The Translator's Tale

By Stephen Howell

Conan Burke’s childhood is curious. He is born in Bootle in 1920 to a couple who marry in haste. His Belgian mother suffers from long cyclical depressions and Conan spends half of his childhood in the care of his maternal grandmother in Brussels. He proves to be an unusual, single-minded child who is obsessed with language. He develops a special talent for recognising accents and learns to pinpoint a speaker's birthplace by the sound of their voice. When his mother dies prematurely, he finds himself free to roam the north of England on his bike, all the while honing his linguistic skills. He is earnest and undeviating in his obsession and there are hints of how his compulsive behaviour will make his grown-up life difficult, singular and sometimes absurd. Nowadays he might well be diagnosed as suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome.

By the 1960s Conan has become a radio personality and university lecturer in Romance Linguistics attached to a Department of Spanish somewhere in the North of England. When his marriage fails because his wife can no longer stand his unreasonable and often ludicrous obsessive behaviour he decides he will try to change in order to win her back. He wishes he could become more romantic and imaginative instead of being so cold and factual. So, during the summer vacation he embarks upon a journey to Galicia in north-west Spain, hoping that a pilgrimage to this rural cradle of magical realism might wondrously transform his notoriously concrete thinking.

The tale is narrated by his daughter Jennifer, who accompanies him on the journey. She grounds him, rescues him and protects him, jealously guarding him from the predatory attentions of an academic girlfriend who takes advantage of his lack of worldliness and attempts to rob him of his chance discovery of a literary and anthropological find.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Howell
• Release date: Jan 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301776054

Stephen Howell

Stephen Howell has been a social worker or support worker nearly all his working life: in child care, in psychiatry and in services for the disabled. He was brought up in Sussex and Educated at Bangor, Cardiff and Bristol Universities; he has degrees in Social Theory and Hispanic Studies. He is married, has four children and now lives in Bristol, England. The Translator’s Tale is his first novel.

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Prologue

On June 8th 1917, the day after the assault on the Messines ridge, Joseph Patrick Burke was sitting outside the dressing station in a line of injured soldiers that stretched back some four hundred yards. A bullet had creased his left hand and he was waiting in the queue to have it bandaged. For the first time in a long while there was some banter amongst the wounded, despite the two hour wait for treatment. The mood amongst the soldiers had lifted.

For once, the battle had been a clear-cut British victory. It had devastated the forces of the German Fourth Army. The offensive had been painstakingly planned and well executed, achieving all of its main objectives in less than twelve hours. The success of the operation had been largely attributable to the 455 tons of high explosives that the British and Anzac tunnellers had quietly buried beneath the German lines over the period of the previous year; when the detonation had come at 3.10 am it had produced the greatest and loudest man-made explosion ever heard; so terrible was the noise that it had caused panic in the city of Lille some 25 miles away; in Switzerland it had registered on seismographs as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. Seven minutes after it had begun, the sound wave had reached the Kent coast where it had woken people in their beds and another seven minutes after that Lloyd George had heard it in his study in London. It is even said that about 3.45 am a faint series of distant thuds had been noticed by an insomniac student in Dublin, the home city of Joseph Patrick Burke, the soldier who now sat sunning himself outside the dressing station while he waited to see the nurse.

Joseph was a young man with a naturally jocular and optimistic leaning, although the experience of the trenches had tested his sportive temperament to the limit. Nevertheless, the achievements of the day had restored his sunny disposition and he was now buoyed up by the ill-considered but widely held belief that the imminent advance on Passchendaele would be equally as triumphant as the taking of the Messines ridge.

Like many of his friends, he had volunteered for the British Army to help bring a speedy end to the war. He was a man of his word and he expected Lloyd George to honour the Liberal Party’s promise to grant Home Rule for the South of Ireland just as soon as the British victory was declared. Like his fellow volunteers, he did not approve of the Prime Minister’s intention to keep six of the counties of Ulster under British rule but he was prepared to accept this as a temporary measure while the Protestants could be reassured of the benefits of joining a united Ireland.

And like most of the other soldiers in the British Army who had joined up in 1914, he had no formal schooling in either German or French. Only a handful of troops had any knowledge of a foreign language and most had enlisted without the slightest consideration of the need to make themselves understood in anything other than English. What would have been the point? After all, the British had made their intentions plain to the subjects of Empire for the past two hundred years without having to go native. Anyway, the time for talking with Jerry was all over. If he wouldn’t understand plain English then he’d just have to be taught a lesson in the only language that he really understood. As for learning French, why would anyone bother? Everybody knew it would all be over by Christmas.

