First Words

Mrs Clutterbuck's class: sometime in the early 'eighties.  The door opens onto rows of single desks, side on, and there's a window seat across the room. The school used to be a grand home but the furniture's changed and there are dry-erase white boards in place of artwork. There's an impressive entry with a marble slab stairwell clinging to the walls, taking it's time to meander past large stone windows, down to the iron studded double oak doors. Beyond Mrs Clutterbuck's class is the stairwell. We never use it, of course. We come in through the cloakroom at the back. Past the dining rooms, eyes on the black and red floor tiles, and up the back stairs. Homework is to find out what our first words were.
'Cow', I discover, and write it proudly on my piece of paper.  Cow. I learn that my brother said 'Clower' and I imagine my mum pushing him in the purple Silver Cross pram and pointing out the primroses and snowdrops as they emerged from the hedgerows. Or maybe it was later, May perhaps, and the lane was full of cow parsley and campions. By the time I arrived, my brother would have just been toddling at my mum's side. You didn't have to walk very far before reaching the crooked iron gates and seeing the cows. Damp pink noses pushing through the bars, whiskers as tough as fishing line.  The farmer left giant bricks of salt by the water troughs which they'd lick like eroded sandstone, before pushing their vast sandpaper tongues up a nostril.  My brother's gaze, by now, had shifted from flowers to cows and I was the beneficiary.  'Cow' would be my entry into language, my stepping stone.  How often did we walk up the lane? Twice daily, with the dog? A single track, muddied tarmac, with gravel smoothed in two neat grooves from the wear of car tyres.  I can only imagine those walks but they are sealed forever in a part of me with the knowledge of my first word.  I remember the later walks, using my doll's bonnet to stash wild strawberries only to find out that I had stained the soft blond flannel with a gash of red that looked forever like a head injury.  I was not a 'girly girl'; I had called the doll 'floppy legs', but it still shocked me. And later again, home from boarding school, walking with my camera, taking pictures of those noses, or of black and white hide pulled tight over angular haunches.  Then the walking became running the loop; up the lane in one direction, zig-zaging to the end, a left and right, up the hill, past Treswallen and Creed Lane, hugging the hedge on the way down the other side, over the bridge and back home.

What is a first word?  Must it be accompanied by a pointed finger? 'Look, a cow!' Or is it a mother's memory; 'You loved the cows, we walked the lane so often to look at them.' Our youngest has, in the past few weeks, put his first word on the slate of his emerging history.  Though he mimiced 'apple' beautifully several times he hasn't quite aligned the softly spoken syllables to the fruit in the bowl. What he does say frequently and what is all too clearly understood is 'Nee new', copied from his brothers' 'I need you!'  He must have worked out that 'Nee new', in this house, is the equivalent of dialing a first responder.  What picture will this third child draw for himself when he is asked by his teacher to find out his first word?  Mine, after all, could have come from a picture book.

Words

Back in about 1988, my brother and I owned a word. A word that was meaningless to everyone but us. Nyyrrrr. It described a situation that involved some kind of awakening, a touch of confusion and probably mild embarassment. It was neither an adjective nor a noun and we never used it as a verb. It was just said.  A single word. And it was understood.
So it is both funny and familiar to hear strange new words bubbling up from inside my own children. Bundi. Apu até. Driz Driz. I have absolutely no idea what they mean - and Max isn't even in Kindergarten yet - but he uses them with a cozy familiarity. Even Oli, who has only just learned to say 'carry me' rather than 'kai me', is fluent in the language of Driz Driz.

What bears eat?

