Читать книгу By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English - David Crystal, David Crystal - Страница 13

WELSHPOOL

The A487 away from Portmeirion runs alongside the Ffestiniog steam railway for a while, then winds its way through the edges of Snowdonia National Park. It was a clear day, and every now and then I could see the dramatic peaks of the Snowdon range. All highly photogenic, as film companies have repeatedly seen.

Take a left at Penrhyndeudraeth and you soon pass through Carreg Llanfrothen. There you will find Plas Brondanw, the family home of Clough Williams-Ellis. The ‘Dr Who’ series The Five Doctors was shot at the Folly Castle in the grounds. So was some of Brideshead Revisited. And, if you could time-travel back to 1958, you would encounter hundreds of Liverpudlian Chinese children marching with Ingrid Bergman across stand-in Chinese mountains for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

The roads through Snowdonia resound with the echoes of famous films. Carry On Up the Khyber was shot along the Watkin Path, one of the routes up Snowdon. Tomb Raider 2 used the environs of Llyn Gwynant. James Bond was in the area (for From Russia with Love), as were Robin Hood and Merlin.

That’s North Wales for you. One enormous film set. You can measure out any journey in film locations.

Robin Hood is a bit of a surprise, but you would expect Merlin to be here, in view of his home-grown origins – Merlin is an adaptation of Myrddin, according to the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kingdom of Britain’). Myrddin in turn comes from Caerfyrddin, the Welsh name of the county of Carmarthen, where he is supposed to have been born. Where exactly is a conundrum. I have lost track of the number of places in Wales – let alone elsewhere – which claim his presence, in birth, life, or death. There are several caves and mounds associated with him or his battles. I would pass at least three on the way to Hay.

In the meantime I followed the A470 winding south towards mid- Wales. I soon reached Lake Trawsfynydd, and in the distance, on the lakeside edge, I could see the solid mass of the old power station. It started service in the 1960s, but was decommissioned in 1991. What do you do with a retired power station? Turn it into a film set, of course. It was the location of Camelot in First Knight. They built the town on the shore of the lake and transformed the front of the power station into a castle.

Shame they had to build a mock castle, seeing as real castles abound in the region. I had passed four already on my journey from Gaerwen – Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Criccieth, and Harlech.

Every time I see the turning to Harlech, ‘Men of Harlech’ comes into my head. The song commemorates the men who defended the castle during a long siege in the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. It is one of the few Welsh songs that has crossed the border into England. It achieved worldwide – or at least, Hollywood – fame when it was sung in the film Zulu by the men of the Welsh regiment fighting in the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.

Did they sing it, really, in 1879? The song was first published in 1860, and the regiment didn’t officially adopt it until 1881. It seems unlikely. But it was a great film moment, nonetheless.

I had to make a decision after Trawsfynydd. Should I turn east and cut across through Bala towards Welshpool? Or should I keep going on the A470 south through Dolgellau and on towards Builth Wells? Linguistically, there was no contest. Welshpool is in marcher country. England is just a mile or so away. And marcher country is an excellent breeding ground for interesting accents. But time wasn’t on my side. I had to go ‘straight down the middle’, as they say in Wales.

Marcher has nothing to do with marching. It comes from Old English mearc, which meant ‘boundary’. That’s why people talk about ‘the Marches’, referring to the land on either side of the Welsh–English border. The modern word mark is related. Offa’s Dyke closely follows the modern border, going back and forth across it several times.

Offa was the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia between 757 and 796. He built the dyke to protect his kingdom from invasion by Welsh barbarians. It reaches twenty feet in height in some places along its eighty-mile length. One end is at Prestatyn in the north; as you travel south it passes Llangollen, Chirk, Knighton, Hay, and Monmouth; the other end is at Chepstow. It isn’t continuous. Offa may never have finished it; or maybe he decided to save unnecessary labour and let other natural obstacles fill the gaps.

The earthworks are especially prominent at Knighton. Indeed, the town’s entrance sign now has the caption: ‘The Town on the Dyke’. It boasts an excellent information centre.

