Common People
Page 1
For everyone who finds their lives written in these stories
With special thanks to Paula Hawkins for generously supporting this book
Contents
Dedication
Foreword by Kit de Waal
Tough
Tony Walsh (aka Longfella)
Working Class: An Escape Manual
Lisa McInerney
Don’t Mention Class!
Katy Massey
Shy Bairns Get Nowt
Chris McCrudden
The Funeral and the Wedding
Jodie Russian-Red
Little Boxes
Stuart Maconie
Which Floor?
Loretta Ramkissoon
Misspent Youth
Emma Purshouse
Darts
Cathy Rentzenbrink
This Place Is Going to the Dogs
Louise Powell
Underdogs
Helen Wilber
The Dark Hole of the Head
Jill Dawson
Domus Operandi
Riley Rockford
Steve
Daljit Nagra
No Lay, No Pay
Paul Allen
Any Relation?
Louise Doughty
I Am Not Your Tituba
Eva Verde
Uniform
Damian Barr
Play
Adam Sharp
A Pear in a Tin of Peaches
Lisa Blower
A Brief History of Industrial Action,
Vauxhall Motors, Ellesmere Port
Lynne Voyce
The Things We Ate
Kit de Waal
Night
Elaine Williams
Driftwood
Adelle Stripe
Matoose Rowsay
Jenny Knight
On Class and the Countryside
Anita Sethi
Stalin on the Mantelpiece
Ruth Behan
Night of the Hunchback
Paul McVeigh
Passengers
Shaun Wilson
Dear Nobody
Alex Wheatle
Black Cat Dreaming
Astra Bloom
Snakes and Ladders
Malorie Blackman
Detail
Julie Noble
Class and Publishing: Who Is Missing from the Numbers?
Dave O’Brien
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Supporters
Copyright
Foreword
I started this foreword a dozen times. I thought I’d start off with something witty and literary to show that common people can quote the classics and should be taken seriously.
Then I decided, no. Be yourself. So I began a riff about what it’s like to be working class. How, when all the world wants the same thing – a long life with enough to eat and a sound roof, a good education, meaningful, paid employment on safe streets and a reason to laugh from time to time – working-class people have to pick a few things off the list and do without the others. Bleak, I thought. Too bleak.
Context is where I went next. Facts and figures. Dazzle them with data. I was going to spend 500 words on how many of us there are, how much we live on or can’t live on, by what horrendous percentage living standards have declined and poverty has increased, and the precarious nature of working-class life today. I would demonstrate, with a graph or preferably a Venn diagram, the grim intersection of class, race, disability and gender. But there’s already an academic in this book who does that better than I can, so I thought I’d better leave the numbers to the expert.
I wanted to throw in an amusing anecdote about the editors and agents who took me aside at book launches and whispered, ‘I’m working class too, you know,’ and I heard in their confession a pride and nostalgia for the lives they had left behind or had to hide. I also heard relief that, at last, someone on these pages might tell their story and say it’s OK to be working class, you can step out of the closet (or broom cupboard). But I’m not a comedian and the anecdotes weren’t that funny.
In the end, fittingly, this foreword is an opportunity to thank everyone who has supported this book, this cause, this telling of untold stories. To all the writer-development agencies (New Writing North, Literature Works, Spread the Word, Writing East Midlands, Writing West Midlands and the National Centre for Writing in Norwich): thank you for the massively difficult task of sifting through so many submissions and providing us with the seventeen excellent memoirs by brilliant new writers whose lives demonstrate such resilience, humour, solidarity and courage. To all the published writers who leapt on board at the first opportunity, lending their names and their stories to this book of common people: thank you for your generosity and faith in this project and for standing alongside us.
And to you, you who have pledged good money and time, who have tweeted and liked and cheered from the sidelines, thank you from all of us, sincerely.
Most of all, these memoirs, written in celebration and not apology, are dedicated to everyone who has yearned to see their life on the page, who has hoped one day to read about working-class lives told by the working-class people who lived them. Today’s the day. Enjoy.