So it was that to begin with, most of the soldiers conducted their occasional contacts with the local population using a few basic words, a handful of common gestures and a smattering of slang and phrases of what they supposed to be double-entendre: the ribald refrains of popular songs such as the ‘Hinky-dinky parlez vous’ of ‘Mademoiselle de Armentières’.

But the war had dragged on so much longer than expected and some of the British servicemen had started to get by in French. Of course, some clearly had more of an aptitude than others. Joseph, for example, proved to have a greater interest and ability in the language than the majority of his companions in arms. After three years in military service he had become quite a linguist. He had the assistance of a phrasebook: What a British Soldier wants to say in French and how to pronounce it. Perhaps, when it was produced, before life in the trenches, there had been no intended irony in the title. Who knows? It was subtitled, An English French booklet for the use of the Expeditionary Forces. The price was 3d but Joseph had acquired it for free. Or nearly at the cost of his life. It depends on how you look at it. On his first engagement with the enemy, when he had gone over the top in an attack that had already caused the deaths of several hundred men, he had thrown himself flat on the ground in a desperate attempt to avoid the sweep of a German machine gun which was plotting a swift route towards him through the bodies of his comrades to the left. As he hit the earth his hand had closed around the abandoned paperback.

What he was thinking when he stuffed the small, muddied booklet into his ammunition pouch he had no idea. In the subsequent terror he had forgotten about it entirely, but three days later he chanced upon it when he was going through his various pockets in search of a smoke. He imagined then that he had found a lucky charm and in gratitude for his deliverance from the German guns he took to pronouncing the book’s strange, stilted phrases as if they constituted the catechisms of his own private Church of Protection. He tried out his beginner’s French on whoever would listen and he embellished the simple sentences with as many new words as he could acquire.

As a result of his endeavours he had become a proficient conversationalist. And, not surprisingly, in a world that was starved of feminine company, a large number of his opening gambits were locutions that complimented the delights of the female form.

For two hours Joseph had sat waiting in the dressing station queue, never taking his eyes off the pretty Belgian nurse as she worked her way through the long line of soldiers who required attention to their wounds. He noted that she performed her tasks with speed and efficiency without being at all dour and officious. Indeed, she smiled and she seemed elated. Occasionally she would give a small laugh when one of the lads flirted with her in his rudimentary French. When it was Joseph’s turn he did exactly the same thing, only more proficiently, writing down his address in Dublin and telling her she was gorgeous and that he would marry her straight away if only she cared to look him up in Ireland after the war was over.

He was not actually expecting her when she knocked on his front door in the spring of 1919 and said she was ready for the wedding. But, being a man of his word, not betrothed to another and having more than a tendency to make rash decisions, Joseph kept his promise, knowing little more about his future bride than she had a pretty face and was as reckless as himself when it came to making lifetime commitments. So it was that Joseph Patrick Burke and Marie Estee Maréchal were married within the month.

Maybe it was also the social rejection that Joseph was experiencing back home in Dublin that had prompted him to make the impetuous choice of marrying this most unexpected of wives. Ever since the survivors of the 16th Irish Division had returned from the front they had been given the cold shoulder and for some time Joseph had felt desperately in need of a little love and affection. Public opinion in Ireland had changed considerably during the four years of the Great War. The executions and repression that had followed the Easter Rebellion of 1916 had turned Irish public opinion against the British Government’s condescending plans for limited independence. Many in Dublin now found it unforgiveable that Irish volunteers should have taken it into their heads to go fighting the cause of the British Army while that same army had been so violently suppressing the legitimate aspirations of their own people.

Joseph, of course, didn’t see it quite like that. Having risked his life for his beliefs in Home Rule and seen thousands of his comrades die in the fight against a totalitarian militaristic dictatorship he now felt forsaken and shunned by his own people.

At first, everything went surprisingly well with the newly-weds and the unexpected joys of his extempore marriage insulate Joseph from outside hostility. But it wasn’t possible for long to ignore the bitter animosity that surrounded him. He found it difficult to find work and there had been two occasions when somebody had picked a fight with him in the pub.

Joseph had no chance of keeping a low profile; his new foreign wife was a constant reminder to everyone of where he had been for the past four years and that he had fought on the side of the Crown. She was also an attractive, exotic figure and no doubt there was an element of jealousy that prompted the men to feel he didn’t deserve such a reward; the women identified her straight away as a hussy. Marie felt leered at, pointed out and disapproved of. This life was not the romantic Irish adventure that she had imagined and Joseph often arrived home to find her shut in the bedroom, her face streaked with tears. When she informed him in the Spring of 1920 that she was pregnant Joseph made a quick decision that they should up sticks and make a new life across the water in Liverpool where he had an aunt and several cousins who promised to find him work on the docks.