Beware. If you look up Offa’s Dyke on an Internet search engine, you may need to do two searches. They spell dyke with an i in American English.

The name Welshpool means exactly what it says: ‘Welsh’ + ‘pool’. But the pool in question is not just an area of water. The original thirteenth-century borough was called Pola, and this developed into Pool. The region was known for its marshy land – the flood-prone River Severn is not far away – and in Welsh the local name is Y Trallwng, meaning ‘the sinking land’. But when the railways developed in the nineteenth century, the railway companies felt that travellers would get confused with the other Poole, in Dorset – so they changed the name to Welshpool, and it stayed.

I had already visited Welshpool a few weeks earlier, as it happened, as part of the same BBC project which had brought me to the sheep market in Gaerwen. On that visit I ended up in a different kind of market (fruit and veg), in the town centre, talking to one of the stallholders. What I was hoping to record was evidence of a mixed accent – one displaying features of both Welsh and English.

And that’s what I found. Here was a man who had lived all his life in Welshpool, but if you didn’t know that you might have placed him further south over the border in Herefordshire, or maybe even Gloucestershire. It was the phonetic quality of the r sound after the vowels in such words as car and heart that did it. He didn’t make it as a trilled sound, which is what you would expect to hear further into Wales. Rather, he curled the tip of his tongue back, producing a darker sound, more like a West Country or American r than anything else.

But it definitely wasn’t a West Country accent. Several of his vowel sounds were Welsh, as was the general lilt of his voice. And when I asked him if people recognized where he came from when he went on holiday, he was quite clear about it. ‘They always know I’m from Wales,’ he said. ‘But they think it’s Cardiff.’

Did everyone in the town have this ‘English r’, I wondered. And almost as soon as I had formulated the question, I had it answered. A customer arrived, a schoolfriend of the market-man. He too had lived in Welshpool all his life. They were the same age. They seemed to have similar farming backgrounds. And yet he had no trace of an r after vowels in his speech.

That’s one of the fascinating things about the way people speak along country borders. Because they are exposed to two ways of speaking, they make all kinds of different choices from the array of sounds that surround them. Even quite short distances can produce a noticeably different accent. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the two friends lived on opposite sides of the town.

I asked them whether they could tell the difference in the speech of someone from Welshpool itself and someone from nearby. ‘Of course,’ they said. ‘Someone from Llanfair Careinion sounds much more Welsh than we do,’ the market-man added. ‘I sometimes have difficulty understanding what they’re saying, when they come into the market.’ That village was just five miles to the west. ‘And if you go that way across the border,’ said his friend – gesturing vaguely towards England – ‘they’re even more different.’ That was only three miles away.

Professor Henry Higgins came to mind, from Shaw’s Pygmalion. He announces himself as a practitioner of phonetics: ‘The science of speech. That’s my profession, also my hobby. Anyone can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue, but I can place a man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.’ And presumably in Welshpool, also.

Two streets? In parts of Victorian London, this might not have been too far from the truth. Accents identify communities, and there would have been areas abutting each other which displayed major social differences, and thus different accents. Then as now, Mayfair and the East End are two hugely contrasting linguistic worlds.

Higgins would have had an even more enjoyable time today. There are over 350 language communities in present-day London, and when people from these ethnic backgrounds speak English their accents inevitably reflect features of their mother-tongues. Nor is it just their accents. Words and features of grammar from their mother-tongue enter their English as well, producing new hybrid dialects – Bengali English, Hindi English, Chinese English… It’s all a natural process. Increased language variation is an inevitable consequence of an ethnically diverse society.

Phoneticians are having a great time trying to disentangle the multiple influences which operate on modern English accents, but it isn’t easy. The situation has changed dramatically in the past century. Until relatively recently, most people lived their whole lives in one place, and rarely travelled. They would encounter only the occasional visitor with a different regional accent. As a consequence, their local speech would change little during their lifetimes.

