Common People

by Kit de Waal

  With each year that passes, our views decrease. Now our sunsets are slowly disappearing, our views blocked, but we do have the privilege of looking across into the curtainless, characterless Tupperware boxes that house those who have made it in society. These flats aren’t affordable and they aren’t social. They are investment pieces, bringing alien currencies into our boroughs. These blocks look at mine and say: ‘No, we don’t really want you here; you don’t really fit in here any more. You’re old-fashioned, out of date. Can’t you see? This is what we look like now; these are the people we house now…’

  But in reality they’re no different from us. They still stand upright in their silver coffins.

  When that news alert woke me up, ‘Huge fire engulfs tower block in west London’, I jumped out of bed thinking surely this couldn’t be the way I would hear about my own death. But as I looked out of my window, I saw another tree fall. We wept for our sister tree and exchanged whispers in the lifts, wondering how an entire tree could go to bed one night and be cut down by the next morning. The letters fell through our letterboxes, telling us the block would be inspected, reassuring us we were safe. As a community we questioned. ‘Do we have sprinklers?’ we asked. ’No,’ we were told. ‘And if there’s a fire, what should we do?’ ’Stay in your flats,’ we were told. Our branches may be scarred, but from the scab, beauty is formed. Our communities grow closer, stronger.

  The council spews words ending in –tion: innovation, demolition, regeneration, which can all be translated into G E N T R I F I C A T I O N. But we hold strong; this tree will not fall. My grandparents always tell me: ‘Have your own front door; there is nothing more valuable than that.’ Here we all enter through the same door, we don’t own it. We don’t own the building that holds our homes any more than the birds own the tree they choose to nest on. Only we aren’t as free as those birds. In a land where money talks, we are rendered speechless. But like the others, something will always bring me back to Braithwaite Tower. We were here before these glasshouses that dodge all the stones thrown up at them.

  I used to think we died wrong, unnaturally. But now I see that maybe we die stronger. Standing, ready to walk out of this world and into the next on our feet. The same way we walked into Braithwaite Tower when it became our home. I wonder if, when my time comes, I too will stand in the lift as I prepare to meet my maker. We may live tall and straight, we may be elevated and fall, but when the wind blows we don’t sway, because when us tower people die, we rest in peace upright.

  Misspent Youth

  Emma Purshouse

  With me, pool’s the thing. A thing that started when I was twelve, in the caravan-site games room where there was the Space Invaders machine with the cracked screen, and that beautiful green lawn of a table.

  I’d sit away from it, parked on the metal chair by the window, underneath the poster of Spain. Somebody had put a wine bottle on the windowsill with a candle in it. I’d pretend to be picking off the stalactites of wax that had dribbled down the bottle neck, but really I was sneaky-peeking at the players. I liked the way they moved round the table, and their banter.

  There was a skinhead, much older than me, camo trousers, twenty-hole oxbloods, wouldn’t have looked out of place kicking shit out of other skinheads on the terraces. I’d seen that kind of thing at the Wolves games, all these fired-up lads raging. I’d also seen a copper on an ’oss corral a lad against a wall, and then lean in off his saddle to smash his fist down into the kid’s face. Yeah, I’d seen that too. Before I was even ten. Put me off coppers. Been brought up to respect them, but that made me question it… proper question it.

  Anyway, on one of the days of the holiday, I’d gone in the caravan-park games room and the skinhead with the oxbloods was in there playing against himself, potting the balls, getting low over the cue. After a bit he looked over to where I was working on my wax-picking and said, ‘Wanna game?’ I looked behind me at the bull on the poster, sure the skinhead must be talking to someone else. No way on God’s green earth he could have been talking to me, the uncool, fat, goofy kid wearing an Elvis T-shirt. Yeah, an Elvis T-shirt back in the 1970s. I know. Perhaps I’ve always liked to live on the edge. Dangerous.

  Unlikely as it seemed, he was looking at me. The skinhead was looking at me! He had to be. There was no one else in the room.

