Common People

by Kit de Waal

  But right then, I didn’t care about books.

  I was too busy hoping Heather would stay with us – I couldn’t believe she’d want to stay in Nanna’s arctic cottage with its moth-eaten thatch and its mattresses crackling with brown paper to stop the damp. Our brick semi was cold – ice feathered the metal-framed windows and mould spots peppered my bedroom walls all winter – but it couldn’t touch the tear-inducing savagery of Nanna’s. Still. Adults were incomprehensible things, capable of pulling bizarre stunts like falling asleep on Christmas afternoon, so stay at Nanna’s they did.

  I heard them before I saw them: Heather’s splicing twang and Mac’s canyon-deep laugh ricocheting off the pamments and papered-over beams of the cold old cottage. I smelled them too; the burnt wood and boiled fish of Nanna’s kitchen subdued by notes of Fabergé hairspray, the pubby smell of tipped cigarettes and an indefinable aroma of difference.

  My uncle placed his Stetson on me, lifted me up and tickled my cheeks with his beard until my knees bent almost backwards at the convex bulk of his stomach.

  My aunt stroked my face. Her nails were blood red and shone like the crimson paint teachers made at school from gigantic square tins of powder. Her lips were the same colour and she smiled just like Dad, but without the tombstone effect – her teeth shone like the school piano keys. Her hair was a sculpted cloud of chocolate satin, her eyebrows a perfect sideways comma, and things called contact lenses floated in her eyes, their outline rimming her ink-dark irises like a horizon. The diamonds in her ears were stars winking at me, and when she smiled I thought of a peacock spreading its tail. She looked like no one I’d ever met. She was perfect.

  ‘Why din’t you want to stay with us?’ I burst out, ambushed by hurt. How could she like staying here, with its rustling beds and chamber pots, its one icy tap with a rubber nozzle and the horrible outside privy with that scribble of spider-filled honeysuckle?

  Aunt Heather laughed. ‘Honey, this is mah home.’

  Her accent was like trees swaying in summer.

  ‘But America’s your home!’

  ‘Well, baby, you got a point.’ She reached for her ‘soft pack’ of Winston cigarettes. ‘But the States is just where Ah live, sweetie-pie. Mah home is here. Wid my mama. Someday y’all gonna git what Ah mean.’

  I didn’t say so, to be polite, but I didn’t think I would.

  For two weeks, battling an endless river of relations, my sister and I camped by our aunt’s feet. While adults competed for air space in rooms sweating with the layered fug of cigarettes, cigars and unaccustomed heat, we sat in awe of the alien pots and vials that populated my aunt’s vanity case: American shampoo, toothpaste, nail polish, lens solutions, all embellished with gold writing, stamping superiority over our drab Co-op own brands. We giggled at ‘fanny’ and ‘diapers’, ‘pants’ and ‘trunks’. We pawed albums of tanned American cousins seemingly stapled to photographs by terrifying braces. We fawned over the diamonds encrusted into Heather’s watch that glinted like sunlight on snow ‘ev’ry which way’ we turned it. We twisted the Star of David sapphire that only revealed its opalescent secret if you turned it ‘thataways’, and wore all at once the pomegranate-seed necklaces and diamond rings that danced under Nanna’s fly-specked lampshades and made her low, lumpy ceilings jitter with wobbling lights.

  ‘Now Ah’m gonna fix me a Bourbon,’ Uncle Mac would boom at some time after tea every night.

  ‘And Ah’ll have a Mateus Rosé, honey!’ shrieked my aunt, except she pronounced it ‘Mat-oose Row-say’.

  It was the most exotic thing I’d ever heard. Dad drank bitter or mild. Mum drank shandy, or maybe a Babycham with a defeated cherry in it at the pub at Christmas. Nanna drank tea, sometimes sherry at weddings. No one drank wine – especially pink wine. I was willing to bet even posh people didn’t do that.

  Then my parents ruined it all.

