Common People

by Kit de Waal

  I didn’t know Patty, but she saved my mother’s life. She had pneumonia when she was six and Patty sat with her through the night making bread-and-milk poultices. My mum and Patty shared a bedroom until my mum was sixteen, around the time my mum won a competition to meet the Beatles. Which she did. At the Savoy. In London. Nan went with her. The first and only time she went to London, and she saw nothing but the Savoy Hotel reception and the carriage they sat in on the train.

  My mum wasn’t trained but sent to work at fifteen. She wanted to go to art school but she ended up painting the plate rims on a pot bank with gold leaf. Remember, she had pneumonia? Well, the paint fumes affected her lungs, so she went to work in Hanley Baths.

  I learned to swim up Hanley Baths. Top of Lichfield Street and the bus wouldn’t make it up the hill, so we’d have to run. I learned to run in Hanley Park. Nan would take me on the swings. Then she’d show me where her brother Ron hid out; a coward gone absent without leave. She’d take him jam sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and got the local bobby to turn a blind eye. It would be nice if the jam was apricot, but I don’t know for sure. She would show me the exact bush he hid in. By that time, I was toddling, so went and hid in it too. ‘You can’t find me,’ I’d say.

  What my nan would say to me: ‘Do you want a piece of jam for your tea?’

  After we’d been for Sunday dinner. To their house up Rosevale Street. To their bungalow in Barratt Gardens when my granddad, with forty years of pot-bank smoke fogging up his lungs, could no longer manage the stairs. The kitchen would smell of Bisto. The rest of the house would smell of Pledge. Another new hearthrug from Stoke Market would be in front of the electric bar fire; blazing away, chucking out no heat. We’d have hot milk poured onto treacle-thick Camp coffee; marrowfat peas and Mr Del Monte’s fruit cocktail with evaporated milk, me and my sister fighting over the single cherry.

  I google this: Why is there only one cherry in a tin of fruit cocktail?

  I quote: ‘Cherries are more expensive than peaches and pears.’

  I thought glacé cherries were cherries. That’s what Sally Midwinter told me.

  Then we emigrated to Shrewsbury, fifty-three miles down the A53.

  When we first moved to Shrewsbury, some of the mums told their children to stay away from me and my sister because we had Scouse accents. Then I went for tea at a friend’s house and we had spaghetti bolognese. I started to cry because I didn’t know how to eat it.

  I didn’t know I was different. I didn’t think fifty-three miles would make a difference, yet girls called me common and some called me poor. I knew poor souls in Stoke. My mum will talk of families she grew up with who were dirt poor, as she talks of my dad’s family as poor as crows. My dad had grown up not a stone’s throw from where we had moved to in Shrewsbury, in the tin houses on the Rad Valley council estate. I used to take the dog for a walk past where Dad used to live. The houses were owned now. It never looked poor to me.

  Poor means having few or no possessions, deficient, in need, scant. Then I learned some bigger words: underprivileged, disadvantaged, inferior, second-rate. I like the fact that poor sits between poop and pop in the dictionary. A lot of people, I realised, those who’d called me poor, those who choose not to see the poor, were either up their own arses or full of hot air.

  What my nan said when I went to university: ‘With too much education comes too much choice. That’s all that’s up with you girls today.’

  I got really interested in women’s writings at university, feminist agendas and working-class matriarchs. D. H. Lawrence and Nell Dunn. I talked to my nan about it. She said they were too busy working to go in for all that women’s stuff. She forgets that she helped to make ammunitions during the war. That she did more for the women on the estate than most and, most importantly, brought up a daughter who enables and encourages beyond what I can ever pay back.

  ‘Aren’t you ambitious?’ my mum’s cousin, now having told her I’d given up my job to return to university and was midway through a PhD on female autobiographical practices: I was particularly interested in why working-class women didn’t think their lives worthy of the pen, so persisted in telling them in my fiction. ‘And that’s your job?’ she asked. She would still send me typed letters in the post – gossip she’d overheard on the bus. I thought you’d like them for your stories, she wrote. She called those stories ‘the titpips’. I never corrected her.

