Opposing the smiles and perfections of the consumer 'lifestyle', this slight hint that all is not well - a ladder in Mrs Barr's stockings. But it comes into the poem associated with 'rumour' - gossip. And stockings are already 'sexualised' - especially associated with 'American Tan' - suggesting something of the popular gossip of the 40s regarding English girls, nylons and American soldiers. Perhaps there are rumours about Mrs Barr's past; certainly for Mrs Barr, the 'consumerist' dream isn't quite perfect.
Looking at the use of language - a way of talking, with its rituals, gaps and difficulties - is the means through which Duffy aims to diagnose the way of life in the 50s. There's two levels of speech in the first verse: the 'litany' of the names of desired products, and the level of 'rumour' - embarrassing, necessarily 'sly' as it will be about those things in life which are not perfect, which should not (for the wives at least) be named directly. This difference between what can be spoken, and what not, becomes the subject of the poem - and also, the means of the speaker's 'rebellion', the defining feature of her difference to the wives.
If the tiny ladder in the first verse introduced something not quite right, the second verse begins by focusing on the gap between the comfortable appearance of 'public' speech, and the uncomfortable 'reality' underneath. The marriages are simply acknowledged, judged, by the poem as 'terrible'. But not clearly spoken about then - the only sound they produce is 'crackled' - a word suggesting an absence of clear articulation as well as a continuing disturbing energy, like static. The noise of the suppressed conversation about the bad marriages is compared to the crackling of cellophane (a material new to the period, just as 'polyester' is - both materials suggesting something of the artificiality of the time, its false glossiness.)
The words are given capitals as though what is being named is a kind of unique place. 'Lounge' - as opposed to front room/back room or sitting room/living room - becomes fashionable at that period of time as more 'posh'. Duffy is able to suggest some of the pretensions of these wives by a mere word, a capital. Like 'Pyrex', it suggests a whole tone of voice, an attitude.
The wives in the lounge are described in threatening terms: '...Eyes, hard / as the bright stones in engagement rings....sharp hands....’. This atmosphere of threat leads to the poet's punishment in the last verse. The wives spell out the 'embarrassing' words - that vaguely funny habit of adults when speaking of something difficult with a child present. But Duffy gives the action a suggestion of violence - to language and a proper knowledge of the world - while the wives find what the word signifies also, in their turn, threatening: ...(it) tensed the air like an accident. This way of (not) dealing with the relation between language and the world is what is taught the poet by her mother and her friends. The world then cannot be understood or read - it's a form of just pretending to read. What's left out is an odd collection of things which threatens their world's neatness: cancer, or sex, or debts.
I find something slightly odd about the tone of this line. It refers back to the spelling out in verse 2 perhaps - but it also seems an 'academic' scoring of points against the less well-educated wives: a kind of 'dig' at them. Perhaps it's a pre-emptive dig at them in the poem, as it leads to the final lines, with their defeat of the child.
If the main part of this verse has focused on what the wives leave out of their 'world', then the last two lines refer to the poet/child's own curiosity and discovery of the world beyond the lounge. This process of discovery is represented by the child's perception of Nature.
The butterfly (a figure for Nature) has its own language for the child - though as yet not fully understood (the butterfly stammered...).Although the issue for the wives will be the child's repeating of the boy's words, and not the boy's aggression towards her -and that might seem surprising, the child herself knows that her repetition will indeed shock - and for her, that's the point. She wants to shock; precociously she wants to strike back against the wives' censorship of the world. '...a thrilled malicious pause / salted my tongue like an imminent storm’: note particularly the word 'malicious'; this is a conscious rebellion.
The satiric energy of the poem has been fuelled by a desire for revenge for the humiliation of the child; all these years later the poet still recalls the names of the women to whom she had to apologise.The 'traditional' punishment for swearing: washing the child's mouth out with soap, after having said something 'dirty’. The poem might be regarded as a recreation of a whole past way of life from that one continuing remembered sensory detail. It also perhaps suggests a kind of motivation for aspects of Duffy's style of expression - to react against that effort to clean up the world and to make language clean and comfortable.
