Dialect

Arr yer orrite, little mawther?

said by most people we met in the village when I was young.

The Norfolk dialect is much maligned and, as someone Norfolk born and bred (with spells away for various reasons), this does make me quite angry. It can be beautiful and descriptive and, if you link it with stupidity, you are quite likely to come unstuck.

I remember sitting in a pub one evening in the early nineties, listening to all the old chaps talk and laugh. A couple were in from down south and were talking about these people as if they could not hear them: frowning at words they ‘couldn’t understand’, laughing at pronunciation etc. and generally being a little dim. They did not know that the people they were laughing about owned more land than they ever would, that one of them owned a stately home nearby, that another ran a huge arable farm with very profitable shoot. It doesn’t make you stupid – it is just an accent.

I was lucky enough to be taught by John ‘Jack’ Kett at primary school (he also taught Stephen Fry and that boy knows how to use words). Jack wrote poetry in dialect and now, reading it whilst looking out at the fields that I love, it has a real resonance. The joke at the local high school was that pupils from Cawston could only dance and recite poetry. Well, it didn’t hurt Stephen and my Virginia Reel is a thing of great beauty.

Here is John Kett’s poem about an Adder.

There he lay, agin that stone,

In the sunshine, all alone.

Ah, he like this rea’ hot day,

That ole snaake dew, so he lay

Right agin the dusty track,

Zigzag marks all down his back.

Though he fare like he’s asleep,

Yit, y’know, I bet he keep

One eye open like, fer fear

Any daanger might come near.

Come a little sound, a shadder,

Tha’s enough fer that ole adder;

Orf he’ll go… now he’s a-slidin’

T’rew the grass; there he go glidin’

Under that there gorse bush, hidin’

Right away… there he lay.

John Kett, taken from ‘A Year Go By’

In the 1960s, when sugarbeet was still hoed by hand, Jack watched my dad working on a huge field and asked him why he worked so fast. Dad replied that as long as his feet were moving, he was earning and Jack turned this into a poem. Below is my dad, Pat, in his garden with the field he was hoeing when Jack spoke to him in the background. Bear in mind that Pat is an incomer – he has only been here since the 1950s – and so this accent is more Bedfordshire.