went on to provide a bit more context. He still seemed uncertain.
It was a pretty important moment in the novel, so I was a bit taken aback. But then, I reflected afterwards, why should he be able to bring it to mind, years later, just because someone randomly presents him with a moment from what is, after all, a pretty extensive oeuvre? Readers tend to think that authors know their books better than they do. That doesn’t follow at all.
One forgets. I remember once someone asking me whether I had read a certain book. I said I hadn’t. Later, I came across a reference in my files. Not only had I read it; I had reviewed it.
Authors are human. They forget, like everyone else.
‘So, Mr Shakespeare, I loved that bit in Hamlet where the prince meets Ophelia and he tells her about going to a nunnery.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Hamlet, you know, where…’
‘Oh, yes, Hamlet, Hamlet…’
‘Going to a nunnery?’
‘Did I write that?’
‘Yes, William, don’t you remember…’
Well, why not?
Authors sometimes turn up quite unexpectedly. A few years ago I was giving a talk at the Hay Festival about English accents, and describing the mixed London accent often called ‘estuary English’, which was receiving some media publicity at the time. To fix it in the minds of my audience, I thought I would refer to some well-known personalities who spoke with it, and mentioned Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson, the two actresses in the television sitcom Birds of a Feather.
After the talk there was time for questions. A man in a middle row put his hand up. He was delighted to hear me talk about Birds of a Feather, he said, and he went on to say how the actresses had needed to modify their originally broader London accents to ensure that they would be readily understood on national television. I didn’t know any of that, but I was glad to hear it, because it was an excellent example of the kind of social factor that fosters the spread of new accents.
‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ I said.
‘I ought to,’ he replied. ‘I wrote it.’
It was Laurence Marks, half of the writing partnership of Marks and (Maurice) Gran. They were the ones who also created the acclaimed The New Statesman, with the larger-than-life politician Alan B’stard, played by Rik Mayall.
That’s the kind of thing that happens at the Hay Festival. You never know who’s going to be there. And you’d better not make careless literary allusions to modern writers, as it would be just your bad luck to find one of them sitting in your audience.
It turned out that Laurence was staying at the same hotel as I was, The Swan at Hay, so we had other chances to talk. A year later we were both at The Swan again, and so it has been most years ever since. From time to time I would give him one of my linguistics books, and he would give me one of his scripts. We talked a lot about the overlap between our two professions. We were both fascinated by English usage, but had come at it from totally different directions.
I would get emails from him with questions about slang, related to the latest characters Marks and Gran were creating. Where does by hook or by crook come from? Why do people say on the wagon? (Or earlier British waggon?) Not all of them had answers.
In fact, the American spelling is the appropriate one, for earlier versions of the phrase can be traced back to the early 1900s in the USA. There we find ‘on the water cart’, and later, ‘on the water wagon’.
Horse-drawn water carts were used in late-nineteenth-century America to damp down dusty roads in summertime, and they seem to have provided an appropriate metaphor for the temperance movements of the time. You would hear men who had pledged to stop drinking say that they would rather drink the water from a water-cart than break their promise.
The earliest reference found so far is in Chapter 9 of Alice Caldwell Rice’s social novelette Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, published in 1901. She comments on poor consumptive Mr Dick that ‘he had a orful spell while I was there. I wanted to git him some whisky, but he shuck his head, “I’m on the water-cart,” sez he.’
Going on the wagon came along soon after, and was quickly supplemented – to the gloom of the temperance supporters – by falling off the wagon. Both idioms stayed virtually unchanged throughout most of the century. And then, surprisingly, people started extending the phrase to other areas than drink.
Abstaining from virtually any vice can be seen as being on a ‘wagon’, these days. I’ve heard someone say that she was ‘on the wagon’, when all she meant was that she had started a diet. I’ve also heard someone referring to coming ‘off the wagon’, meaning she had stopped her aerobics course. And one of the slang historians reports that it was used in a US newspaper in 2000 to refer to the times in which a serial killer failed to murder anyone. ‘He didn’t murder at all for two long periods… before falling off the wagon each time.’
In 2002, Marks and Gran went on the wagon again, and wrote Believe Nothing, a futuristic satirical comedy introducing an eccentric academic, Adonis Cnut, played by Rik Mayall. This is not a Caernarfon malapropism: it was pronounced ‘Canute’.
Cnut is known to be the cleverest man in the world, a quadruple professor at Queen Edward College, Oxford, and a Nobel Prizewinner. But he is bored by his own brilliance, and is looking for fresh challenges. He therefore accepts an invitation to join the Council for International Progress, a secret underground organization which controls all the governments and corporations in the world. The series presented Cnut with challenges to be solved, such as getting the whole world to use genetically modified food. He usually succeeds, aided by his faithful manservant Albumen, played by Michael Maloney. However, he fails to make much headway with the beautiful (and palindromic) Dr Awkward, first name Hannah, the college’s Professor of Pedantics.
Laurence invited me to the recording of one of the episodes, at Teddington Studios on the River Thames. I was introduced to the cast as ‘the real professor of semantics’. I sometimes wonder which bit of me had lodged in Marks and Gran’s subconscious, and transmuted into the characters. I’d like to think it was an aspect of Adonis Cnut. More likely it was Albumen.
Believe Nothing had one of the best pieces of word-play ever. In one episode, Albumen is under the weather and looks awful. Cnut asks Hannah to check up on him, then asks her: ‘How green is my valet?’
Of course, if you had never come across the 1939 novel about South Wales by Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley, you wouldn’t get it. But judging by the audience reaction, most people did. The novel won a National Book Award, and it was made into a very successful film, winning an Oscar for John Ford as best director in 1941. It also became a televised mini-series in the 1970s. The name is almost a catch-phrase.
Audience laughter is a curious linguistic phenomenon, though, as I learned at the recording in Teddington. There were about a hundred people watching the show, seated in tiered rows facing the studio set. It’s a bit like watching a play on stage, but there are some crucial differences.
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