One of the things I love about working with Callum Hale on my audiobooks is his ability to throw himself into pretty much any British accent and bring the character to life. To my British ear each of the people I’ve created sound exactly as I’ve envisaged them as he brings them off the page.
I asked him to make Rob, from Inheritance of Shadows ‘less ooh-arr’ and he toned the accent down so to me at least, Rob doesn’t sound so much like a heavy-handed son of the Somerset soil. And I wanted Will Grant in the 1920s London Trilogy to sound more like Lord Peter Wimsey. Callum obliged, perfectly. (These are my two favourite of all my characters, ever, incidentally).
The question I’m always asking myself about my writing though, is how right can I get it? I want the history in my books to be accurate, unless I’m deliberately twisting the universe out of true with magic. I think this is the same question historians have to ask themselves about looking at anything in the past. We are both looking at things through our own rose-tinted spectacles, coloured with our own experiences and social expectations. My characters in these books grew up in Victorian England. What did they really think about the Empire? What did they talk about in the pub? What did they really sound like? How did they really smell? We’re fudging it, the whole lot. Historians and archaeologists because of lack of data. And writers because of lack of data and because we don’t want our main characters to be unsympathetic to modern audiences.
Anyway…during one or other of my late-night sessions randomly browsing the web, I came across this programme about Edwardian accents. A regional English language specialist in Germany during the First World War, a real-life Professor Higgins, suddenly realised he had a huge pool of untapped research material in the German army’s British prisoners of war. In this documentary you can actually listen to their voices.
I was very interested in how the modern specialists in the programme say the regional accents of the past are broader in the recordings than they are now. It’s as if the rising tide of London-speak has swept the broad vowels of the regional accents back from the centre of the country, into the more remote west of England. So although to me, Rob sounds about right, a farm labourer from Somerset who’s self-educated and likes to read, to his contemporaries he’d probably have sounded out of place. You can listen to Callum’s reading of him here, in the first chapter of Inheritance of Shadows.
I think, listening to those long-ago voices in the programme, it’s important to remember these men were prisoners. That’s one of the filters we mustn’t discard. Were they doing this work in the language lab out of the kindness of their hearts? Because they were bored and wanted an occupation? Because they were threatened in to it? Because they were offered extra rations or privileges? Are these their actual accents? Or are they performative, a joke on the professor? They’re immensely touching, whatever their origin and I hope you enjoy it.
You can buy the 1920s London audiobooks at Authors Direct.
Oh my gosh, this is fascinating. A few years ago, I was in San Francisco and toured a WWII submarine now moored at Fisherman’s Wharf. The conservation and interpretation is really well done. You can take a self guided audio tour that primarily relies on the voices of men who served in the pertinent areas of the sub during its deployment, describing what it was like to serve in the engine room or live in the bunks or cook in the unbelievably wee kitchen or read your letters from home in the equally wee recreational area. There are some voices from the ‘letters from home,’ too, wives and family whose men served aboard the sub. It’s incredibly intimate and real and evocative. But the overwhelming thing I came away with – because man I love this language and all the weirdo ways we speak it and have spoken it, so much that the language itself can overshadow the content sometimes – was how heartbreakingly beautiful it was to hear the accents of all these men from all these small and large places across 1940s America. The audio was recorded…maybe in the 90s or early 2000s when many of these men and their wives and girlfriends were elderly but still vital, and it records what feels like an infinite variety of variations on 20th century American speech. You can hear pure Brooklyn and Chicago and New Orleans, and maybe those are familiar, but then so many microregional midwestern and southern and everywhere-everything that maybe are not and maybe have been lost. It’s rare to hear that broad a variety of dialects in the US now. Honestly, it was the lost languages that brought me to tears as much as anything else that day.
Often when I listen to brilliant narrators like Callum Hale or Moira Quirk or Joel Leslie or others who can cross a wide variety of British regions and classes I feel like I am listening to a language I only partly grasp – I know that there are nuances that would be so much more delightful and powerful and meaningful if I were, you know, British. And the time element is a dimension that I often ponder. Like, that whole ‘Hollywood’ accent of the 1920s to as late as the 1960s in its most posh and pretentious expressions; today it sounds ridiculous and entirely affected. But it’s an interesting mishmash of received British pronunciation and Americanisms and American pronunciation, and tons of recordings of both celebrities and less rarified people suggest that it was, in fact, the legit American version of a posh accent, unlikely as it seems today. It, too, sounds like a lost language, whose nuances I can hear but barely understand.
I live in New England, not far from Plymouth, where a rogue band of Hugeonot fanatics landed in 1620 and, heaven help them, inaugurated colonization and genocide and all the lovely things that characterize the New World. Plimouth Plantation is an historical recreation of their very early settlement that attempts to recreate not only their housing and gardening and technology and all that boring stuff, but their language. With a slavish attention to historical detail. The whole thing is more theater than anything else. Each interpreter has a particular role to play, a particular settler, and speaks in a way that is meant to be accurate to their time and place – so Joe Schmo originally came from Devon in the early 1600s before winding up in what is now Massachusetts, and he’d have spoken in a certain way, different to Mary Berry [not that one] who came from Yorkshire and immigrated god knows why but spoke a practically different language. It’s always fascinated me. Even more so when you listen to these 17th century accents recreated as 20th century historians imagined them, and can hear the roots of the way Bostonians drop their Rs (it’s so weird, the rest of America thinks we invented the pronunciation of R as ah, but literally the entire rest of the English-speaking world says it that way; it’s only the rest of the US that says R like pirates) and the way people in Maine shape their vowels. It’s been averred that there are isolated parts of Applachia where you can still here 16th and 17th century regional English, Irish, and Scottish accents that no longer survive anywhere else.
I can’t even begin to grapple with British POWs being studied in this way, how they might have reacted, whether they’d have let their true voices be heard. How fascinating, and heartwrenching, and oddly wondrous in terrible and beautiful ways to have this work survive.