Had had and other tense moments

Why getting the hang of the past and present perfective can help your writing

My eleventh most common line-edit on students’ work - (the first ten are here) - is suggesting they pop a had into a past-tense verb. Sometimes they’re surprised, sometimes they’re not - and occasionally they confess that they’ve never really understood ‘the rules’ about this one.

Yes, there’s the old had had chestnut: my version (adapted from Wikipedia) goes like this:

A teacher asked Jo and Jane each to describe a person who’d once suffered from a cold but was now better.

The person had a cold, Jo wrote, but Jane wrote, The person had had a cold.

So Jane, where Jo had had had, had had had had; had had had a better grade at the end of the year.

Though the first thing I do when I get new software is to turn off the grammar and spell-checkers*, I suspect checking this one would give any self-respecting word-processor conniptions. It’s told to illustrate the importance of tools like punctuation and italics, which we use in writing to stand in for the intonation and emphasis that would make the meaning perfectly clear if it were read aloud. But I suspect its absurdity makes writers shy away from had had, even when it’s grammatically necessary or even the best way to do things.

What is the had had problem about? At its heart, it’s because an action in the past is not just simply past and done with: we make sense of it in the context of other events in wider time, including up to the present. To understand this, you need to remember that verbs don’t only have a tense, they can have an aspect.

• ‘simple’ forms are a bald statement of something happening: He breaks his arm. They closed the door.

• in ‘progressive’ (or ‘continuous’) aspect, they describe an action which is or was ongoing at the time we’re referring to: He is breaking his arm. They were closing the door.

• in ‘perfective’ (or ‘perfect’) aspect, they describe a finished action but in relationship to the time we are referring to: He has broken his arm (and it’s still broken). They had closed the door (by the time the storm arrived.)

Generally speaking, the ‘auxiliary’ verb which we use to give verbs a perfective aspect is have:

• Simple present: I cook. … Supper is ready.

• Simple past: I cooked. … Supper was ready.

• Simple future: I shall cook. … Supper will be ready.

  • ( a) Technically English doesn’t have a ‘future tense’ - we just express the future by adding present-tense auxiliary verbs like shall or will to the main verb, but it works like the other simple tenses, so I’ve called it that here. b) Also, these days we more often say I will where traditional formal grammar still dictates I shall. I’ll blog about that soon, I promise, but meanwhile I’ll stick to the formally correct version.)

• Present perfective: I have cooked, and supper is ready.

  • The action is now finished, but the fact that it happened is relevant to now.

• Past perfective: I had cooked, and supper was ready.

  • The action was already finished by the time we are talking about, but the fact that it had happened was relevant to the time we are talking about. If you like, the cooking is the ‘past inside the past’ of the moment when supper was ready. I think of this as being in ordinary past tense for supper being ready, and going ‘a step further back in time’ to fill in what had already happened: I had cooked.

• Future perfective: I shall have cooked, and supper will be ready

  • The action will be finished by the time we are talking about, but the fact that it will have happened is relevant to the time we are talking about. You could think of this as ‘the past inside the future’, even if at the moment of speaking or writing, the whole thing including the cooking hasn’t happened yet..

Notice how if you use just the simple forms of the verb, you can’t hold actions which take place across time within a single sentence; I had to add the ellipses to make the sequence of events clear. But with perfective forms you can do that: whether your basic statement is about the present or the past, time moves on within a single sentence, and we arrive where you need us to by the end, ready for what happened next.**

Had had trouble arises because have is used not only as an auxiliary verb, but as a verb with its own meaning in its own right:

• Simple present: I have beautiful hats.

• Simple past: I had beautiful hats.

• Simple future: I shall have beautiful hats.

• Present perfective: I have had beautiful hats, but I have decided not to buy any more because I always lose them very quickly.

  • note that always lose them is the ‘habitual present’; the implication is that carelessness with hats is part of the speaker’s nature. If it nowadays it isn’t, the sentence could finish with another present perfective … I have decided not to buy any more because I have always lost them very quickly . The losses are in the past, but are relevant to the present.

• Past perfective: I had had beautiful hats, but I had decided not to buy any more because I always lost them very quickly.

