Maeve's Times

by Maeve Binchy

  The Dean of Westminster, who is a very civilised, cheerful sort of man, was sort of happy about it all, and so was the Archbishop of Canterbury. They beamed all round them and extracted a few return grins from the nervous-looking lot in the VIP seats. The choirboys looked suitably angelic and uncomfortable in their ruffs. One of them got his fingers caught behind his neck and had to have it released.

  The trumpeters were noble and rallying, and the Beefeaters were traditionally beefy. Everything was as it should be in fact, as we waited for the bride.

  About three seconds after the glass coach had left Buckingham Palace with Anne and her father we were all handed two pages of strictly embargoed details about the wedding dress: it would have threatened national security to have had it before, apparently. Journalists all around me were devouring it and rewriting the details of seed pearls and 1,000 threads of 20-denier silk to every inch of the garment. When she arrived at the door of the Abbey there was a bit of excitement about arranging the train and adjusting the tiara, and the bride looked as edgy as if it were the Badminton Horse Trials and she was waiting for the bell to gallop off.

  Up at the altar all the royals looked out as eagerly and anxiously as if they thought the Duke of Edinburgh and his only daughter might have dropped off for a pint on the way. The Queen actually smiled when they got into sight and Mark gave a matinee-idol shy, rueful smile. Princess Margaret read her programme of the wedding service as if it were the latest Agatha Christie that she had promised to finish before lunchtime.

  The Duke of Edinburgh went and sat beside his wife and mother-in-law and seemed to have a far greater control over his sword than did Prince Charles, who carried his as if it were an umbrella. I was waiting for half his relatives to have their legs amputated but there must have been some kind of plastic top on it because nobody seemed to be maimed or anything when they were leaving.

  The service went as planned and the young voices were clear and loud, as everyone remarked approvingly afterwards, no coyness or nervous stutters. There were a lot of hymns, and I saw the Queen singing her head off, but gloomily, and the Phillips parents sang, too, nervously on their side.

  Then off they galloped down the aisle and it was over. And do I mean over! There was no hooley in the palace or anything; the party had been on Monday night. The people who had got all dressed up went home, I suppose. The bridal couple had about nine hours of photographs, and all the people who had been camping on the street packed their spirit stoves into plastic bags and went off for lunch.

  It was a superbly organised show, with all the actors playing their parts perfectly, timing and all. Everyone who had a role kept to it: the Duchess of Kent looked sweet and pure English girlhood; Princess Alexandra managed to give the odd vaguely tomboyish grin which she thinks is expected. The Duke of Edinburgh and Lord Snowdon looked as self-effacing as Mark Phillips is beginning to look already. The ushers saw us out, thrilled that we had been able to get there and hoping earnestly that we had a good view of everything. The evening papers were already on the streets with early photographs. ‘The Snow White Princess!’ screamed one headline, as if the readers had expected the bride to wear scarlet jodhpurs.

  It was a very well-produced show, no one could deny that, but then the actors are getting slightly above Equity rates.

  How to Speak Proper

  27 May 1974

  I was particularly fond of the word ‘antithesis’ and used to drag it into all kinds of conversations, until I noticed people smiling at the way I pronounced it. Apparently there was something unusual about the ‘th’ bit, which made me red with rage since the English are totally unable to speak their own language and insist on talking about the Shar of Persiar, and having a good idear about something, and wondering what’s going to happen next in Eirer.

  It was with a vicious joy that I discovered that the BBC had a pronunciation unit no less, a section which defined the correct way to use words, where to lay the emphasis and, most importantly, how to deal with unfamiliar places and people’s names. Armed with recent examples of their horrifying mispronunciations I went off to investigate it, sure that I would give them a few helpful hints and set them straight on it all. It wasn’t only the infamous Drogg-heeda, and the multifarious pronunciations of Charlie Haughey’s name at a time gone by, but it was words like ‘Sinai’ which I was certain they had got wrong.