Today, people are always on the move. Commuting over long distances is normal. And even if you don’t commute, innumerable accents and dialects enter your home every day through radio and television, the telephone, and, these days, Internet telephony. People move house more than ever before. Formerly isolated villages now have their eye on attracting tourists. Second homes are everywhere. It is unusual to find a village which does not have some incomers. And incomers do not usually adopt the accent of their new hosts wholesale, as my Gaerwen shepherd illustrated.

But if incomers find themselves integrating well into their new community, they will inevitably pick up a few features of the local speech – new words, sentence patterns, sounds, tones of voice. They will still sound ‘foreign’ to the locals, and they may not notice that their speech has changed. But if after a while they pay a visit to where they lived before, it’s a typical experience to hear their old friends say they sound different.

My wife comes from Hertfordshire, and people in Holyhead, where we now live, readily notice the southern accent in her voice. When she goes back to Hertfordshire, they say she sounds Welsh.

Mixed accents are the norm these days. My own accent is a mix of the places I have lived in – Wales, Liverpool, London, Berkshire. That means it isn’t an entirely consistent accent. Sometimes I say example, with a short a, sometimes exahmple. I never know which it is going to be. It depends a lot on who I’m talking to.

Generational differences are an influence. My children all say schedule beginning with sk–, as Americans do. When I was their age, I always said shedule. Today, I say both. If I’m talking to them, I join their skedule community. Otherwise I say shedule. They swap about a bit too, depending on who they’re talking to.

Mixed accents mean that it isn’t so easy to identify where people come from any more, just by listening to their voices. Quite often, when I meet someone for the first time, and they learn I am a linguist and discover what linguists do, they say smugly: ‘I bet you can’t tell where I’m from.’ I never take the bet.

Radio programmes sometimes include quizzes or games with such names as ‘Where Are You From?’. A team listens to guests and tries to work out which part of the country they come from. It wasn’t too difficult to get the right answer a few decades ago. It’s much harder now. Impossible, with many speakers.

I left the fruit and veg market and drove to the edge of Welshpool, where I had an appointment with another accent. I was keen to explore the identity question again. Here were people who had no Welsh language ability and whose accent lacked some of the most distinctive features of the English accents people associate with Wales. Would they feel as Welsh as their compatriots from the Snowdon hillsides or the Rhondda valleys?

Indeed they would, and the lady I had come to see proved it in a most unorthodox style. Halfway through the interview she began to take her clothes off – Huw the cameraman couldn’t believe his lens – and displayed a Welsh dragon tattooed below her shoulder. She waxed lyrical about Wales. She was pregnant, and was determined that her baby would be born in Wrexham hospital and not in Shrewsbury, even though Wrexham was twice the distance away. Her speech had the English r in it again. To my ears, she hardly sounded Welsh at all. Evidently there isn’t always a correlation between the national recognizability of a person’s accent and the strength of the speaker’s feeling about national identity.

Henry Higgins would have loved all this. Or rather, Henry Sweet would. Or rather, Daniel Jones would. Was there a real-life model for Henry Higgins?

Henry Sweet was the leading English philologist and phonetician at Oxford in the late nineteenth century. Daniel Jones was Professor of Phonetics at University College London a generation later. Phonetics, as Higgins, said, is the science of speech – or, slightly more precisely, of human soundmaking. Phoneticians spend all their time happily analysing how people speak, how speech sounds are carried through the air, and what happens when people listen to them.

What phoneticians don’t do is work with people like Eliza Doolittle in the way that Higgins did. No phonetician these days would dream of trying to change someone’s natural pronunciation so that it sounds more like the upper-class accent of a country. Traditionally, the people who would do that sort of thing are called elocutionists. And even they value regional accents more these days than they used to. Audibility and clarity of speech are still important goals, but they can be achieved in any accent.

Shaw had had a great deal of correspondence with Sweet over the years, but he says quite plainly in the Preface to Pygmalion that ‘Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.’ Yet he adds: ‘still… there are touches of Sweet in the play’. Shaw was puzzled that Sweet had not achieved greater public recognition, given his scholarly achievements. ‘With Higgins’s physique and temperament,’ he says, ‘Sweet might have set the Thames on fire.’ Shaw felt the reason was the way phonetics as a subject was being seriously underrated at Oxford, and he concludes: ‘if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn’.

