When I was seven, I stopped saying “afters” and began using the term “dessert”. That was what was right. My best friend, Aimee, called it dessert, and her family in their nice suburban house called it that too, so it must be right.

When I was nine, I started feeling embarrassed by the words my dad used, cockney rhymes that my grandad picked up in the Air Force. I started purposefully pronouncing my T’s and removing any semblance of that Essex accent from my words. I was proud of speaking well, of being articulate. When I was thirteen, my friends would joke with me about how my Dad talked to me. Hearing “cheerio” and “ta ta” would make my cheeks redden, and I would look around to see if anyone heard. I stopped talking with him as much.

By sixteen, I acted the way everyone else did. I recorded videos of my dad saying fajita but pronouncing it “faj-ita”, sending it to my friends to laugh at together. By nineteen, I sounded the same as anyone else in Cambridge. When my family first visited, my dad knew I would fit in because “they all sound like Jessie”. By twenty, I stopped pronouncing my T’s.

“Suddenly the little village I grew up in seemed not to fit that dream, nor did my parents”

Annie Ernaux details the life of her father through the lens of money and labour in her book, A Man’s Place. Throughout the book, Ernaux references the way her father spoke, his limited knowledge of what she knows so freely from her schooling. She harboured resentment at times, causing arguments. Her father, not outwardly named in the text, has a lot of insecurity linked to this lack of class, which seems to contrast with his daughter’s social mobility.

Having grown up as a worker, the biography explores Ernaux’ father and mother’s (who is developed in A Woman’s Story) struggle to maintain their shopkeeper image, fearful to return to the working class they escaped and now serve within their shop. Ernaux herself, on the other hand, was able to attend school and then get a scholarship to continue studying, due to her parents’ hard work.

A Man’s Place bluntly reveals the shameful thoughts Ernaux had about her father, in such a brutally honest way that it forced me to face my own shame head-on. Neither of my parents went to university. My mother grew up on a farm in Ireland, sharing a room with four siblings. My father came from a military family, constantly moving around – sometimes to houses that had no bed for him, leaving him to sleep in the bath. These are the stories I heard as I grew up, surrounded by my grandparents, cousins, and aunts, curious about how school, and now university, was going.

I must have been only seven when I first noticed how my parents spoke differently to my friends’ parents. Words like “afters” or “front room” felt embarrassing when faced with “dessert” in the “living room”. From then on, I felt myself slowly distancing myself more and more from that world. When I was thirteen, I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge, and suddenly the little village I grew up in seemed not to fit that dream, nor did my parents.

“We are left with the responsibility to uphold our roots within a University set on our homogeneity”

Daily, I am faced with the opportunity to show my parents I am smarter than them, though they already believe that I am. I try to prove time and time again how smart I am, yet I am still unconvinced of my worth. Ernaux’s constant turmoil with the difference between her new life and how she grew up makes her want to shy away from that old world. Cambridge is much the same: we are left with the responsibility to uphold our roots within a University set on our homogeneity.

I want to sit at a cramped dining table occupied by my grandads’ Air Force stories, my mum’s time in Ireland, my cousin’s current job, and give back my own stories. I do not want to sound like everyone else anymore. I want to speak like my Mum, laugh like my dad, I want to be an archive of my family, of those who moulded me to where I am today.

When someone asks me, “how did you get to Cambridge?” I will say my mother’s kindness and my father’s dedication, and I will say it all without pronouncing my T’s.