  Mrs Hazel Wright wouldn’t give an inch on Sinai. Not a centimetre. Yes, she knew I’d been there, so had the hundreds of others who objected to it being pronounced Sign-e-eye. But still she had done her work and this was what had come of it. In Hebrew and many Arabic languages the A and the I were both lone vowels, in rapid speech it was pronounced Sign-e-eye. Look at the file, look at the research. But since you could never be doctrinaire about language, it was quite possible that this pronunciation might change. They were not pedants, they didn’t want to impose a pronunciation, in a few months they might agree that common usage had sanctioned it and then it would be Sign-Eye, as I wanted.

  They were not stuffy in the pronunciation unit, she said firmly. And indeed stuffy they are not. They have a huge metal filing index with over 100,000 entries. As soon as a word is queried or thought worth querying, a little card is filled out on it, with the whole history of the investigations and a summary of the findings. Sometimes, of course, a place or a person comes into the news so rapidly that they don’t have time to find out how it should be pronounced. But they usually have it right in a few hours. ‘Like some Northern Ireland names,’ I said, thinking of the time that poor Henry Kelly had been going to bed in Belfast satisfied that he covered the main stories of the day. He turned on the two a.m. news and heard that there had been great trouble in Collisland, a place of which he had never heard. Frantic, he checked around and was told to go back to sleep; they meant Coal island and he had done the story hours earlier.

  Mrs Wright agreed. Scottish, Welsh and Irish names were difficult to pronounce to a southern English ear and voice. If they had to be pronounced without recourse to any advice people usually tried to say them as they were written, which, she agreed, was not only unwise but which had too many bad precedents. ‘When you think that the English have a name like Featherstonehaugh and are capable of pronouncing it in at least five ways including Fanshaw and Feesonhay it’s ridiculous that we should expect others to go by spelling alone. But we don’t really, you know. We go to great trouble to try and get it right, and sometimes it’s not as easy as you think.’

  In the case of an Irish place name the following procedure is used. Firstly they go to their enormous index to see is it included. A great many names are there already. Asked to pick one at random, I chose ‘Magherafelt’. There were four pages of notes on it, beginning with the report of a BBC overseas reporter who said that when he was there during the war, local people had called it Maarafelt, and going on to various contradictions of this all dated and documented. There were reasons for accepting or rejecting the Macherafelt pronunciation, and an eventual conclusion as to how it should be uttered. Suppose the name did not appear in the index? Mrs Wright and her assistants would telephone the Irish Embassy in London. There was a girl in the library there, Dympna Coughlan, who went to great trouble to tell them how it was pronounced. If she didn’t know or gave a couple of alternatives they would ring their man in Dublin or Belfast or wherever and ask him to enquire around a bit and see what was the accepted usage; sometimes they rang Brigid Kilfeather in RTÉ who would help them. I wouldn’t believe all the trouble they had had with Seán Mac Stíofáin’s name. Honestly, everyone they asked gave them a different variation.

  Were the biggest files on Irish names’ then? Not at all. You had to remember how many countries they were dealing with, especially through the Overseas Service at Bush House. Actually if I wanted to see the biggest file it was on the word ‘Nyasaland’. It went on for over 16 pages, coming up with the final conclusion that it should be pronounced Nee not Nye. The biggest problem was that they had to remembe
r they were speaking in English and since English people didn’t call Paris ‘Paree’ they had to concentrate on what would be the accepted English pronunciation of the word. They weren’t monitors or spies in the pronunciation unit. They didn’t listen to broadcasts and ring up a speaker and pounce on him for saying the word incorrectly. They don’t have time for one thing, and that’s not their job for another. It’s funny that an organisation like the BBC which was for so many years considered rightly or wrongly the great authority on how to talk nicely should in fact have just a small section where people apply if they want to know how to pronounce a difficult word. Certainly Mrs Wright, who is an honours graduate in modern languages and who has phonetic training, is very capable of dealing with anything that occurs, and many things that don’t occur. Every morning they send around a list of words which they think might be needed during the day, like ‘Ma’alot’ in Israel or ‘Potchefestroom’ in South Africa.

