A master of naturalistic dialogue
Nigel Balchin’s use of the English language, and particularly his handling of dialogue, is an aspect of his writing that has tended to polarise critical opinion. In 1949, considering A Sort of Traitors in the Times Literary Supplement, Anthony Powell declared that “…at moments Mr. Balchin has the oddest ideas of how people behave and how they talk.” A few years earlier, whilst reviewing The Small Back Room in the New Statesman, Philip Toynbee complained about the “fanatically undistinguished style” of Balchin’s writing and drew attention to its dependence on a “flat, exhausted slang” to achieve its effects. Other considerations of Balchin’s deployment of language have tended to be much more complimentary and in fact he has been praised for performing the valuable function of keeping alive the distinctive speech patterns of a bygone age. For example, in War Like a Wasp, a survey of artistic accomplishments during World War Two, Andrew Sinclair stated that “Balchin reproduced with extraordinary accuracy the staccato style and clipped rhythms of contemporary speech.” A great many fiction reviewers praised Balchin for the highly realistic nature of the conversations described in his novels, with L. P. Hartley expressing the view that “His characters have only to open their mouths to reveal a personality”and Walter Allen in the New Statesman claiming that “He is a master of naturalistic dialogue”.
Mine own personal lexicon
Balchin created his own personal lexicon and the novels of his mature period (the 1940s and 1950s) are peppered with examples of this highly individual vocabulary. Balchin’s characters admonish each other with mild insults such as “rot”, “sap”, “ass”, “hog” and “bunkum”. Dislikeable people tend to be “stooges”; likeable ones are “coves”. If a Balchin protagonist is slighted or undermined then the perpetrator is accused of “doing them dirt”. Acting in harmony with one’s personal value system is described as “according to one’s lights”. If an individual is deficient in one particular quality then, in Balchinese, it is “not in the shop”. And so on.
Most of these words and phrases are of course readily understandable, even at a distance of 60 years or more since Balchin first used them. The precise meaning of certain other examples of the author’s vocabulary continues to elude this reader. For instance, in Mine Own Executioner, when Felix Milne chastises his accident-prone wife for breaking a glass, what exactly does he mean when he issues his rebuke “Don’t do a baby-mine about it”? He appears to mean something like “Don’t be childish” but from where does the word “baby-mine” originate? Similarly, in Darkness Falls From the Air, Bill Sarratt is a reluctant visitor to a private club. In his own words, “I was feeling a bit straight-run and Lifebuoy Soap myself.” Sarratt appears to be morally affronted by the prospect of an appearance by striptease artists and is expressing a slightly priggish desire to avoid this particular form of entertainment but what is the derivation of the phrase, is it a Balchin original and would it have been widely understood when Balchin used it in 1942, let alone in 2010?
Balchin and the OED
I was astonished to discover recently that vocabulary from Balchin’s books is responsible for a staggering 65 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. His works were scoured for illustrative quotations that found their way into a supplement to the OED published in four volumes in the 1970s and 1980s and will hopefully be used again as source material as part of an ongoing revision of the dictionary. Many of these entries concern commonplace words such as “about”, “chair” and “plain” but there are more characteristic examples of Balchin phraseology as well. Thus we find a mention of “dirt” from A Way Through the Wood (“But she doesn’t do you dirt with characters like Bule”) and the same novel also provides an occurrence of the phrase “and then the penny dropped”. Lord, I Was Afraid supplies a usage of the word “pessimum”, defined as “The least favourable condition”, in the sentence “Assume that the radius of effectiveness against a reinforced concrete structure is 100 feet for a two-ton bomb—which is in many ways the pessimum hypothesis.” Darkness Falls From the Air appears to have been extensively trawled for interesting uses of language, contributing words such as “Pete” (“Why in the name of Pete didn’t you say so?”), “roll-neck”, “skinful” and “squiggle”. The technically minded The Small Back Room yields “trembler” (a device for making or breaking an electrical circuit) and the statistical term “correlation” amongst other entries; Mine Own Executioner is used as a source of the word “schizo”; and the lavish wining and dining of the three protagonists during the central “overseas” section of A Way Through the Wood generates examples of “fine champagne” and “scampi”. To lower the tone for a moment, Balchin’s novels also provide homes for slightly less wholesome words such as “damn”, “hell”, “frigging” and “wolf-whistle”.
