This article is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.
Double-Think
Someone came to look after us. How slowly I printed out the letters. S… for Some..one. S… for stranger. And how strange I had become to myself that day. The capital letter, I remember, had to rise to the ceiling of the first line, yes, and be perfect. It was the first letter at the top of the panel of six ruled lines directly underneath the part left blank for where I was to make a drawing afterwards. And that S? It was for a Someone I couldn’t yet name, a word of such uncertainty and doubt it felt as though it was barely a word at all. The middle part of the S had to curve in the centre of itself and curl back again to sit neatly on the base of the line. ‘A perfect little snake’ is what our teacher called it – and she might as well have been talking about me. For at the moment of forming the first letter of the sentence I would write, I was in the act of becoming one myself. Sssssss… I could hear it. Snake in the grass. Sssssss… For secrets. Sssssss… For lies. For thinking one thing, and writing another. For Someone came to look after us. I finished the sentence. It was done. I was five years old and I had committed my first infidelity to language.
This is the earliest instance I can recall of being formally aware of there being, within one vocabulary, two registers of speech. That there existed in my writing and reading world two very different ways of reflecting experience: a this and a that, a right and a wrong. The teacher had asked us, as she did every Monday morning, to write a story about what we’d done in the weekend. This was a composition as well as a handwriting class – and, yes, that snaky S had to be neat and tidy but the real effort of the exercise came from the work I had to put into masking the betrayal I was committing to one kind of language by choosing another. For that ‘Someone’, my mother’s mother, was a word that hid behind it the tumble and confusion of the sort of sentences and phrases, pronunciations and rhythms and syntax that abounded on that New Zealand side of my family, and could not, must not, be released within the stapled papers of my composition book. All those rural elisions and softened consonants, the casual arrangement of nouns and adjectives that should have been adverbs or carried verbs, or the sentences missing verbs altogether: ‘You good, honey?’ ‘You fresh with that bath?’ Along with rounds of expletives: ‘Jesus Wept!’ and ‘Take your damn own time’, and the unmanageably intimate, gentle affections, the ‘honey’s and the ‘darlin’s we never heard at home… I had silenced the lot by sending a ‘someone’ onto my page instead who would never speak that way. Who was only a someone else instead. It was as though, in one morning’s lesson of primary two, I had come to own the complexity of my Scottish and New Zealand inheritance of language and the way the former dominated the latter to such an extent that I could only recognise it – now that I was actually confronting it through piece of writing I myself was making – as a form of speech that had to be corrected.
For: Good English. Clarity of intention. Grammatical sense. How these concepts dominated my education and understanding of one’s means of expression and thought. And yet, how the flip version of all that propriety popped up like a-jack-in-the-box – the many phrases and words that the ‘someone’ contained and that were so different from the way our family spoke – in the musically, forcefully forthcoming speech and manner of my maternal grandmother. Who wasn’t even a grandmother, was she? Not a ‘Granny’ as my Scottish grandmother was? Nor a Grandma or Grandmother as all the other children had? No, she was ‘Nanna’ – and with the word (the country cousins called her, even more complicatedly, ‘Nan’) came all the power and surge of thinking about and being a different kind of person altogether. One who existed not only in another part of the country but in an equally distant grammar, with a set of linguistic priorities that were at far, far remove from the only other ‘Nanna’ I knew of who was in ‘Peter Pan’ – and she was a dog. And how could I get all that down? All that questioning, doubting, uncertainty, in a composition class on a rainy Monday morning in winter in Wellington, in New Zealand, in the mid-sixties? I couldn’t. The ‘Someone’ was all I could manage.