Phoneticians among the most important people in England? Could there be any doubt? But when non-phoneticians say so, it makes you think, well, maybe they are. And Shaw is not alone in his opinion. The novelist Anthony Burgess states just as firmly, in the epilogue to his language memoir A Mouthful of Air: ‘Phonetics, phonetics, and again phonetics. There cannot be too much phonetics.’

It was probably Shaw’s correspondence with Sweet, along with supposed similarities between the characters of Higgins and Sweet, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, that led people to assume that the one was based on the other. In fact, if Shaw is making a bow in the direction of a real phonetician at all, it has to be Daniel Jones, who in his youth had worked with Sweet.

Jones helped Shaw in several ways. He gave him advice on phonetic detail, corresponded with him several times, and invited him to see his department at University College London. The technology used in Higgins’ laboratory in the play is close to what would have been in a phonetics department of the day. After Pygmalion was completed, Shaw offered Jones an unlimited supply of complimentary tickets to see it.

Where did the name of Higgins come from? By all accounts, it was borrowed from a London shop sign. By whose accounts? Jones himself, via one of his students. It seems that Shaw was riding on the deck of a bus through South London, wondering what name he should give his character, and saw the shop name ‘Jones and Higgins’. The student recalled Jones saying: ‘he could not call me Jones, so he called me Higgins’.

If Shaw’s bus route was through Peckham, he couldn’t have missed the shop. Jones and Higgins was the largest and most prestigious department store in the area, in Rye Lane. It closed down in 1980, but the distinctive building is still there.

Why couldn’t Shaw call his character Jones? It would have been very risky to portray a living character as a fictional one. Flattering as the idea might seem at first, we can immediately imagine the real-life source being unflattered by aspects of Higgins’ character. The plot contained taboo language. Higgins, moreover – to put it in modern terms – has an affair with one of his students. Not the best set of associations for a career academic.

Furthermore, the play wasn’t doing phonetics many favours. True, it brought the word phonetics to the attention of millions who might not otherwise have heard of it, but – as Jones himself remarked – ‘In Pygmalion phonetics is represented as providing a key to social advancement,’ and he adds, drily, ‘a function which it may be hoped it will not be called upon to perform indefinitely.’ His dryness, it seems, was replaced by fury when he saw the play on the first night. This was not how he wanted phonetics to be seen.

In The Real Professor Higgins, Jones’s biographers conclude that he wanted to distance himself from the character and the play, and that Shaw agreed. Shaw then went further, writing a preface which made no reference to Jones but hinted at a portrayal of the now-deceased Sweet. The ruse was successful. Nobody publicly associated Jones with Higgins, and Sweet remained the link in the public mind.

And in mine. For many years I thought it was Sweet, and I say so in a book or two. I recant.

There is a lot of recanting to be done. Type ‘Henry Sweet and Henry Higgins’ into Google and you will get over 800,000 hits. Start scrolling down and you will see the Sweet claim asserted over and over.

Another of Jones’s students was David Abercrombie, who later became Professor of Phonetics at Edinburgh. He passed his recollections of Jones on to one of his students, Peter Ladefoged. And this brings the story up to date. Because it was Ladefoged who acted as the phonetics consultant for My Fair Lady, the screen adaptation of Pygmalion, designing Higgins’ laboratory and sounding out the vowels that Eliza hears there on her first visit.

At the very beginning of the film, Higgins shows Eliza his notebook, in which he has been transcribing her speech in Sweet’s Revised Romic phonetic script, and the camera shows us what he has written. In the upper paragraph of the right-hand page, there is a transcription of her utterance ‘I say, captain…’. It is the lower paragraph that is interesting, for it is nothing to do with the film at all. It is a greeting to David Abercrombie from Ladefoged. I wonder if director George Cukor knew?

