-Kate Lunn-Pigula
“TOO REGIONAL” SAID MY FEEDBACK. “Can’t take her seriously because her voice is so annoying.”
My line manager put the piece of paper down. It’s not like I didn’t know that I have a high-pitched voice and, when teaching, can go a bit “unconfident.” I could see them all looking at me, then some of them look at each other. Then they’d start talking. I suspected some of it had to do with the Brum accent too. Once voted “worst accent in the country.” This was a Russell Group university, after all.
Somebody once said that I sound like a Birmingham version of that annoying actress in “Singin’ in the Rain.”
“So,” said my line manager, her voice was a sonorous Southern breeze. I tried to laugh it off. What could I do about my voice? She looked sheepish. “Elocution lessons might be an idea?”
She phrased it like that… “an idea?” She went up at the end, meaning that she didn’t feel confident in what she was saying. But at least it’s a quick fix. Send them to a teacher and it sounds like we’re listening to the students.
“I didn’t think they still had elocution teachers,” I said.
“Oh, they do!” She was more enthusiastic now. I felt like Eliza in My Fair Lady. Cor blimey, Mrs.! She was happier because I hadn’t outright rejected the idea. We were in her office. I would feel more comfortable in mine but Elaine told me that she does this as a power play. She has her books all lined up on the bookcase. Nobody else’s. I don’t know how she learns anything new if the only person she reads, at least here, is herself. But no matter.
“I can give you some details of the person who gives them, right here in town!” Sunlight burst through a gap in the blinds beside her head. No quiet summer for me then, researching what I had actually been employed to do. I had to relearn how to speak. “I’m so glad you’re open to the idea,” she said.
I wondered why they’d even bothered hiring me in the first place if they thought I couldn’t speak properly, but it was a school with a lot of men from privileged backgrounds. Perhaps I was a diversity hire.
“What else are the students saying about me?”
“Oh! Set texts are fine. Just, you know…”
“My voice,” I said. The thing that I made a career on, that was my way of expressing myself, wasn’t serious enough for posh students. I felt like crying. I had never felt smaller. The “you can’t take her seriously” really got to me most. I felt like I knew which student it was too. That asshole in my first-year seminar, smirking, reminding me of a boy I had a crush on in school who would never have given me the time of day. At least he works in a supermarket now, I thought, this first-year will probably get a third and will be running the country in ten years.
“Your voice, yes! That’s the only thing. Everything else, you’ve been wonderful!”
I nodded. She gave me the name and number of an elocution person as if I had no access to Google. She chatted away and I tuned out. Then I realised that she’d asked me a question.
“Do you want Sandra to book it, or you can do it yourself?” Sandra was her PA. She resented doing anything that wasn’t for the woman she worked for and I didn’t want her to know I was taking these lessons. She would laugh at me.
“No, I’ll do it!” I said.
“Ok, well make sure you don’t forget! Term one will be here before you know it!” She smiled too widely. I imagined her talking with her head. They had been to a couple of my final lectures of the year. I thought just to see another lecturer, a peer thing. But I could feel them all laughing at me, laughing at my accent. Mark, the head of the school, saying they didn’t know why they hired me, saying I was unprofessional.
And they had to listen to these students now. Since they started paying nine grand a year, their complaints were taken far too seriously. They were coddled. I felt a sudden stab of hatred for that year-one boy. I bet he was having a wonderful summer even though he failed my class. Maybe his dad was very rich and the complaint had been fast-tracked.
I realised I had been walking around the empty—apart from a few staff—campus. I only had a vague idea of where I was. The campus was full of trees and hills. I was somewhere near various halls, I knew that much. I would never venture here in term-time. But as I walked around, I realised I very much preferred the place without students. It was beautiful, a really pretty campus. Green, quiet, old buildings mixed with new. A lake and a culture centre. Where would I go from here? Back to my cupboard-shaped office, back to phone an elocution teacher who could teach me how to speak proper.
I got back to my office and the sun was glaring in now, so I closed the blinds. It was a lot darker. I took out a mirror from my bag and wiped the mascara from under my eyes. Only a little. I didn’t know if it was from sweating or crying, I had been pretty out of it.
I googled “elocution lessons.” I found ones who would promise to “reduce” my accent right here in the university. I found students saying they could do so. Students I could teach, teaching me how to speak. What an awful world this is. They don’t have any expertise—and when did first-years get so cocky?! They are probably Southern and think they can tell me how I’m supposed to talk.