They lived in the rural centre of the North Island, the family on our mother’s ‘side’ (a word our father repeated as though to remind us all through our upbringing of what side we children were really on – i.e. the Scottish side, the proper side, the authentic and grown-up and responsible and cultured and intelligent side – all inferred by comparison to my mother’s wild and volatile relations made up of rural, farming stock with their calling voices and maddeningly intimately informal syntax. Theirs was a way of life and interpretation of the world come straight out of a place of wide skies and big sheep stations, of small towns with ‘Milk Bars’ and ‘Main Streets’ and shops known by the Christian name of the proprietor. So: ‘Go up Nelly’s for six fruit buns…’, ‘My magazine from Jim…’, and ‘N-half doz’n’ – (it sounded like that, prepositions and connectives and vowels missing on all fronts) ‘apples from Chan’s’... All contributing, these kinds of instructions and sets of words – none of which would be spoken, and spoken in that kind of way, in the house where I grew up – to a form of language fitted, as much as the land and its people and grasses and waters, to the orders and rhythms of the seasons of the southern hemisphere and its vast Pacific light.1
The house where I grew up was a house of clipped sentence endings, using the right words, forming proper phrases, clear vowels and syntax and no swearing except by my father when he was in one his tempers. We had Scottish words for all the New Zealand things so they weren’t New Zealand things at all: ‘burn’ for creek, ‘coast’ for beach, ‘dinner’ for tea – and so it went on. We didn’t know a single Māori person nor knew the proper Māori words for the trees and flowers that grew there. Yes, we saw tuis, but we drew robins, or put them in our stories – though my mother’s mother’s best friend was a Māori woman and Nanna spoke often of the plants in her garden with those other names and used words like ‘pa’ and ‘tangi’ and ‘kai’, along with the word ‘eh’ that softened sentences and seemed to make of life a casual and relaxed affair. Her sentences, and those of her friends, sounded adrift in time and open to New Zealand experience in a way the writing and speaking at school or at home couldn’t seem to allow, and which I forgot about until I came to read the wondrously hand-made prose – for that is how it seemed! A kind of writing made up to suit its purposes exactly, not forced for one second from any Western literary tradition or canon – of the Māori fiction writer Patricia Grace, as well as the work of the poet James K. Baxter, with his Autumn Testament, and then more. That distinctive New Zealand kind of English language – Grace’s discrete shortened sentences and fragmentary dialogue, the Māori inflections and rhythms and words, blended into one, malleable whole – the syntax of a country open to its own temperatures and emotions, its languors and possibilities, of sitting in the kitchen for endless-seeming mornings drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, ‘having a yarn’… It was a world away from ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘Excuse me’ and ‘Can you please tell me that again?’
I’d never had a moment’s hesitation in composition class before. I loved it. Loved writing the neat and tidy little story of what I’d been doing on the weekend, making the sentences lead towards the ending, choosing the words. I loved forming the letters as neatly as I could – using for guidance the three pale blue lines that kept the small letters below the middle line and allowed the capital to rise up to the top. I loved every second of the whole process, the thinking and the writing and then making the drawing to illustrate the story afterwards.
But that morning: I sat for long minutes, powerless and silent, before I could pick up my pencil. My mind couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t write ‘My grandmother came to look after me’ because that was not who Nanna was and the words for such a grandmother wouldn’t fit nor describe the experience of the weekend at all. Yet neither could a ‘Nanna’ be made to live within the ruled grid of the exercise book. A ‘Nanna’, that word, and everything it stood for… It would have to be freighted into another story I hadn’t been brought up or schooled in to imagine or represent or think about or understand.
So I wrote, so I spoke – for I had to read the story aloud to the class after writing, we all did – so I betrayed. And that was only a small part of the redaction and eradication of a kind of language – a rich and supple and mobile and highly subjective, ever changing, often very funny and sweet, and infinitely gentle form of expression – that I used to hear on the country holidays of my childhood in the rural North Island of New Zealand but was as though it didn’t exist back in Wellington where I was born, with its Scottish school and church and ceilidhs and piping recitals and Highland Balls. And how very strange – my own peculiar form of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, to paraphrase Edwin Muir2 – that my father’s ‘talk’, from his ‘side’ of the family after all, would become, when we lived so very far away from the Scotland we called ‘home’, my dominant language, my single speech. Though, here I am thinking about this now, and about Edwin Muir’s essay and more, and it is perhaps no wonder.
After my mother’s death, when I was older but still young, my father announced that ‘that’s it’ – that there was no need to see any of that ‘side’ of the family again. He’d adored my mother but it wasn’t his pain of losing her that had made him pronounce the end of her story. No. It was the language of her family – their speaking and so, therefore, their way of being – he wanted to finally root out once and for all from his so-called ‘Scottish’ children’s speech. ‘No need for any more of that sort of thing now’, he said, or something of that sort, and that side of life was closed off, pretty much, altogether. I didn’t hear it again, as actual words sounding in the present tense of the air around me, until I was on a beach in Auckland, many, many years later, with my first daughter as a baby who had been hospitalised upon our arrival in New Zealand but was now on the mend and healthy again. There was a big Māori family having lunch on the sand, and an older woman looked over at me where I was with Millie at the water’s edge, and I caught her eye. ‘My daughter has been very sick,’ I explained to the woman ‘and I’m just so relieved she’s better.’ ‘Ah…’, the woman smiled, a big smile, ‘You got your little girl back again, eh?’ she said. ‘That’s good…’ And I could have wept at the sound, with the recognition of it, of the lost language, of her voice.
