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 ...