The language that connects us to the past

On the trail of my ancestors

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It’s finally happened: after an adolescence spent yawning and rolling my eyes whenever my mother tried to tell me about her genealogical discoveries, I’ve become a genealogist myself.

A sudden hunger to know where I come from and a subscription to Ancestry.co.uk that needs justifying have combined to turn me into a feverish seeker of historical puzzle pieces. I’ve been spending my money on marriage certificates and burial records and my time squinting over illegible Victorian census forms.

My mother has her side of the family pretty well covered, so I’ve been looking into my father’s side. I’ve always been idly curious about these folks because they were from London, where I’ve been living for the last ten years. I now know that their London roots go back at least as far as the late eighteenth century, which means that my move here in 2014 was almost a return to my ancestral homeland. Only almost, because my ancestors lived south of the river, and I’ve always lived north of it. I have, however, discovered a great-great-great-great aunt who moved away from the neighbourhood she grew up in and ended her days at an address just around the corner from my first London flat, which also happens to be where I met Roberto. I must have walked past the site of her house countless times without ever knowing it.

My south London ancestors lived in terraced houses that are mostly gone now, destroyed by the Blitz or by post-war demolition. They worked in the docklands, in warehouses and on wharves; also in factories, gasworks and laundries. They unloaded ships, made lace, cured fish, sold things from carts. Some of them ended up in the workhouses of Peckham and Camberwell. They died of dropsy, ‘senility’ and chronic bronchitis. Many were buried in communal graves without headstones.

It’s humbling to see what remains of a person generations after their death, once their possessions have been lost and everyone who knew and loved them is gone. Just the scaffolding of a life: names of offspring and a few dates, addresses and job titles. Official pieces of paper reveal where and when and, to some degree, how they lived, but don’t tell us anything about who they actually were.

Occasionally, however, a little piece of treasure is handed down to you: a glimpse of the person themselves.

I recently revisited an old blog of my father’s and discovered a post in which he describes the experience of having a half-remembered phrase pop unbidden out of his mouth. A friend’s absence at a get-together was said to be down to his having ‘a touch of’ something, and before it could be explained what, exactly, he had a touch of, my father had interjected: ‘the oh-be-joyfuls?’

‘A touch of the oh-be-joyfuls’ was a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for an upset stomach, my father explained in his blog post: a stock saying from his childhood. Where it came from he had no idea, but in his memory, the voice that said it was his mother’s.

My grandmother was still alive when this occurred, so he asked her where it came from. Immediately she replied: ‘my mother used to say it.’ He asked where she would have got it from, and my grandmother said, ‘From her mother. She got all her sayings from her mother.’

So the phrase, according to this story, goes back at least as far as my great-great grandmother. Thanks to my genealogical foraging, I know that my great-great-grandmother was called Jane; that she was born in 1873 and left home to work as a servant in the countryside before moving back to London and getting married; that she had five children and all of them survived to adulthood; that she died in 1930, when my grandmother was three, and was buried in Lewisham. And now, thanks to an obscure turn of phrase passed down through the generations, forgotten and remembered and forgotten again and eventually dredged up from the annals of the internet, I also know that she had a sense of humour.

The other day, the same thing happened to me. I was doing my tax return and came to the question: ‘We think the amount of tax you have underpaid is: £0. Is this correct?’ Under my breath I muttered: ‘I should cocoa.’

It had been so long since I’d heard this phrase that I’d forgotten it existed, and it was a surprise to find it suddenly coming out of my own mouth. In my head I could hear it, crystal clear, in my father’s voice. He died five years ago, and my grandmother three years before that, so I can’t ask them about its origins. But fortunately, the internet came to my rescue. ‘I should cocoa’, an ironic expression of derision, is Cockney rhyming slang for ‘I should say so’.

In the process of looking it up I also made an incidental rhyming slang discovery: ‘tea-leaf’, meaning ‘thief’. Instantly, echoing down the years, came my father’s voice, saying with mock gravity: ‘Yoooou tea-leaf!’ I’d always thought this was a cheeky synonym for ‘rascal’ or ‘scamp’. Had he said it to me? What would I have stolen? But then I realised: he must have been talking to our dog, an incorrigible raider of rubbish bins.

How strange that I, a middle-class East Anglian millennial who visited the capital all of three times prior to the age of eighteen, should find my childhood memories to be stamped with working-class slang from Victorian east London. But then, it’s not so hard to imagine a few choice phrases making their way out of their Cockney heartlands, crossing the river and taking up residence in the south London vernacular of my ancestors; then surviving the journey to Kent, where my great-grandmother moved after being widowed and made homeless by Nazi bombs, and then the journey to Norfolk with my father, aunt and grandmother. Now they’re back in east London again, with me.

My ancestors didn’t leave much behind — no writings or heirlooms, certainly no assets. But just through speaking they planted seeds that lie dormant in the subsoil of our linguistic memories. A breadcrumb trail back into the past; a glimmer of light shining out from the vast unknown.

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