This is the earliest instance I can recall of being formally aware of there being, within one vocabulary, two registers of speech. That there existed in my writing and reading world two very different ways of reflecting experience: a this and a that, a right and a wrong. The teacher had asked us, as she did every Monday morning, to write a story about what we’d done in the weekend. This was a composition as well as a handwriting class – and, yes, that snaky S had to be neat and tidy but the real effort of the exercise came from the work I had to put into masking the betrayal I was committing to one kind of language by choosing another. For that ‘Someone’, my mother’s mother, was a word that hid behind it the tumble and confusion of the sort of sentences and phrases, pronunciations and rhythms and syntax that abounded on that New Zealand side of my family, and could not, must not, be released within the stapled papers of my composition book. All those rural elisions and softened consonants, the casual arrangement of nouns and adjectives that should have been adverbs or carried verbs, or the sentences missing verbs altogether: ‘You good, honey?’ ‘You fresh with that bath?’ Along with rounds of expletives: ‘Jesus Wept!’ and ‘Take your damn own time’, and the unmanageably intimate, gentle affections, the ‘honey’s and the ‘darlin’s we never heard at home… I had silenced the lot by sending a ‘someone’ onto my page instead who would never speak that way. Who was only a someone else instead. It was as though, in one morning’s lesson of primary two, I had come to own the complexity of my Scottish and New Zealand inheritance of language and the way the former dominated the latter to such an extent that I could only recognise it – now that I was actually confronting it through piece of writing I myself was making – as a form of speech that had to be corrected.
For: Good English. Clarity of intention. Grammatical sense. How these concepts dominated my education and understanding of one’s means of expression and thought. And yet, how the flip version of all that propriety popped up like a-jack-in-the-box – the many phrases and words that the ‘someone’ contained and that were so different from the way our family spoke – in the musically, forcefully forthcoming speech and manner of my maternal grandmother. Who wasn’t even a grandmother, was she? Not a ‘Granny’ as my Scottish grandmother was? Nor a Grandma or Grandmother as all the other children had? No, she was ‘Nanna’ – and with the word (the country cousins called her, even more complicatedly, ‘Nan’) came all the power and surge of thinking about and being a different kind of person altogether. One who existed not only in another part of the country but in an equally distant grammar, with a set of linguistic priorities that were at far, far remove from the only other ‘Nanna’ I knew of who was in ‘Peter Pan’ – and she was a dog. And how could I get all that down? All that questioning, doubting, uncertainty, in a composition class on a rainy Monday morning in winter in Wellington, in New Zealand, in the mid-sixties? I couldn’t. The ‘Someone’ was all I could manage.
They lived in the rural centre of the North Island, the family on our mother’s ‘side’ (a word our father repeated as though to remind us all through our upbringing of what side we children were really on – i.e. the Scottish side, the proper side, the authentic and grown-up and responsible and cultured and intelligent side – all inferred by comparison to my mother’s wild and volatile relations made up of rural, farming stock with their calling voices and maddeningly intimately informal syntax. Theirs was a way of life and interpretation of the world come straight out of a place of wide skies and big sheep stations, of small towns with ‘Milk Bars’ and ‘Main Streets’ and shops known by the Christian name of the proprietor. So: ‘Go up Nelly’s for six fruit buns…’, ‘My magazine from Jim…’, and ‘N-half doz’n’ – (it sounded like that, prepositions and connectives and vowels missing on all fronts) ‘apples from Chan’s’... All contributing, these kinds of instructions and sets of words – none of which would be spoken, and spoken in that kind of way, in the house where I grew up – to a form of language fitted, as much as the land and its people and grasses and waters, to the orders and rhythms of the seasons of the southern hemisphere and its vast Pacific light.1
The house where I grew up was a house of clipped sentence endings, using the right words, forming proper phrases, clear vowels and syntax and no swearing except by my father when he was in one his tempers. We had Scottish words for all the New Zealand things so they weren’t New Zealand things at all: ‘burn’ for creek, ‘coast’ for beach, ‘dinner’ for tea – and so it went on. We didn’t know a single Māori person nor knew the proper Māori words for the trees and flowers that grew there. Yes, we saw tuis, but we drew robins, or put them in our stories – though my mother’s mother’s best friend was a Māori woman and Nanna spoke often of the plants in her garden with those other names and used words like ‘pa’ and ‘tangi’ and ‘kai’, along with the word ‘eh’ that softened sentences and seemed to make of life a casual and relaxed affair. Her sentences, and those of her friends, sounded adrift in time and open to New Zealand experience in a way the writing and speaking at school or at home couldn’t seem to allow, and which I forgot about until I came to read the wondrously hand-made prose – for that is how it seemed! A kind of writing made up to suit its purposes exactly, not forced for one second from any Western literary tradition or canon – of the Māori fiction writer Patricia Grace, as well as the work of the poet James K. Baxter, with his Autumn Testament, and then more. That distinctive New Zealand kind of English language – Grace’s discrete shortened sentences and fragmentary dialogue, the Māori inflections and rhythms and words, blended into one, malleable whole – the syntax of a country open to its own temperatures and emotions, its languors and possibilities, of sitting in the kitchen for endless-seeming mornings drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, ‘having a yarn’… It was a world away from ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘Excuse me’ and ‘Can you please tell me that again?’