'What bears eat, Mama?'
The question comes from Oli and seems to be completely unrelated to the train track we are building.
'Fish' I say, and then thinking of Winnie the Pooh, I add '...and honey.'
The next question comes in casually, 'Bears eat peoples?' He uses the kind of tone that says, 'not scared, just curious.'
'No, fish and honey' I reassure him, but perhaps a more honest answer might be 'sometimes'.
Oli and I must have danced through this little dialogue dozens of times. I wonder whether he just likes the familiarity of knowing the answer. Because, when you're two, there's a frustrating amount that you just don't know, after all, there's so much language that just doesn't quite make sense.  Even for Max, at the mature age of nearly-five, there are words I'm sure I use every day that he'll suddenly ask me the meaning of. Today it was 'throbbing' and 'skinny'.  No wonder children get frustrated. Wouldn't you? It must be like being surrounded by people throwing in words like spissitude and temulent* to your everyday conversation. 
At the moment Max is obsessed with the sinking of the Titanic.  As well as drawing my attention to the fact that he pronounces 'sink' and 'think' in the same way, (Do you sink it sunk...), it has also brought a lot of technical language into our home; the nature of watertight chambers, poop decks and orlops. Each night Max asks me to leave him a note by his bed for the morning, with some new fact about the infamous vessel.  Sometimes I remember.
Then, the other day, Oli and I were in the car, having just dropped Max at school.
'When Titanic sinks Mama?' he asked.
'The Titanic sunk in 1912, Oli.' 
'Oh', he says, then 'When dinosaurs sink?'
'Dinosaurs are extinct, Oli.' I tell him. 'It means they don't exist any more.'
The phonetics are identical and it makes marvel again at how the world is slowly revealing itself to this child.
'Do peoples sink Mum?' he asks.
Sink, extinct, think...'Sometimes' I say.

*density and intoxicated for those of you with aspirations for the scrabble board.

Dotta Bridge

'Dotta Bridge!' cries Oli, pointing to the Golden Gate Bridge as we turn left along the Marina.  Sometimes he yells it in the middle of city traffic and I glance around to see its vanishing image on a passing bus or an impression of it high up among the electric bus cables, on a banner persuading us to visit the National Parks. I wonder how deeply the image of the bridge will be embedded in Oli's mind - the tall red ladders slung low with delicate matching string.  There are so many representations of it around the city - it's on a mural at the supermarket, in shop windows and on logos everywhere.
Speaking slowly, Max tells him 'It's the Golden Gate Bridge!' He has all the authority of someone who is going to be five.
Luckily Oli hasn't taken on board this correction yet. It's Dotta be Dotta Bridge, for now at least.

Oli's words, part II

I remember how, 2 years ago, I watched Max's language begin to evolve. I went to bed at night hearing his peculiar turns of phrase, it inhabited my head, his repeated demands for 'big milk' or the intriguing way in which bananas were always 'numanas'. I smiled at the sweetness of those ever so slight phonetic inaccuracies. And now it is Oli's language that rattles around in my mind, the repeated lines that he uses to make himself understood.  'You dough-way' he says, pushing me off, his independence threatened by my kisses.  'Me pee!' he cries as we rush to the pot.  Then 'You read it!' as he drags a book to the sofa where I am nursing Jack. 'You read it 'den. You read it right now.'  The other night he cried out in his sleep. 'Me have it. Me have it.' I walked down the corridor to his room. His hot head was on the pillow, his body curled round his sucked thumb. 'No, me have it!' It was a wail of desperation. 'It's yours' I whispered in his ear as he dreamed.  And how I love the phrases he's heard, like a traffic jam which he calls a 'japping jam' or how he proudly sings 'row row row your boat' and abbreviates those final 'merrily's to a succinct no-nonsense, 'melly like deem'.
I'm all too aware that this is a brief window, it's almost impossible to hold onto his changing language and his emerging comprehension of it.  He has now worked out that his name is Oli with an L rather that Oyi with a Y. He said it with a Y for the last time a few days ago. And soon enough he'll realise the small yellow beetle that hides out in Richard Scarry's strange world of bananamobiles and carrot cars is not in fact dollbug. 'Me see dollbug!' he says, stamping his little finger down on the page with an audible inhale of pure excitement, or a whine of 'Oww, me' if Max spots it first.  Funny to think all this will be gone in a month or so.  I'm sure he'll still tell me to 'dough-way' but he'll say it with a 'g'. And I'll be able to take it because I'll have the memory of him asking me, just today, 'hold yous hand, Mummy? Hold yous hand.'

Oli's words, a selection...

Oh yook Mummy!
Li-boat dumming!
Oh no Mummy!
Bug hurt me.
On my yeg.
My eye broke down.
Airplane dumming!
Day-you me up!
No, down.
No, you do it!
No, me do it.
You help me Mummy.
No, me!
O-there Mummy!
Up there!
Down 'air!
Right Max?
O-day Mummy.
Me sad. Want Daddy.
Me sad. Want Danny.
Me tie-yed.
In my bed.
Stro me!

Don't let me forget...

how Oli quietly took me by the hand, this morning, walked me over to his book, and pointed out the tiny picture of a 'raffe' on the back page. It was the page that told him about all the other stories he could collect by the same author.  Perhaps we will one day collect them all, but I think before we do there may have to be a story about a giraffe that lost his gir.