  His head was shaved to a grade two. He had a hard face. A scary face. I wasn’t sure what to do. He looked like he was reading me, head on one side. ‘Can show you…’ His voice didn’t match his look. I probably shrugged. I probably wanted to run. But there was something about the way he said it. I must have nodded. I don’t remember speaking. I’m sure he did all the speaking. Just sort of talked through the game. Showed me how to hold the cue. To be honest, it felt natural. I was hitting balls straight away. ‘Lean further over your cue… hold it in to your side… look down the length of it…’ I started potting a few balls. He looked surprised. ‘You played before?’ Shake of my head. No way I was speaking. I might have squeaked or something. No way I wanted my Black Country accent getting out and sharing the air with his cool, cocky cockney. I don’t remember what he showed me with regard to rules. I don’t remember much else about that first day at all, other than the sound of the balls when they were hit, and the way they ran through the table once pocketed.

  After that day I went to the games room every day of the holiday, waiting for him to come in. And when he did, we’d play.

  And then the holidays ended. And we went home. My parents weren’t drinkers, didn’t go down the club or up the pub, like other parents in the street, so there was no access to be had to a table.

  Then school restarted. And that was shit. Even though school days were broken up with the light relief of midweek and weekend Wolves matches (so keen I even went to watch the reserves), it was still shit. Some might question the notion of footie being light relief. I was watching Wolves in the seventies, after all. I can assure you it was. The terraces had nothing to offer that the playground couldn’t match and double. Kickings before I’d even got through the school gate, the name-calling, the gobbing. All year I got my head down in the middle of the class and tried to avoid the attention of teachers and kids, sharpening and resharpening my pencils. Dealing with the broken leads, smashed protractors, the school bags that went out of the back of bus windows, the shoes lobbed up trees. And all that year through, between the crap school and the crap football, I thought about the pool table at the caravan site, and I played it in my head.

  The next summer I was back, two weeks in Tal-y-bont near Barmouth, in a caravan. The same caravan, of course – creatures of habit, our sort. Well, you knew what you’d be getting. Rain on the roof mostly, and a variety pack of cereals.

  In previous years I would have been mithering to swim, build sandcastles with my dad, but now I beached myself in the games room, sunbathed in the glow of the light above that table. And I played anybody that came in. The little kids, the kids my age, the old men with Stoke, or Brummie, or Liverpudlian accents, who gave out sweets and tips on what to do and where to put the white. And I sucked it all up: the sweets, the pool, the accents. I loved it. And at the end of the holiday it was back home, back to school, back to the grind, and the never-ending ‘you are shit’ of a comprehensive education.

  I carried on with the same old routines, but introduced a new element to the week. I started watching Pot Black. Every week. It wasn’t pool, but it was the closest thing I could find in the interim between the once-a-year seaside holidays. Cliff Thorburn and his cowboy swagger, Hurricane Higgins and his sniff-and-stalk style. I wanted a piece of that confidence. They oozed something I wasn’t.

  I left school at fifteen. Walked out after the last exam and never went back. Some of the people in my year ‘stayed on’. I didn’t even know what that meant. Just couldn’t quite comprehend why anybody would go back when they didn’t have to. I wasn’t even sure what they did. I’d seen prefects swanning round. They had a common room, but it never o
ccurred to me to ask why or what it was for. Or what they were for. It didn’t seem to be any of my business. And nobody seemed to think it worth explaining. Occasionally, in the couple of years after I’d left school, kids out of my year would reappear in Wolverhampton from places that might as well have been the other end of the world… like Preston. And their voices would have changed, and they’d be talking posh.

  Me, I got on a scheme when I eventually turned sixteen. Exploitation! That’s what a lot of folk said. Maybe, but I had £25 a week and once I’d paid my board out to my parents I could spend what was left on what I liked, and what I liked was pool.

  They all had pool tables then, the pubs. Not like now. And I chose the Tavern in the Town to hone my craft. A biker pub. It was over the way from where my scheme happened, and not as busy in the daytime as it was at weekends. I could go over on my lunch break and have a few games. Sometimes I would just watch. I wasn’t so fat now. Grown taller. The Elvis T-shirt had been replaced by denims, a Scorpions T-shirt. The pub was dark and you could lose time in there. And I did sometimes, running back late to work.