Chapter One

My father was born four months after Joseph and Marie Burke arrived in Liverpool and he was delivered in the front bedroom of the two-up, two-down they rented in Bootle. They christened him Conan. When the name was pronounced in Joseph’s Dublinese the last two letters were rarely discernible by the average English listener. At best, people heard ‘Cone’. More often than not they simply called him Con and it was by this abbreviated form of his name that he came to be known throughout his life.

Dad’s full name is Conan Thomas Leo Aloysius Burke. My grandfather would have been content with just Conan. The name is Celtic and although there is some slight disagreement about what it means exactly, there is a general acceptance that it is associated with the wolf and signifies a sagacious and swift-footed warrior. My grandmother had not been so sure about the choice. She had consulted the Lives of The Saints and had discovered that the name of Saint Conan was conspicuous by its absence. Although grandfather reassured her that it was the given name of several minor Irish saints, not to mention a seventh century Bishop of the Isle of Man, she could find no written confirmation of this assertion and she didn’t trust her sacrilegious socialist husband when it came to the spiritual welfare of their son and what such a baptismal name might mean for the prospects of his eventual entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Marie had heard of Saints Thomas, Leo and Aloysius and she insisted on the inclusion of their names as auxiliaries in Conan’s title in the expectation that their presence might help to allay any suspicion by the Catholic Church that hers was a pagan child. Dad was therefore baptised with these supplementary Christian names so that, when his time came, he could be recognised more readily at the Pearly Gates as a bona fide recipient of eternal life. Hopefully, Saint Peter would acknowledge her pious intentions, take no notice of any of that heathen nonsense about wolves and let him through to Paradise on the nod.

Such future planning was unusual in my paternal grandmother’s short life.

As for the qualities that his parents hoped that they had endowed upon him by naming him in this way, I don’t know who was more disappointed when they failed to appear. He never embodied the vulpine traits that were foreshadowed in his father’s choice of a first name. If he was a wolf he was certainly a lone wolf, and an odd one at that. Dad did turn out to be clever all right, but even that has to be tempered with the proviso that his intelligence tended to fixate on certain subjects. He did eventually fulfil the worst fears of his mother and develop into a heathen but at least she was spared the anxiety of this realisation as she didn’t live long enough to know exactly how godless he would become. But I’m getting too far ahead. Let’s get back to the chronological order of things.

Initially, the move away from Dublin seemed to suit Marie. Until Conan was a year old they were happy again and she managed very well, but soon after the boy’s first birthday she became inexplicably sad and took to her bed. Indeed, she was so poorly that the doctor was called. He declared that she was suffering from neurasthenia and needed a long-term rest, including a break from caring for her son. Marie would not hear of any of her husband’s relatives looking after Conan and made it plain that she would only feel safe enough to relax and get better if he was cared for by her widowed mother in Brussels.

So it was that Conan was dispatched to his grandmother’s house in Belgium, his father accompanying him on the tiring sixteen-hour rail and ferry journey from Lime Street to Brussels Central Station where they were met by his maternal grandmother, Mamie Louise.

Eventually Marie did recover from her misery, but she had been well for no more than a week when she entered a period of nervous exhilaration during which she demanded the immediate return of Conan from abroad. Joseph was disconcerted by her agitation but wanted to please her nevertheless, and he was quickly on the train to make the long round trip to retrieve his son.

But in another six months Marie was once again unable to cope. A pattern began that saw her oscillate between the two extremes of sadness and euphoria. With each swing, the depressions seemed to deepen and the manicity become more intense. When she was flying high nothing was beyond her but when she sank to her lowest point she took to her bed, ate very little and became so pale that it was no exaggeration to say that it was difficult to tell where her complexion ended and the grey-white sheets began.

It was during these annual descents into the depths of despair that Conan was returned to the care of Mamie Louise. What with the increasing duration of his mother’s illnesses, the financial cost of the journey and the exertion of getting him to and fro, whenever Conan arrived in Belgium he was pretty sure of staying there for several months. And that was how it began, the alternation of his childhood between Bootle and Brussels.

