Common People

by Kit de Waal

  It’s been a terrible couple of years. We’ve had a referendum and Britain has voted to leave the EU. The country is divided between those in favour and those against. In London, a tower block burned down, killing seventy-two people, because it was covered in cheap, flammable cladding. And I daren’t tell you who is in the White House; it would give you (another) heart attack.

  They’ve knocked down our pub, the one where the bar staff used to shout, ‘You’ve just missed him,’ if I got there after you’d left. The land was needed for student accommodation. Vice chancellors earn megabucks nowadays and some say that they get more perks than bent coppers. The students don’t live in grubby housing any more, like we did when university was an escape hatch for working-class kids. They pay through the nose for wipe-clean apartments and leave forty grand in debt. Don’t worry; most of them never pay it back.

  I’m still a bit annoyed with you for dying. I know you couldn’t help it, but you told me that you were going to live to be at least 140, and I believed you. I miss talking to you. I still do it in my head – not all the time like I did at the start, just sometimes.

  We all miss you.

  In other news, Leicester City won the League!

  The Dark Hole of the Head

  Jill Dawson

  Robert McCrum, literary editor of the Observer at the time, once broke off from a conversation to ask me, out of nowhere, ‘Which school did you go to?’

  ‘Boston Spa Comprehensive,’ I said.

  He looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, well – and you did OK, didn’t you?’ he added, turning back to his phone. He was apparently in the middle of an agitated discussion with his daughter about her entrance exam to somewhere or other. It was only later that I figured out that McCrum, whose father had been headmaster at Eton, had expected me to name a private school. One he’d actually heard of. I don’t know which – Bedales? Marlborough? (Those – and Eton – are the only names I know.)

  I have come across these assumptions often in the literary world. McCrum had probably not read any of my books: novels set on council estates in Hackney, or about domestic violence in America; about women who grow up in the 1950s as skilled thieves; of maids who work for famous poets, or peasant women for famous doctors, or social climbers who long to learn French; or about eighteenth-century rural agitators, boys who give up their hearts after suffering in love, and school exclusion.

  But he’s right – I did do OK and I loved my Yorkshire comprehensive school. My older sister passed her eleven-plus and went to Tadcaster Grammar and I think I was the luckier of the two of us. When I was in the sixth form we were taken on a school visit to see Ted Hughes at the Yorkshire Playhouse. I remember sitting in the front row and tittering as the tall man stepped out from the curtain and strode towards the one stool on the stage. He was not the commanding figure we’d expected. ‘His flies are undone!’ Vicky Stables whispered beside me. Hughes didn’t look like a poet should, we girls thought. We didn’t approve of the dark green raincoat he wore loosely around his shoulders, the sort a ‘dirty old man’ would wear.

  But then he sat on the stool and began reading. He had a Yorkshire accent, to our surprise, and a voice of rolling warmth and power. He began reading ‘The Thought Fox’ and it was as if someone had turned a key in my back. ‘I imagine this midnight moment’s forest…’

  I sat up straight. We’d read the poem many times in our brand new sixth-form classrooms at our local comprehensive. ‘Yeah yeah,’ we said, ‘we get it,’ when Mr Foggin laboriously explained that it wasn’t just about the real fox but about the writing of the poem, about imagination, memory, creation and recreation.

  ‘Two eyes serve a movement, that now,/And again now, and now, and now…’

  Over thirty years later and I can hear Hughes’s voice, intonation, and the impact of those words on me. He didn’t read in the modern drone that poets like Simon Armitage use. He practically shouted the line: ‘with a sudden hot sharp stink of fox’. Vicky Stables jumped out of her skin. She was too mesmerised to titter this time.