I shut my laptop’s lid in disgust and grabbed my handbag. I was going home for the day. I wasn’t here to be insulted like that. I would apply for different jobs before I’d stoop to something that humiliating. They were nicer to me in the Poly, I thought. But were they? Amelia used to wrinkle her nose up at me whenever I spoke up in meetings. I stopped going. But funnily, when I was doing my PhD, I never noticed class warfare like this. Perhaps I was too in love with my subject to pick up on it. Maybe I was too scared to notice other people’s reactions to my voice. Maybe I even used a different voice then.
The elocution lessons had been nagging at me all week. What if she was right? I had been avoiding her because she wanted me to book them. This was the way the world was going. It wasn’t what you said but how you said it. The children had been so used to presentation that when faced with someone who doesn’t care about it like me, they aren’t used to it and they can’t cope.
I had two choices—get mad or get these lessons they said they would pay for. I certainly wasn’t going to pay for them.
I googled the lessons again. Their punctuation was sporadic. “First lesson Free!” Natalie was cheapest, a student here who had probably gone home for the summer. Lawrence was expensive. Well, I thought, if they’re paying, what do I care? If it got stupid people off my back, what did I care? I sent an e-mail. I didn’t want them judging my accent before I could meet them. And I went on with my day.
When I was growing up, everybody talked like me. As I went to uni, less and less people did, and in academia, fellow working-class people would band with me at conferences. I hadn’t been made to feel so subhuman before, however. I was sure that wasn’t the school’s intention, but I knew it was some of these scummy kids’ intentions. My family already thought I talked really posh. Not posh enough, apparently.
To my surprise, Lawrence e-mailed back almost straight away. I hadn’t caught it. I only saw later that I e-mailed at 14:37 and he replied back at 14:53. He said “Yes am available right away! Going to Malta in July but apart from that, not as many students at this time of the year, unfortunately!” He went on to list his dates. I didn’t care that he was going to Malta. Was he actually lonely?
I tried to imagine a day in the life of an elocution teacher. I felt like how people in my family feel when they ask me what it is all day when I’m not teaching. They understood the teaching part. They did not understand the research. “Aren’t the Vikings researched enough already?” Uncle Sid had asked last time. I had smiled and shaken my head, and he’d asked me when I was going to get married.
I was still in my office, hiding away. I wanted to enjoy the sun outside, but I’d rather stay by myself. I am better by myself. Maybe it was time to take leave and write a book.
I told him that I was free on Friday. It was only Tuesday. I didn’t want him to be too eager.
“Sounds great!” he replied six minutes later. I looked at my paperweight Mjølner on my desk. A postgraduate student had bought it for me, sort of as a joke. I told him I had a problem with the Thor movies, and this one was a gift that said “Disney” on it. I lifted the hammer. “Heh, I am strong,” I said, as I often did. But then I heard myself talk. I heard my voice, like I used to when I came back to uni after a Christmas break. The accent was wrong, guttural. I desperately didn’t want to be wrong. I could argue, and had, that accent didn’t affect the words you were saying. But ultimately, it must do. I could pick up the hammer, but I felt defeated.
I wanted to hear my alien voice again. “Won’t have to think about it ’til Friday, though.” It went down in the wrong places. It went down a lot. I didn’t say a lot else for the rest of the day. When Jacob asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee, I went, enjoying the change of scenery, but I let him talk. Jacob is a nice person, he’s interesting, but he doesn’t often notice if you don’t partake in a conversation. I let his words wash over me, something about Brexit, and I immersed myself in his upper-class lexicon. I sounded the words out in my head. Jacob went to Cambridge. He must have thought we’d had a good conversation because he said, “Thank you very much for cheering me up, Emily. Now, must get back to the research!” His accent was plummy, polite, Hugh Grant. Gosh.
I had felt a little lost ever since I came to university as an undergraduate. I never felt like I really fit in. Winifred wouldn’t ever dream that her suggestion to get elocution lessons would humiliate me so much. She wouldn’t understand. She didn’t feel the hot shame I felt in my first seminar when, broader than I am now, I said something that was wrong and some people laughed. They didn’t laugh when other people got things wrong. They were laughing at my voice, my way of speaking. I smoothed it over a bit then, copying others, but I thought I had got over that. And I thought my voice had mellowed. And it had.
All week, I heard other people’s voices more clearly than I ever had before. The vowel sounds their lips made. People I spoke to in real life, television I watched. The narrator of my audiobook was so posh, I was only listening to the words she was saying, not the depth behind them. I was so attuned to people’s voices by the time Friday limped around that I was struggling to comprehend much.
Winifred knew I had booked for Friday. Smiling, she popped over to my office a few hours before—which she never did.
“Remember to ask for a receipt so we can pay you back,” she said, still smiling. How was that possible? How was she still smiling as she was saying the words so perfectly? How was her life that easy?
