East-West

by Unknown

  A fifth, he thought. A fifth of people smoked where they lived. His wife had drawn the map. She worked for the borough. She told him she’d chosen the brown tobacco-stain shades on its key especially for him. She didn’t smoke.

  ‘Look, Dot,’ he said. She was called Dorothy and hated the name. ‘It’s because we live on the tube line. Less than one in six smoke in Ickenham, Eastcote and Northwood. They’re all just a mile or so away from the tube. So they must be more relaxed places.10 Look,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘It’s the stress of being a commuter.’

  ‘You’re not a commuter. And anyway, it’s a “synthetic estimate”,’ she said, making quotation marks with her fingers. ‘It’s been made up by the company we pay to get the data to draw the maps. Nobody really knows how many people smoke round here.’

  She’d got all clever like that when he started to be shirty. He thought it had become worse since they retitled her group the ‘Corporate Performance & Intelligence Team’.

  Imagine calling her team ‘intelligence’. It wasn’t as if they were fighting a war, was it? And since when had the London Borough of Hillingdon become a ‘corporation’ that had to ‘perform’? Last year her group had been the plain old ‘Policy Team’. Last year’s report hadn’t included any annoying tobacco-stained maps of smoking.11 And last year she’d pointed out just how much South Ruislip’s primary schools were improving, just as the little one was about to go. This year she was worried. The ward had slipped back, especially at Key Stage 2. West Ruislip was doing better than South Ruislip.

  ‘We should think of moving,’ she said.

  ‘You need to get that promotion,’ he said.

  ‘I need more qualifications,’ she replied. ‘That’s why I’m meeting that lecturer at Tottenham Court Road at 3.00 this afternoon.’

  Cigarette, he thought. He could hear that his daughter had figured out how to get the DVD player working.

  What was the real reason for his wife meeting a lecturer on a Saturday at Tottenham Court Road? What was the lecturer doing working on a Saturday afternoon?

  Northolt, 7.30 a.m.

  A DVD player didn’t cost anything. Of course they had to have a DVD player. The boy was nine. He couldn’t tell his friends that they couldn’t watch a DVD here. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t working. And she was getting Tax Credits. It was just that she was working part-time, twenty hours in a week, most weeks, getting about £10 an hour, £200 a week (£800 a month, just under ten grand a year). Child Tax Credits gave her another £56 a week for the boy.12 Then she got Child Benefit, £20 a week. However, she was about to lose £20 a week because of the Housing Benefit cuts.13 That was like losing the Child Benefit. Every week! She had to find another £20. Every week! That was like not buying the cheapest DVD player. Every week!

  And £20 a week is £80 a month, is £1,000 a year, is £10,000 by the time he is nineteen. That’s a lot of jeans. It is a lot of money to her and to him. But they had to stay in the area. It was a nice area. But it’s a Labour ward, a Labour area; it has a Labour MP. It’s not as if she’s living somewhere posh.

  She could save the money by stopping having the Internet at home and selling her computer. He needs her computer and the Internet for his homework – there is a ‘club’ at school for that (but he calls it ‘chav club’). The school was not that great, but she could just afford to live here, and she could get work here.

  If she worked a few more hours she could get back that £20 a week. Her friends were here and his friends were here. And this was Ealing. It was a nice place. A bit too much trouble round here sometimes, but it was not the kind of place that would ever see a riot (would it?).14 The boy needed more, he needed something to do. He needed a dad.

  ‘Mum, I’m bored,’ he shouted from the living room.

  What does everyone else do on a Saturday morning? she thought. What do they worry about, what will they do with their day?

  ‘Mum, I’ve got nothing to do,’ he complained.

  ‘You need some exercise,’ she said. ‘Should be playing football.’

  Maybe your dad would still be here if he’d exercised more, she thought; she never said it out loud. Maybe then they could have bought that flat. The home they really wanted, rather than be renting here. But she didn’t say anything; she couldn’t confide in the boy, could she? At this rate they’d be pushed out of London within a year.

  She’d heard rumours the council were rehousing people out to the east, but soon they wouldn’t be able to afford even that. It’s not as if it was posh here, but it was home. They’d tease him about his accent if they moved north, or to Essex. What if they moved them somewhere where no one else was Asian? He’d get picked on. He was starting secondary school in two years’ time.

  West Ruislip to Northolt

  All of these four families can sense how the social landscape tilts. None of these four families can see that landscape, but travel left to right, west to east, on the Central Line and at first you travel slowly downwards on one of the smoother slopes of what is in other places a more wildly undulating invisible social topography.

  We count distances in miles and kilometres, but in London, and especially underground,15 more often distance is measured in seconds and minutes. We assess height as feet or metres above sea level, but in our great flat cities, especially today, elevation is more often measured in terms of enhanced life expectancy, inflated house prices or impressive school exam results. For every minute spent moving east past homes on the Central Line, the GCSE results of the children you pass by drop by four points. One grade C, worth 40 points, is lost every ten minutes on the tube while heading eastwards through this part of London.

  Between the first four stations on the Central Line it is the accelerating drop in GCSE results that is most consistent. It is the sudden rise in poverty on entering Northolt that is most shocking. It is the relentless drop in average incomes that underpins this social landscape, the real landscape influencing people’s lives: London pay not London clay.

