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.