  The words had entered ‘the dark hole’ of my head. Poetry had me in its snare. You could say I was, perhaps more than other girls from Boston Spa Comprehensive who sat in the front row of the Playhouse that day, a ready candidate. I was anorexic. I weighed around six stone and had lately begun to notice a downy hair growing on my forearms. I was having a relationship with a bullying, needy boy a couple of years older than me who worked in the carpet store at Thorp Arch Trading Estate and bought me giant bars of chocolate to try and ‘feed me up’. But I found it hard to fathom the ways his moods flipped towards me: one minute I was a bitch and worse; the next he begged me to marry him. This young man later told me he was being sexually abused by his older brother at this time. This might have gone some way to explain his frightening behaviour towards me. But I was a girl of sixteen and I didn’t know that then.

  Our school trip to see Hughes changed my life. I wanted to be a writer. I think I knew this already but in that badly lit theatre, listening to Hughes murmuring, ‘The window is starless still, the clock ticks,/The page is printed,’ I knew it with a dreadful certainty. I want to make people feel things; I want to enter the dark hole of others’ heads. The problem was that being a poet, or a writer of any kind, was an impossible, ridiculous ambition for a girl from my background. What did my parents hope for? My mum thought a teacher would be nice. (She was in awe of teachers. In my teenage eyes it was a lowly profession.) Neither parent had gone to university themselves. There was a vague hope that I might, but no clear plan for how this miraculous thing would happen.

  I had already had a poem published in a women’s magazine, but I didn’t tell teachers or parents that. I’d been so embarrassed on seeing it there in the newsagent that I shut the pages and left the magazine behind. The poem was about my anorexia and contained the strange truth I could only articulate as a poem – that if I carried on not eating like this I would surely die.

  Poetry and embarrassment were bedfellows to me. My dad had once said to me that he couldn’t see the point of any books that weren’t practical or instructional (our house had an entire set of encyclopaedias with red hardback covers that were not often disturbed, and many books on gardening and golf, which were). When I dig around now, trying to find the reason for the source of both the fierce obstinacy and the utter hopelessness about my desire to write, all I can find is a weird feeling of shame. Seeing Hughes – who had an accent like mine – made something shift, made something preposterous at last just a tiny bit possible.

  Our English teacher, Mr Foggin, also introduced me to a book and a writer who had a lasting effect on me: Akenfield by Ronald Blythe. Blythe appears – with his permission! – as a mischievous character in my novel The Crime Writer thirty years later, such is my indebtedness to him. The idea of vernacular voices, the lack of a neutral storytelling authority (implicitly from the educated classes) is what I got from Blythe, aged sixteen, and it was revelatory.

  By the time I was in my mid-twenties I was visiting schools as a published writer too, to offer workshops and readings. Over about a decade of doing this I visited young offenders’ institutes, a school in Chicago for pregnant teenagers, a school in the Chicago projects, libraries, literacy projects, schools in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and south London comprehensives much tougher than my own. I was reading books by African American women writers – Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker. I felt more affinity with their writing – they had bodies, they wrote about sex and giving birth and raising children (I had my first son aged twenty-six), they wrote in astonishing lyrical voices about experiences they deemed important. Many of the admired writers in the English canon felt to me like disembodied intellectual heads compared to the sensuous, living writing I was reading.

  I think I was looking for a mirror of some kind – which is odd, since I was a white girl from Yorkshire. But I often got the impression that lurking in my workshop group was a girl or b
oy who felt how I felt when I read Maya Angelou, or Ronald Blythe, or heard Ted Hughes. Ah, so that’s what a writer sounds like. Here is their voice. Not so posh, after all. Not overeducated. Not dead. Someone like me.

  Once, a sixteen-year-old boy in the secure unit I was visiting wrote me a short story and begged me not to read it in class but afterwards, after I’d left. ‘I don’t want to see your face when you read it,’ he said, handing me the paper. I read it on the train going home: the story of a boy in a secure unit who is about to go out to sixth-form college after several years inside and who has been having workshops with a visiting writer – a woman, he writes, who reminds him of his long-dead mother. ‘Mum believed in him; she was the only one, until now.’ I knew this boy was inside the institution for arson. But he told me in this ‘true story’ what he couldn’t do in class: his father had killed his mother and then committed suicide when he was seven years old. He had been in care for a long time; this was not deemed relevant to the arson, committed at fourteen. So therefore no one had mentioned this in his defence and he simply wanted to tell me about it so I would think better of him.

