Mistaken Identity
ScousersPets' post reminded me of my own experience.

I spent the first six years of my life in Aberdeen, and acquired a very, very broad accent (so much so that when my Dad went down to London for work and the rest of us spent a year at my Grandma's in Inverness before joining him, I was sent to elocution lessons because no-one in Inverness - reputed for the clarity of its accent - could understand me).

That wasn't so bad, but then we moved down to London a year later and I started primary school there.

It was bad enough that I was effectively a year ahead of all the other kids in my class (primary school in Scotland starting at age four) and so came across as a bit of a teacher's pet/smartarse, but my Scottish accent also marked me out as being different.

Except the thick little twunts couldn't identify it as a Scottish accent, they thought it was Irish.

Now, this was at the height of the IRA bombing campaign in the early 1970s and, given that all the catholic Irish kids in the area went to the local Roman Catholic school, I was marked out as the only "Irish" kid in the school.

So, despite my protestations that "I'm no' Irish, I'm Scottish!" I would get regular beatings from bigger kids for being a Fenian, Paddy or whatever, particularly whenever the IRA hit the headlines with a new bombing.

Eventually, to fit in and to get the beatings to stop, I ended up speaking with an English accent like everyone else (although a lot of people even today find it impossible to place where I'm from).

One unexpected side-effect of this is that many years later I almost got beaten up in Edinburgh by a couple of brain-dead squaddies for being "an English bastard".

Sometimes you just can't win...

Length? About 18 months till the accent was gone, I think.
(Capo, Mon 19 Jan 2009, 13:31, Reply)