Where I grew up no one was ever scared. Hot was the frying pan when my mother was cooking. Or what the open fire could be where my grandfather sat. Hot had nothing to do with sex then either, which didn’t exist.
All conceptions were immaculate and the end product ended up under a head of cabbage, which is where I was found. And as we had a big cabbage garden near our house, there were a lot of us children in our house.
We never heard of zero and years later when Joan Armatrading sang about Down to Zero it had to be translated. "Oh the feeling/When you're reeling/You step lightly thinking you're number one/Down to zero with a word/Leaving/For another one."
Passing time
Back then too people only ever passed when they went to the toilet or had kept going when they met someone on the street.
So it was very confusing when I was told that first time ". . . poor Mrs Fogarty has passed". I waited for my informant to finish the sentence. She didn't. I was tempted to ask ". . . passed what?" but felt it might be indelicate.
So I was left wondering whether it could be a kidney stone for surely it wouldn’t be news that she had, well, passed water or, well . . . “made a motion”. Yes, no one ever – brace yourself Bridget for I am about to use a four-letter word. Ready? – shit, in those days either. Remarkably.
Not that anyone was ever constipated. All that cabbage of course.
In fact I was so unfamiliar with that four letter word I had to ponder a piece of graffiti I saw many years ago before I finally got it. It read – ready Bridget? – it read: “Did you know that nine out of 10 constipated people just couldn’t give a shit!” I didn’t. Then I understood.
The context helped. It was in New York where, through a process of osmosis and still in my teens, I learned that no one in America was ever afraid either. They were just plain scared.
It was there too I learned the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s observation that our islands and America are separated by a common language.
Language from the Middle English langage, meaning "words, conversation, talk", from the OId French langage, from the Latin lingua, meaning "tongue".
