Common People

by Kit de Waal

  But it was hard work. My mother got up several times in the night to run hundreds of towels through the washing machine at home. She drove to wholesalers to buy industrial-sized bottles of bleach and tile cleaner. She continuously hired and, on occasion, had to fire a stream of women, many of whom thought that working in a sauna was easy money, then quickly discovered it wasn’t. She booked adverts in the local paper; she kept accounts. In fact, Mam was an exemplary small businesswoman right up until the day Aristotle’s was raided by the West Yorkshire vice squad.

  On the day Aristotle’s was raided it made the front page of the Yorkshire Evening Post. Ten policemen burst in simultaneously through the front door and an unused back door upstairs. An elderly doctor, a regular of Pamela’s, got the shock of his life. He was allowed to dress and leave after giving his personal details. This is key to the role of police raids in shutting Mam down – after the raid and the publicity, the regular punters, who are the bread and butter of a business like Aristotle’s, become too scared to come near the place.

  The police took my mother to the police station and presented her with their evidence. They’d obtained this by sending two constables into the sauna to pose as punters in the preceding weeks.

  ‘I’m sick of only getting handjobs – that’s all they’ll pay for,’ one officer of the law complained of his employers.

  Understandably, my mother had little sympathy.

  They already had days, times, sums of money that had changed hands, but this didn’t stop them questioning her for hours and dragging up everything they could, including a minute enquiry as to exactly why Pamela was wearing stockings at the time of the raid.

  The worst part for her was when they put her in the cell.

  ‘Get in there!’ said one of the officers.

  ‘I haven’t killed anyone, you know!’ she reminded him, but he ignored her and slammed the cell door shut. They had put her in one of the men’s cells with an awful stench and only a wooden bed to sit on. She had had enough.

  ‘What’s she doing now?’ she heard someone ask.

  ‘Crying her eyes out,’ came the anonymous reply.

  And it was true.

  It might have been the questioner who came and moved her to a woman’s cell. A stainless-steel toilet and a woolly waffle blanket lent it an air of relative luxury. He brought her food too. Bread with Stork margarine on it and salad so bland it was like water on the plate. She just had time to reflect that the salad could have been improved no end by a spring onion or two, when one of the kinder officers came to tell her she was free to go.

  ‘We don’t usually get people like you in here,’ said the young man who escorted her to the desk sergeant.

  And that was the problem with the whole business, really, as Mam says now, ‘We weren’t the types to go to prison,’ so a career as a criminal queen pin was never really on the cards. She opened up the next day, of course, but a fine of £2,000 and being raided for a second time shortly afterwards would eventually shut Aristotle’s down for ever and force the good women who worked there in safety into other, less reputable establishments or out onto the streets.

  Today, I exist in the world as an educated brown woman who makes a living in the arts. I am middle-aged and, perhaps, middle class. As such, it may seem as if I have ‘overcome’ the circumstances of my childhood, somehow outperformed appropriate expectations of a girlhood like mine. But I do not believe I have overcome it. In fact, I believe I was made by it. I was partly constructed by the good women of Aristotle’s, and what small successes I have had in negotiating adulthood are because of what I learned from them. But still, I have found it difficult here to find the exact words to explain how this happened. I have tried to find a vocabulary that is specific, not slippery, words that are fixed in time, not so easily subject to resignification. I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that they won’t mean one thing today then something quite different tomorrow.

  Shy Bairns Get Nowt

  Chris McCrudden

  My mam and dad grew up half a mile from each other in Whiteleas. It was an estate built on the edge of South Shields in the housing boom of the 1950s, when the county council laid a utopia of modest working-class houses over what had been ‘white leazes’, or daisy-covered meadows. I imagine they were designed by a council architect. If so, they built with a child’s eye. Every one of those houses, with their four windows, pitched roof and red brick is that archetypal shape you get when you hand a crayon to a five-year-old and bid them draw you a house. When they were built, they were a dream of progress for people who’d grown up in the slum terraces near Tyne Dock. They were new, clean, and, barring a bedroom here or a bigger garden there, uniform. The perfect setting, you’d think, for a working-class monoculture. Yet the truth was more complicated for us, because we were a family split down the middle by a single saying: ‘Shy bairns1 get nowt.’