'Oh me-anne!'

'Oh me-anne!' Max says when I ask him to wash his hands.  'Oh me-anne!' he says when I tell him his fish fingers must be finished before he can have chocolate cake.
I can't stop myself from repeating it.  I don't mean to mock, but oh me-anne, it's pure American drawl coming from our pure English boy.
Apparently Alex says it round the block table at preschool and PJ says it too. That's what I'm told. I smile and think of these three boys in a conference around the duplo.
The language of frustration: 'Oh me-anne!'

Words repeated

It's always funny when the phrases we use at home are repackaged and repeated, with the added twist of a three year old's comprehension. Max has been known to ask his parents if they need a hand in the loo. "Do you need any help?" he'll ask us through the closed bathroom door.  I've also heard him tell Dom he's "had a long day" when asked how the last 12 hours of play went for him.
Over the past year when Max has been trying to communicate with Oli (2 years his junior and yet to get his first word on the vocab scoreboard), quite obviously he has not been given any intelligible responses. I've tried to tell Max that Oli doesn't really understand.  It seemed to help a little with the frustration Max felt when his train track was mauled or his tower destroyed.
"When we tell him not to do that, he doesn't understand." I say.
I try to demonstrate by asking Max to put his finger on his nose. He does it beautifully.
"But look", I say, "if I ask Oli to do the same thing, he won't, because he doesn't understand."
Well, now that Oli is a little older, it's quite possible he might understand. He just might touch his nose.  Or he might answer me correctly when I ask him what a dog says.
'What does a dog say Oli? " I ask.  I try to encourage him by pointing at one.
"What does a dog say?"
I promise you, Oli does have a noise for a dog's bark even though it's not really a 'woof' and I may be only one who can recognise it.  On this occasion, Oli gives a baby babble that, I can't deny, sounds nothing like a dog.
I see Max looking at me.
"Mummy," he says with a knowing pause and a sigh that hints of despair at having to spell it out yet again "he doesn't understand."

But Why?

We've hit it...the "but why?" stage.
"But why? Mummy?"
At this point, I'd like to add my own "but why?" to the author of Clifford the Big Red Dog.  To those who are yet to discover the joys of Clifford; he's a big red dog and when I say 'big' I mean, yes, as big as a house.  So Max raises a very good question, "Why?"
"Why does he grow so big?  Why is he the size of a house? Why does he need a crane to lift him out of his owner's apartment?" And here, I'll point out, we are reading this book out-loud in the library, the public library. 
'But why?' Good question. I should have checked it out sharpish and taken it home to read in the privacy of Max's bedroom. But instead, I can feel people lingering in the aisles near us, waiting for my answers.
Inconceivably the runt of the litter suddenly grows and grows, bigger than a horse; yes, bigger than a digger.
"But why?" says Max again.
"Well, let's read to the end, and maybe, we'll find out."
I can hear the browsers nearby shifting their weight. Instinctively I know, there is no answer, no salvation for me on the last page.
"He's about the size of a very tall tree, but a bit bigger." I approximate for Max.
"But why?"
I think Dr Seuss wrote a book about a goldfish who was given too much fish food, and briefly ended up in a swimming pool before being shrunk back to his real size.  I'm hoping Clifford's author will offer some sort of explanation, and if not, a return to normality, but no, there's nothing.
The book ends. The dog is still big, very big, and red.
"Can we take this book home?" Max asks.
Think of me, we've got it for three weeks.

And all of a sudden...

There I was, thinking Max's questions were easy peasy when he threw me this one: 'Does peppercorns come from a tree, Mummy?' This was as he was going through the kitchen cupboards and asking me to identify the contents. I had to turn to wikipedia to clarify that pepper actually comes from a flowering vine, the peppercorn is the single seed inside the blueberry-like fruit. Who'd have known? His next question? Well of course, it was 'Mummy, does peppercorns say 'yum, yum, yum?'

What do they say?