  It all began, this care and emphasis on pronunciation, as long ago as 1926, when an advisory committee on spoken English was set up under the chairmanship of the then poet laureate Robert Bridges, and it went on gently, I would imagine, discussing things in an academic way until 1939 when the war meant an end to all such committees. Shaw was on the team with them and gave a lot of good and memorable advice, although he is once meant to have said that it would have been a hell of a lot better if they had a few London taxi drivers and less lords and ladies on it. The woman who had done all the donkey work on the committee was Miss Elizabeth Miller, whose name is still a legend in the BBC. She took over the pronunciation business for the whole Corporation. Hers are the main body of the notes in the files and Mrs Wright pays tribute to the way she worked almost unsung and quite obviously had to fight long battles over almost every word for many years. Miss Miller retired two years ago but the standards she set in policy still remain, and are strenuously supported by those who have come after her.

  I found some of the items in the pronunciation handbook utterly comic, like the paragraph that deals with local educated usage, which is established ‘by consulting the vicar of the parish, the town hall, or the police’. How could you seriously ask the police or the vicar how to pronounce a place? ‘I don’t agree with you at all,’ said Hazel Wright, ‘you can’t ask the first person you meet or take a name out of a phone book to define how a place is pronounced. Vicars and policemen have often been a long time in the area, they meet a lot of people by the nature of their work, they get a good average idea of how the majority of the people pronounce the place and that’s what we need.’ It is interesting to note that the BBC these days is more anxious to avoid being patronising than to sound posh. For example, they don’t try too hard to get local accent or pronunciation and emphasis in case it looks as if they are trying unsuccessfully to take off the accents of the people who are strangers to them. The British say post office. In Ireland we accent the second word; a reporter in Ireland would not conform to this because it would look odd and sound odder.

  They try too not to be too accurate. This came up over the recent football match. There is no adjective ‘Argentinian’. In fact, the word you should use is ‘Argentine’ to describe the team. But the pronunciation unit did not recommend this as it sounded a little too hair-splitting and liable to be misunderstood by the majority of the audience. If I thought that the BBC pronunciation unit was rather over-documented, said Hazel Wright, I should have a look at the way the French go about it. Almost every day she receives their documentation and it is incredibly detailed and indeed much more dictatorial. It is also extraordinarily charming since every manifesto about the wrong pronunciation of consonants before vowels ends with a little quote from the famous. I examined a few. ‘I’ve been speaking prose for forty years and didn’t know it’ Molière. Or: ‘A knowledge of words is a knowledge of things’ Plato. The French do things with style, thinks Mrs Wright. Who wouldn’t like to do things with more style if there were more of them, and more time? She doesn’t want to order people what to say but to be able to give exhaustive reasons for any particular pronunciation she suggests. Her rooms are surrounded with reference books as well as files. The phone hardly stopped ringing with people wanting to know how to pronounce things.

  ‘Life would be very simple for us if we didn’t have news,’ she says. ‘You see we could get the correct pronunciation of any word correctly in a day or two, but somehow that isn’t the way a radio and television service works. It has to know at once or not at all.’

  Who Sent this Postcard?

  2 September 1974

  It arrived the other day. A nice postcard of Paris. On the back was this message: ‘Everything arranged this end. Have finished the book finally. Paris as lovely as it always was. Hope everything fine with you now. Love John.’

  This is the greatest mystery that has ever occurred in my life. What has he arranged at his end, for God’s sake? Is it a hotel room, a bank robbery, an interview with the President? Who is he? I checked the Johns I know. The ones in The Irish Times are still working away at their desks and are arranging nothing in Paris.