  Because you never quite know when you’ve swallowed a pip, and here’s another one: when we got flashed at in Milton Park by the witch’s hat. Nan squealed then told him to put that bloody pigeon where the children can’t see it. Since most granddads I knew kept and flew pigeons from their allotments or converted coal sheds, I carried on climbing to the top of the witch’s hat to see if I could watch them fly. Pigeons, said my nan, were filthy, and that’s why London was full of them. ‘You never see a London pigeon up here,’ she’d say. But then the man burst into tears and she sat him down on the swings and listened. I have no idea of their exchange, just that he was a pitiful soul. ‘A bit poorly,’ is what she said.

  I thought Nan was always poorly, she went to the doctor’s so much. Turns out it’s what she called the bingo. She was at the doctor’s so much you’d have had to hire Pickfords to transport her files.

  Only in old age did she get ill, diagnosed with breast cancer at eighty-six. She told me, ‘If I dwell on it, it’ll make me ill,’ so she put all the pills in the cupboard drawer along with her blood-pressure tablets, haemorrhoid cream and hearing aids. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever been touched by a black man,’ she told the consultant who first checked her breasts. ‘Shame it’s not spread in the other breast too.’ My mum said that a small part of her died, but I don’t think my nan had ever been more alive.

  She’d remind us she was still alive. ‘I’m just phoning to use my voice,’ she’d say, me now at work. ‘I haven’t spoken to a soul all day. I’m still here, you know.’ I’d ask if Uncle J. had been. He didn’t count. It was us she wanted. My mum. Me. My sister. All that women’s stuff she’d never gone in for. She couldn’t get her pips out quick enough. ‘I’ll leave you that in my will,’ she’d say, but there never was one because there wasn’t enough.

  I have a couple of her sherry glasses. A silver toffee hammer. A photograph of her in her twenties, which is like looking in a mirror. Her engagement ring bought up in Blackpool, barely a carat in gold.

  There are gold pears and peaches called Summer Gold. Three thousand varieties of pears, in fact, and two thousand varieties of peaches, most of them grown in the States. Nan always called us Little America as we privatised this and privatised that, but blamed China mostly. MADE IN TAIWAN, she said, had brought Stoke to its knees.

  Taiwan isn’t China, I know, but then peaches and pears belong to the same Rosaceae family, which is one of the six most economically important crop plant families. See? Six families, six towns can live harmoniously. Yet when I googled this, I also found people arguing about whether nectarines were derivatives of peaches, as some botanists argued that peaches are also plums. In which case, it shouldn’t have mattered that there was a pear in a tin of peaches if they are one and the same.

  I think about all that long division:

  ← I left being a peach when I moved to Shrewsbury.

  In Shrewsbury I became a bruised pear and wanted to go back →

  = If I’m ½ there ½ here, do I still belong in the same tin?

  I don’t have the answer. I’m not sure why I need to be reconciling this anyway when peach and pear, just six centimetres apart in the dictionary, share the same page. So, I ask Mr Del Monte. Mr Del Monte, he says yes .

  And yes, she is six years old already. Big blue eyes, so tall for her age, so pretty, so me. She has the same name as my nan, my porcelain babe, and stands talking to the apple trees. She calls them Rigger, Olga and Iggy One. She is telling them the story of the two girls. The one who has the posh pram and the other who pushes a tin cart w
ith a wonky wheel that falls off and rolls into the pond.

  ‘What happens next, Mummy?’

  That’s who I am. Until I become Nan.

  I open my mouth.

  She beats me to it. ‘Granddad will mend it with his toolbox,’ she says, and as I slice up some fruit for her and her friends, I think how peaches and pears were both discovered in China, how I met my husband in China, how she is fine bone china, that time has its place and we are all things made but above all, put simply, us.