Kit de Waal
Tough
Tony Walsh (aka Longfella)
They don’t like it when we make it despite all their ifs and cuts
They don’t like it when we take it as our right to shake things up
They don’t like it when rough voices start demanding better choices
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
They don’t like it when our stories rise above the kitchen sink
They don’t like it when we learn, remember, organise or think
They don’t like it when we’ve knowledge so they price us out of college
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
They don’t like it when we’re standing on our own, on our own terms
They don’t like it when our candle lights another so it burns
They don’t like it when we’re spotted in a slot they’ve not allotted
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
They don’t like it when we’re uppity and throw a ladder down
They don’t like it when we’ve sussed it and we grow and gather round
They don’t like it when we minions have articulate opinions
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
They don’t like it when our pens begin to join up all the dots
They don’t like it when we send back what we’ve learned to the have-nots
They don’t like it when our writers can ignite us into fighters
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
They don’t like it when the common people sing a single song
They don’t like it when forgotten people realise we’re strong
They don’t like when race and gender join with class as one agenda
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
They don’t like it when our classes are not cowered but empowered
They don’t like it when the masses clock the power that is ours
They don’t like it when their victims will not suck their fucking dictums
But it’s tough, we’ve had enough and we are coming
Millions strong!
Yes, it’s tough, we’ve had enough.
And we are coming.
Working Class: An Escape Manual
Lisa McInerney
Of the various social classes, working class is the most slippery. If, like me, you were born into a working-class family or community, do not be
concerned about being labelled in perpetuity. The world is lousy with people who will happily erase your identity, and you don’t even have to pay them.
This is a big statement to make; after all, is it not that social class exists in all of its impermeability for a reason? If social class was an unsettled state, then surely it wouldn’t be social class at all; it would be called ‘current circumstances’ and we’d all be flinging it on and off like modish headwear. But, alarmed by alarmist reports that membership numbers are shrinking, the middle classes seem to have taken the drastic measure of attempting to induct as many wretches as possible. And, wearing otherness as though it’s a suit of armour, the working classes seem to have adopted adoption as a viable method of dealing with the successful. Whatever about median income and the evolution of Marxist theory, if you’ve got a pair of chinos or a third-level education, prepare for assimilation.
I write about working-class characters. I do so not because I want to redress the balance in English-language literature, where characters seem to be comfortably middle class by default, but because it’s my default.
No car, no holidays, no opinion on Joyce; a council house, a cynic’s caution, an army of cousins.
I have highfalutin ideas about storytellers’ responsibility; there are certain stories that are yours to tell (‘This task was appointed to you, Frodo of the Squalor, and if you do not find a way, no one will’). Still, it surprises me when I am asked questions about my supposedly noble motives, or referenced as a writer who writes about lives that are not often featured front and centre in literature. It shouldn’t surprise me, because we’re all very worried about the homogenisation of literary fiction, but it does, because if I’m working class why wouldn’t I write about working-class lives? It’s not as if I’m doing it as court-ordered community service.
A potential explanation is that writers, like characters, are assumed to be comfortably middle class by default, and because no one likes cognitive dissonance, the working-class writer will be encouraged towards redefinition. It’s quite rude to say to a working-class writer, ‘I am experiencing cognitive dissonance, so if you wouldn’t mind warping into something more manageable?’ so attempted erasures tend to be a little more subtle. But don’t worry. I’m doggy-wide, and I’ve identified a few and outlined them for you.
Bonus points if your assimilation discredits the working class as a whole!
Competence is a foot out the door
There exists this canard that aptitude is something you pay for, that talent, hard work and tenacity are part of a success story only when they’re moulded into a useful whole by an expensive education, one-on-one tuition, mentorships agreed on golf courses, or good old, pre-Reformation-style nepotism. Being first-rate at something that isn’t drinking tins, childbearing or bare-knuckle boxing is a sure-fire tell that the subject was only tentatively working-class in the first place. So handy that a person’s entire background, upbringing and personal philosophy can be peeled off like a purifying face mask if they make good, for the past is something to be overcome and not celebrated.
I spoke not so long ago to a broadcaster who asked whether published writers could still be working class, as if aesthetics is all that separate the social classes. We got a little further into the conversation and it came out that his partner had suggested he wasn’t working class any more because he had become a broadcaster. Farewell to all that built your character, bucko, you’re a bourgeois boy now. In this scenario, accomplishment mutates not only your present circumstances but all of your past experiences. In this scenario, class is simplified so as to be about money, and, occasionally, moral fortitude; its parameters don’t really exist unless you’re inept, in which case adversity is just deserts.
All a working-class person needs to do to become middle class is be good at something. Those who benefit from a class system – they are few but they are powerful – will ensure the class system is maintained. Ergo, we cannot have the idea that working-class people are just as talented, hard-working or tenacious as anyone else, otherwise ‘class’ could revert to its Marxist definitions and all and sundry will be wondering how, exactly, one seizes the means of production. So the lesson is: pick a skill and work on it, and you’ll be courted by mortgage providers before you know it.