  It was my grandma Joan’s maxim. If you didn’t ask, you didn’t get. My dad had heard it his whole life but my mam hated it. So much that it became her favourite shorthand for how dad’s family weren’t quite as respectable as us. If they were respectable, my brothers and I wouldn’t have come home from visits to Joan’s house with fifty-pence pieces won on the horses, clothes smelling of cigarettes, bodies and voices thrumming from refined sugar.

  Teas where my mam’s mother – my gran Hilda – lived were a more Protestant affair. We got lemonade (in the north-east of the 1980s, drinking plain water was considered a bizarre fad), malted milk biscuits and brown-bread sandwiches that slaked the tinder-dryness of tinned tuna with malt vinegar and sunflower margarine. The hostess trolley in her sitting room housed the same bottle of Bristol Cream sherry and Malibu from one Christmas to the next. Money still exchanged hands, but usually as an act of aggressive generosity. I lost count of the number of times my mam pressed a tenner into my hands at the end of a visit and made me hide it behind the carriage clock. I was a guerrilla fighter in a war where mother and daughter were determined to do everything for each other, yet not owe each other a penny.

  It took me a long time to realise that the two sets of grandparents might have lived three streets apart, but were from different wings of the working classes. They lived in the same houses and sent their children to the same schools, so asserted their differences in more subtle ways. Not that Hilda’s attitude to my dad’s side of the family was ever subtle. As a child in the 1930s, Hilda’s nickname was ‘Sarah Bernhardt’2 and she maintained a Victorian tragedienne’s sense of injured dignity well into her eighties. That her daughter Ann married my dad at all was chief among those indignities.

  Hers was a dislike born of proximity. Literally, because Dad’s family also lived in Whiteleas. Figuratively, because the only distinguishing factor between their lives was Hilda’s performance of superiority. While Joan fed us cream cakes bought at the local freezer centre, Hilda got the bus into town and bought Marks & Spencer’s date-and-walnut loaf. It was a cake that none of us liked, but whose wholesome ingredients and ‘St Michael’ label meant we could feel good about ourselves while it went stale in the cellophane. Joan’s cream cakes, things of airy nothing, felt wonderful at the time, but I remember little of them now. I do, however, have photographic recall of the dry crumb and gritty buttercream of the date-and-walnut loaf: a cake that begs you to enjoy yourself, but not too much.

  This was because Hilda had aspirations but, like her favourite cake, not too many. She had wanted better things for Ann. For her to finish her A levels and train as a teacher, which was a secure and respectable thing to do until you were married. Ann, however, had wanted different things: to go to art college or be a nursery nurse, neither of which were respectable enough for Hilda. Too downwardly mobile, too louche, too insecure. Fast forward to the end of the 1990s and I would have the same disagreements with my parents about studying drama instead of their secure choice for me, which was law. The difference was that Ann knew from her own teenage experience that sometimes it was better to back down than br
eak a relationship.

  More or less the last thing my mam ever said to me before she died of cancer at the age of fifty-three was that she missed Hilda, who by that time was alive in body only, her mind curdled by Alzheimer’s disease. Yet while they loved each other fiercely and lived in each other’s lives in a way that I haven’t been able to do with my own parents, I don’t think Hilda and Ann ever liked each other much. There was a chasm in the middle of their relationship that dated right back to the time when Ann had tested the limits of Hilda’s aspirations for her. And which had led, crabwise, as all major life decisions seem to proceed, to her walking down the aisle with my dad.

  There was a story in the family about Hilda’s horror when she found out Ann was going to marry my dad. Not so much because she disliked her future son-in-law, but because she realised she knew his mother. Joan was a regular customer in the shop Hilda served in, and a woman who committed the ultimate crime of asking, ‘Do you take coupons, hinny?’ To Hilda, who couldn’t go into a shop without buying something for fear of offending the shopkeeper, this was unforgivable. So Joan and Hilda’s ideological clash provided both the mood music of my childhood and the root of my confused relationship with class and aspiration ever since. It was Joan’s maxim of ‘shy bairns get nowt’ against Hilda’s leitmotif of social anxiety, ‘What will people think?’