If you have a DVD of the film, pause it at that point and look at the third line up from the bottom. It says:

Peter Ladefoged died in London in January 2006, on his way back from a field trip working on the Toda language in India, just as I began writing this book. It was a tremendous loss to the world of phonetics.

One of his many interests was a concern to establish just how many vowels and consonants the human vocal tract is capable of producing in the languages of the world. The answer is more than people think. He estimated that there were over eight hundred different consonants and some two hundred different vowels.

First impressions count, so I have good cause to remember David Abercrombie. I first met him when I was an external examiner for his department in Edinburgh, back in the 1970s. Or rather, I met an aspect of his character before I actually met him. I had arrived a little early at the university, so I made my way to his office, where, the departmental secretary had told me, there were some examination scripts waiting for me to read.

I knocked at the door. No reply, but it was unlocked so I went in. There in the middle of the room was a fridge, and on top of the fridge a piece of cardboard with a large green arrow on it, pointing towards the door of the fridge. I opened the door. Inside were the examination scripts. And on top of the scripts were a bottle of French wine, a glass, and a corkscrew. No examiner ever had such a pleasant introduction to the dull routine of marking.

We had dinner at the Old Howgate Inn in Penicuik, just south of Edinburgh, where I learned that David had a house in France and was one of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the elite wine-tasting society in Burgundy. The restaurant-owner knew him well, and when it came to choosing a wine, there was nothing as mundane as a wine list to read. Instead, we were ushered down into the wine cellar, and the bottle was chosen straight from the racks. I learned more about wine from that one meal than I have ever done since. I just wish I could remember half of it.

Henry Higgins wasn’t the first fictional language expert. Four hundred years earlier, Shakespeare had given us the caricature of the pedantic schoolteacher Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Holofernes is very much concerned with correct Latin and with English spelling. He insists on having words pronounced as they are spelled. People (he is thinking of Don Armado in particular) should pronounce the b in doubt and debt, he says, and the l in calf and half. And as for leaving out the h in abhominable… Those who do so are ‘rackers of orthography’, he says – torturers of spelling – and they ‘insinuateth me of insanie’. They drive him mad!

There were several linguistic pedants around in Shakespeare’s day, most of them interested in ways of reforming English spelling. Any of them might have been the model for Holofernes. One of them was Richard Mulcaster, the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in North London, and the teacher of Edmund Spenser, who would become the leading Elizabethan poet. Another was the humanist scholar Roger Ascham, the young Princess Elizabeth’s Greek and Latin tutor, famous for his 1570 treatise on the best way of teaching Latin, The Scholemaster.

Shakespeare would certainly have been aware of Mulcaster, as the boy actors of Merchant Taylors’ were a well-known theatre company. They may even have been the ones chiefly in mind when Hamlet and Rosencrantz pour scorn on the ‘eyrie of children’ who were so fashionable that they were putting real actors out of work.

Or, of course, they may not. Neither Mulcaster nor Ascham, nor anyone else, may have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing his play. Still, it’s a tempting thought. Mulcaster didn’t die until 1611. Love’s Labour’s Lost was written in the mid-1590s. Both Mulcaster and Shakespeare had their companies play at Hampton Court. Depending on which biographical temperament you choose, they possibly, probably, definitely met.

Searching for sources of characters is always a dangerous occupation, unless you have the author there to ask. And even then, when you do meet the author, you don’t always get a clear answer. Or, sometimes, any answer at all.

At an event in Paris, back in the 1980s, I met William Golding. We had both been at the Paris Salon du Livre – the annual book fair. He was signing his books and I was signing mine. My queue was a few yards long. His stretched outside the building.

Golding arrived late from the hospitality room, expressed surprise at the length of the queue, and reluctantly sat down at his table. He signed half a dozen books, then decided he’d had enough. He got up abruptly and walked off the stand, heading back for the hospitality room. I saw raised eyebrows, shoulders and rounded vowels throughout the queue, in that unmistakeably French body language which simultaneously expresses puzzlement, disgust, and amusement. The queue disintegrated, with people talking animatedly. They did not seem especially surprised. Evidently this is what famous literary authors were permitted to do, at least in France. Expected behaviour, almost.

