No. 13 - Minding My Language

When I read a book or watch a film set in the past, I want to be taken there. I want to live it - to feel the good and the bad of that time and place. I want it to be so authentic that it feels close to time travel. I try hard to do this in my own writing, although I will inevitably get things wrong.

Some tatty first editions - I buy them to read, so their condition is immaterial, which helps keep down the price.

One of the first things to consider for any age, is the language people used. To try and get that right in the three 1930's novels I've completed, I put a lot of effort into finding out how ordinary Londoners spoke. I found the following resources helpful, although none of them are perfect:

• Books from the period are the sources I trust most. Any author worthy of the title aims to make their characters sound authentic, and reading the work of those actually writing in the 1930's is a good start. There are caveats. Not many authors came from a working class background so you have to trust their ear for dialogue. My mother insisted that people did not used to swear in ‘her day’, but I reject that. In George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, the expletives have been deleted, but you can see that they were there. Maybe it didn’t happen in her family, but living in a South Wales mining community as she did, I think a short walk would have taken her within earshot of some colourful language.

• Old feature films offer a good idea of the vocabulary and terminology used by middle and upper class people, but the voice of the working class in most British films cannot be relied upon. They often feature very middle class actors giving “Cor lummee Guv, gorblimey, stone the crows” type performances, which suggest that those funny little working people are mostly there for light relief. All dialogue in British films had to pass the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), and that resulted in the very inaccurate impression that no-one ever swore much beyond 'blimey'.

• Old documentary films however innovative and well-intentioned, tended to feature a rather posh sounding man, relaying information with authority. If the GPO Film Unit or the BBC declared a factory ‘the biggest in the world’, people tended to accept it without giving it a second thought. Working class voices were heard on films such as Housing Problems (1935), but one had to bear in mind that they were trying to talk as properly as they were able, rather than using their everyday vernacular.

• My parents were old enough to be my grandparents and while they did not hail from London, they did come from a working class community - the Rhondda Valleys in South Wales. They both used dated phrases that may have been national rather than local. For example, Dad would often call me ‘a confounded nuisance’. Mum would occasionally threaten, ‘I’ll swing for you,’ - as I child, I imagined that she meant with her fist, rather than murdering me and hanging for it. I never heard either of them swear badly - my mother often used to say 'bugger' because she liked the word, but I'm certain she would have desisted had she known what it meant.

My mother and father sitting on the running board of my uncle's car in Southerndown, Glamorgan, August 1937

Flaws in the Illusion

Sources I don't use are modern period dramas, because in my opinion, they often make a pig’s ear of dialogue. They may have an interesting story and get the clothes, cars, music and settings just right, but so often the characters will use turns of phrase that are clearly from the Twenty-first Century. For example, in 1932 no-one would have described an obvious course of action as a ‘no-brainer’. In one drama set in 1940, several of the characters used the phrase ‘how did you think that was going to go?’ It is entirely possible that a single character might have used the phrase, because all the words within it existed - but its repeated use makes it sound like something they’ve picked up from a feedback session following a business seminar, and not one from 1940.

The use of the modern idiom may be a deliberate attempt to ‘connect’ with a contemporary audience, but I'm afraid it grates on me. Similarly, some films used 1930’s-style covers of modern songs, presumably for the same reason, but it doesn’t work for me - I abandoned the 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby because of it. These devices used in many dramas that are meant to be set in the 1920's and 1930's, detract from their authenticity and make them feel like themed fancy dress parties.  

London Noir Books and Films

Having completed three novels set in the early to mid 1930’s, before embarking on another book, set slightly later, I purchased a copy of Anna Cotterell’s London Writing of the 1930’s. Second-hand it was cheap, but I knew that it was likely to cost me a good deal more than that in the long-run, because I would almost certainly buy practically every book mentioned in it.

Thanks to bookfinder.com I was able to buy first editions of A London Story (1935) by George Buchanan, Common People (1938) by William Cameron, Time Gentleman! Time! (1930) by Norah Hoult, The Brimming Lake (1937) by Ashley Smith, and The Scapegoat Dances (1938) by Mark Benney, all of which had been serialised or reviewed in the Daily Herald.

I couldn't get an original copy of Jew Boy (1935) by Simon Blumenfeld, but I discovered that it had been reprinted by London Books.' It is part of an attractively packaged series of classics by authors who have perhaps been unjustly overlooked, such as James Curtis, Gerald Kersh and Arthur La Bern.

Many of these novels were adapted into British ‘noir’ films, even though the more risqué aspects had to be removed to get them past the BBFC. In There Ain’t No Justice (1939) Jimmy Hanley plays a young boxer (look out for the nicest smile in film history), but the BBFC wouldn't have accepted wholesome young Jimmy hopping into bed with a prostitute, as his character in the book does.

In It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), housewife Googie Withers’ past catches up with her in the form of an old flame, who's a fugitive from the law. There's also Night and the City (1950) starring American Richard Widmark as a Soho wannabe gangster, and They Drive By Night (1938) featuring Welsh actor Emlyn Williams fleeing a murder he didn't commit.

London Books Classic collection. These are dangerously attractive to a habitual collector like me. I suspect I may have to buy them all rather than stopping at these six.

My own novels were written before I read James Curtis’s The Gilt Kid (1936), There Ain’t No Justice (1937), and They Drive By Night (1938), and that is probably a good thing, because I may have been influenced to the point of plagiarism. I found it gratifying that Curtis’s books, which are very dialogue centred, suggest that I got the language right. For instance, I had worried that my use of the word 'proper', as in 'that's proper nice, that is', had more to do with my fondness for the word than with period detail - but there it is in Curtis's work, used in the same way.

I also find it very encouraging that Curtis's novels resemble mine in other respects. I don't claim to be as good, but we are recognisably describing the same world and the people in it. I would consider it a triumph were someone to read one of my books and believe that it might actually have been written in the thirties, remaining unpublished because of the taboo and explicit subject matter.