  I sometimes wonder what our lives would have been like if Ann hadn’t taken her mother’s part against the sin of asking for what you want. It didn’t stop her wanting things for me and my brothers, but it did make it impossible for us to articulate what we wanted without feeling like upstarts. Even now I think of success as being something you’re invited to participate in. That was how Ann thought things were: you worked hard at school, you got good exam results, and that was how you got into university. Then you did the same thing all over again when you got a job, preferably in one of the classic professions. I think she believed that life had an external examinations board. If you got the right number of marks, then the light of recognition would shine down upon you and lift you up to the next level of achievement. I was in my early thirties before I realised that opportunity is rarely offered and mostly snatched. I am my mother’s child: the shy bairn who waits their turn.

  There was another problem with ‘shy bairns get nowt’. Not only were we taught that it was vulgar, it was an entirely sensual creed. If aspiration (but not too much) accumulated on one side of the family, the other side was about pleasure, because Joan was a lotus eater. The priest at her funeral in 2016 (who never met her) spun a marvellous work of fiction out of Joan’s life, which revolved around the pleasures of gossip, instant coffee, the TV and cigarettes. He turned her good-natured idleness into a lesson of a woman consumed in caring for her extended family. I know she cared: nobody at that funeral needed a priest to tell them that. But it was easier to understand her by how she consumed: indiscriminately, sensually, seated. One thing I’ve inherited from Joan is her grabby attitude towards gratifying the senses, yet I’ve often wished that was better directed. I have just enough front to take the last biscuit, but I’ve never been able to ask for a pay rise.

  Since I became an adult and a reader, I’ve read a lot about the supposed poverty of ambition among working-class households in Britain. That doesn’t quite match my experience. Ambition was never a dirty word in Joan’s house, but it was an insubstantial concept. What hopes Joan did have for my dad had the same airy quality and flat aftertaste as her cream cakes. He could be a professional footballer, and if that didn’t work out there was always the Coal Board. Ann, however, was a more practical woman. So when she left work, which you still did when you got married in 1977, she got a new job steering my dad, then her children out of their backgrounds on the Whiteleas estate. Because while Hilda idolised her friend Margaret, with her genteel flat full of porcelain figurines, Ann made a little shrine in her heart to Mrs Thatcher’s ideas of self-help.

  First came the flat – bought not rented, and not in Whiteleas – and then the houses when I and then my brothers came along. She manoeuvred my dad out of his dead-end job with the Coal Board and into the police force, where there was better pay, a final-salary pension and, most importantly, no prospect of Mrs Thatcher’s handbag full of redundancies. It put Dad, whose family were coal miners, on the wrong side of the picket lines in 1984. But that just gave physical form to the ideological battle that had raged between the families since Joan asked Hilda if she took coupons.

  I remember my childhood in the 1980s and early 1990s as a series of bubbles. Our progress bubble, symbolised by home ownership and reproduction mahogany furniture, had a tendency to pop. Sometimes we’d have good patches and go abroad for holidays. Other times, when interest rates or my dad’s dreamy attitude towards money management exploded in our faces, we’d sell up and move to a different house with a bigger mortgage to cover the gaps. Between the crash of 1987 and 1994 we moved house five times. What we never moved out of, however, was that awkward, liminal space between classes. My parents’ ambitions for their sons started to focus on things like university. Ann got Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, served pasta and binned her chip pan. Yet we were still perilously close to Whiteleas. We even moved back there for a few months between houses, my brothers, my dad and I disturbing the hallowed quietness of Hilda’s home. Because even shy bairns make noise.

