Low life | 18 June 2011

After I’d migrated from Essex to Devon during the last recession but one to look for casual work, the first woman I ‘went out’ with in any formal sense was my boy’s mother. She lived at her mother and father’s tied cottage and for a while I more or less lived there as well.

Her father was a cowman, and the sweet, lovely smell of liquid cow manure permeated the house when he was there. The mother was, in her words, a ‘scrubber’ and she scrubbed for a Mrs P and a Mrs R to the point of total exhaustion. My boy’s mother was then still at school.

The family spoke with a rich south Devon accent laced with dialect words; words such as ‘crams’ (nonsense), ‘orts’ (leftovers), ‘smitch’ (smoke) and ‘evil’ (fork). A girl was always a ‘maid’ or a ‘party’. If she had large breasts, she was a ‘party with gurt lasers’.