The Importance of Being Seven Read Free Page B

course, and more women were retaining their maiden names, but it would be a little bit complicated now to do that because Bertie was Bertie Pollockand Ulysses was Ulysses Pollock. She had her reservations, too, about the term maiden name. What a ridiculous notion that one was a maiden of all things before one got married. It would be far better, she felt, to use the term woman’s name, or possibly birth name, rather than maiden name. Or possibly authentic name; that had a good ring to it. You would have your authentic name, and then you would have your secondary name, another good term.
    She knew of the old Scottish habit of calling women by their maiden names – or authentic names – first, and then writing
or
and giving their married, or secondary, name. This was the way legal documents had always been worded. So she was Irene Burgess or Pollock, which was better than being Irene Pollock née Burgess, because this form put the authentic name after the secondary name, which gave the wrong message. That implied that the state of being married – the state of being a Pollock – was more important than the state of being a person with an authentic identity – that of a Burgess. And then there was always the problem of people being unable to spell, which would mean that she might be described as Irene Pollock, nay Burgess. Of course, that at least had the merit of suggesting that Pollock was the less important identity, the nay negating its pretensions.
    Had she retained her authentic name, of course, there would have been a question of what Bertie and Ulysses were called. Bertie’s full name was Bertie Wystan Pollock, but in a more egalitarian, less patriarchal society, he could as easily be called Bertie Wystan Burgess. Bertie Burgess, however, was rather too alliterative, and she had been determined not to burden her children with awkward or embarrassing names. What was that girl at school called? She cast her mind back to the roll call at the Mary Erskine School for Girls: Lorna Anderson, present, Nicola Ross, present, Mhairi Smellie, present … Poor Mhairi Smellie. Her first name, a Scots Gaelic name, was pronounced ‘vary’, which sounded close to very. The name Smellie was common enough in Scotland, but to be called something which sounded like ‘very smelly’ was a singular misfortune, and indicative, surely, of a lack of parental foresight.
    The Wystan in Bertie’s name was, of course, after Wystan Hugh Auden, or W. H. Auden as he was usually known. Irene admiredAuden’s work and liked the name. Bertie did not. She had introduced him to Auden, of course, concentrating on the more accessible poems, but Bertie had not responded as warmly as she might have wished. She had read him ‘If I Could Tell You’, and he had listened intently, but then he had shown by his questions that he had clearly missed the point.
    ‘Why does Mr Auden,’ he asked, ‘say that all the brooks and soldiers will run away, Mummy? How can brooks run away if they haven’t got legs?’
    ‘Auden used something called personalisation, Bertie,’ Irene explained. ‘He makes inanimate things talk, or have attitudes. It’s very clever.’
    Bertie thought about this. ‘And then he says that perhaps the roses really want to grow. How can roses want to do anything, Mummy? They haven’t got brains, have they?’
    ‘Mr Auden is very clever,’ said Irene patiently. ‘He makes us think about the world by making the world think. That’s frightfully clever, Bertie.’
    Bertie looked thoughtful. ‘We learned some poems at school,’ he said. ‘There was one about some daffodils. It was when Miss Harmony was still there. She told us to close our eyes while she read it and try to think of daffodils. And then she taught us some Burns.’
    Irene was silent for a moment. ‘Burns is a folk poet, Bertie. He really isn’t very deep.’
    ‘She read us a poem about two dogs,’ Bertie went on. ‘There was this very grand dog, you see, and this