You should have seen her move .

My mum was a keeper of secrets.

A master of it.

Nobody ever had a clue what she was up to from one day to the next.

She had a secret weapon. A way of organising her life in a little black book.

Not words.

Just lines and squiggles.

Some strokes thin, some thick.

All of it unreadable.

Shorthand, she called it.

Now to younger people reading this, shorthand was a proper skill once upon a time. Secretaries learned it, office girls learned it, receptionists learned it. People sat in classrooms taking down imaginary phone calls at lightning speed while some poor teacher barked out sentences like an auctioneer having a nervous breakdown. My mum could do a hundred and twenty words a minute apparently. God knows how. To me it looked like somebody had let a spider walk through an ink pot and sent it skating across the page.

But Mum treated that little black book like MI5 classified documents.

The funny thing was, most of it was actually written in plain English. Names, bits and pieces, reminders, phone numbers maybe. But every now and then the shorthand appeared. Little coded sections dropped in among the normal writing like landmines. Important bits. Private bits. The stuff she clearly didn’t want anybody else reading.

And she thought she was safe.

To be fair, she probably was.

Her husband Graham wouldn’t have known what he was looking at even if he’d stared at it for six months. Me and my brother certainly didn’t care. We were too busy being kids and smashing about the place causing chaos. As far as Mum was concerned, she had created the perfect system. Her own private language hidden in plain sight.

Then Alison turned up.

Now this was years later when Alison first started coming round the house. We were all sitting indoors one evening having a cup of tea and a chat while Mum was doing Mum things, fiddling about with bits of paper and that famous little black book nearby. Alison spotted it and casually picked it up.

“What’s this then?”

“Shorthand,” Mum said proudly.

I remember Alison flicking through the pages with this strange little look on her face.

Then she started staring at one page properly.

Mum sat there reading bits out loud to explain it. Not proper words exactly. Just sounds.

“Chay… jy…”

Or whatever it was.

I was just sitting there thinking the whole thing sounded like two people trying to communicate with sneezes.

Then suddenly Alison said:

“Oh… so is that Graham’s mate Peter?”

Silence.

Absolute silence.

I looked at Alison.

Then I looked at my mum.

And I swear to God her face just dropped.

Not angry.

Not shouting.

Just pure panic.

You’ve never seen anybody move so fast in your life.

Straight out of the chair she came, diving across the room and snatching that little black book straight out of Alison’s hands like she’d just found somebody reading the launch codes for the British nuclear deterrent.

Me and Alison burst out laughing.

Mum definitely wasn’t laughing.

That was the exact moment she realised her secret language wasn’t actually secret anymore.

Years of safety. Gone in about five seconds.

The thing that makes me laugh now is the confidence she must have had in it all those years. Imagine carrying around a book full of private notes, names and thoughts knowing full well nobody around you could read a bloody word of it. It must have felt like having your own invisible cloak. Hidden in plain sight every single day.

And then one day your son’s girlfriend casually strolls in and starts decoding it over a cup of tea.

Like Alan Turing had suddenly appeared in your front room.

That was the beauty of shorthand though. To most people it looked completely impossible to understand. Even now if I look at pages of Pitman’s shorthand my brain just gives up instantly. It’s all hooks and loops and scratches and lines sitting above or below imaginary spaces. Looks less like writing and more like somebody trying to tune in a radio signal from another planet.

But to the people who knew it, it all made perfect sense.

You forget how many little hidden languages there used to be floating around ordinary working class life. Whole private worlds hidden inside ordinary conversations. Not always because people were criminals or spies either. Half the time it was just people wanting a corner of life that belonged only to them.

London especially was full of it.

You had old Jewish families throwing Yiddish words into sentences without even thinking about it. Words like “schmuck”, “schlep”, “oy vey” or “chutzpah”. I grew up hearing words I thought were pure Cockney only to find out years later they’d travelled halfway across Europe before landing in North London kitchens and market stalls.

Then there was Polari.

Now there’s one a lot of younger people have probably never even heard of.

Polari was like a secret handshake turned into a language. A whole mix of theatre slang, sailor talk, bits of Italian, Cockney rhyming slang and goodness knows what else all stirred together into this strange hidden code. Mainly used by gay men back in the days when being openly gay could get you beaten up, arrested or worse.

So people invented ways of talking that outsiders wouldn’t understand.

You could stand in a pub and hear somebody say:

“Bona naff omi.”

And unless you knew Polari you wouldn’t have the faintest clue they’d just said:

“Good looking straight bloke.”

Words like:

• “vada” meaning look

• “riah” meaning hair

• “omi” for man

• “palone” for woman

All floating around London hidden in plain sight.

It fascinates me now thinking back because every generation seems to invent its own codes. Sometimes for safety. Sometimes for privacy. Sometimes just so adults, bosses, police, teachers or nosey neighbours don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

Even us kids had it really. Little phrases. Looks. Nicknames. Whole conversations adults couldn’t decode.

Nowadays the world seems desperate to drag every thought out into the open. Everything public. Everything announced. People filming their dinners, their arguments, their breakdowns and their political opinions for complete strangers before they’ve even finished their morning coffee.

Nothing hidden anymore.

No mystery left.

Maybe that’s why that little black shorthand book sticks in my mind so much.

It belonged entirely to my mum.

Her own private little world.

Until Alison cracked the code.

Honestly though…

You should’ve seen her move.