Common People

by Kit de Waal

  The people who built the Whiteleas estate in the 1950s set out to break that link between working-class lives and poverty. It worked for a time, though perhaps not in the way they intended. Today the houses in Whiteleas are largely in private hands. What were homes for heroes are now the stuff of daytime DIY TV, with the odd 4x4 parked outside. They aspire to a new condition, and the snob in me judges them on their success in passing as middle class as we drive by to my last grandparent’s funeral. I roll my eyes at those uPVC Georgian windows in exactly the same way that people I’ve met over the years have judged me when they heard a flat ‘a’ or that I went to a comprehensive school. Why try to change yourself at all, they imply, when you can’t get the imitation quite right?

  Because there are two ways of looking at class. For some people, class is a vector: a quantity that has direction. It admits the possibility that Hilda can become Ann and then Chris. For others it’s a fixed point. Where you start out is where you stay. So for me, that would be Whiteleas.

  The daisies are coming out again in the sidings and the green spaces of Whiteleas. Since the council can’t afford to cut the grass any more, they’re rewilding, and older, sturdier strains of daisies than I remember have woken up. In summer they’re thick enough to turn the leazes white again. Whiteleas is reverting to a time before social housing and the welfare state that hoisted first my grandparents, then my parents, then me out of our fixed point in the social order. And while I love the daisies, I hope the old times aren’t coming back.

  Notes

  1 Bairns: a colloquial term in north-east England for children.

  2 Sarah Bernhardt was a French actor active in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Paris and London. A great star of the melodramatic stage, she was most famous for creating tragic leading roles, such as Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias.

  The Funeral and the Wedding

  Jodie Russian-Red

  The Funeral

  I’d been trying to convince myself that it was all completely normal, an everyday thing, just going to a funeral. It’s one of only two reasons the entire family gets together. Everybody said, ‘Wear something bright and sparkly – that’s what she loved to see you in.’ When I say ‘everybody said’, my mum texted me saying ‘everybody said’, so I had no idea if that’s true or if it was just my auntie Jackie. It was probably just my auntie Jackie. To play it safe, I wore a black glittery dress. She would have liked to see me in something bright and sparkly, but you never know who’s going to try and moan for the sake of moaning.

  My mum came down wearing her best outfit and jewellery, which was strange to see. My brother was standing on the edge of the back step, arm outstretched as far outside as possible, with a cigarette at the end of his nail-bitten fingers. The cigarette was probably from the ‘communal bacca tin’, which as far as I’m aware, only my mum has ever topped up and only my brother ever uses and often makes me wonder how many other families have communal tobacco tins in repurposed cream-cracker tubs. He was staring down at the green jumper he was wearing and then at his crumpled shirt on the ironing pile. He kept exhaling smoke into the kitchen: ‘Is everyone going smart?’

  ‘No, Jodie’s going sparkly.’

  My dad came down the stairs wearing a cheap black suit he’d told me the night before he’d bought for £30 in the Next sale in the retail park.

  ‘Your suit looks good, Dad.’

  ‘Not bad for thirty quid, is it? I got it in the Next sale; you know, the one in Anlaby Retail Park?’

  He looked just like a shop security guard. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the exact suit the Next security guards wear. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad wear a suit in my entire life, apart from in his wedding photos, which is why I said, ‘Was your wedding the last time you wore a suit?’

  ‘Err, I think it was. I didn’t have a tie, though. Or socks, but that was down to Nabby on my stag do.’ The story I’ve heard before about my dad’s stag do is that his friends tied him up with rope, stole his socks and tried repeatedly to set fire to him. Whenever telling the story he usually laughs, ‘Yep, I nearly died, what a laugh!’ The other part of the story is that he apparently ‘refused’ to let them shave his eyebrows off, which makes the story bizarre, because it can only mean that he didn’t protest to the burning.

  It all felt so strange: what a surreally normal, sunny day it was.