  A Brief History of Industrial Action, Vauxhall Motors, Ellesmere Port

  Lynne Voyce

  As a child, I knew my parents hated the Conservative Party, because every time either Bruce Forsyth or Jimmy Tarbuck came on TV, they’d switch over. ‘Can’t stand him; he’s a Connie,’ they’d say, and that was explanation enough. These days, that may seem an extreme reaction to other people’s democratic rights, but in the dark depths of the early eighties, the battle for workers’ rights had not yet been fought and lost. And a family like ours was at something close to war with the Tories. Their general, Margaret Thatcher, a spindle-fingered bogeywoman in pussy-bow blouses, part Child Catcher, part Grand High Witch, was the stuff of my nightmares. Her strategy was attrition warfare, in which she relentlessly attacked the worker, until they had nothing left; their only choice was to surrender. A war like this is always won by those who have the most.

  But still, even knowing this, the fight went on and – in our house – strikes were the crusades. My father was a mere foot soldier. Every few months, at the directive of the union, Dad got on his 250 Honda and went the eleven miles to Prenton Park for the vote. A strike was inevitable. There were no secret ballots in those days; each worker would a raise a hand for or against strike action, and a steward with a pencil and paper would walk the terraces and count. Under the judgemental, beady eye of a shop steward, and in full view of your comrades, it was pretty tough to defy a call to stop production.

  To complicate matters further, even if those on the production line decided to keep working – Dad put gearboxes in Bedford vans – the skilled workers, who voted separately, could still call a strike. Those fabled fitters and electricians often held the factory to ransom.

  There was always a dreadful pall over the house when Dad was on strike. Although, as kids, we were relieved that the silent pantomime of ‘letting your father sleep because he is on nights’ didn’t need to be performed daily: we could flush the toilet and turn the TV up. But there was a price to pay for being able to freely make noise: that price was hunger. Strike pay from the union was never forthcoming; this was a source of much bitterness, as union fees had been paid for twenty years. And the bitterness always grew when the cupboards were bare after the two-week mark, when the strike really ‘bit’. Indeed, there were times in week five or six when we barely ate, resorting to flour-and-water pancakes with salt to fill us up. Thank God Mum’s cleaning job was in a café; her wages barely covered the rent, but the leftovers were handy. If we were lucky, dinner might be a slice of apple pie with a chocolate teacake for afterwards. We loved it, but there were many days when she came home with an empty basket. There were no savings to fall back on, and in a small industrial town, when the factory was ‘out’, everyone was in the same boat, so there was nothing to share.

  I do remember one particular act of charity, though. In this instance, the dispute had reached seven weeks and, as is the way with poverty, it was the monotony of life – the endless diet of potato and egg – that had weakened our spirits. On a Friday evening, when the last seed potato from the back garden had been dug up, sliced and dry-fried, there was a knock on the door: a bold, musical knock. Standing on the step in a Harris Tweed sports jacket and beige slacks was our neighbour Mr Dooley – a man who had never worked a day in his life but still had a colour television and a Vauxhall Viva. Under his arm was a white-paper parcel. ‘This is for you and the family, Bill,’ he said, ‘don’t give in to the bastards.’

  Minutes later, with empty tummies, and hearts full of hope, the four of us stood in wonder around the kitchen table as the parcel was unwrapped. In all its fleshy glory, coiled like a pink, pepper-flecked snake, was a Cumberland sausage and next to it a sapphire-skinned black pudding; both lay on a stack of best back bacon, deep pink and edged with ivory fat, like the illustrations on the Second World War rationing posters we’d seen at school: Eat for Victory. God knows where it all came from – other than being heaven sent – after all, this was Merseyside in the eighties. It may have ‘fell off the back of a lorry’ or even been passed on by the butcher himself as a means of support. That evening we all ate hearty.

  In fact, many of my memories of strike action are ones of people pulling together: men playing football in the street with the kids, because they had naff all else to do, or the women placing unwanted tins from long-forgotten Christmas hampers on a communal table, so others could pick up their cast-offs and put down their own. Mum would put down a jar of mincemeat, for example, and pick up a tin of gooseberries.

