Hard Word by John Clanchy

Author:John Clanchy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

Miriam

‘No, Farida,’ I say. ‘Not led the egg. Laid it.’

‘Laid it –?’ she says. While I ponder the genius of her original suggestion: The hen led the egg.

Into the world? I’m still thinking, as Laid the egg echoes in the room around me.

‘But you also say laid the table?’ Farida wants to know. Her hands appealing to the rest of the class.

My God, I think then, this language – how does anyone ever manage to learn it? And thinking of this, I’m struck yet again at how lucky we are – how lucky I am, that is, and Philip, and Laura, and Katie – to have come into the world with the gift of this language, this English, already there, unearned, on our tongues – even Mother’s, although in her case she’s gradually handing it back – while the rest of the globe is forced to sweat and struggle just to fit their mouths around these impossible shapes. Sounds. Lay, laid, laid. Slay, slew, slain …

‘Maria,’ I say, ‘can you give me a sentence using the past tense of drink?’

Today it’s irregular verbs. Last week it was irregular spellings and phonics: off and enough, and cough and dough and plough. I hadn’t the heart to mention hiccough …

‘Of course,’ Maria says without hesitation. ‘Yesterday …’ she begins, rhythm and intonation blending like tequila and grenadine on her tongue. ‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘I drank my boyfriend over the table.’

‘Under the table actually, Maria. But drank is perfect. Okay, so let’s see if you can give me the principal parts.’

‘Drink,’ she says, less confidently now. ‘Drank, drunk. ‘Wonderful, Maria.’

This is a crazy way to teach a language, and an even crazier way to test it. But I have no say in the matter. They’ll all be facing a progress test after the break, and Immigration – which has about as much idea of language learning as Mother does of fly-fishing – still has a say in its construction. And so we’re revising.

‘All right,’ I say to her then, ‘now what about think? Give me the principal parts of that.’

‘Think,’ she says, in fact without thinking. ‘Thank, thunk.’

The others look at me, caught between puzzlement and stifled laughter. Her answer is wrong somehow – they know that – and yet the sounds have a plausible logic to them.

‘No, Maria,’ I say. ‘That’s not right.’

‘I thought not,’ she says, and the laughter finally breaks.

And this is Maria, God’s gift to teachers, a mermaid among language learners. An hour later, and we are still slogging our way through this formal morass.

‘Shamila,’ I say, as we limp towards coffee. ‘What about to fly? Can you give me the parts of fly?’

‘Fly, flied, flewn,’ she says, and my heart drags. Shamila would never use these forms in conversation or in her writing. She’s no longer trusting her own knowledge and instinct, I realize, simply following abstract patterns of sound. And all the others are the same – today they’re getting worse, not better. It is time to stop.

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