Working for the man means being his emissary
For a time I worked for a company that manufactured and fitted windows and doors. I was hired to answer the phone and to answer emails, and in order to be all right at both I developed a clear phone voice and took care with my grammar and punctuation. Also I ironed my clothes before I came to work in them.
One day I answered the phone to a local councillor, who proceeded to eat the head off me over a delayed repair for a constituent’s windows. We had not repaired the windows because the required part had not yet come in, but the client lived in a council estate and had assumed we were dragging our heels because the company was staffed with moonlighting nobs who hated the poor. She had contacted the local councillor, who hoped one day very soon to be a local TD, so he got on his high horse (stoned donkey, if he’d been committed to his theme) and charged into battle. I explained to him the problem was a lack of casement hinges and not snobbery, but he was still muttering darkly as he hung up. The main thing was that he assumed the building company I worked for represented Opulent Ireland, despite the fact that we were a motley bunch of white van men and incompetent typists. ‘Working for the man’ had become ‘endorsing the nefarious plotting of the ruling class’. The only problem was that my wages didn’t match the job title.
The other thing was that now that I had a full-time job it was assumed that I would be sending my child to a private school. I felt utterly transformed when a colleague expressed confusion at my plans – if you could call them plans and not lackadaisical assumptions – to send them to the local community school. ‘Not into town?’ she said, ‘town’ meaning the city eight miles up the road. ‘You haven’t put their name down anywhere?’ This colleague was a job-sharer. She worked one week on, one week off, and though she had a large and beautiful home it seemed that she worked to keep her considerable brain active rather than out of financial necessity.
‘No,’ I said, calmly, but that evening I went out and bought a Lexus NX and Debrett’s A–Z of Modern Manners.
Long words make magic spells
‘Moratorium’ is a common enough word in Ireland, because it refers to that blessed practice not every country can take for granted: the cessation of all election coverage in the media from 2 p.m. the day before voting. Ostensibly this gives the electorate a chance to reflect before heading to the polls; in Ireland we usually reflect on how aggravating and wrong the politicians are. So perhaps the word ‘moratorium’ is not so commonly used in other English-speaking countries, but it gets fair use in Ireland, and my character Ryan Cusack, who appears in my novels The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles, is Irish, and on one occasion he uses it. Thereafter were raised little red flags. How would Ryan, being working class, know a word like ‘moratorium’? Was the question not how would his author, being working class, know the word ‘moratorium’? She learned it from the telly, as it happens.
Another reader said that for the sake of realism she had wished that even one of the Miracles characters had been a moron. If this was simply because she prized intellectual variety in a novel’s cast, that would have been fine, but I suspect there was a little more to it, because it’s rare that readers cry out for more simpletons in books about horny academics or the disorders of the gentry. Working-class people, know your place! But do not know your ‘vicinity’ or ‘domicile’, because they’re big words for middle-class people.
I’ve gone on about this before, because I am loquacious and pugnacious and a bunch of other things working-class people are but can’t spell. About a year before I wrote this essay, I wrote an article for the Guardian about how one’s use of language is not a class signifier, because language is not a catapult to take you f
rom plebeian to toff. However, no one ever listens to me, so the upwardly mobile should make use of this language scepticism. Club Middle Class? A thesaurus and a lozenge and you’re in, mate.
Feminism is for ladies of leisure, socialism is for dandies
One thing I’ve learned from watching those of us on the left tear each other to shreds on social media is that there’s no such thing as a working-class feminist. This was news to me, and news I’m sure to a lot of engaged, enraged and activist women. Surely the desire to see gender parity across all strata of society is not particular to the moneyed intelligentsia? Surely, my arse. Idealism and empathy, once traits associated with revolutionaries or mothers with an awful lot of sons, are in contemporary terms but fleeting fits of bourgeois conscience. Feminism is a sewing circle for the upper crust and socialism has something to do with champagne.
This is particularly confusing when you consider that the people most likely to benefit from feminist or socialist policies are the disadvantaged, and for feminism or socialism to triumph there would have to be a dismantling of the class system. It seems a pernicious trick to insist that asking for social change is an activity for the people who are least likely to want social change, but there you go. Out yourself as a feminist or a socialist and you will immediately be awarded your middle-class citizenship and expelled from the terraces, which, for some reason in this scenario, are peopled by Conservative voters and Men’s Rights Activists.