  My brother ironed his shirt from the pile and changed into it, my mum sat on the back step smoking, I triple-checked my speech. Five minutes later, my dad got the car started, I triple-checked my speech again, my mum dotted her cigarette and my brother changed out of the shirt and back into his green jumper. We all locked the door and left.

  At the crematorium, we hung around the car park and put our sunglasses on because the day was still being surreally normal and sunny. I kept thinking about the announcement in the newspaper the week before: Service at 2 p.m., Chanterlands Ave Crematorium (small chapel). I couldn’t stop thinking about the brackets: (small chapel). I felt like doing one great, big sigh.

  Cousin after cousin gathered in a haze of smoke and cherry vapour and wheezed about how small they were when they’d last seen the other, what a mad night they’d had that one summer and, ‘Are you still doing car mapping then?’

  ‘Nah, mate, I packed it in. I’m at the Briggston’s pork abattoir now.’

  ‘Oh, are you? What’s that like, then?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you something, I’m pig sick of it!’

  ‘Heyyy! Ha ha, nice one!’

  My brother kept muttering and fretting about everyone wearing a shirt and do I think he should have worn one? I tried to listen, but I was just staring up at the big, long brick chimney.

  My uncle Paul’s ex-wife Trish turned up and no one knew how to act or what to say while Paul stood in the corner with his new wife Coleen and pretended not to notice Trish. She said to me, ‘Hiya Jodie, I haven’t seen you in a while! How’s your mam?’

  When the hearse arrived, everyone dotted their cigarettes, put their vapes in their handbags and I pretended not to notice the coffin.

  The service started with the paid-for pastor saying things someone had written down for him about someone he’d never met.

  ‘She spent three years working in the metal-box factory.’ (Did she? She never told me that.)

  ‘When she first met Bob, he was up a tree, or so Tracey tells me.’ (Why was Tracey talking to the pastor? Why wasn’t I invited to the talk with the pastor? Hang on, how come Tracey’s sat in the front row?)

  ‘She went on to have six children, who went on to give Betty a running total of thirty-six grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One of them, Jodie, is going to come up and read a poem she’s written.’ (I looked down at my speech and pretended to triple-check it.)

  I wanted so desperately to say all the true things that were interesting and funny and sad. I wanted to mention all the unique and complicated and inimitable things that everyone would recognise, and do justice to this event the whole family had anticipated our whole lives. Instead, I read out the greeting-card soothing platitudes I’d written that morning and I knew it was the right thing to do because everyone smiled and was happy as they contentedly imagined a different, probably less interesting person. I finished and walked back to my seat and pretended not to notice the coffin.

  As we were exiting, my auntie Jackie put a hand-embroidered pillow on the coffin and then my granddad found her in the car park.

  ‘You didn’t make that yourself, did you?’

  ‘Yeah, I spent all last week making it.’

  ‘Well, it’s gonna bloody get burned up! You don’t want it to get burned and waste it like that, do yer?’

  ‘I made it for my mam. It’s for her.’

  ‘Well, you’re mad, it’s just gonna get all burned up. What a waste!’

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the Red Lion pub, on part of the estate I never ventured to. I’d grown up with stories
from my family of all the nights they’d spent in there. I’d seen them put on sequinned, batwing-sleeved jackets, unlock the Old Spice from the communal family bureau I was obsessed with, and stagger after winning the darts tournament. When my life was still in single figures and I stayed up late watching the home-taped Lily Savage videos my grandparents had sat me in front of in the back room, I loved hearing their Baileys-soaked stories about the karaoke, how everyone was miserable that night until Bob did ‘My Way’ and got everyone up. I loved the running joke that my nanna ruined every single Saturday with ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ by Vera Lynn. I loved that she didn’t see it as a running joke.

