‘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. Looking at an old appointments diary the other day I saw one snippet I did record, but at the end was an ‘etc’ and I cannot now remember the et cetera. It began with a woman on a bus, talking to her friend:
‘“And she’s been that ill she’s ’ad to go into ’ospital; and she’s ’ad all ’er livers out”, etc’. But the et cetera? That et cetera is the novel, the play, the monologue, the short story. That’s where Bennett begins, and where I fizzle out.
Last week, however, I did write something down: I took a full note. The woman whom this column began by quoting was on a flight from somewhere in Europe (let us be unspecific and change the names, just in case) to Doncaster. As we stood together in the check-in queue and her conversation with Janet caught my ear, I quietly pulled out my diary under the guise of writing down some appointments, and started to take notes.
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