  The following week, on my last visit, he didn’t want to talk about the story, though we both acknowledged that I had read it. We talked about the fact that Dwayne (as I’ll call him) was about to leave the secure unit and go out in the world, and was thrilled about his place at a college. We talked about the future, and I asked him how he imagined his life outside. ‘Different?’ he suggested, with hesitation. Then, more confidently: ‘Different.’ The officer who had arranged my visits and helped Dwayne with his college application beamed. Sometimes a young person – especially a troubled or unhappy one – can only picture more of the same. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the future. It will grow to fit the shape we hold for it.

  Back to ‘The Thought Fox’ again, and the power of what we imagine and how it creates reality. ‘Brilliantly, concentratedly,/Coming about its own business.’ Writers’ visits to schools should never be a luxury, an add-on, only for well-off schools that can afford them. The arts are as essential a subject as any we have. Sometimes a visiting artist or writer, a trip to the theatre, can change lives. I am grateful to Hughes and Blythe and poetry for saving mine.

  Domus Operandi

  Riley Rockford

  20:00 When we are shown to the table, it is already two hours later than my family would have eaten at home. Somehow I have made it onto a programme at a famous graduate school, and here I am at the birthday dinner of one of my classmates. People are ordering water that you pay for, and I don’t dare to ask for tap water. So if I’m going to have to pay for water, I’m definitely going to get bubbles in it. I’ll take that air over getting nothing extra for my money. ‘Sparkling,’ I say, and then, moments later, hear someone else ask for tap water anyway. Around me they begin to speak of summer houses, and skiing trips. My classmates are crystals, casting rainbows across the table, as generations of their families radiate from them, fanning wide.

  20:12 I am finally at one of those bright, swirling dinner parties, and I don’t know if I have any of the right things to say. And these are nice people too, so sooner or later one of them is going to ask me something directly. Across from me, the guy who grew up by ‘the Heath’ (which is a lot posher than it sounds: it’s in Hampstead) is explaining that in the 1950s his grandfather crossed a continent with only a backpack and a camera, and next summer he will retrace those steps and make a ‘documentary feature’ about it. I wonder what my granddad was doing then. Working in the laundry, I guess. Slipping notes to the girl who would become my gran, notes that sometimes were without words, just a stick boy and girl holding hands. They only went twenty miles down the road for their honeymoon, and it rained most of the week, but that didn’t matter at all. They would wait forty years before getting on a plane. And ten years after that, I would get on a plane, because they had saved money to give me a holiday for working so hard in school. But I don’t think I can use these stories here. I need something else.

  20:17 Unfortunately I am seated on the corner, and the waiter asks me if I’d like to try the wine.

  20:21 While I am smiling and passing the butter, I slip out of the restaurant and run back home. I will have to be quick. I don’t have long to find something I can use.

  At university, I had been introduced to the globe artichoke. A thistle you can eat. Thistles are from where we are from, so I thought it would be a nice thing to take when I went home for the first time. The artichoke flower head is an inflorescence – a cluster of many budding small flowers. I cooked one for each of us. I brought real butter instead of marg to have on them too. I laid it all out, and I explained that the good stuff is inside all the little compartments. The edible parts are the fleshy bits – the heart. They lifted their eyebrows. Expensive, fiddly, and not even that nice. After, they were still hungry, so they made a quick stew from corned beef and it smelled great, but I didn’t say so. Once the buds in an artichoke bloom, the structure changes to a coarse, barely edible form. I sat staring at the ugly grey-green flower heads lying broken on the kitchen counter.