Back-room boys (but no boffins!)
Perhaps Balchin’s most telling and long-lasting contribution to the English language came in his fifth novel (and his first bestseller) The Small Back Room. This book contains three mentions of the phrase “back-room boy” (in both hyphenated and unhyphenated forms!) on pages 13, 32 and 53 of the 1985 Oxford Paperbacks edition. According to the OED, the first known use of “back-room boy” is attributable to Lord Beaverbrook, in an article published in The Listener in 1941. The OED cites the title of The Small Back Room as the most significant instance of the expression, although I have asked them to also consider one of the above occurrences of the phrase during the current revision process.
It has often been stated that The Small Back Room contains the word “boffin”. The novel is of course set among boffins, Balchin himself was a boffin during World War Two and he would almost certainly have been aware of the word, which is believed to have first been applied by the RAF to scientists working on the development of radar. Although I have never succeeded in locating it within the pages of the book, I would be happy for some eagle-eyed Balchin reader and user of this website to prove me wrong.
Balderdash and Piffle
In 2006, BBC TV’s Balderdash and Piffle programme asked for help in finding the earliest uses of particular words and phrases (and incidentally, and rather misleadingly, ran a clip of the movie version of The Small Back Room to illustrate the word “boffin”). That same year, lurking within the intriguing pagesof Lord, I Was Afraid (1947), Balchin’s strangest novel, I stumbled across a mention of a surprisingly modern-sounding phrase during a scene set in an air-raid shelter: “Jerry’s throwing his toys out of the pram.” This represents a huge 42-year antedating of the expression compared to the current entry and a suitable revision will be considered in due course by the OED team.
Balchin and brand names
It is not all that surprising that Balchin’s works are liberally sprinkled with brand names and that some of these have subsequently found their way into the OED. He worked in market research for Rowntree’s in the 1930s and, after the Second World War, acted as a consultant to advertising giants J. Walter Thompson. Thus we find mentions of a Jaeger pullover in Darkness Falls From the Air and of British Warm overcoats in The Small Back Room. Mine Own Executioner chips in with Monkey Brand Soap (“It won’t wash clothes”) and there is the aforesaid mention of Lifebuoy Soap in Darkness Falls From the Air. Finally, The Fall of the Sparrow contributes Ronuk, a long-vanished brand of floor polish, as part of an unflattering description of a schoolteacher: “He was a big, bulky man, completely bald, and it was believed that the house matron polished his head every day with Ronuk.”
Realistic or not?
Through the medium of his novels, Nigel Balchin developed his own particular argot. At times, with his use of expressions such as “what-ho” and “bunkum”, he certainly harked back to a much earlier age. It would appear likely though that the middle-class professionals who populate the novels of Balchin’s mature period speak in much the same way as the colleagues with whom the author worked both before and during World War Two. Despite extensive reading of novels set in the middle decades of the last century, no writer I have yet encountered has a vocabulary quite like Balchin’s. This may be because the professional middle classes were poorly represented in the fiction of the time or perhaps Balchin was writing about a specific substratum of society with its own peculiar way of speaking. British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s can shed some light on this matter. Films made during this period (and not just those scripted by Balchin himself) sometimes contain characters such as middle-ranking military officers who do talk in a similar way to certain of Balchin’s characters. If one accepts that these socially realistic films can serve as an accurate guide, it would appear that, with regard to the language used in his books, Nigel Balchin was above all else a realist.
© Derek Collett 2010