Linguistic soup in Trieste

Also this week: my mother’s malapropisms and the Pig Man of Pinner.

In the last week of August, my wife and I went to Trieste. We once put forward an idea to a radio station to visit the place in order to make a programme about how James Joyce taught English there. One of his pupils was Italy’s great modernist writer “Italo Svevo” (Ettore Schmitz), author of Confessions of Zeno. It had seemed at a distance an intriguing place, at the meeting point of several cultures: Italian, Austrian, Balkan, and probably more. We read that Joyce tried out some of his early writings on Svevo, including “The Dead”, which would end up in Dubliners. We imagined Will Self, say, walking in their steps, speculating in his sinewy way about the birth of modernism while crunching some grissini.

The programme never happened, but we were in Trieste because I was invited by the International Board of Young Books for Children. We found Joyce and Svevo, bronze statues both, one on a bridge, the other in a square near the library where Joyce and Svevo went. My wife indulged me and took pictures of me talking to them.

The city seems mostly Italian but Austria breaks through. In the Piazza Hortis, there’s an imposing building with a portico engraved with a word in German, Staatsgymnasium (state grammar school, if you like). Eat on the Via Giorgio Galatti and on the menu is Schnitzel mit Sauerkraut.

I kid myself that I can understand Italian by making some kind of linguistic soup out of the French and Latin I know. It’s mostly an illusion, but when I heard a waiter calling out the table number “trento-quattro” I found myself musing, so many years after the Roman era, on how close that is to “trente-quatre”.

Flourishes of phrase

I was on BBC Breakfast to talk about my book Rosen’s Almanac: Weird and Wonderful Words for Every Day of the Year, and I shared some of my parents’ sayings from the book, such as my mother’s: “Ask your father what he’s doing and tell him to stop it.” People were soon texting in with theirs. One person said that in their family in Norfolk, they would say of someone who was easily amused: “They would laugh to see a pudding crawl.” Another: “Any time we asked my nana what was for dinner it was always: ‘Wim-wams from wow-jow for winding up ducks.’ I still say that to my grandchildren,” she added.

I also mentioned that the book was full of non sequiturs and malapropisms. In response, came: “Many years ago, after a visit to the doctor, my mum’s friend confided that she had an infection in her Geneva.” I’ve done some sessions for bookshops, too, and someone said that, in their family, if their mother used to talk of a distant relative that they didn’t see any more, they talked of them as, “Him? He’s cat-run-up-the-entry.”

These sayings, some hilarious, some powerful, reminded me that when my son died suddenly, his aunt reacted by saying: “Death doesn’t wear creaky boots.”

Memories and mysteries

The Pinner Local Historical Society invited me to talk to them about growing up in Pinner (north-west London) in the 1950s. It took place in the Pinner Village Hall, a new building erected where, as I remember, there was a “British restaurant” and not far from it, the “Pig Man”.

In the 1940s, the wartime government, and then the Labour government, reckoned that there were many people not eating enough. They created a chain of subsidised canteens, and I remember my mother taking me to the Pinner one. It was more out of socialist principle than hunger, I think. I can see myself sitting in a government white hut (asbestos sheeting?) eating meat and two veg followed by apple pie, thinking that this was gorgeous.

In the corner of the park, a few hundred yards from the restaurant, was a nettle patch. In the middle, behind a fence, there was a shed with a pig in it. But there was also a man. We thought that he lived there. It seemed so mysterious. I lived in a flat, my friends mostly lived in houses, but did the Pig Man really live in a shed in the park?

A few months ago, I thought I’d look on the internet to see if there was any mention of him. I found a write-up of a council meeting in Harrow that minuted that they were setting up “piggeries” in local parks, all part of the drive to feed the nation. This one had survived until the 1950s, and the Pig Man survives in my mind in 2024.

“Rosen’s Almanac” by Michael Rosen is published by Ebury Press. He appears at Cambridge Literary Festival on 23 November, and via livestream at cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

[See also: Sigrid Rausing’s Diary: Why it’s time to step down at Granta, the sound of music, and the art of making lists]