The emergence of Conan’s speech was slightly delayed, as if he had been silently calculating how he might commence his parlance with the world. When he made that initial journey to Belgium at the age of fourteen months he was yet to utter a word. It was only during his second stay there, when he had just turned two, that he spoke for the first time, dispensing with single syllable utterances and addressing all and sundry with the same short sentence in both English and French: Where do you come from? or «D’ou venez vous?». Thereafter, it was always the same blunt interrogation whenever he met anyone new. Maybe it was his way of orienting himself in a world that for him was constantly changing. Maybe it was just something he had in him.

Most small children would have baulked at the whole idea of such a regular long journey between two distant poles of existence; during each repetition of the trek they would have moaned continuously and asked repeatedly how much longer it would be before they were due to arrive. But not Conan. He relished the long migration and he especially enjoyed the switch from one language code to another. Over the years he became equally at home in both cultures, just as much a native Bruxelloise as he was a born and bred Liverpudlian. Later in life he used to say that he was brought up speaking four languages, French, Flemish, English and Scouse.

The days of his childhood that Conan passed in Liverpool provided him with plenty of raw material for his primitive investigations into the provenance of those around him. He busied himself with a relentless survey of the Scouse speaking world; it became his one and only preoccupation: an all consuming and never ending task. When he felt that this was complete he showed a particular interest in anyone he apprehended from outside this linguistic enclave and he would return home excited and energised if he’d managed a conversation with someone say from Preston, Bolton or Bury.

To the perpetual amazement of his second cousins he wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in joining in their play. He couldn’t have cared less about hanging off the back of trams, keeping pet mice or playing footie in the street. When Everton won on a Saturday afternoon and joy and celebration spread throughout the neighbourhood Conan stared blankly at the euphoria generated by the team’s success and listened unimpressed as all the other boys basked in the reflected glory of the goal scoring feats of Dixie Dean.

But they weren’t spiteful children and they didn’t reject him for all that; they sniggered sometimes at his absurd preoccupation with people’s talk, they teased him by claiming to have heard little green men from Mars chattering in the street and they all joined in with copying his school work word for word. The latter was fair trade. He mimicked others and they copied him. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, a symbiosis. On the many occasions when he turned up for school without his sandwiches they shared their lunch with him, and on games afternoons they always picked him for their team even though he was, in the words of Jimmy McKenna, about as much use as a one-legged bloke at an arse-kicking party. And if they were with him in the street he was neither baited nor bullied.

Of course, if he went out without any of his young bodyguards he did so at his own risk and several times when he ventured forth alone he came home with a bloody nose. On one typical occasion he found himself in Scottie Road conducting his street by street survey of passers-by when he was cornered by a gang of boys who asked him for his considered opinion of the players of Liverpool Football Club. Unable to see where the conversation might be leading he said that he didn’t have a view of his own as he was not much interested in the sport but his cousin Patrick had assured him that they were all a bunch of shite.

Even so, it wasn’t a warm sense of belonging that Conan obtained from being part of such a protective tribe. For him, the huge benefit of such an extended family was that it brought him into contact with a wide variety of diction. The irony was, that however much argot, jargon and slang he consumed, he never acquired the savvy attitude that accompanied the mastery of these street-wise forms. He couldn’t do the snappy come-backs, he never learnt the gift of the gab and he struggled to find the common touch.

In the crowded houses of Joseph’s relatives, on the busy streets of the city or amongst his fellow pupils at school, Conan met any number of people from every part of Ireland and his gift of mimicry was such, that by the age of six he was quite capable of passing himself off as a Corkonian, a Kerryman or a Dubliner. But for all his close association with the Irish there was nothing of the blarney about him.

By the same age he could demonstrate the difference between Glaswegian and Midlothian just on the basis of the exposure he got to native speakers when the family had gone on a fortnight’s holiday to stay with relatives in Scotland during one of Marie’s more robust interludes.

And that was the genesis of Conan’s obsession with geolinguistics, although as yet he couldn’t give it a name. At first, as an infant, he made a rough separation of accents and they appeared like dots on his mental map, resembling nothing more than a random distribution of spot heights scattered mainly over Ireland, the North Country and Belgium. Later, as more and more people responded to his question, the dots became increasingly congested. He began to draw lines between them and around them as he discerned the linguistic contours that obtained between regional differences in speech, the isoglosses, another term he would only know in a few years’ time.

Chapter Two

As each year passed there was a constant and dramatic increase in his skill of speech recognition and of his ability to replicate whatever he might hear. Every time that Joseph accompanied him to Belgium he never failed to be amazed at Conan’s swift progress in French; such was