  The Red Lion pub wake was the biggest shock and disappointment of my adult life. As I stood peeling cling film off a bizarre buffet, I looked around, and all the stories and what a glorious, raucous, heart-of-the-community place I’d imagined the Red Lion to be were changed for ever. There were no chairs. There was no till. The toilets didn’t have lids; the rusty hand dryer was on a chair next to the sink with a bitty bath towel draped over it to dry your hands. The towel looked like the landlord had emerged out of the bath in it sixty years ago, draped it on the chair and built the pub toilets and pub around it.

  I balanced ten Hula Hoops, two breadsticks and half a slice of white, marge-spread Sunblest on a paper plate and pretended to remember Paul’s ex-wife Trish. The immediate moment after my mum shouted, ‘Who wants a drink?’ the landlord shouted, ‘I’m not putting on the cider tap, Janis, tell ’em they can ’ave bottled!’

  No one ate any of the buffet until they were too drunk to notice how disgusting it was, except for me, who ate all the Hula Hoops as I sought refuge by the trestle table and pretended to be hungry while my cousin Louise moaned to my mum about Uncle Paul not acknowledging her as his biological daughter while he’s stood there at the bar with the daughter he did acknowledge. We were all there; it was just like old times.

  When I say we were all there, well, we were nearly all there. All but one.

  The next day I was stroking the cat on the patio set and my mum came down the steps with a coffee and a cigarette and said, ‘God, what a night! Your dad passed out and Steve ripped his jacket falling off the stool – did you know he’d already done four lines of coke by the time we went in to the service?!’

  The Wedding

  It’s one of only two reasons the entire family gets together. From what I’d seen on Facebook, Michelle was taking Kerrie’s name, which is our name; she wanted to become one of us. That’s what I shouted to my mum as she came down the stairs in her best outfit and jewellery. My brother was stood at the back door with his smoking arm outstretched, his eyes glancing between the Levi’s jeans he was wearing and the crumpled suit trousers on the ironing pile.

  My dad came down wearing a cheap, sheeny waistcoat he told me he’d bought for £7 from Matalan the night before and started painting his bald patch in the mirror.

  ‘What do you think of this waistcoat? I got it from Matalan in Anlaby Retail Park. Not bad for seven quid, is it?’

  My brother said, ‘Is everyone going smart?’

  I said, ‘Will there be a buffet?’ and my mum said, ‘I can’t believe we were only invited to the night do.’

  My brother ironed his suit trousers and changed into them, my mum smoked a cigarette on the back step, I surreptitiously added my name to the wedding gift, the taxi came down the street and my brother changed back into his jeans.

  Opposite a giant industrial estate was the wedding venue, an ex-servicemen’s club. We’d been before, for Tracey’s wedding and for Steve’s surprise fortieth, but this time it was different because there were no bowls of crisps and someone had wheeled in a ye olde sweet cart in the entrance with Kez ’n’ Shell handwritten on heart-shaped chalkboards. To elongate the gap between outside and everyone, I ate as many flying saucers as anyone would willingly choose to eat (two), and headed in to tell everyone how small they were when I’d last seen them and ask them if they were still doing PAT testing or whether they’d packed it in.

  We were the last to arrive (we’d only been invited to the night do) so everyone was already there and halfway through the semi-sober conversation.

  ‘Are you still at that abattoir, then?’

  ‘Yeah, but I’ll tell you something, I’m pig sick of it!’

  As my cousin Kerrie, the biological daughter who Uncle Paul acknowledged, danced awkwardly with her new wife on an empty dance floor to a song they hadn’t picked and didn’t know, my cousin Louise cornered my mum to ask why she thinks Uncle Paul won’t acknowledge her as his biological daughter.

  More aunties and uncles arrived, and my mum stood at the bar shouting, ‘Who wants a drink? Jackie? What you having?’

  Now and again, people said things like, ‘I think it’s for the best she missed this, don’t you? I don’t think she would’ve got it,’ or, ‘Do you think she would’ve approved of it? It’s sad, but I think it’s for the best,’ but this is something that was said to fill air: it wasn’t true. I don’t know if people knew it wasn’t true.

