An Education
to check sound levels and gave Jane a letter to read, and me another letter. Then, after some muttered conferring, they gave me and Jane a pile of letters each and told us – as usual – to go into the green room and practise reading them. But what was this! My pile was still full of idiot scrawls from six-year-olds, whereas Jane was reading stuff from teenagers! How could this be? ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said to the producer, ‘I'm senior girl! I'm older than her!’ ‘Yes,’ she said sweetly, ‘but your voice sounds younger than Jane's’ ‘No!’ I cried. ‘It's not fair. I won't do it!’ I threw a full-blown tantrum, complete with tears and shouting. They calmed me down and somehow got me through the broadcast. But I was never asked to read letters on Children's Hour again.
    That was the end of my elocution career. But alas, I am left with this terrible legacy – my accent. It is the classic elocution accent, homeless and inauthentic, suggestive neither of grouse moor nor shop floor, an accent that screams ‘phoney!’ the moment it opens its mouth. It is by far the most repulsive thing about me, and I notice that people meeting me for the first time are often taken aback. I have no idea what my natural accent should be – my father still speaks broad Lancashire, my mother elocution. But perhaps it was because I so hated my voice that I chose to become a writer. By thirteen or fourteen, I was writing regular children's columns for the Richmond and Twickenham Times and being paid for them. And that was something I arranged entirely by myself, with no help from my mother. I felt, as Julie Burchill memorably remarked, that when I discovered writing it was as if I'd been speaking a second language up till then and had finally found my mother tongue.

An Education
    By the time I was sixteen, I had ‘filled out’ as my mother always promised I would, and, with my new curves and hair no longer in plaits, was beginning to become quite a looker. Also, I'd swept the board at O-level and was well on track to do English, French, Latin at A-level and go on to Oxford. The only fear was that my Latin would ‘let me down’ – in those days you had to have A-level Latin if you wanted to read English at Oxford – a fact that still makes me go white with fury. I could probably speak four languages now if I hadn't had to waste all those years learning Latin.
    Meanwhile, my mother had stopped giving elocution lessons and become a proper schoolteacher. It started when Twickenham County Girls' School over the road asked if she could give occasional elocution and drama classes, which she did, and then asked her to fill in for an absent English teacher. In no time at all she was a full-time English teacher and then head of English. I always found it shocking that she could be head of English while privately preferring Georgette Heyer to Jane Austen, and Walter de la Mare to Wordsworth, and occasionally thought of writing to the education authorities to denounce her. It was only because I didn't, I felt, that she was able to continue her remorseless rise up the educational hierarchy. But anyway she rose so successfully that she ended her career as deputy head of a sixth-form college.
    My father also kept getting promoted so we must have been quite well off, but we were never allowed to feel it because my father could never shake off his desperate childhood fear of poverty, and was eternally saving for ‘a rainy day’. (In the exceptionally wet winter of 2000, when their house was flooded to a depth of six inches, I cheerily remarked to my father, ‘Well it looks like your rainy day has finally come.’ Despite his being blind by this stage, in his mid-eighties, and handicapped by water lapping round his ankles, he still tried to wade across the room to hit me.) His great fear was ‘fecklessness’, which seemed to mean any form of fun. Thus – why did I want to have a Christmas tree? Terrible waste of time, money,
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