  It was winner stops on in the Tavern. Chalk up your name, wait your go. I could pot. No doubt I could pot. Positioning the white was a bit hit and miss, but getting better. In my memory the song that’s always playing when I think of the Tavern is Tina Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’, ramped up to full volume.

  Like a lot of things in life, pool is all about knowing that you can. And I’ll never forget the first time I knew. When it all came together. When it all just clicked. Bonner had just walked into the Tavern. Leather hat. Not a Cliff Thorburn, cowboy-cool sort of hat, but a grizzled, sweat-stained, light-brown affair that looked like he’d fished it out from down the back of his maroon Draylon sofa before leaving his flat (it had to be a flat, not a house). As wide as he was tall, Bonner. And he was pretty fucking wide. He was like Lemmy’s older, rougher-looking brother. He didn’t so much speak as growl. He had obviously woken up one morning and decided he was going to go for the walking cliché look and he’d hit the mark.

  Yep, look at him standing there. He’s definitely hit the mark. When he chalks up his name the chalk snaps.

  I’ve just won the previous game by default. The other guy has potted the black, and the white has dropped. Bonner walks up to the table. ‘You can set ’em up, our kid.’ This is bad form. The winner doesn’t set them up, the newcomer does. Everybody knows that. I take a swig from my cider, but even with a sip of Dutch courage I’m not going to argue, not with that. I do as I’m told… I’ve always done as I’m told. But today as I do as I’m told something loosens up inside me. Something… something shifts, and the music and the light and the mood all tunnels together and I focus… and there is this voice in my head telling me… telling me the moves… telling me what needs to be done.

  Money in slot. The push and the drop. The rack and the clack. The balls triangulated. Flip of a coin. Tails never fails. I’ll break. Slide of a cue. Crack of the pack. Two yellows gone. Game on. And this is a stage. A green-baize stage. Spotlit. Arch of a bridge. Thwack and the smack.

  Pause for chalk. Cocky walk. Thwack. Smack. Smack. Thwack. Smack. Brush? Final yellow. Hush. No rush. Tap. Fine cut. Slows up. Jaws and… drops. Black. Bottom bag. Long shot.

  Bang. Shake of his hand. You are on fire, girl. Smile.

  Next.

  I’ve hit the zone. Dammit, I’m on a roll.

  Apparently the ‘Next’ might not have been in my head. It might have come out loud. And Bonner? Bonner is a pissed-off, fruitloopy, badass biker. He is the walking cliché who is not taking ‘Next’ well. He froths at the mouth. He is incandescent with rage. Can’t speak for incandescent rage… and froth. And he looks at me, and he carries on looking at me and I know he wants to smash me into pieces and I know he wants to knock me into the middle of next week. I know he wants to pick me up like a bar-room barstool and fling me at something. And the pub knows it, and it goes quiet. And Tina Turner knows it, and she stops wailing. And the interested spectators know it, and look the other way. But I hold my ground, I tell you. I stand cue in hand, with all the bob of Cliff Thorburn, and all the sniff and swagger of Hurricane Higgins, and all the new-found in-the-zone confidence that is within me. And I say it again: ‘Next.’ I look him straight in his eyes, and he throws his pool cue down so hard onto the table, the slate bed shakes. He clenches his fists, reaches to grab the white ball off the table and then slings it against the wall. My ground holds, and my look says, ‘You lost, Bonner. You fuckin’ lost.’ I give it a perfectly timed beat, and allow my eyes to add, ‘… to a woman.’ And then I watch him walk out of the pub.

  I like to think he went home and sobbed into a misogynistic bag of chips, but I don’t know. In my remembered pub the jukebox restarts and the chatter picks back up, and the glasses begin clinking again. And, truthfully, that day I didn’t care about anything else, because I was in the fuckin’ zone. Adrenaline pumping and nobody was taking me off that table that afternoon and yes, I probably should’ve gone back to work, but hey, I was being exploited, everyone said so, and the government could go fuck themselves. I was playing pool. And I wasn’t just equal. I was better, better than equal. And all those biker blokes knew it. And it was glorious.