  After the cousin bride left early (she had to take her army uniform off and put it in a clothing-protection bag in case it got dirty or creased), I bumped into my mum in the toilets sink area, blotting her lipstick on a piece torn from what was probably an entire roll of toilet paper stuffed into her handbag, and in between blots, above the sound of some anonymous cousin violently vomiting in the cubicle behind, she said, ‘Can you believe how much that round was? Sixty-eight fifty! For one round! It’s absolutely disgusting.’

  Just before I said, ‘You shouldn’t have offered to buy everyone a drink,’ she blotted. ‘I’m not offering to buy everyone a drink again. You know why? It’ll have been your auntie Jackie’s gin and tonic.’

  I steered the conversation away from there being any possible revelation that I hadn’t actually taken my purse with me and we talked about how awkward it was when Paul’s ex-wife Trish turned up. The non-related bride staggered in front of the sinks to peel off her eyelashes and thank us for coming and say how happy she was to be part of the family and to ‘please help yourselves to the sweet cart because no one’s touched it’.

  Everyone was there. All but one.

  The next day I sat in the garden swinging on the hammock that’s been reconstructed with Gorilla Tape since my dad fell through it; I was watching the cat watching nothing. I was wondering about whether I should get married, whether or not I’d left it too late, whether there was any point, if anyone would come, if I’d ever own a house, if I’d ever have children, if I could picture myself living a normal life; the cat sat watching nothing.

  My mum creaked across the kitchen wearing my brother’s parka, leaned down to the hob to light the cigarette already in her mouth, inhaled, slipped on my dad’s heel-flattened shoes, opened the back door and came down the patio steps before exhaling. ‘I just cannot believe that round. Sixty-eight fifty; it was Jackie’s gin and tonic that did it, you know.’

  Eight weeks later Michelle put on a Facebook post that Kerrie had moved in with a ‘boy from the barracks’ and taken the dog. My mum texted me at midnight wanting me to read it, pointlessly speculate and pretend not to enjoy having something to text about at midnight on a Tuesday. I texted saying that I thought my nanna would’ve really liked Michelle, and my mum texted back, saying: Yeah, maybe. How much money did we put in their card?

  Little Boxes

  Stuart Maconie

  I grew up amongst poets.

  Keats Avenue, Eliot Drive, Blake Close, Milton Grove.

  I was a kid, one of a large, rough and ready tribe, on the huge Worsley Mesnes council estate in Wigan, and the names of these great men (they were all men too; no Dickinson Avenue or Plath Place) were not to me a litany of English verse, but simply the rugged and dependable furniture of young life.

  I navigated by these ageless names, as if they were stars. Keith Clegg, who gave me all his Beatles singles in a black leatherette wallet, lived in Dryden
House flats. The insanely fanciable Anne Thomas could be ‘bumped into’ (if you were very lucky) between Browning Avenue and Coleridge Place. Gary Mason had half his face melted off one icy Bonfire Night down Masefield Drive, when kids from a rival estate threw a can full of red-hot ash at him. He’d worn a balaclava every day, summer and winter, since.

  We lived among poets. We fought, drank and snogged amongst literary giants. Later, I would learn that some poets themselves, the Mitchells and McGoughs, were actually from streets like ours and would have felt a kinship with us. Even the Betjemans and Larkins envied us our easy sensuality and natural vigour, whilst sneering at our houses and our jobs and loathing our politics and our power. For we were powerful then; vast, grey, regimented council-house estates like mine were the citadels of ordinary men and women whose work conferred prestige and influence, the last of their kind to wield that kind of power. Posh men in blue suits, clipped of voice, plump of lip, would tell me nightly on the news that we were ‘holding the country to ransom’, we recalcitrant, treacherous workers. If so, it was ransom money that paid for my school blazer and Vesta Chow Mein and football boots, and so it seemed entirely reasonable to me, then and now.