I did invite people to join my queue instead. Nobody took up the offer.

I don’t know whether Golding came back to the signing area. He hadn’t by the time I left.

As I walked away from the Salon I passed hundreds of visitors arriving for a day out. Several were whole families. I saw a man (carrying a picnic basket), his wife, and their three children, aged between about five and twelve. They were chattering excitedly about where they would go first. A day out. A picnic. At a book fair. It seemed so typically French. And so typically not English.

Try the following dialogue out in virtually any English accent, and it doesn’t really convince. ‘’Ave a good weekend, Arthur?’ ‘Yeah, lovely, thanks.’ Ad a nice day out on Sunday. Took the kids to the Book Fair.’

It works perfectly in a French accent.

That was in the 1980s, mind. Today, you will see such sights regularly at the Hay Literary Festival. Times have changed.

Later that day my wife and I went to a soirée at the British Embassy, and after a while we met Golding and his wife. He was taciturn, so I searched for a conversational topic. What do you say to a Nobel Prize-winner?

Coincidentally, the week before I had given an evening of readings back home in support of a local parish community trying to raise money to renovate its church spire. One of the readings was, I thought, particularly appropriate: the climactic scene from Golding’s The Spire, where the masterbuilder, Roger Mason, realizes that the weight of the new spire being added to the cathedral is causing the building to be in danger of collapse. I had no idea then that I would be meeting the author a week later.

So that was my conversation opener.

‘This is a nice coincidence,’ I said. ‘Just last week I was doing a reading from one of your books.’

He showed a spark of interest: ‘Oh, which one?’

‘The Spire,’ I said, and I explained the reason.

‘Which bit did you read?’ he asked.

‘The bit where everyone looks down into the pit and they see the ground moving.’

There was a silence.

“‘The earth’s creeping!”’ I quoted, lamely.

His eyes seemed to glaze over. There was a pause.

‘Idon’t recollect that,’ he said. He turned to his wife. ‘Did I write that?’

‘Yes, William,’ said his wife, ‘You remember…’

She went on to provide a bit more context. He still seemed uncertain.

It was a pretty important moment in the novel, so I was a bit taken aback. But then, I reflected afterwards, why should he be able to bring it to mind, years later, just because someone randomly presents him with a moment from what is, after all, a pretty extensive oeuvre? Readers tend to think that authors know their books better than they do. That doesn’t follow at all.

One forgets. I remember once someone asking me whether I had read a certain book. I said I hadn’t. Later, I came across a reference in my files. Not only had I read it; I had reviewed it.

Authors are human. They forget, like everyone else.

‘So, Mr Shakespeare, I loved that bit in Hamlet where the prince meets Ophelia and he tells her about going to a nunnery.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Hamlet, you know, where…’

‘Oh, yes, Hamlet, Hamlet…’

‘Going to a nunnery?’

‘Did I write that?’

‘Yes, William, don’t you remember…’

Well, why not?

Authors sometimes turn up quite unexpectedly. A few years ago I was giving a talk at the Hay Festival about English accents, and describing the mixed London accent often called ‘estuary English’, which was receiving some media publicity at the time. To fix it in the minds of my audience, I thought I would refer to some well-known personalities who spoke with it, and mentioned Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson, the two actresses in the television sitcom Birds of a Feather.

After the talk there was time for questions. A man in a middle row put his hand up. He was delighted to hear me talk about Birds of a Feather, he said, and he went on to say how the actresses had needed to modify their originally broader London accents to ensure that they would be readily understood on national television. I didn’t know any of that, but I was glad to hear it, because it was an excellent example of the kind of social factor that fosters the spread of new accents.

‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ I said.

‘I ought to,’ he replied. ‘I wrote it.’

It was Laurence Marks, half of the writing partnership of Marks and (Maurice) Gran. They were the ones who also created the acclaimed The New Statesman, with the larger-than-life politician Alan B’stard, played by Rik Mayall.

