Worlds Apart: Stories about love, language and cultures

By David Newby

‘Worlds Apart’ is about relationships between men and women from different places, different languages, different national cultures, different religions, different lifestyles, and of course, different genders. The stories are humorous yet heart‐rending, satirical yet sensitive, upsetting yet uplifting – essential reading for anyone who loves life, language and British humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verlag Klingenberg
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9783903284081

David Newby

David Newby was professor of linguistics at Graz University, Austria, and Bergen University, Norway. He is the author of academic publications, school textbooks and several works of drama. His play ‘The Language of Love’ was a finalist in the BBC World Service playwriting competition. ‘The Family Album’ was performed by Vienna’s English Theatre. His most recent play is ‘Love Conquers All’. Teaching Birds to Talk, the first story in ‘Worlds Apart’, was broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Book preview

Table of Contents

The Birds Trilogy:

Teaching Birds to Talk

Teaching Birds to Sing

Teaching Birds to Fly

Culture Lovers

Carol’s Christmas

Joy of Man’s Desiring

Framing

The Reading Circle

About the author

Editorial

Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa

Grasp the rose and leave the thorn alone

– Georg Friedrich Händel

Teaching Birds to Talk

I’ve got this budgerigar at home. Name’s Penny. And she’s a talker. They say that female budgerigars can’t talk. But this one can. Just like a woman. ‘My name’s Penny,’ she’ll say, ‘What’s yours?’ And lots of other things besides. It took me months to teach her. When I think of the hours I’ve sat by that cage repeating over and over again: ‘My name’s Penny, my name’s Penny’ till I was blue in the face. For a long time she just used to sit there staring at me as if to say: ‘Tha’s bonkers, lad!’ That’s what me two mates Arnold and Terry in the Pig in the Poke used to say too.

‘Tha’s bonkers, Cyril! Female budgies don’t talk. Everyone knows that.’

Then one day – I can remember it as clear as a bell – I was just putting me boots on to go off to the Pig in the Poke, when suddenly she shouts out: ‘My name’s Penny – what’s yours? My name’s Penny – what’s yours?’ over and over again as if her very life depended on it. Do you know, I was so happy when I heard that, I nearly burst into tears. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my life. Well, perhaps the first few weeks with Natalya. But that’s all water under the bridge now.

Course it’s not really talking. Just sounds. At least that’s what Natalya used to say. I wonder if she knows what she’s saying. I wonder if birds can think. Sometimes I just sit next to her cage gazing at her for hours and she gazes at me and I think, ‘I wonder what she’s thinking.’ ‘Penny for your thoughts, Penny.’ That’s what I say to her. And she says it back to me: ‘Penny for your thoughts, Penny.’ I suppose if it was real talking, she’d say ‘Penny for your thoughts, Cyril.’

I made no secret of the fact that I got Natalya from a marriage bureau. The owner had got the photos all laid out in neat little rows on his desk. Reminded me of the rows of bird cages it did, when I went to buy Penny. Come to think of it, he probably said more or less what the pet shop owner said.

‘Now Mr Stanley, which of these young ladies takes your fancy?’ It was hard to tell. I mean, it wasn’t just me fancy she was going to take, it was the rest of me life, half of me bungalow, half of me bathroom, half of me bed. She was going to be coming with me to the saloon bar of the Pig in the Poke. It was much more than me fancy.

‘It’s hard to say from just a photo,’ I said. ‘This one looks presentable enough, but I’d like to have a chat with her.’

‘Ah, Mr Stanley,’ he said, ‘a chat would cause something of a problem with regard to her present location. At this precise moment in time she is not residing in the immediate vicinity.’

‘You mean, she’s not in Yorkshire?’ I said.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘she’s not in Yorkshire, she’s in Minsk.’

‘Where’s Minsk?’ I said.

‘Minsk! You don’t know Minsk! Minsk is but a short plane ride from Leeds Airport.’

And Leeds Airport is but a short car ride from my bungalow. But the marriage bureau man didn’t want me to fetch her in person. Said he would deliver her to my door. We’d done all the paper work and the financial aspects the night before so when he brought Natalya, he dropped her at the garden gate with her belongings and was off without so much as a by-your-leave. She stood there at the gate, looking nervous. Right bonnie lass. Quite a bit younger than me. Tall, high-jumper’s legs, squarish jaw, pretty eyes that slanted at the corners. Duty free plastic bag from Minsk Airport with half a bottle of Johnny Walker. My present. I rushed outside and took her little canvas bag off her. Touch of the gentleman like.

