Reg Johnson

You don’t say Goosnargh. Or rather, the people who live there don’t. They say ‘Goozna’. They say it with a pleasing rhythmical softness, a local variant in which the ‘r’s seem to flutter on indefinitely, as in ‘Coming in for a brrrrrew?’, and ‘s’s become ‘z’s, as in ‘Take uzz as you find uzz.’ That’s how Winnie, Reg Johnson’s mother, spoke, as she stood in the yard of Goosnargh Farm, duck feathers sticking to the toe of her green wellies, light-blue plastic coat billowing above a heavily floral pinnie.