Och Aye the Noo

Or how to speak the lingo without getting beaten

This week’s Bread and Roses about the connections and disconnections between languages inspired me to share my stumbling into a world of miscomprehension when I was a child growing up on the lam. (Thank you for your terrific Substack, Portia!)

In this piece from The Opposite of Hollywood, after my father jumped bail in New York we were suddenly living in Scotland. And now it was time for school.

In Scotland, school was either Protestant or Catholic, just like the gangs and football teams. My parents sized up the situation quickly and decided we were Protestant. No obligation to confess made it an easy choice. 

At 11, I began my sixth school in four years. The headmaster didn’t believe my mother when she said I belonged in a class a year above my age because I had skipped a year somewhere along the way.

“Och, no, we don’t do that here.”

So I was placed in the last year of elementary school—called a primary school—where I soon got into trouble by asking for a pencil in a loud voice.

“No talking,” scolded my teacher.

“Okay,” I said agreeably.

Her face turned red. She sent me to the headmaster, Mr. Mutch, who sat me down in a chair across from his desk. He adjusted his glasses and grimaced down at me. 

“In this country, we call our teachers ‘Sir’ if they’re men and ‘Miss’ if they’re not. You understand? When your teacher asks you a question, you have to address her like this: ‘Yes, Miss.’ Not her name, just ‘Miss.’”

“Okay,” I  nodded, getting up to go.

“Sit down!” he said. “I did not give you permission to leave.” His face bulged with rage. “And call me Sir!”

I cocked my head. “Okay.”

Mr. Mutch looked like he was going to explode as he reached for a leather strap with a fringed tail hanging behind his desk. “You’ll learn not to be insolent! You’re in Scotland now, not America!”

Yanking my hands, he turned the palms upward and raised the strap above his head. He pelted me six times, staring at me fiercely all the while. I started crying after the second thwack. When it was over, he replaced the strap onto its hook and ordered me back to class.

My mother looked up from her magazine when I told her. “I guess that’s how they do things here,” she said.

School imposed a whole bevy of new rules, beginning with language. I was not to say Scotch but Scottish when referring to people (a prickly subject), ken not know, hen not sweetheart, stones not pounds, fortnight not two weeks, and the money was shillings and pence, not dollars and cents. Sometimes a whole string of words had to be translated in whole like I dunny ken, hen, bu’, meaning I haven’t a clue, sweetheart.

In the playground, I learned to say shite not shit, arse not ass, aye not yes, ta not thanks, och not oh, the noo instead of now, or to emphasize the aye as in Och aye the noo, and bog for bathroom. When I cried, I was laughed at for being a wain not a child. In history class, I learned that the country used to be ruled by lairds not lords who had lots of bairns not babies.

Breakfast was still breakfast, but lunch was dinner and supper was tea. For the upper classes, high tea was a more formal, food-laden tea and supper a snack before bedtime.

Outside class, I learned to smoke for real, not just putting a lit cigarette to my mouth but inhaling tiny Players No. 6s on the school roof. The first time I was up there with the class bullies, I boasted so much that I knew how to inhale that I almost choked to death on the stairs leading up to the roof. But it did the trick and I was accepted into the gang of two.

Erica, red haired and freckled, had approached me in the school yard my second day of school. “Say ‘Hi, honey,’” she said, chin jutting forward.

“Why?” I asked.

“I said, say ‘Hi, honey.’”

“Aye,” said Bridget.

“What?”

Erica pushed me. “Say it or . . .” A scrambled stream of words flowed out of her mouth.

I assessed the situation—two girls bigger than me who belonged here.

“Hi, honey,” I mumbled, feeling like an idiot.

“No.” Erica shoved me. “Say it like they say it in the pictures.”

My guess that pictures meant the movies was right. I put a hand on my hip and said mockingly, “Hi, honey,” in a loud nasally voice.

The girls rolled around laughing. “She’s all right,” said Bridget, slipping her arm around my shoulder. “Come to the bogs.”

My new friends taught me how to moisten torn-off wads of tracing paper, the gold standard of toilet paper, each sheet inscribed with HM Government. The wads had just enough water to stick on the ceiling after we hurled them up there so they would drop on teachers when they came looking for us.

After I left the school, I found out that the girls were locked up in a juvenile detention center for burning a classmate’s legs with the ends of cigarettes. I had no trouble with them, just as long as I kept saying ‘hi, honey.’