ABSTRACT
I was born in England and that was the only country I knew as a child; hence it was ‘my country’. But I had a problem in that I was quite a problem to others. My parents were of peasant stock on my mother’s side and of working class on my father’s. As refugees living in extreme poverty and depending initially entirely on charity, they had no access to the middle-class accessories of books and tutors. Not wanting to speak the enemy’s language, German, but not having a word of English, they resorted to picking up fragments of English vocabulary, generally mispronounced, to form essential communications heavily influenced by German semantics and grammar. This was the linguistic environment within which I was brought up.