‘Hello, love,’ I said. ‘Have you had a good trip? Come on in and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea. Coronation Street’s just started if you like the telly.’

She didn’t move. Just stared at me, like I was mad or something. Then I noticed her eyes darting back and forward like she was trying to think of something. All of a sudden she grabbed my hand and shook it hard. Then she said in a slow and loud voice that reminded me of one of them James Bond spy films:

‘Good day. My name is Natalya. What is yours?’

I’ve got to laugh when I think back to them first few days. I must admit I was bit shocked to discover that she could hardly speak a word of English, let alone Yorkshire. It was all miming and play acting at the beginning. We got quite good at that. Had quite a laugh. Good way to break the ice, I suppose. Patting me stomach and throwing out me arms to ask if she was hungry. Pointing at Penny and making little jerky movements with me fingers to tell her that Penny could talk. When she wanted to know where the toilet was and tried to mime that, we laughed so much I thought we were going to bust a gut. I had to take out me hanky and wipe the tears from her cheek. And when it came to bed time and we had to – well, you know, resolve the sleeping arrangements – it all went like a dream. I must say I hadn’t been looking forward to broaching the subject, knew I’d be a bit embarrassed about clarifying the details, but somehow it was easier to ask about it without having to talk about it. Just felt real natural like. Afterwards, in bed, she really opened up – spoke a lot to me. Course, it was all in Russian or whatever they speak in Minsk. But it didn’t matter. I knew what she was saying even if I couldn’t understand a word. I just felt so incredibly happy. Like a little baby.

The next day I began to teach her to talk. I thought, well if it worked on Penny it can work on Natalya too. So as soon as we’d had our breakfast, I began with lesson one. Started with the really important things for her, like vacuum cleaner and washing-up liquid and self-raising flour. She was a real quick learner. After a couple of days she could say quite a lot. When she’d learnt some new words she liked to try them out on Penny. She would go over to her cage and say:

‘Penny, my name is vacuum cleaner. What is yours?’

It’s funny, though. Penny would never talk to her. The moment Natalya came into the room, she’d go all silent. Almost as if she was jealous. Another funny thing was that Natalya didn’t seem to like Penny much either. Would never let her fly around the living room and couldn’t stand it when I talked to her. One day, when I was trying to teach Penny to say ‘give us a kiss’ she shouted out:

‘Penny she not talk. That not talk. Penny not want nothing. She live in cage. She not real talker. My talk is real talk.’

I hadn’t got the faintest idea what she meant, but I suppose her English wasn’t up to much at that stage so she was a bit confused in her thinking.

She loved going down to the pub in the evening. Much preferred that to the telly. I think it was being with Arnold and Terry. She seemed to like male company. They liked her too. She said being there was good for her English. Never stopped asking questions: easy ones, like ‘what means pint?’, which we could all answer, and hard ones, like ‘when you say some and when you say any?’, where none of us had the faintest idea what she was talking about. Sometimes ones that made us laugh, like when she asked Arnold what ‘haemorrhoids’ meant and he went bright red. One night, as we were coming away from the Pig in the Poke, she looked up at the pub sign and pointed to the picture of the pig. Can’t say I’d ever really noticed it before but when she saw it, her eyes lit up like a little child.

‘Cyril,’ she says: ‘please tell me what is poke. What means pig in a poke?’ ‘Oh dear, love,’ I said. ‘You’ve got me there. I mean, it’s an expression you hear all the time, but I couldn’t actually tell you what it means.’

She began to laugh – them gorgeous slit eyes spread out and made her look really mischievous.

‘Cyril,’ she says, ‘I think you not speaking English very good.’

I must say, I felt a bit embarrassed about that.

‘You’ll have to ask that young chap across the road,’ I said. ‘He teaches at the further education college. Go and knock on his door some time.’

