I caught the end of the day at Wimbledon on TV last night. Jannik Sinner had three match points against Aleksander Vukic, but for a moment Vukic was fighting back – the umpire announcing Deuce each time he won a point, and evened the game. My partner remarked on the strangeness of tennis scoring. Deuce, the umpire said again.
Suddenly I remembered my father saying deuce when he counted playing cards. Ace was always low, then deuce, three, four, five. He always said knave for the jack. Deuce. It must have been the common word on the East End card and dice tables where he spent most of his nights. It comes from Daus in German, and refers to the two-card, which often has the highest value in German card games.
It made me think about my father’s voice, or his voices. The Jamaican patois he could speak when he chose to – his first language. The Hakka dialect I think he must have known, from having to translate for his Chinese father in Jamaica. The formal English he learnt at school, and which he could speak as well as the Queen. And then the idioms he picked up from his years playing in the East End.
In the part of Essex I grew up in, most kids would claim their dad knew the Krays, but my father actually did know them; he played in their clubs, and at one point, had been a kind of broker in a deal that never went down. An acquaintance of his, known only as Joe the Pilot, who lived in Newcastle and had a lot of money, was going to buy a pub from the Kray brothers. It didn’t happen, but I know for a while my dad felt he was in the Krays’ bad books and avoided certain haunts.
It must have been in the East End that he picked up terms like off to see a man about a dog – an activity he often claimed he was doing, though no dog ever emerged. When he referred to my mum, he called her The Mrs. Things he didn’t like, he called poncey.
Later, as a teacher, I learnt terms like ‘code-switching’, which my father was adept at, switching between patois and formal English, depending on who he was talking to, but sometimes in the same sentence. I learnt the term idiolect, meaning the speech habits peculiar to a particular person.
My father loved the English language. He loved idioms and colloquialisms. We occasionally drove past an undertaker’s called something like F.D. Chillum. Passing, my father would always declare, You kill ‘em, we Chillum! and descend into a fit of laughter, veering across the white lines, while other drivers tooted at him. He was a terrible driver.
Facing death, my dad announced he was going to tell the story of his life, and tried to tape-record his autobiography. It was another deal that never went down, though I think he made at least one cassette – long lost now. I wish I could hear his voice again – but deuce yesterday made me stop and remember. Deuce. You kill em, we Chillum. Off to see a man about a dog.