  But Whiteleas was changing too. Across the estate, laid-off coal and shipyard workers spent Mrs Thatcher’s redundancy payments on her Right-to-Buy scheme. First the privately owned front gardens grew fences and walls, then new doors and windows that swapped council utility for faux-Georgian moulding and stained glass. A few bohemian souls even stone-cladded their houses, before Coronation Street made a sly joke of the activity. And it was Right-to-Buy that tipped the balance in the families’ fortunes. My dad and his sister talked Joan into buying her house. Hilda was immovable: she wanted no one’s help. So she began her slow spiral downwards. She gave up the house, moving into a small flat in sheltered accommodation. Here she didn’t have to worry about the heating bills, but was operatically scandalised by her neighbours, who enlivened their last years by having affairs with one another. Then came dementia, and the flat became a tiny room in a care home around the corner from Joan’s house in Whiteleas, where Hilda died in 2010. She left enough behind her to cover her funeral.

  Joan died more comfortably. She stayed in her house, which my dad redecorated for her, until Alzheimer’s disease scrambled her mind as well and took her first to a (better) care home and from us in 2016. The house is still there. My granddad John lived on in it, cared for by my dad, until he died at the beginning of 2018, which was the last time I went to Whiteleas.

  As we were waiting for the rest of the family to arrive before his funeral, my brothers and I laid out some snacks. I washed the teacups that were kept for best, so never used, and used them. My brother looked for a bowl for olives and cubes of Manchego cheese and I plated up sausage rolls. We served Nespresso coffee and Yorkshire tea. And I can’t think of a better metaphor than that spread – in a privately owned council house, on an estate intended to give working families a better start in life than the slums – for our muddled position between the working and the middle classes.

  If my relationship with class is so muddled, maybe that’s because the patterns I have to describe it in are so uneven. In nearly forty years on the planet I’ve seen so many stories about the subtle permutations within middle-class life and about five or six for the working classes. We tend to flatten a whole spectrum of experiences into a few tired tropes: the boy or girl done good, the escape from poverty, the sink estate rife with drugs and teenage pregnancies. Since the 1980s an idea has taken hold, shaped by cliché and the Benthamite cruelty of the current Conservative government, that to be working class is to be deprived. This wasn’t my experience. The working class was never a monoculture. It just looked like that to observers who couldn’t be bothered to unpick it. And even though the words ‘
working class’ still conjure up images of grey terraces, flat caps and the dreaded whippet (in my whole childhood I do not remember a single whippet!), the values, aesthetics and aspirations of the working classes have changed utterly, even though our image of them ossified some time around the miners’ strike.

  I deal with demographics for a living now, and I know that the class my grandparents inhabited looks very different today. So much so that even defining it is a struggle. If we classify ‘working class’ as people who earn under the national average wage (£26,000 in 2018) and didn’t go to university, I see a population of 4 million adults, which is around 7 per cent of the total UK population. Yet even these people display characteristics that would put them outside the flat-cap stereotype of the working class: 40 per cent own their homes, 25 per cent go on holidays abroad every year. When I look at what they do for work, yes, many of them still work in the manufacturing and engineering jobs we associate with Britain’s industrial heritage, but far more work in care homes and hospitals, in shops, pubs, restaurants. The new working class serves things when the old working class made them.

  Yet this is still a flat picture. When we look at the working classes in the twenty-first century, do we include the 1.7 million adults who earn under the national average wage despite having that golden ticket into the middle classes, the degree? Do we include the unemployed and the unable to work? Both groups expand the definition of ‘working class’ in interesting and problematic directions. Adding graduates blurs those aggressively policed boundaries between the upper reaches of the working classes and the lower rungs of the middle classes that my parents tap-danced between their whole adult lives. Lumping the unwaged in with the waged is another way to breed resentment. Not just because you get the kind of tensions over ‘respectability’ that meant Joan and Hilda snubbed each other in the street for twenty years, but because being working class doesn’t and shouldn’t have to mean living on the breadline. I remember how irrationally angry I felt a year ago when someone suggested to me you could define working-class people by looking at whose children received free school meals. Poverty is such an important issue within the working class, but it’s not the only story we can tell about it.