My parents had learned
some English in school but my mother’s ability was really quite limited. She could sing songs like “pudda you right
hand in, pudda you left hand in, shake it all around”. In other words, she really couldn’t
understand English at all when she landed in the middle of Little Italy. My father was a bit better and managed very
quickly to pick up the lingo. He would
read the newspaper every night and particularly he would read the sports page
because at the coffee breaks that is what the guys talked about.
One of the neighbours in the
apartment that they moved to on Keele Street was kind enough to invite my
mother in during the evening to watch a little television which was a real
phenomenon for my mother as no one in Denmark, of her acquaintance, had a
television set. One evening when my
father came home my mother was quite excited and told him,
“I have just seen the funniest lady
on the television set.” It turned out it
was Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy. My
father was coming home rather late so it was some time before he ever got to
see this show but he could tell that my mother was liking it so much that he
went out and bought a television set for her.
He justified it by saying she would learn English much quicker by
watching it. This turned out to be true
and in particular my mother was very soon parroting the various commercials she
saw on television. Some of the ones she
remembered was “W I S K Wisk” which was a dish soap. She could sing the Mr. Clean jingle “Mr.
Clean, Mr. Clean leaves a sheen” although she really had no idea what a sheen
was!
Within a year my mother was speaking
English very well and able to ask for anything in the grocery store. She also started reading paperback novels
which were a lot cheaper than books back in Denmark.
We children learned English almost
without thinking; in fact I don’t remember ever struggling with communication
at all. I was out playing with the other
children from the beginning and managed to communicate somehow. I probably learned through the television
also since my parents never spoke English to us. My parents believed that their strong accents
would handicap our pronunciation so we speak Danish at home to this day. In any event by the time I went to school the
following year I was fluent in English.
Interestingly enough I never had a self conscious thought about my
parents’ English until I was in grade 4.
That’s when I noticed how long the absence notes of the other children
were. I became embarrassed by my
mother’s one liners, written on a tiny slip of paper. “Susanne was il” (misspelling intended). It wasn’t until I was an adult that I
wondered what the heck the other parents were writing since the letters were
sometimes two pages long. How much
explanation were they giving the teacher about the kid’s illness anyway?
I’d really like to know!
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