  As a family – perhaps even as a community – we didn’t think we were ‘sticking it to the bosses’. I know my father didn’t. Rather, we felt poor, depressed and manipulated by all sides. Dad was a man stuck between the managers and the union. If a strike was called, whether you had voted for it or not, there was absolutely no way you would break it: to be a scab was a terrible shame on you and those you loved. But there was one time he spoke to me, when we’d not eaten properly for weeks, when he’d explained that for all the hardship, he had to stand his ground. A dispute had sprung up when it was decided that the table by the factory drinks machine was to be removed, and the chairs around it; this was where the workers took their break. I’d thought it silly to strike over a table and chairs and said so. ‘First it’s the table and chairs,’ he’d said, sagely, ‘then it’s the break. They won’t care, as long as they’re making money.’ I understood. And subsequent years, with the introduction of zero-hours contracts and docking staff wages for keeping a hospital appointment, have proved him right.

  But there was one strike that bit harder than the others; it tore the flesh from our optimism and resolve, and left us permanently wounded. It was called in late autumn but lasted until winter; yet another winter of discontent for us. Christmas came: the tinsel tree stood in the corner, faded paper chains hung on pictures, and the brass candle carousel on the mantelpiece, little winged cherubs with horns, spun above the flame of a candle stub. But there wasn’t so much a feeling of celebration as there was a sense that we were doomed. There was simply no money.

  At least my brother was working; at weekends, early mornings and after school, he’d rig up a market stall and sell handbags with a man called Tony. Of course, even at the market takings were down, but my brother earned enough to buy us a small turkey. And my sister, married and living away by then, sent a bottle of sherry and a tin of biscuits.

  I was used to sparkling Christmases, full of presents to open: Matey bubble bath; Sindy accessories; and the latest walking doll or talking teddy bear. So, on 25 December, when I tumbled downstairs at the customary time of 5 a.m., I couldn’t hide my dissatisfaction when all that was there was a sage-green Raleigh Shopper with one wrapped parcel in the basket. What I should have felt was humble elation, but there was hardly anything to tear the paper off: there were no surprises. Mum had got the bike on the weekly from the Janet Fraser catalogue. It won’t have cost much shy of a week’s wages. But I wanted to drown in a sea of cheap festive paper and disappointment made me cruel. ‘Is that all?’ I said instantly, then sulkily opened the single present in the basket: a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Mum looked crestfallen. It was not my finest hour as a human being.

  I know my mother cried that morning; and I also know there was a ball of indignant shame and rage in my father’s stomach, the sickening effects of which stayed with him for days.

  The siege finally ended a few weeks later. Hungered and depressed, my mother complained there
was neither money for the rent, nor the bills. It was then my father made up his mind: it was time to leave Vauxhall and look for something else.

  It can’t have been an easy decision: unemployment was over 3 million, and Merseyside was hit particularly hard. In our street there were only two men who weren’t unemployed or striking, and one of them was a window cleaner, who’d heard ‘I’ll pay you next week’ so often that winter, he’d practically given up asking for payment.

  To call what my father did then ‘voluntary redundancy’ is one of the great misnomers of the eighties: he’d had no choice. The union kept redundancy pay low too, in order to keep the workforce at work and fighting; still, with no savings, nor anyone around who could help financially, the small payment seemed like the only option. So, the morning after my mother’s desperate plea about having to pay the rent, following a sleepless night, Dad rang the factory and asked for his ‘cards’ to be made ready: he was leaving Vauxhall for good. His mates on the production line couldn’t believe it; he ‘was part of the furniture’, having been there since the plant opened in ’62. But over the following years, most of them left too. Battle weary, probably. Their payouts were bigger than Dad’s, though, and some even took Thatcher up on their ‘right to buy’, refurbing their square red brick council houses with double glazing and porches.

  The months following Dad’s decision were ones of hope, despair and pretty much no money – but we were used to that. The only difference was the Thursday arrival (or non-arrival) of the dole cheque to tide us over for the following week. If the cheque was late, we went back to flour-and-water pancakes.