What’s in a name? Depends which one….

Two names, and an identity crisis? It runs in the family

A young Miranda Ruth Mobey with. her mother in 1959

One of the odd coincidences of my family history (apart from the fact that my parents were first cousins) is that myself, my mother and my grandmother were all known by names other than the ones intended. In my mother’s case her name was meant to be Ginny in honour of her long-dead grandmother, but in a revealing mistranscription this was entered on her birth certificate as Jeanne, and she was always known by this strangely spelt Anglo-French hybrid of Jean, which was also her second forename. Her father, who registered the birth, was blamed for this confusion.

My own situation was even weirder. My father loved the name Miranda, after the character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He died before I was born and my mother wished to honour his memory by bestowing it on the child he never knew. However, her family loathed the name, largely for reasons to do with social class, so I became known by my second name, Ruth. This has continued for much of my life; I will forever be a monument to my grieving mother’s lack of resolve. It’s a complicated legacy.

My mother probably didn’t do me any favours by exhorting me to “be more Miranda”, which basically meant behaving in a middle-class, refined way. We also lived with my grandparents, who had a very different view. They watched Opportunity Knocks on ITV while my mother read poetry to me and struggled to pick up BBC Radio 3 on her transistor radio. Once, during a broadcast of the comic opera Patience (what irony!) she became so frustrated that she smashed in the delicate grille on the tinny device with her knuckles. That seems to sum up my childhood sense of being halfway down the stairs, like Christopher Robin, or Kermit’s nephew if you’re a Muppet fan.

Christopher Robin halfway down the stairs, illustration by E H Shepherd

Halfway down the stairs isn’t up and isn’t down
It isn’t in the nursery, and it isn’t in the town
And all sorts of funny thoughts run round my head
It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead
AA Milne

Of course, there was nothing other than sheer force of habit to stop my adopting the name Miranda if I chose to do so, and there was a significant turning point in my life when I fully intended to do just that. I was about to begin an MA in Shakespeare and Theatre Studies in Stratford-upon-Avon - there was even a boat floating on the river with Miranda painted on its prow. What could be more appropriate? But that resolution didn’t survive the first meet-and-greet session. I just couldn’t think of myself as Miranda. I had been Ruth for too long.

The shift to Miranda began twelve years later, in very different circumstances. I was lying on a gurney, gowned and ready for a biopsy. I was already 90% certain that I had breast cancer, which turned out to be the case, when someone called me Miranda, naturally enough since the name was written on my file. In my experience medical professionals are generally very sensitive to using a patient’s preferred name, so I had every opportunity to point out their error, but something held me back. No, I thought, I want this tumour to be bounded, separated from me as quickly as possible. I do not want cancer to be the defining experience of my life or my identity. For the duration of my treatment, I shall be known as Miranda.

If you’ve ever had a serious illness you will know that they are not removed from your experience quite that tidily (I am in remission now but who knows what lies ahead?) But indeed, I was known as Miranda all the way through the treatment, and as my friends complimented me on my bravery (which seemed to come from a place beyond myself) I really did feel that I had become a different person.

I have never completely adopted the name Miranda, but interestingly I find myself owning it much more readily than I used to. Perhaps a year of therapy helped, or simply that I found I couldn’t just draw a neat line around cancer-me and say she was some kind of aberration. Besides, though I feel truly saddened that my mother capitulated on something as significant as my name, I don’t reject my working-class heritage as completely as she did. As my husband reminds me, “You can take the girl out of Blackpool but you can’t take Blackpool out of the girl”. I continue to enjoy Lancashire dialect poetry, broaden my vowel sounds in certain social settings, and enjoy fish and chips smothered in tomato ketchup. It is as much a part of me as my mother’s hopes of me going to university to be with “nice people like myself.” That got me into Oxford, where I lasted precisely three weeks.

There is, in fact, a lot to be said for multiple identities. None of us fit neatly into pre-defined boxes. Even my breast tumour needed two separate surgeries to get everything safely out. And I can never remove cancer, or being a fatherless child, from my history, but nor am I completely subject to my dead father’s wishes. I will be Miranda when it suits me, but remain Ruth to my family and friends who have known me by that name for so long.

And, just in case you’re wondering, I answer readily to both.