Apparently wind chimes say 'nee, nee, nee', worms say 'glub, glub, glub' and even inanimate objects must have a voice.
'What do they say, Mummy?' asks Max of the bamboos we are using to try and make a wigwam. 'What do they say?'
I offer something like 'click, clack' and it seems to satisfy, but this is just fuel for the fire - later it is the the traffic lights that have got to say stop or go and then it is the washing macheem that must speak to us. I tell him I'm not sure that a washing macheem says anything,
'No, no, Mummy, what does it say?'
And it has become virtually impossible to read Max a story because of this endlessly repeated question. For example, I started reading Rupert the Bear earlier,
'Next day, the sun is shining bright - "The old barometer was right"' I read.
'What is he saying?' says Max
'Well', I tell my curious listener, 'Rupert's saying "The old barometer is right"'
'No, but what is he saying?'
It's as if there must be some hidden subtext. 'Well he's saying the forecast is right...' I try reading the next line:
'But looking out, Rupert sees how the whole of Nutwood's flooded now...'
'What is he saying?' says Max again.
Luckily there's some dialogue coming up so I keep reading:
'"It's terrible!" says Mr Bear "The Flooding has spread everywhere"'
To which Max responds, (and you'll know this one), 'But what is he saying?'
It makes the story drag a little.
I'm well aware though, that we are currently in the easy question stage. If Max isn't asking me what things are saying, it's 'what are they dooing? or 'what are those are?' and 'where is my that.' It's the next stage of questioning I should be bracing myself for, when I'm going to need to dust off my brain cells and recall my school science lessons to explain why bamboos grow straight, who switches the traffic lights to green or how exactly a barometer works.

Puzzling Chit Chat

Last week as I picked Max up from preschool, one of his teachers commented on how talkative he'd been. She told me he'd been sitting next to her telling her the colours of things, but not just that one thing was green and the other blue, but that there were different kinds of blues and what a blue something might say to a green something and so on. A few nights before I'd been telling Dom that Max's chit chat had started taking over my head. I go to bed with his voice ringing in my ears as if I've been out to a concert. It reminds me of when my brother and I were home from school one holiday and it was raining. Mum got out one of those 4000 piece jigsaw puzzles and we spread the tiny pieces on the dining room table. Each one was no bigger than a 2p piece and each one had to be turned over and identified as sky or water or brickwork and matched up to something else to give it some coherence. We spent an entire day obsessively putting the picture together. And all day, while focusing so intensely on our task, we listened to the local commercial radio station with it's inane chatter and repetitive jingles. When we went to bed that night it felt like the noise from the radio had inhabited every corner of my head and I honestly thought I was going mad. I remember my brother laughing when I asked him if that was possible. I was sure I'd heard of that happening to someone. And nowadays I sometimes feel as though my life is a bit like that jigsaw day - I spend all day turning over the minutiae of childrearing; Has Max done a pee? Have I got his snack? What about his supper? Where's the monitor? Is there enough milk? Where are the keys? Where's his hat? Does he need suncream? And in the background is Max's endless commentary, mingled with the clatter of toy trains or boxes being emptied; "I want to make a SHOP. I'm going to step over Mummy. Hold ON! Go round and round. It goes ROUnd and ROund. I'm going to take these to the laundry. Then hide. PeekabOO. What's swiss one? That's Bertie. Where is the ulla piece, Mummy? I want to make a REINdeer, OK? I JUST WANT the reindeer Mummy. The kettle makes noisy, Mummy. I'm making a train track, OK? All right?" .....I feel exhausted just writing it down! And frankly sometimes I do feel a little insane from it all. Three years of motherhood, the picture is still being pieced together and I'm sure I'm losing brain cells. But I've done Max a disservice if I've indicated that his chit chat is inane. To the untrained ear he might in fact sound really quite profound. A while ago Max began reciting his bear stories ("'I'm up here Big Bear' called Little Bear, 'I've made my own cave.'') And now he's moved on to song lyrics. He was recently overheard saying "You can't break my spirit. It's my dreams you take." James Blunt. Inane or not, the moments of silence in our house are pretty rare. Before I became a parent I'd go round to people's houses where there were kids, or be out at a cafe with a family, say, and the noise level was all consuming, even debilitating. I found myself mute as I watched the source of those rising decibels. But now I'm the mother so the story is different. I was on the phone to my brother a few months ago (before he became a father) when there was an avalanche of lego followed by the jaunty rendition of the alphabet song coming from the fridge magnets - all that, above the din of Max's banter. My brother told me he kept on expecting me to suddenly have to rush off, or at least take cover, hadn't the neighbour's house just fallen down? No, that is the soundtrack to our life these days and now I'm even capable of having a conversation amongst it all. That's not to say the silence, when it happens, isn't appreciated. I'm sure I will delight over Oli's first word as much as I did over Max's but at the moment when Max is at preschool and I'm at home with Oli - whose vocab consists of a gentle rarrrh - oh, that quietness is wonderful!