I’d never had a moment’s hesitation in composition class before. I loved it. Loved writing the neat and tidy little story of what I’d been doing on the weekend, making the sentences lead towards the ending, choosing the words. I loved forming the letters as neatly as I could – using for guidance the three pale blue lines that kept the small letters below the middle line and allowed the capital to rise up to the top. I loved every second of the whole process, the thinking and the writing and then making the drawing to illustrate the story afterwards.
But that morning: I sat for long minutes, powerless and silent, before I could pick up my pencil. My mind couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t write ‘My grandmother came to look after me’ because that was not who Nanna was and the words for such a grandmother wouldn’t fit nor describe the experience of the weekend at all. Yet neither could a ‘Nanna’ be made to live within the ruled grid of the exercise book. A ‘Nanna’, that word, and everything it stood for… It would have to be freighted into another story I hadn’t been brought up or schooled in to imagine or represent or think about or understand.
So I wrote, so I spoke – for I had to read the story aloud to the class after writing, we all did – so I betrayed. And that was only a small part of the redaction and eradication of a kind of language – a rich and supple and mobile and highly subjective, ever changing, often very funny and sweet, and infinitely gentle form of expression – that I used to hear on the country holidays of my childhood in the rural North Island of New Zealand but was as though it didn’t exist back in Wellington where I was born, with its Scottish school and church and ceilidhs and piping recitals and Highland Balls. And how very strange – my own peculiar form of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, to paraphrase Edwin Muir2 – that my father’s ‘talk’, from his ‘side’ of the family after all, would become, when we lived so very far away from the Scotland we called ‘home’, my dominant language, my single speech. Though, here I am thinking about this now, and about Edwin Muir’s essay and more, and it is perhaps no wonder.
After my mother’s death, when I was older but still young, my father announced that ‘that’s it’ – that there was no need to see any of that ‘side’ of the family again. He’d adored my mother but it wasn’t his pain of losing her that had made him pronounce the end of her story. No. It was the language of her family – their speaking and so, therefore, their way of being – he wanted to finally root out once and for all from his so-called ‘Scottish’ children’s speech. ‘No need for any more of that sort of thing now’, he said, or something of that sort, and that side of life was closed off, pretty much, altogether. I didn’t hear it again, as actual words sounding in the present tense of the air around me, until I was on a beach in Auckland, many, many years later, with my first daughter as a baby who had been hospitalised upon our arrival in New Zealand but was now on the mend and healthy again. There was a big Māori family having lunch on the sand, and an older woman looked over at me where I was with Millie at the water’s edge, and I caught her eye. ‘My daughter has been very sick,’ I explained to the woman ‘and I’m just so relieved she’s better.’ ‘Ah…’, the woman smiled, a big smile, ‘You got your little girl back again, eh?’ she said. ‘That’s good…’ And I could have wept at the sound, with the recognition of it, of the lost language, of her voice.
- See ‘There’s Always Song in the Water’, by Gregory O’Brien, a book flooded with the waters and light of Pacific New Zealand, and a poetic call to inscribe its seas and tides as part of its land’s map.
- See Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer by Edwin Muir, a book that makes sense of ‘double-think’, of double writing, of the relationship of poetry to prose – and more.
This article is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.