Weasley accents etc

[Susan Hall]

No: HPFGUIDX 22739

Someone made a comment which indicated that they were rather surprised that
the Weasleys had rather posh accents on one of the taped versions of the
books.  I'd always assumed that the Weasleys fell into that well known
socio-economic group "English Upper Class Eccentrics - No Money" and that
therefore the only characters in the canon likely to have posher accents
(and then only by a short head) would be the Malfoys.  The Burrow is so like
the house of a typical EUCENOM - well, the Muggle version is held together
by baler twine rather than by magic, and we've only met the hens and not the
goats so far, but everything else figures - idealistic father (the usual
father of a EUCENOM family looks as though either he's escaped from the
monkey house at the zoo or from the SCR of an Oxbridge college, possibly
both, and wears for all occasions including doing the garden and going to
the pub a jacket which would be discarded by the average tramp but which
close examination reveals to have come from Saville Row and to have
descended in the direct line of the family for three generations, each of
whom seen to have slept in it), mother holding everything together with
string and grim determination, hordes of bright kids with the sort of street
smartness that comes from having had to find solutions to "oh dear, the goat
house has exploded" from the age of about 41/2, various eccentric pets [An
muggle EUCENOM meeting the Weasleys and their owls at Kings Cross would
probably greet them as long lost cousins and compare owl breeding notes].
If Ottery St Catchpole is on the Devon/Dorset border it is in a typical
EUCENOM hideout; other possibilities for EUCENOM locations are the Isle of
Wight, the Welsh borders, Leamington on Spa, the Forest of Bowland
(particularly Abbeystead and Dolphinholme) and those parts of London where
you can get truly huge regency terraced houses in the middle of rampant
areas of gang warfare but with wonderful plasterwork ceilings where the
bullets have missed.  The key EUCENOM slogan when buying houses is "well, we
need lots of space - who cares about the roof? Oh, don't worry about THAT -
this was a superb area in 1746 - bound to be on its way back up soon."

Susan