  • similarly, always lost them, being simple past tense, implies a tendency which is still current at the time of the speaker’s decision. Again, if at the time of the speaker’s decision the tendency is definitely in the past, you could go for … I had decided not to buy any more because I had always lost them very quickly.

• Future perfective: I shall have had beautiful hats, but I will decide not to buy any more because I shall have always lost them …

  • This is getting a bit silly, but I did want to demonstrate how it all works. Of course, if one or more hads really stick out, you may well be able to recast the sentence. I’d had many beautiful hats, but never one that didn’t get lost at some point. Only a spendthrift would buy another. You will never regret learning to perm and com sentences.

You almost certainly do need had had when you are ‘stepping back’ from the current period of the narrative, to show us the past. There’s more about flashbacks and backstory, in the Tool-Kit; for now what matters is that using past perfective forms helps make sure the reader goes with you when you move. Once you’ve got your reader safely back in the past, you can revert to (mostly) simple past.

The house was beautiful but cold, and even though I used three firelighters, the damn wood was too damp to catch. Of course, Jo had put the log deliveries away. And Jo had known which logs to pick - and Jo had always laid the fire. I sat back on my heels in a cloud of dank paraffiny smoke. She’d had no need of firelighters, she’d just had that magic touch, twisting a bit of newspaper, chucking on a handful of sticks, and then the logs would be glowing and she would stand up. ‘Red or white?’

‘Red,’ I’d say.

Then came the day when we opened the champagne and drank to our future, and the firelight wrapped us up in warmth. ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked as we lay, slightly drunk, on the hearthrug and watched the sparks flying up the ancient chimney. We had finished the bottle, but neither of us wanted to let go of the other and fetch more.

Notice a few things:

• One way to fade the necessary hads out a bit is to contract them: She’d had no need … she’d just. Whether the slightly more informal, speech-like contraction feels right for any given example is best judged by reading aloud. It often also works with would, as in I’d say. (So if you decided to un-contract something, you might need to check if it should be a had or a would.)

• Even when you’ve moved into the simple past of the flashback, you may well still need past perfective: We had finished the bottle, but neither of us wanted…

• If the main narrative is in present tense, when you want to express actions which are in the past for the ‘present moment’ of the story, just think the same thing: take one step back:

  • Even though I use three firelighters, the damn wood is too damp to catch. Of course, Jo put the log deliveries away. And Jo knew which logs to pick, and Jo always laid the fire. She had no need of firelighters, she just had that magic touch.

• A handy check if you’ve got the move between simple past and past perfective is to temporarly pop a now in: we had finished the bottle, but now neither of us… If you think your reader would appreciate a hand-hold, you might even decided to leave it there. Similarly, I have had beautiful hats, but I’ve now decided not to buy any more.

• Another handy check for the ‘step back’ can be to try popping in an already: we had already finished the bottle.

• she would stand up is the ‘habitual past’ equivalent of the ‘habitual present’, but it’s more obviously habitual; in present tense you’ve only got she stands up for both habitual and specific actions. One strong reason for using past tense for your main narrative is how many more options it gives you for these crucial relationships of action to time.

• In this little example my slide from the ‘present moment’ of the unlit fire to the ‘past moment’ involves the would of the ‘habitual past’. It actually just came out that way in drafting, but I’ve stuck with it because it shows another helpful trick for taking the reader with you: the ‘habitual past’ is easily conjured for the reader, and from there it’s only a small step to a specific past moment, with then came the day an explicit hand-hold for the reader.

• If you’re wondering about all those sentences beginning with and, try this Itchy Bitesized post.

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* Having said I turn off spell-checkers, they do have their uses as a first-stage proof-reader. Just remember that it won’t know if you meant rain, rein or reign, nor yet there, their, they’re or a Shakespearean th’ heir.

** Interestingly, when I’ve taught academic writing to students whose first language doesn’t do the perfective thing, they’ve struggled with this kind of statement: Brown has demonstrated that Smith’s analysis was correct but did not go far enough. Here, the implication is that Brown’s demonstration happened in the past, but is still valid and relevant today. Scholarly writers are (or should be) always aware of the context in history of the bricks that they’re using to build an argument, and the nuance available to you by understanding past and present perfective forms is a useful tool for expressing it.

Image credit: Zoltan Tasi at Unsplash