That’s the kind of thing that happens at the Hay Festival. You never know who’s going to be there. And you’d better not make careless literary allusions to modern writers, as it would be just your bad luck to find one of them sitting in your audience.

It turned out that Laurence was staying at the same hotel as I was, The Swan at Hay, so we had other chances to talk. A year later we were both at The Swan again, and so it has been most years ever since. From time to time I would give him one of my linguistics books, and he would give me one of his scripts. We talked a lot about the overlap between our two professions. We were both fascinated by English usage, but had come at it from totally different directions.

I would get emails from him with questions about slang, related to the latest characters Marks and Gran were creating. Where does by hook or by crook come from? Why do people say on the wagon? (Or earlier British waggon?) Not all of them had answers.

In fact, the American spelling is the appropriate one, for earlier versions of the phrase can be traced back to the early 1900s in the USA. There we find ‘on the water cart’, and later, ‘on the water wagon’.

Horse-drawn water carts were used in late-nineteenth-century America to damp down dusty roads in summertime, and they seem to have provided an appropriate metaphor for the temperance movements of the time. You would hear men who had pledged to stop drinking say that they would rather drink the water from a water-cart than break their promise.

The earliest reference found so far is in Chapter 9 of Alice Caldwell Rice’s social novelette Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, published in 1901. She comments on poor consumptive Mr Dick that ‘he had a orful spell while I was there. I wanted to git him some whisky, but he shuck his head, “I’m on the water-cart,” sez he.’

Going on the wagon came along soon after, and was quickly supplemented – to the gloom of the temperance supporters – by falling off the wagon. Both idioms stayed virtually unchanged throughout most of the century. And then, surprisingly, people started extending the phrase to other areas than drink.

Abstaining from virtually any vice can be seen as being on a ‘wagon’, these days. I’ve heard someone say that she was ‘on the wagon’, when all she meant was that she had started a diet. I’ve also heard someone referring to coming ‘off the wagon’, meaning she had stopped her aerobics course. And one of the slang historians reports that it was used in a US newspaper in 2000 to refer to the times in which a serial killer failed to murder anyone. ‘He didn’t murder at all for two long periods… before falling off the wagon each time.’

In 2002, Marks and Gran went on the wagon again, and wrote Believe Nothing, a futuristic satirical comedy introducing an eccentric academic, Adonis Cnut, played by Rik Mayall. This is not a Caernarfon malapropism: it was pronounced ‘Canute’.

Cnut is known to be the cleverest man in the world, a quadruple professor at Queen Edward College, Oxford, and a Nobel Prizewinner. But he is bored by his own brilliance, and is looking for fresh challenges. He therefore accepts an invitation to join the Council for International Progress, a secret underground organization which controls all the governments and corporations in the world. The series presented Cnut with challenges to be solved, such as getting the whole world to use genetically modified food. He usually succeeds, aided by his faithful manservant Albumen, played by Michael Maloney. However, he fails to make much headway with the beautiful (and palindromic) Dr Awkward, first name Hannah, the college’s Professor of Pedantics.

Laurence invited me to the recording of one of the episodes, at Teddington Studios on the River Thames. I was introduced to the cast as ‘the real professor of semantics’. I sometimes wonder which bit of me had lodged in Marks and Gran’s subconscious, and transmuted into the characters. I’d like to think it was an aspect of Adonis Cnut. More likely it was Albumen.

Believe Nothing had one of the best pieces of word-play ever. In one episode, Albumen is under the weather and looks awful. Cnut asks Hannah to check up on him, then asks her: ‘How green is my valet?’

Of course, if you had never come across the 1939 novel about South Wales by Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley, you wouldn’t get it. But judging by the audience reaction, most people did. The novel won a National Book Award, and it was made into a very successful film, winning an Oscar for John Ford as best director in 1941. It also became a televised mini-series in the 1970s. The name is almost a catch-phrase.

Audience laughter is a curious linguistic phenomenon, though, as I learned at the recording in Teddington. There were about a hundred people watching the show, seated in tiered rows facing the studio set. It’s a bit like watching a play on stage, but there are some crucial differences.