My Voice

Another thing that drove me from my students was my voice—with rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—but this wasn’t the voice of my childhood. I picked it up at public school and then even more so at university, along with a penchant for cider! Perhaps this is just a bald case of social climbing—but at the time i thought this was the voice of the intellectual people and if i didn’t have the voice of the intellectual people i could never really be an intellectual. A braver soul would have stood firm, teaching his or her peers a lesson par exemple: not all intellectuals should be of the same class or speak identically. I went the other way, though. This was partly a reflection of my personality—an eagerness to please—and probably some cowardice too!