I said that I would, only I thought the first one was free. I saw her, blonde bun, she was excited. She wanted a shiny new robot lecturer, one who spoke proper. One she could get to speak at Open Days. She asked Jacob to speak at Open Days, generally. Paul if Jacob rebelled, said he did too many. She was waiting for the improved me.
“Well, have a lovely weekend!” She finally left. I decided to limp off slowly to the lessons. Why wait around? They were in a house a short walk out of campus. I went for a coffee and walked to the house. I was half an hour early so I walked around the horseshoe-shaped road. There really wasn’t much to look at. One house had a hole in the roof. Another had a grey mattress on its lawn. The address I’d been given had a red door. I looked at it, and after making a decision to walk around some more, perhaps check out the newsagent I’d seen on the way, I saw a ruffling behind the red door. An old man came out. Grey hair, pale blue shirt, sweat patches showing when he waved to me. I thought, here was some old person concerned with neighbourhood watch. But this was Lawrence.
“Excuse me,” he said, of course he did, “are you Emily?” He sounded like an audiobook narrator.
“Yup, that’s me. I’m a little early.” I heard Birmingham surround me as I spoke. I saw a whisker of displeasure curl Lawrence’s upper lip. He flattened it into a smile.
“Come on in! There isn’t any point in you waiting around out here!” I wondered what such a well-spoken old man was doing living here. Maybe he didn’t live here. He was well-shaven and presented too, apart from the sweat stains. The day wasn’t as hot as it had been.
He showed me inside and asked if I wanted a drink. I shook my half-empty paper coffee cup at him. “I’m good, thank you.” He nodded and showed me to another room. Maybe I should have let somebody know the address I was going to. His house, if it was his house, had dark green walls, dark wood. Copies of paintings, presumably, coloured the walls. There were two navy chairs in his hallway, and he led me into another room. This room was much lighter. It had a huge window showing a beautiful back garden. It was so different from the room we’d just come through. I had felt like I was receiving a detention at school, but the sudden brightness of this room, with its beige floor and white walls, pale blue sofa and pale wood desk, put me slightly at ease.
“What a pretty garden,” I said, looking out of the window. A row of sunflowers was fastidious against a wooden fence. All tall. The lawn was immaculate.
“Thank you, Emily. I am rather proud of it.” Lawrence was a man who didn’t use contractions. He didn’t shorten any word. I wondered if he did that in his down time or only when he was at work.
He walked to his desk and gestured that I sit in the chair opposite. I complied. Why was I complying so much now? I never used to.
“So! You lecture at the university. And in Viking Studies. Well, that is marvellous!”
“Thank you,” I said. Bashful. Was he being condescending?
“But you mention that you want some help? It is usually the students who come to me, Emily, so let me know if I seem strange. I am used to teenagers.”
I nodded. He asked me what I wanted. I suddenly forgot how to articulate. “Well, I had some feedback from students saying that I didn’t speak…” I was slow, muddled. He looked patient. “…in a way that they were accustomed.”
“Students are more demanding than they once were,” he said generously.
I nodded.
“So, I hear Birmingham.”
I nodded again.
He explained that I didn’t speak wrong, just that he wanted to neutralise various shades of the way I talked. That sounded okay.
“It doesn’t mean that it is wrong, it is just that people are better able to understand you if you strip your sounds down to their basic parts.”
I nodded again. I just wanted to nod and never talk again. His voice was sonorous. He had authority. I bet that shit from first year would respect this man, listen to him, even if he was sweating too much for this room. It wasn’t that hot today. I had a small green cardigan on. A dress.
But I couldn’t listen to him. This was about my speech after all. He lifted a book from his desk with a pale yellow post-it marking a page. It was the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice. He asked me to read to the end of the page.
I tried to get lost in the words but I felt self-conscious. He must have felt this because he said, “I know this is an odd situation, but please try to read as if I am not here. Please use the voice that you would use when talking with a friend.”
I started again, trying to ignore his presence. I was able to do it. I felt my guttural tones dropping deeper. I was doing it—this was my voice. My childhood was in my “must,” my “want,” my “wife.” The words I learned at university, my “chaise,” my “vexing,” and my “caprice” were closer to standard RP. The way I moved across a sentence was my history. I was listening to myself speak again and I was excited. I was excited to listen to what I was going to say. The way I pronounced words was mine. I smiled at the end of the first chapter.
“Shall I continue?” I asked, sounding more Brummie than I had when I had walked in. I felt born-again, in all honesty. A cloud had lifted.
“No, that’s quite enough for now,” he said. “As you will no doubt know, we have a lot to be getting on with.”