  Of course, pool, like life, isn’t always about being on a roll. Sometimes there are the days when it doesn’t work out and you don’t feel it. There were other Bonners that came later. The ones who ‘let me win because I was a woman’. The ones who had ‘bad backs’, or were ‘a bit too pissed’. The ones who thought a girl shouldn’t be out in a pub on their own without a man. There was the bloke who got me round the throat and pushed me up against the wall because I beat him. That night I managed to strangle out a laugh and hold his eyes with my fearless Bonner stare, and he let me go. And then there were those stuff-of-legend days, when I drubbed the former England pool player, who went home in a sulk. Oh God, the rounds of beers the barman bought me that night, in his sheer delight of ‘that knob finally being put in his place’.

  And there were those many, many nights when good blokes shook my hand and said ‘good match’. Two players playing for the love of a game, gender not mattering.

  And nowadays? I don’t play so much. Well, a lot of the pubs don’t have tables any more, and there is other stuff to do. But occasionally, when I glimpse a pool table through a window of a pub, I can’t let it be. And I walk in and put down my quid and wait my turn, and then for an afternoon there’s banter and craic and nothing else matters. And sometimes I hit the zone again… it all comes back… flooding back. For an afternoon I’m calling the shots. I’m stalking round that table and the years drop away, and pool’s the only thing that matters. Back in the zone. Better than equal.

  Darts

  Cathy Rentzenbrink

  I won the Snaith and District Ladies’ Darts Championship when I was seventeen. I was the youngest-ever winner. There was a presentation evening where a newsreader from Look North handed out trophies and I got an extra one for getting a 180 during the match. The presentation evening was at Drax Club, and I had to leave my sixth-form college in Scunthorpe early so that I could get there in time. I explained to my English teacher, whose class I’d miss. ‘Darts?’ he said. ‘How unusual.’ I didn’t get the impression he thought it was unusual in a good way. Still, he let me go. I was an eager student and had recently got a very good mark for my essay on The Bell Jar.

  You don’t get much about darts in literature. Martin Amis is a fan. There’s a lot of darts in his novel London Fields. In one of Sylvia Plath’s letters to her mother she writes about her and Ted Hughes having a game in a pub when they are staying with his parents in Yorkshire. I wonder what they were playing and who won. Around the clock? 501? Maybe Ted got stuck on double one. Maybe Sylvia offered advice: ‘Think it’s a field.’ Maybe they both got stuck on double one. That’s called being in the madhouse and can go on for ages. Maybe they got bored and decided to settle it by going up for bull. It d
oesn’t feel like a realistic scene, does it? Darts and literature go together like… not much, really.

  My dad remembers his first-ever game of darts. He was in the Prince of Wales in Falmouth. He was eighteen. His parents were both dead and he’d run off to sea from his aunt’s house in Cork City three years earlier. When he’d get signed off a ship he’d go ashore and find a nice-looking pub and make some friends. Once he got into it, darts was a great way to get to know people. He decided to get his own set. He saw some he liked in Woolworths – they had a dartboard up and you could practise – but they cost £17 and he only had £7. Later that day he went into the working-men’s club for a pint and told one of his new friends how disappointed he was that he couldn’t afford the darts. The friend asked him to describe them, went off, and came back a few minutes later. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Give me the seven quid.’

  The darts lasted for years. Dad met my mother. She was a grammar-school girl, so it raised a few eyebrows that she’d hooked up with a tattooed Irish sailor who could hardly read and write. My mum once heard herself being discussed by her teachers: ‘She comes from a working-class family but they have middle-class values.’ What did that mean? My granddad was a bus driver who’d had to leave school at fourteen, but he loved reading, believed in education and wanted his three children to have the opportunities that he hadn’t. He bought them a set of encyclopaedias on hire purchase. We still have them; they are called The Books of Knowledge. Everything else in their house was home-grown and home-made. They were not exactly poor, my mum says, but there was never quite enough of anything. She used to swap her pudding for her sister’s meat. My granddad was a dab hand at carving a tin of Spam into five equal portions. He liked darts, too. There was a dartboard on the wall of the sitting room. They’d untie the washing line my granny had hung up over the Rayburn and use it to direct the ceiling light at the board.