This Much Is True

There is an Oxford High School voice; I have it, as did most of the middle-class girls who went to my school. But accents separate people: used as clues to a person’s background they enable and reinforce snobbery. I thus acquired an accent that was different to my mother’s: I could hear the difference and that sharpened my awareness of class, and separation. I’m sad because I can’t hear my mother’s voice in my head any more. Hers wasn’t a stereotypical ‘Jewish’ accent; it was powerful, and well-produced, but there was an unpolished South London inflection to it, slightly different from Cockney. Mummy wanted me to sound ‘posh’; my voice was an important tool for social mobility, and so she sent me to elocution lessons.

One of my father’s patients was an elocution teacher called Miss Mary Plowman, who taught at the High School. I went weekly for private lessons to her flat in Iffley Road. She was an eccentric but lovable woman, who had whiskers and always (like my mother) wore a cape. She suffered from narcolepsy and would fall asleep quite suddenly in the middle of a diphthong. She taught me about diphthongs and triphthongs and iambic pentameters and diaphragmatic-intercostal breathing and the value of vowels and consonants. In my occasional master classes to drama students, I quote Miss Plowman: ‘Remember, vowels carry the emotion in a word — consonants carry the sense.’ Dame Maggie Smith, another of the High School’s illustrious former pupils, was also taught by her.

I enjoyed Miss Plowman’s lessons; she made me conscious of ‘lips, tongue and teeth’. And breathing, was of course, VITAL. ‘Oddi-orri-oddi-orri’ she would make me repeat very fast. ‘Breath is the material of which voice is made.’ She entered me for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama exams. I became the youngest person in the country to have the letters ‘LGSMD’ after my name.

I don’t entirely approve of the concept of elocution. We should judge people according to the purity of their morals: the purity of their vowels is neither here nor there. And it’s a pity to iron out the rich variety of accents available in the British Isles. We shouldn’t all sound the same. Therefore, in some ways I regret that my vowels are pure — because they are: I doubt you’ll hear a purer vowel in Equity. That purity was due to Mary Plowman — she was my vowel creator. However, when I want to approach a stranger, to ask the time or to use their loo, I always use the Scottish accent inherited from my father, rather than my own. Scottish has a pleasant and trustworthy sound, and it relaxes people.

After I’d had a few lessons, Mummy entered me for poetry competitions at music and arts festivals — competitive events in places around the country: York, Leamington, Coventry, Warwick, Banbury — all over England. I don’t know if such festivals still exist. Mummy would teach me the set poem and I would recite it before the judges. I was always placed in the top three. I have a collection of medals from those times, stored in a drawer. Almost every weekend, we were off somewhere in the Standard Eight to another festival.

There was one drawback, however: the school did not approve. Mummy was called to see Miss Stack, who felt that the festivals were not helpful to my homework. She was wrong: the poems I learnt and the experience of performing in public was extremely useful. I’ve never lost my nerves, and I’m still often physically sick before going on stage, but at least I do it.

My voice was also useful in another way. Whilst working at the BBC Drama Repertory Company, I became aware that some of my colleagues were making lots of money doing commercial voice-overs for television, advertising various big-name brands of goods. Patrick Allen was the first leading voice artist. Patrick was an actor, with a distinguished career in British films, and he was blessed with a rich, commanding, quite posh voice that enabled him to enjoy a flourishing second career as the self-styled ‘grandfather of the voice-over’.

In the seventies, this was a booming growth industry, yet there were fewer voice-over opportunities in TV commercials for women. Generally speaking, people believed a male voice: the man was the ‘expert’; in fact, male voices accounted for 93 per cent of all commercials. I asked my fellow actors how they’d got into it (I knew it was an extremely lucrative area of the business). Somewhat ungenerously, they would say, ‘It’s difficult. Almost impossible.’ The people who were in the know wanted to keep it to themselves. Mummy always said, ‘The world is big enough for everyone’ — but then she’d no experience of commercials!