“I enjoyed it,” I said. “Thought I sounded pretty good.”
He nodded, pursed his lips. “We want what’s best for your students though, is that not so?”
I had had enough of his chastisement. But I wasn’t paying, so I wanted to see what he had to offer.
“Let’s start with ‘universally,’ ” he said. I was thrilled to be finally getting somewhere, to stop pussyfooting around. “You pronounce the word ‘You-nih-vur-sul-lee’ when it ought to be pronounced ‘You-na-ver-sa-lee.’ Now—”
“Why ought it?”
“Because it is Received Pronunciation, Emily.”
“Is that a legitimate reason?”
“Yes, now, back to it. We want to soften your accent, so we’ll need to bring your vowels to the front of your mouth, to your lips. Your accent places them further back, resulting in a ‘ugh’ sound.” At the “ugh” his mouth turned into a grimace and his shoulders hunched up, hinting at those sweat stains.
“What are you implying?”
“I am not implying a thing, Emily—I am simply doing what you asked me to do, that is, to soften your Birmingham accent. If you have a chip on your shoulder about your working-class upbringing, and you do not find my time valuable to you, I may question why you are here.”
“I am questioning why I’m here,” I said. My accent was as broad as it had been in a long time. I enjoyed it. I was luxuriating. My accent was me.
“You will find that you advance further in your career if you accept my help.”
“Maybe I don’t want to advance in such a prejudiced profession.”
“You’re being childish,” he said. Arms crossed. I had irritated teacher. Him getting me to read in the accent I grew up with had brought out the teenager in me.
“Are you going to take this—me—seriously?” he asked. His face had clouded. He must have a short fuse. You’d think a man like this would be patient. Perhaps nobody ever called his methods, his expertise into question. I had met many men like that. I looked out of the window at his manicured lawn and sunflowers. This wasn’t for me.
He got up. “Well, thank you for your time, Emily. I am sorry that this method isn’t for you. I think you may regret it but my door is always open.”
He actually thinks that he’s helping me.
I thanked him and I left through his dark hallway. He didn’t linger, speaking pleasantries on the door. He was false. His house didn’t add up. The red door shut abruptly behind me. At least I could tell Winifred that I went.
She came to see me on Monday morning. She gave a big preamble. She was excited about a shiny new academic, I could tell. She blathered in her perfect English. Then she asked, “So, how was your weekend?”
“I went to my parents’ house for the weekend.” Her face dropped.
“Oh… er… did you go to those elocution lessons on Friday?”
“Yes, it was quite an experience,” I said.
“But you sound worse.” It was out before she said it. I knew that was what she had been thinking. She actually clapped her hand to her mouth like cartoon teenagers do. She blushed. “I mean.” She tried to backpedal. “Not that it’s bad, it’s just—”
“It’s worse.” I didn’t smile. She made her excuses and she left. Good. She would avoid me out of total humiliation now for weeks. Maybe for the whole summer. I picked up my Thor hammer. It felt light. The weekend had been a pleasant one. I hadn’t thought about how I should speak, I just did. My mum said I’d been the happiest she’d seen in a while. “Bet you’re happy to be rid of those students,” she said. I said I was, not all of them. They asked how the people were in my university.
“Posh,” I said. They all laughed.
I opened my blinds and the light streamed in. Yellow sunlight and blue skies. It looked too good to be real. I printed off a paper I was editing and went outside to lie on the grass. I took my shoes off. I used to wander around with no shoes on when I was small, but after week one in halls, people said it was weird. So, I stopped doing it, even at home. Small things—cutting toast into triangles instead of rectangles. I was experimenting again.
I was lying on my front on the grass, not caring about stains, enjoying making an argument about something I knew a lot about when a shadow came over my paper. Jacob said hello.
“I saw you from my window and thought this looked like great fun!” he said. He had a stack of papers with him. “Too hot in there.” He was taking his shoes off.
“I didn’t think posh people took their shoes off,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “Have you heard about Smith’s article, published in a few days. Load of shit.”
I laughed. His toes had scant dark hairs on them. He wiggled his feet.
“Ahhh, that’s much better!”
“Yeah, I heard about Smith’s article but I didn’t think he was serious about it.”
“Well, it is silly season,” said Jacob. And it was. We sat there, shoes and socks off, which was as wild a thing as either of us had done all year.
KATE LUNN-PIGULA has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. Her work has been published by Litro, Clover and White, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Idle Ink, The Honest Ulsterman, Other People’s Flowers, Bunbury Magazine, and Thresholds, amongst others. You can find her at her website at https://katelunnpigula.wordpress.com and on Instagram @katelunnpigula.
Appeared in rainy weather days volume 1, July 2024