  We’d been admiring, among a handful of Dad’s siblings, photos of Aunt Heather and Uncle Mac’s ‘station wagon’, the new red Cadillac, the cute MG shipped over for their youngest daughter’s sixteenth birthday so she could drive it to her mysteriously titled ‘segregated’ school. The row of shyly smiling maids they called ‘negras’.

  My mother objected. It was offensive, she said, that term. Racist.

  My aunt and uncle strongly disagreed – that was life in the Deep South. What did my mother know about it?

  A row broke out.

  ‘I am a nurse!’ my mother barked before she swept out. ‘I happen to believe we all shed the same blood, and I will not have my children’s minds poisoned!’

  ‘Too damn right,’ Dad said, grabbing my sister and me. ‘You might have hell an’ all now, Heather, but you han’t always bin that way. You should know more ’n most, money’s no excuse for downright bloody ignorance!’

  My mortification knew no bounds: my parents the only ones to argue with this perfect aunt! How could Heather ever poison my mind? What did they know – Mum with her home-made dresses and her Avon dress ring with the blue glass fallen out; Dad with his roll-ups, tatty boiler suit and home-made Christmas-present stilts? And to think I could have been Heather’s daughter. What a cruel twist of fate, that I was condemned to a life of lemon-scented pig manure when just a few genes away lay all that. I promised myself I’d drink Matoose Rowsay and nothing else when I grew up. Even if I hated it.

  I consoled myself by taking the Polaroids we’d posed for to school: me and Jane wearing Mac’s Stetson, flaunting American-style hairdos (although, sadly, you couldn’t smell the Revlon), festooned in Heather’s jewels.

  ‘So?’ said Gillian Webb. ‘My uncle Harry’s just waiting for me to be eleven and then he’s gonna take me on tour with him.’

  I silenced her with a Polaroid of me and Jane in my aunt’s mink coats – one dark, one light.

  There weren’t any more rows, at least. And Heather’s mascara didn’t run like Mum’s when it came to the goodbyes. Tears slipped down her brown cheeks cleanly – no dirty rivulets, no Alice Cooper scariness. Uncle Mac tickled me with his beard and gave me the crossed rifles from his Stetson.

  ‘You come see me, half-pint,’ he boomed. ‘And Ah’ll find you a redneck all of your ownsome.’

  I didn’t know what a redneck was, but if it was anything like him, I knew when I finally reached my homeland I’d definitely want one.

  Colour and sparkle faded from my life after they’d gone, waiting for the garish liberation of the tinsel season. We filled boxes for our American relatives, full of Dairy Milk and Terry’s All Gold and the china teacups twined with ivy that my aunt loved so dearly. They sent us American Christmas decorations, Hershey bars, a cookbook bearing recipes for pecan pie and Southern-fried chicken, where ingredients got measured in cups. I took it to school. It was, of course, I said to my friends, because Americans did it all bigger and better than us. Scales were just so English.

  Then the phone call came.

  It was a week before Christmas when one of the maids found him. She’d been on her way to the house early when she’d noticed something blurring the windscreen of the station wagon. He’d been drinking a bottle of Bourbon a day, Heather told Dad, while the court case his estranged mother brought against him over his father’s will ravaged his mind.

  ‘Pissed,’ Dad said to Mum, and she didn’t tell him about swearing in front of us. We knew then it was serious.

  ‘Desperate,’ Mum said as she pushed away a plate of egg and bacon. The top of the egg seemed to sink in dismay.

  ‘Even so,’ said Dad. ‘I couldn’t. Never. Not to my girls.’

  Mum sighed, picked up her plate and went to the sink, only she kept wiping her face with the backs of her hands more than she seemed to wash anything. When she turned round, there were drips all down her uniform. I wondered if they’d dry before she started clipping all those old feet or doing whatever it was she did with the mysterious Incontinence Pads that filled the boot of her Morris Minor.

  ‘I’d better tell Mother,’ said
Dad.

  I didn’t want to tell anyone. I didn’t want to say what I’d overheard – that Uncle Mac shot himself in his car with his own handgun; that he’d obviously meant to do it because he’d put the barrel in his mouth, not against his temple, where it could have sheered to one side. Nor did I want to say that he’d been found with two empty bottles of Bourbon, and that Aunt Heather had screamed to Dad how she’d burn all her furs and diamonds and her house full of maids for just one hour with him to tell her why all that courthouse shit mattered more than her or their kids.

