Languages

Of course I grew up speaking and understanding Manchester English, with its strong past tenses like lit and learnt instead of lighted and learned, and its many minor dialect words. I'm especially fond of mi for my and cling to it, and thi for 'the' before a vowel. We heard very plummy queen's English on my grandparents' television, as when we saw Muffin the Mule on a weekend evening, and understood that too, stilted though it seemed. Both these programmes appeared when I was very young, before 1955, along with Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben. My grandparents owned a television, and I often stayed with them at weekends. My grandfather was Manchester born, whilst my grandmother was a country girl from north Cheshire.
I was also aware of Italian, as that was the language that my mother spoke with her Italian friends, Franca, Anna, Maria and Pierina and several others, who had come to England as brides of British servicemen. She didn't speak it to us, but she sometimes used interesting vocabulary, anglicised Italian terms such as bifurcation for a road junction, and using 'nervous' in its Italian sense of ratty or worried, not quite the same as in English usage, all of which helped me to develop my sense of language and my love of words and etymology.
A new language came into my experience when I was ten and heard and saw Latin in church services. This fascinated me. as did foreign alphabets and foreign handwriting.
When I was a sixth-former at St Bede's one of our duties was to take turns in reading from the bible each day to all the fellow students before dinner from a pulpit set high up in the wall above them in the refectory—pronounced distinctively with the stress on the first syllable, a Roman Catholic public school tradition we were told. It was in this role that I began to clean up my accent, attempting to emulate standard Southern English. I remember Father Jackson, the bursar, complimenting me on my efforts, but pointing out sensitively that 'put' was definitely not pronounced like 'pat'.
At school I studied Latin and French. I still have my stolen copy of Flecker and Macnutt's 'Concise Latin Grammar', which was the main tool of teaching, and which we spent many hours memorising. There was a monthly test, followed by a 'walk past' of all the boys in the year in the Great Hall, and boys who failed this test had to remain standing in a straight line on the stage in front of the school's rector, Monsignor Duggan. I don't know if there was a punishment for failing, as for once I didn't fail any of these monthly tests, but I should imagine that in accordance with the spirit and traditions of the school boys who failed received six lashes on their palms from the priestly Prefect of Discipline on his daily rounds. I never really got to internalise the language and enjoy it, and struggled when we had to study the first book of Virgil's Aeneid for GCE O-levels, but the language did come into its own with me when I started to study Italian independently when I was about fourteen, taking my O-level in my first year in the Sixth Form.
French was also pretty badly taught, and I didn't get a feel for the language in the first year, when the master was a dour Irish priest who obviously did not enjoy his task. The priest in the second year was more enthusiastic, but the turning point came when I received a fluke high score in a test, when one of the questions was something like being asked to list first conjugation verbs, and I listed quite a few. This gave me confidence, and I thereafter was 'good' at French.
When I went into the Sixth Form I was interviewed about my choice by the rector, the same Monsignor Duggan. I had an unusual and unique request: I wanted to study French and Latin, as I wanted to follow a career in modern languages. "Languages?", was his astonished retort, "There's no future in modern languages." So I was refused the Latin, which was suitable only for those studying Greek as well, and had to study History, which I had just failed at O-level—History was another subject that was extremely badly taught, although the teacher was a personable chap when persuaded to stray from the subject. I didn't do too well at A-level History, taught by Father, soon after Bishop, Burke, but I did well at university and received my postgraduate degree in it. I can claim the credit for that, but it did teach me that I didn't always need a teacher, and I could be my own best teacher in many subjects. My knowledge of Latin also came in useful when I mastered the skill of reading and understanding medieval documents.
My knowledge of Italian improved tremendously thanks to weekly visits to Manchester Central Library in the evening to use their Linguaphone Italian course on their reel-to-reel machines, followed by a long visit to Monza in 1966 when I spent much time with my very young half aunt and half uncle, as well as a seaside holiday with other cousins, both Italian and French. I spent over a week travelling back alone through France, a brave venture, but it forced me to communicate as best as I could. I was only just sixteen. Two years later I passed my O-level, and sustained my interest. I began to read Italian books, struggling at first, but I had crossed the first barriers, and didn't look back, maintaining my contact with Italian, speaking it with relations, reading newspapers and books, especially the books of Primo Levi that I bought on holiday there.
French was one of the six subjects that I studied for my first degree at Exeter university. Here we studied French literature, which helped me to develop my vocabulary as well as my understanding, but at the end of the second year I opted to spend the summer vacation training and working as an animateur in a colonie de vacances. The training was wonderful, with students from all over the world, and I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with them. Working with young boys in the Jura, in the foothills of the Alps, improved my fluency in spoken French enormously. Afterwards I hitched to my grandfather's home at Peschiera and improved my Italian, then left for Lyon for a course at the university, but was stricken with appendicitis and had to fly back suddenly to England the day after I arrived.
Hebrew gradually entered my repertoire over the years. I had started studying it on my own early in 1960 when only ten years old, when I bought 'Teach Yourself Hebrew' with Christmas money from my Italian grandparents. I dabbled in classical Hebrew on and off over the next dozen years, then when at the university of Leicester or Southampton I started to study modern Hebrew with the help of their language laboratory which was free to use. When eventually in 1979 I went to Israel, I opted early in 1980 to study modern Hebrew in an intensive course on a kibbutz where we worked half the day and studied the other half. The teacher, Uzi, was superb: intense, focussed, persistent and a good follower of the direct method—he taught totally in Hebrew, which made good sense as between us in the class we spoke English, Russian, French and other languages. We learnt our grammar, our vocabulary, our reading and writing skills, including handwriting.  When after almost six months we moved to the northern town of Ma'alot we spoke modern Hebrew as our daily means of communication. I was fortunate that after working for a while as borough engineer with Mark, a South African, he left and I worked alone, with staff whose only other language was French, as they were mostly of Moroccan origin. At the same time I became involved with a synagogue where I went most Saturdays, and became familiar with the language of prayer, which is the Hebrew of a later period than the bible, and whose grammar reflects. I also began to become acquainted with the Hebrew of the bible, and over the years I have become confident and proficient in reading and understanding this, a rare and precious skill of which I am proud. Over the past thirty years I have chanted frequently from Torah scrolls, but the turning point was in 1980 whilst in Israel, when I worked my way through the entire book of Ruth—and understood it. In Devon I used to study each week's Torah reading with my friend, the scholar Harry Freedman. I also learnt how to chant services using the traditional tunes, whether for the sabbath, the festivals, or the high holydays, all of which helped me to internalise and understand the language.
I love language, I love being able to express myself in different languages. It made a huge difference during the ten years we owned a cottage in France that I could communicate freely and fully in French. It was similar in Italy, and the pleasure was very much in being able to participate fully in the life of those places, to deal with problems and make friendships. Languages can have a magical power of transformation: I remember sitting round the table with French and Italian cousins where we all passed between all three languages fluently, and one cousin remarked to me—I forget in which language—"You know Frank, when you switch language your personality subtly changes too." I noticed it too when I attended that original training course in France in 1970, when speaking French constantly became a liberation for me, when my personality was able to bloom, explode even, through this new and exciting medium.