‘I’ll tell you, Janet, if I was 23 an’ ’ad a nice, good-lookin’ young man, I’d not be here on ’oliday with you. Don’t get me wrong — it’s been a lovely holiday — but let’s be honest. If I was your age and ’ad the chance, I’d be walkin’ along the beach, alone with my young man.’
I often wish I were Alan Bennett — or at least that I had his talent for overhearing real English spoken by real people, then stitching together what he has remembered into sustained prose, with weight, shape and a story. George Eliot, too, whose verbatim English rural conversations in Silas Marner are small masterpieces suggesting a village culture little changed in a century and a half — she would have known how to paint these glimpses into a wider canvas.
But I only ever gather tiny fragments — unconnected, hanging in the air — and, smiling to myself and vowing to write them down later, forget.
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