  Gillian Webb was the first person I saw when I went back to school, though I never knew if she knew or not. No one said anything and it seemed easier to simply follow suit. I didn’t know then I was to leave my tiny primary six months later to start a new academic life at the ex-grammar in town, ten miles away. That I’d get to know kids who had nannas, nannies, grannies and grandmas – but never feel sure again of exactly where it was I fitted in.

  As years passed, my Suffolk accent would wash so frequently in the seas of other voices and other places it would fade until its only colour came from the parrot that waited silently on my shoulder for the cadences of home. I would become chippy long before I slowly, and then quietly, grew proud.

  I would live in cities and love central heating; prefer manuals to automatics; get a diamond I’d twist and turn to light its fire. I’d marry, too – though he wouldn’t be American, and he definitely wasn’t rich. Few people would believe I came from a family so poor the village parson once asked Dad’s mother to keep her kids away from the church because the sight of them upset the parishioners. Or that flash displays of cash once impressed me enough to believe a woman’s best chance in life was to marry well – and having rows of black maids was fine as long as they smiled.

  I would eventually move back to the countryside. I would smile at the smell of pig shit mingling with the scented air of my tumble dryer and tell my kids about my amazing mum, my brilliant dad. And I would always have secret guilt for hiring some other Gillian Webb’s mum.

  But I never did acquire a taste for Matoose Rowsay.

  On Class and the Countryside

  Anita Sethi

  The huge grey road wound its way up through the hills, further and further up. Out of the M6, the heavy greyness, the cluttered-up world gradually spaced itself out, lifted itself up. Up and up and up we drove, into the high regions of the earth, where the space dived straight into my belly, leaving me winded. The world grew softer, wider, dragged me out of myself and into something larger, layering into the mountains. Suddenly, everything was slightly warmer. Everything was slightly lighter. The world seemed to open itself up, lift itself, lighten up, shrug a weight off its shoulders.

  Those roads were taking us to the highest mountain in England, and to the deepest bodies of water.

  We were on a journey to the Lake District with Mum. Mum had got a weekend stay in a bungalow in a place called Barbon, subsidised through the nursing association, and for ages beforehand I’d sing about soon going to the Lake District, although technically the Barbon bungalow was in the nearby district of South Lakeland, Cumbria. The nurses at her work had to sign up if they wanted to go, and finally, Mum’s turn had come up.

  I wonder if I would even have had this early experience of the countryside had it not been for that nurses’ subsidy. My earliest memories of nature were visiting the local park in my hometown of Manchester, which had felt like a safe space before I heard about the guns. After hearing that guns belonging to gangs were rumoured to be buried beneath the trees, I could not walk through the park in quite the same way. My childhood home was just two miles from the city centre in the M16 postcode, which criss-crosses Old Trafford, Moss Side and Whalley Range, and at the time my hometown had acquired the nickname ‘Gunchester’. It seemed a world away from the Lake District.

  There were some trips to parks further afield than our local park, to Lyme Park and Dunham Massey Park. I found a colour photo with my mother, siblings and two cousins, all gazing at a deer, which must have been taken in Lyme Park. This is the closest I came to nature, beyond a school trip to Chester Zoo. For the most part, though, growing up in a single-parent family with a mother who worked multiple jobs, there was not much time or money for many trips away. I rarely ventured out of my home city in early childhood.

  But one day we did leave the city behind and venture beyond it; we ventured higher up in the world than I’d ever been before. I don’t have a photo of it, but now it’s coming out of the dark and into full colour. Before leaving, Mum stuffed all valuables into black bin liners and hid them in the cubbyhole, scared, we all were, of burglars.

  We drove away from the city and up through the hills, up and up and up, the roads growing thin and steep and windy and I looked out of the car window and gasped as the grey fell away into an astonishment of green and blue and gold. Then the car swooped down and we were heading towards a lake, a pinprick of blue in the distance that grew larger and larger until it swamped the whole vision. I fixed my eyes on the blue water glinting with jewels on its surface cast by the sunlight, and it seemed as if I was flying towards the lake, flying into the blue.

