Tuppence and her mother subsequently moved to Nairobi and lived in that city while Kenya transformed itself from British Crown Colony to independent republic. She grew up learning English and Swahili and sang the folk songs of Kenya. She went to college in London, began singing with a jazz group there, and ultimately came to New York, where she took an apartment on the Lower East Side, got a more or less steady gig with a local jazz quartet, and concurrently developed a reputation as an African folk singer at Harlem rent parties and East Village loft sessions.
Her speech reflected all of these influences. The prevailing accent was upper-class English, spoken with the special precision that the language receives only when it issues from the lips of a citizen of one of the Commonwealth countries. No Englishman ever born speaks as pure a strain of English as a well-educated Kenyan or Pakistani or Nigerian. Intermingled with this accent was a strong undercurrent of Harlem diction liberally salted with bop slang and peppered with bits and pieces of Swahili. The result was as profoundly individualistic a speech pattern as I have ever heard, singularly Tuppence.
I received Tuppence’s history a little at a time over a period of several hours after leaving the PAUL meeting. We drank several cups of coffee in a chrome-and-formica diner on 125th Street, ate sweet and pungent almond duck at the Great Shanghai, and wound up, happily enough, at my apartment on 107th Street.