Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Local dialect

When one is young it takes no time at all to pick up another language, accent or dialect. When I was about 9 (1955?) my family had, for a year or so, a dairy farm in Sussex at a village called Hurst Green. After several months at the local school it seems that when I was talking to my school friends my mother could not understand us. I don't know if it was dialect, or accent, or both. I visited the village a couple of years ago and even met someone who would have been at school with me but I had no trouble understanding anything so I suspect that local speech has now become somewhat "normalised".

Strangely enough the ex-farm property still has the name that my parents gave it and I was able to tell the present owners how the name was made up from the names of two Australian towns where we had lived.