Dad

Here's my Dad writing home from Greece in July 1946. He starts by saying he hasn't had a letter from either parent for a fortnight and is worried he may have said something that's upset them.

'If I do say rather startling things sometimes, it is because I am no longer prepared to accept as gospel everything that I see in print or am told by my elders and (would-be) (crossed out) betters. I have thrown off the burden of accumulated conventional ideas, doctrines and parrot creeds, and am now in the process of sifting them in the light of my experience of the world as I find it. I find that a great part of the teachings of the church ... and of our schools, both Public and public, are no more than anti-social propaganda of the most efficient and soul-destroying nature. And I don't like it one little bit ... I was never taught at school that our failure in France in 1940 was largely due to the fact that Baldwin the Bad witheld his knowledge of the full-steam German rearmament, on the ground that if he announced it, there would be such an uproar that he would be ousted at the next election. I have to ferret these things out for myself. We have all been corruptly educated because Mr Bloody Baldwin and his retinue of rich rascals must lie to capacity if they are to keep the proletariat underfoot.

Tomorrow I start teaching English [as part of an Army Education Programme]. I have some misgivings as to my ability to do so, as my knowledge of the parrot-formulae of grammar is negligible, such grammatical astuteness as I possess having been picked up from the reading of the works of authors, whose command of the language is quite evident, and an inducement to emulate them. I shall start off with a brief historical outline, showing how the English language came to its present state. Then I shall tell them one or two good reasons why they should learn to speak a standardized form of English ... For some reason, soldiers are never satisfied with calling a spade a spade. They prefer not only to call it a *!?*!? shovel, but wherever possible to translate the shovel into some obscene tongue, or else to refer to it solely and always as some foul thing which they think it resembles, or with which it rhymes.

Thus bread = Rooty, margarine = mucking, beer = pig's ear, I don't care = Demborazie or Mahleesh or Allah Keefik, tea = char, cake = wad, to mention only 1% of the whole. Such words are their vocabulary. They're (sic) speech is full of such errors as "didn't ought", "It looks like this is them", and other such vile imports from Hollywood. So you can see that I have a hell of a job before me. But it is so important that I hope to make something of it, anyway.'