I’ve always disliked being called by these names. Really I’m Anne. Once I was wife of…., daughter-in-law of….,then mother of…., then we progressed to inglesina. But I have always been Anne. For quite a long while my boyfriend called me littl’un, rather a nice fenland word meaning approximately, runt of the litter, but none of our foreign friends understood and I became Little. My Turkish friend addressed letters to me as ufaklik. Later on, at uni I became prof.
Now I have difficulties knowing who I am, in hospitals and waiting rooms everywhere. I wait to be called by my middle name Virginia because I never understand when they call out RESS, my incorrectly pronounced surname.
This is to say how horrid it is to be just a cipher not a person so you can imagine the delight when I opened my birthday envelope containing my and her life in photos, but the real delight was the envelope on which my seventeen-year-old granddaughter had written “To Anne”, none of this nonna nonsense. I loved it!
English that grows 