American English Please
Last time I was in Ireland, my mother gave me some letters to read. They were written to her parents in England when we were children. My grandparents had saved them for her and returned them neatly filed in folders and dated. When we left home, it was a sort of mother’s eye-view record of our childhood and since my parents were both prolific and witty letter writers, they made wonderfully entertaining reading. I was absorbed in them for hours, transported back to marvellous afternoons imaginatively whiled away in our playroom with my siblings and friends. There we invented many of our own games and acted out all sorts of dramas for whatever audience we could entrap, usually my poor mother of course. She writes, for example, about us being inspired for months by a Christmas trip to the operetta The Mikado. We put on an excellent show, which included costumes and props. Our mother made sure we always had plenty of things that with a little skill and imagination could be turned into nearly anything. She passed on to us old bedspreads and blankets, odd ear-rings, gloves and socks, pieces of leftover materials and jumble sale acquisitions. This particular show became a classic with our drama company, so much so that the next door neighbour presented us with a recording of The Pirates of Penzance, hoping it, too, would catch our fancy and give him a break from ‘Three Little Maids from School are We’ floating melodically but all too frequently through his wall.