  20:25 Someone is describing their unpaid internship with a tech company as I turn my key in the lock. In the front room, the time is February 1968. Dad, a boy of eight, is on the settee eating a bowl of cornflakes with the milk warmed up. His face is a bloom of freckles and in his mouth big teeth stand waiting for a big body to catch up with them. Through the television, he watches the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, which are being transmitted to the world for the first time in colour. Dad watches on a black-and-white set, but still the glistening snow crystals tumble before him like jewels from a pirate’s treasure chest, and the alpine sun shines out onto his face.

  I try to cross the room to get to him, but the floor is covered in bottles and pint glasses. The ones at his feet are those he will first taste six years from now. Hundreds more, from the late 1970s and through the 1980s stretch across the carpet and are stacked up by the window, bending and slowing the light coming through. More are appearing at my feet, as he continues to drink them in the present, which is rock bottom. Some fall and make such a cold, screeching sound, but it doesn’t reach him. He is watching Schranz, the Austrian superstar, in the men’s slalom race, sailing across the mountain and then skidding to a halt, to the consternation of the crowds. Dad holds his spoon in mid-air, and from it falls a drop of milk, like a first tear – heavy, so hard to surrender – onto his pyjamas, which are just beginning to be too small. Schranz will claim a mysterious man dressed in black had crossed his path out of nowhere.

  20:29 Here is my uncle coming in from his job at the Wrangler factory. As he climbs the stairs, I see he has brought another haul with him today. He is slight, with a twenty-six-inch waist. In the stockroom he puts a pair of size twenty-eight jeans on over his own. Later he slips another pair, a thirty, on top. By the end of the day he is also sporting a thirty-two and a thirty-four. Wearing his bomber jacket, his shape doesn’t look conspicuous, and he walks coolly out of the front gates. The plant makes a million pairs a week – these four are nothing. But he can get £8 a pop for them in the pub which, added up, will go a long way, this being 1985, and it will pay for a bus ticket down south to see his new baby niece. Walking home through the timorous air of early evening, buried beneath the many layers he has pulled on over himself, he watches something, Sputnik maybe, passing overhead. It is a reminder that we will not be here for a long time, so we might as well be here for a good time. At any moment, the job could go away, your girlfriend could leave, we could all be gone if some bigwig decides to make it so.

  20:35 The group has ordered lots of small plates to share before the mains. When they arrive, I see that one is the fancy-pants, show-off, too-big-for-your-boots, more-money-than-sense edible thistle. It is a gremlin crouched in a bowl, staring at me, teeth bared, drooling. A classmate offers to show me how to eat it, and as she speaks I realise hesitation will look like ignorance here, especially if you have alread
y demonstrated that there are indeed many things about which you know nothing.

  20:39 Upstairs, in the summer of 1990, Gran and Granddad sit in bed, with a crossie and the Daily Record respectively. I come to stay every holiday, and I am sitting between them, with a bumper puzzle book. Before sleep, Granddad tells me stories from his head. Tonight, he says that once upon a time there was a magic sweet shop where we went to buy a bag of sweets. I ate them walking down the street, and as we walked through the forest, and over the hills, and at home, after I’d had my tea. Soon a week had passed and I still hadn’t finished them. And that’s when we realised – it was a never-ending sweetie bag! We reached down inside it, and saw there was no bottom – it was just sweeties, all the way down. Each night, he goes back downstairs to sleep on the couch so I can share the bed with Gran. And then she tells me stories too, but real ones, about when a couple of GIs came down their street, and how one of them drew her portrait on the back of a cigarette box. She tells me how her dad had come across the water to find work in the mills. When she was a child, they all played outside their tenement building, and one day someone from one of the houses opposite had put a bath out in the street. Neither she nor any of the other children had seen a bath before, so they just assumed it was for coal and dragged it round the back for their parents. She tells me how she and Granddad waited six years to have my uncle, by which time they had given up. And then, another six years after that, along came my dad! So, you never know.

  During the night, I listen to her snoring, to the clock marking the wearing away of our summer, to the gulls outside calling to one another over the estuary. The little holy-water font hangs on the wall above us, a tiny clasp holding on to the promise of blessings, a still, quiet pool, the idea that all of us pilgrims might find a place to rest.