  I know a travel agent called John, who told me gloomily that he couldn’t afford to go to Paris to arrange anything. I rang a John who works in the hotel business and had a ridiculous shouted conversation with him about bed nights and tourist receipts, but he hasn’t been to Paris for five years and doesn’t think he’ll ever see it again. Then what could the book be, is it one he has written or just one he has read? I suppose I can watch the book lists for a year or two in case John Somebody published something, but suppose he was just wading through War and Peace? I’m delighted Paris is as lovely as it always was, but is there an implication that we once saw it together? I was never in that city with anyone called John, never. There were no moonlight walks by the Seine holding the hand of a John. He must mean that it was as lovely as he separately and I separately had always found it. Why shouldn’t everything be fine with me? Now or any other time. What wasn’t fine? It’s terrible to try and think of the things that haven’t been fine, you just become very neurotic. Could he be somebody I met when I fell down all those stairs and had to be taken breathing oxygen to a hospital? That was the last time that things weren’t fine. Or was he around when I lost my diary with every address, phone number and piece of information I will need for the rest of my life?

  Oh to hell with him; anyone who has the arrogance to sign himself John and expect to be recognised doesn’t deserve a moment’s thought. But why can’t I sleep worrying about what he has arranged at his end. And what damn book has he finished? And why did he spell my name right if I don’t know him, and why couldn’t he have sent a postcard to somebody else?

  Holiday Romance

  6 November 1974

  If you go to the Club Méditerranée on your own, you have to share a hut or a bungalow with someone else. One time, when I was in Turkey, I shared with a girl called Francine. She was very, very beautiful; she examined all my clothes with a lack of interest, went through the three pieces of make-up I had with disappointment, asked me rather humiliatingly did Irish women not care about being chic, and finally, deciding that I would be no threat to her, became my best friend for three weeks.

  Francine was an air hostess. She was recovering from a serious operation, the details of which I tried to shut out but it seemed to be bits of stomach being untied from where they were and tied to other bits. She was also recovering from a broken heart, had borrowed £200 from a friend for clothes and was going to have a marvellous time, and return to Paris looking magnificent and possibly with a new remedy for the broken heart in tow.

  We had an unspoken arrangement about not meeting during the day. Because Francine would spend the morning on the beach miles away from everyone, sunbathing nude. She would have three green figs for her lunch, which was insanity since the food was included in the price and was magnificent. She would spend the afternoon in the ‘Hammam’ or Turkish bath and emerge after about three hours looking lovely.
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  Dinner time was when she would cast around for men to hunt. For the first week there was little interesting to catch. She would discuss the conquests flatly when we went to bed. ‘No, the Italian lawyer was very boring. I wish I could have found him suitable, because he is from a very wealthy family, but no.’ And a most handsome lounge lizardish sort of person who paid her constant attention was dismissed petulantly. ‘You see, he is a great nuisance. Other men do not come and talk to me while he is there, and he is a very stupid and very vain little man.’

  I left her to go off and do a strenuous six-day excursion in the valley of Goreme. It meant crawling through rock-hewn churches, climbing what looked like the face of the Eiger. Filthy and out of breath, I would return to our central Turkish base each evening for a quick wash and a night of cheap wine, wondering vaguely how Francine was making out with the checklist of possibles she had drawn up. There seemed nobody likely for me to bring back to her on the outing. They were all filthy as I was, and seemed to have no interest in anything except rock-hewn churches, which I guessed might not be Francine’s secret passion.

  In fact, they were a pretty dull lot, the men on that trip, and the dullest of all was a surgeon with a pipe which made him totally inarticulate in any language. He had a difficult 18-year-old son behaving like a 12-year-old, full of sulks and shoulder shrugging and boredom which drove us all mad. The surgeon said to me once that he couldn’t continue talking with me unless I would learn to pronounce the French word ‘suspendu’ correctly, because it made his teeth water to hear the way I did say it. That kind of thing can either be a challenge or a pain in the face. It was a pain in the face. On our return to the main camp, Francine looked even more beautiful but a bit cheesed off on the quest for the grail. Men there had been in plenty presenting themselves, but they were all of inferior intelligence. Since Francine was not exactly Einstein, this seemed odd but interesting. I wondered hesitantly should she go out and look for friends during the day instead of waiting until dinner time. I had found some playmates of my own out in fishing boats and at barbecues. No, said Francine purposefully, that would not do at all. You would meet a rough sort of person that way. And how could you judge their manners and their style if you didn’t meet them at dinner?