Polly Vernon
After Labour MP Angela Rayner accused ‘anonymous hard right [Twitter] accounts’ of attacking her Stockport accent – adding they just make her more determined to keep it… I face a dark truth. I once accentshamed myself more effectively than any of Rayner’s trolls. I shamed my accent into obliteration, then substituted it with the classless, modulated London-ish tones with which every second media twat speaks. Forgive me, Angela! I wasn’t as strong as you.
I grew up in a village in Devon, which some call ‘idyllic’, though I prefer: ‘seven shades of brain-numbing dull if you’re a teenager and there’s fuck all to do, unless you think sitting outside the Co-op with your mate Sonia having your every poor attempt to smoke a fag reported on by the other locals, who served as a sort of Devon joy Stasi, counts, which it doesn’t’. There. And, yes, I had the relevant accent. It’s hard to recreate it in print, but when I say we let-rilly torqued loike thaaaat – we did. We called boys and men ‘bays’, and girls and women ‘maids’, and assigned gender to inanimate objects. If, for example, Sonia and I found ourselves waiting longer than usual for the bus, I might turn to her and say (of the bus): ‘Maid! Where’s he too, then?’ In reply, she’d shrug, and DIY pierce my ears. We knew how to live.
Aged 18, I left Devon for Sussex University, a dead cool, dead woke establishment, utterly devoid of West Country twang. Pretty much everyone but me came from ‘North’ London, a place I’d never heard of (London’s divided according to the compass points? Really? Why?) and in which I now live (obvs). Somewhere between my dad dropping me off at uni and me locating my halls of residence, I ditched the Devon. My feet hit the landscaped lawns, I sniffed the air: once, twice! And I knew that my existing accent Would Not Fly. I immediately began speaking then, as I do now, like all the people who surrounded me. A little bit Tony Blair, a little bit Caroline Flack, top notes of Susanna Reid.
I don’t really blame me. I know there’s noble authenticity – a realness – in sticking with your natural voice. But I also know no one takes a Devon accent seriously. Or sexily. There’s a brash, forceful, trustworthy quality to Angela Rayner’s Northern accent – but to my Devon one? It just makes people laugh and squeal: DO IT AGAIN! like it’s a freakish party trick involving double- jointedness and farting noises.