  It was as if a surface had been stripped off the world to reveal its colours beneath.

  It was a shock to step out into the world and breathe in, for the air was so much clearer, the light so lucid, the sky vast and blue, reflected in the lakes. I breathed more deeply than I ever had done before and for the first time I could remember, it was a joy to breathe and the oxygen was flowing through the lungs, around the body, lifting the heart, clearing the head. I walked through the grass, which tickled my bare brown legs.

  We stayed in a couple of rooms in a bungalow. A strange conception, to have the whole of life spread out on one floor, so sleeping and waking were all on the same level. It was the first time I had slept under the same roof as Mum that wasn’t our house curving around a corner of Manchester.

  I played outside, picking the flowers, and watching the old couple who pruned the vegetables in the garden next door, not really saying much at all, yet seeming to listen and watch us.

  ‘You don’t see many brown folks out here in the countryside,’ mumbled the elderly man as he paused from pruning to gaze towards me, squinting his eyes, his face contorting in a frown, then going back to his gardening.

  It would be true to say that there were not many brown people to be seen in the countryside, and not many ‘common people’, either. Over the course of my life I’ve experienced not only a north–south divide, but class divides within the same region too. When I told someone from Bramhall, Cheshire, whereabouts I lived, nearby the Manchester United football ground in Old Trafford, he shuddered and commented that it was ‘not very nice around there’.

  One morning I went for a walk with Mum through the mountains, watching how the great expanse of green gave way to the water and watching the wide-open spaces. Mum held my hand as we walked and walked through this new world, stopping to inspect flowers and plants that grew and watch as birds and butterflies fluttered past. We walked through a place filled with so many species I had never known existed. We stopped near a huge tree and I stretched out all my limbs so I was standing firm and proud like the bark of that tree. For the first time I remember, it felt right to be. I felt strong, as if, like that tree, I would be able to withstand any fierce gale that may come battering. The heart was opening; somewhere a tulip that had been trapped in darkness was unfurling itself in the daylight. The heart was growing, becoming as vast and deep as those lakes, as wide as those woods. I walked and walked through the world and the grass brushed my skin and the sweet scents of the flowers filled the lungs and a bright purple butterfly fluttered by so quickly that the heart leapt, and I walked and walked and forgot about myself entirely as the world flooded in and all the bad feelings drained away into the hills, which absorbed them, and Mum’s rage seeped away into the lakes, which swallowed it up and washed it away, and I walked and walked and w
alked, and the skin was renewing itself, each cell was opening up and welcoming in the light, and the skin was shedding itself, the bruised skin, the hurt skin, the thickened, sore skin, shed as the self renewed and strengthened and healed and new skin began to grow. The hard shell that had built up around the self began to melt away amidst all this beauty. Love came flooding in. The world came flooding in, pouring into the emptiness.

  I walked through the world and the air filled my lungs until the heart was beating in the ears so I knew that I was alive alive alive and I was no longer just a girl from home but a girl of the lakes, a girl of the hills, a girl of the flowers, spilling filling thrilling the lungs with their scents, a girl from the world I was becoming.

  I fell in love with the lakes.

  After the bank holiday, we loaded back into the Peugeot and drove back down the mountains, the softness fading away, the car splattered in grey rain.

  We got lost on the way back, stuck out in the middle of the mountains. We asked a farmer who was passing by for directions, pointing to Manchester on our map, but it fell between the creases of two pages, between the dark groove in the middle of the faulty road atlas, so that the city was swallowed up, eluding all directions.

  The roads swerved through the hills, round bends and past lakes flashing and flickering in the sunlight, and we drove through them for a while, lost, before getting back on the right track and finding the road that took us back down through the mountains and towards Manchester.

  It felt strange thinking about our house in Old Trafford without being in it, thinking about it while being so high up, having a distance from it and from everything that had gone on inside it. From up there, near what seemed like the top of the world, I gained a new perspective.