His father was a working-class Scot who had worked his way up to an officer’s rank in the army. He drank too much, and Ian and his mother were both frightened of him. His mother was constantly anxious about trying to fit in with the other officers’ wives, who spoke polished English with upper-class accents. McEwan said: ‘I don’t write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I’ve inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that’s impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you’ve got.’
—This morning’s Writer’s Almanac on Ian McEwan, who celebrates his 63rd birthday