I was quite glad when she started going to the college. She really thrived on it and always came home really happy. And as for her English, well it improved beyond all recognition. She was really pleased about that but to be honest I preferred how she spoke before. I know that might sound a bit daft, but you see because she had learnt all her talking from me, she sort of talked like me. What I said, she said. All those little sayings of mine that me mother used to laugh at when she was still alive, like ‘I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail’ when I went to the pub or ‘the bird has flown’ when someone left the house. And because she talked like me, I reckoned that she thought like me too. We sort of spoke the same language if you see what I mean. But after a couple of evening classes at that college she began to use strange words, words that didn’t belong in my bungalow, like ‘exquisite’ – that was the first one I noticed. Then there was ‘perverse’ and ‘presumptuous’ and ‘repugnant’ and ‘exonerate’ – a whole host of words like that. Course, I knew what they meant but it was obvious she hadn’t got them from me. I would never have used them myself. What really got me was ‘crème de la crème’. After that I just couldn’t keep up with her any more. One night she came home and said:

‘Cyril, I have just been enlightened with regard to the meaning of pig in a poke.’

‘Well, miss clever-knickers,’ I said, ‘in that case you can enlighten me and Penny too.’

She lifted that square chin of hers quite high as she had taken to doing recently. ‘Your beloved Natalya was a pig in a poke,’ she said. ‘That’s what you got when you chose me.’ Those slit eyes of hers gave a little flash.

One evening, just before Christmas, I heard her going out of the front door. ‘The bird has flown,’ I thought to myself as I usually did when she went out. It struck me as strange that she hadn’t come into the living room to say good-bye so I called out:

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Can’t stop to talk,’ she shouted back, ‘I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I must fly or I’ll be late.’

That was the last thing I ever heard her say. Never saw her again. Didn’t bother to tell the police. That college lecturer across the road disappeared too. So I put two and two together.

Now that Natalya has gone, at least I can devote more time to Penny. It seems to me that she’s started to talk much more recently. I suppose I could start letting her out of the cage again now – let her fly round the living room. She used to love that. But somehow I just don’t want to take the risk. It would only take one open window and she’d be off and away.

Teaching Birds to Sing

‘Tell me I am music in your ears. The apple of your eye. The gilt on your gingerbread. Your crème de la crème.’

These were Natalya’s first words as I carried her across the threshold into our new flat. I had to admit that her English was remarkable: she was not just a walking dictionary, she was a walking thesaurus.

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I replied.

‘No, Mr. college lecturer,’ said Natalya, ‘you couldn’t have put it better yourself,’ to which she footnoted a smile of what I was later to recognise as rueful condescension but thought at the time was affection.

If truth be known, I had been rather apprehensive about living with Natalya. It was a big jump from secret trysts in my single bed after evening classes to sharing a household, but we quickly fell into a conjugal pattern, dictated largely by Natalya. I didn’t mind that. I had never been one to take responsibility.

From the beginning it was clear that she would not be content with the role of a housewife.

‘There’s more to life than vacuum cleaners or self-raising flour,’ she proclaimed when she first saw the kitchen.

A few days later, she announced triumphantly that she had got a job at the information desk in the university library.

‘How did you manage that?’ I asked.

‘Surely you must have realised by now, my dear Adrian, that men cannot resist my persuasive rhetoric, not to mention my sexy foreign accent.’

She quickly made friends with the library staff and had soon become an oracle whom students and lecturers, mainly male, it seemed, would consult in droves. She liked the company of other people – more than the company of me, I sometimes thought. She also liked reading and would come home with a bagful of novels tucked under her arm, which she would read until the early hours of the morning. She was particularly interested in female characters and would want to discuss them with me. Sometimes she would shake me awake in the middle of the night with a question:

‘Adrian, which adjectives best describe Tess of the D’Urbervilles: passionate, headstrong, contrary, capricious, whimsical, resolute …?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ I muttered sleepily – anaesthetised, no doubt, by the overdose of adjectives being force-fed to me.

‘My dear Adrian, nothing is hard to say,’ she replied. ‘You just have to move your tongue and your lips.’

Frustrated, no doubt, by my inability to engage in literary debate, she joined, and dragged me along to, a reading circle of university people, in which she would express strident, and non-negotiable, views.

‘Mr Darcy is rich and handsome. Elizabeth gets a big house and servants: a perfect life if you ask me. Why bother being a feminist if life treats you so kindly?’

Such comments were usually met with culture-sensitive, patronising silence: no one wanted to impose their liberal western attitudes on this noble savage from beyond the Balkans or the Caucasus or the Urals or wherever they thought Minsk might be. But one literary character seemed to baffle her:

‘This Lucy in Room with a View; she says she finds it hard to understand people