought up in north London. Despite feeling as Irish as anyone, Prunty often felt the sting of disapproval over the way she spoke.
I asked her why she thought this was.
“Because it’s England.”
I have spoken to elderly Irish emigrants to London who have felt the same. Maybe teasing my 10-year-old over her evolving accent wasn’t the smartest thing after all.
The issue arises more with the southeastern accent that sounds standard English to an Irish ear.
I have been to every corner of Britain in the last three years and have been fascinated by the bewildering variety of speech patterns here.
The Hebridean accent of the Western Isles sounds to me equal parts Scottish, Irish and Norse. Former local MP Angus Brendan MacNeil once told me what I think was a juicy political tale as we walked down the street. I just couldn’t understand a word of it.
There are umpteen Yorkshire accents, but one thing they have in common is a tendency to drop the words “the” or “to”. One Labour friend from the area often rejoices in telling me there is “nowt too good for t’working class, Mark”. He also taught me that in Yorkshire, a blow-in is an “offcumden”. What a word.
I love the contrast between the guttural vowels of Glaswegians versus the softer, more refined accent of many in Edinburgh.
My daughters are also proficient in the multicultural London English of a few of their classmates: “Oh my days, bruv!”
Scousers, Brummies, Mancunians, Geordies, Highlanders, Cornish, East Anglians – it is hard to believe they were all born on the same island.
People from the South Wales valleys don’t so much speak their words as sing them. Meanwhile, the capital of Wales is actually “Kaaa-diff”, according to locals.
Cockneys, meanwhile, are partial to the glottal stop – dropping an ‘f’ or replacing a middle ‘t’ with a momentary pause. To them, it would be a bo’le o’ wa’er.
My 10-year-old will probably get there in the end.