  The direction of the gradient on this part of the line is about neither extreme riches nor dire poverty. This part of the line is typical of much of Britain. It is not that there are that many bankers to the west or that those bankers are not found to the east. It is that, at most, only around a single percentage of the population hereabouts work in well-paid jobs in finance. And, although life expectancy drops overall, the fall is not monotonic.16

  Monotonic has two meanings. One describes the act of talking on and on in a monotone, a tone designed to ensure that boredom quickly sets in. Social statistics are often associated with monotonic lecturing. The other meaning describes a set of values that always go up or always down. Two of the five values shown below are monotonic, but only along just the first four stations of the line. These are GCSE results and household income. Both fall at every station as you begin to move east.

  Five little charts,17 each with four little bars, can sum up the first four stations of the Central Line: the general trend is downward in all these social measures, as you move from exurbia to suburbia. It’s about schools, and avoiding ‘bad ones’. It’s about money, and avoiding living next to the poor. It’s about income, and keeping up appearances; it’s not about bankers. It is about your health, but there is only a year’s worth of life-expectancy difference between West Ruislip and Northolt. Then again, that makes over ten thousand years if you think of all the people who are losing out.

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  Ten thousand years is a hell of a lot. Just over ten thousand years ago and the last Ice Age was ending, the ice was melting, and the area that is now London was part of the Eurasian land mass, not on the edge of the sea. There was no English Channel, let alone Britain. Even if, in the grand scheme of things, each premature death might barely register, seen this way a year of life lost across ten thousand people is of geological significance. Seen from the point of view of a nine-year-old boy whose father is dead,
it is more important than that. Life expectancy falls quickly when a few extra people die young.

  Place matters and even what appear to be the smallest of changes between places matter. Later on along the line there are far greater shifts in life chances than are shown here, but few people cross over those chasms to move home from one area to the next.

  It is along stretches of the line where conditions are more similar that people can envisage choosing between residential neighbourhoods, and so it is in parts of London like this where the local school exam results are so keenly observed, where housing prices and tenure exclude most of the poor from the neighbourhoods where chances might be a fraction better.

  It is along the first part of the Central Line where household incomes drop so neatly in line with GCSE results, where few bankers live because these areas are mostly beneath them, but where people, on average, can expect to live around the national average length of life, if not a little longer – because here is better than average.

  Greenford, 8.00 a.m.

  ‘Have you seen my tie?’ he asked.

  ‘The wedding’s not until 11.00,’ she said.

  He couldn’t help it. He got up every day for work during the week earlier than this, what was wrong with getting dressed now? Was it because the girl wouldn’t be up yet?

  ‘Where was she last night?’ he asked.

  ‘Out with friends. She was back at 9.00,’ his wife replied.

  ‘She’s only twelve,’ he said. He’d found the tie now and was a little happier.

  ‘And her friends are only twelve and it was Friday night,’ his wife pointed out.

  ‘But where was she?’ he said, shaping the knot to perfection. He liked everything to be neat. He liked order. He wasn’t very good at talking to his daughter so he learned about her through his wife.

  ‘She was at a friend’s,’ his wife replied. ‘You look very nice. Why don’t you wear the navy jacket with that?’ she suggested, trying to change the subject.

  ‘Which friend? They could all say they were at a friend’s,’ he retorted. ‘There’s been all that drinking on the recreation ground.’

  ‘How would you know?’ she asked, irritated. It was not as if he ever took much of a real interest in his daughter’s friends, or in her friends, or in the neighbourhood. He’d been reading that Greenford Green Neighbourhood News on the toilet again, she thought. The four-page flyer had been sitting on the toilet for three months now. She wondered how many infections were passed on by junk mail that ended up as toilet reading matter.18 ‘Oh yes, the tie really goes with the beige,’ she said, placating him.

  Don’t they realize how thin the wall is? thought their daughter. Mum’s always telling him his ties are nice when they’re rubbish. Ouch! Her head hurt. Most days she heard the two of them arguing about what he was going to wear. Not the stupid navy jacket, she thought. He thinks it makes him look young and ‘with it’. But the beige one was worse. She winced. Maybe she should get an aspirin. That’s what Mum does. She went to the bathroom. She had just managed to get the child-proof top off when her mum came in.

  ‘Can’t you knock?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t let your dad see you with those,’ Mum whispered. ‘They’re bad for you. They’re banned for children, even junior aspirin now.’

  ‘But you take them, Mum, when you have a hangover,’ she said, not too quietly.

  ‘Shhh, he’ll hit the roof. You shouldn’t be drinking, not at all, and never enough to get a hangover, not at your age,’ Mum whispered.

  ‘I guess that’s banned too?’ she asked, a little quieter.

  ‘Drink a pint of water, get in the shower, be good all day at the wedding and we won’t say another word about it,’ Mum pleaded.

  ‘Can I have a drink at the wedding?’ she bargained.

  ‘Just a sip’, said Mum. ‘Your dad will get shit-faced and I’ll be driving as usual …’

  Perivale, 8.30 a.m.

  He had thought it was funny when he was 13. They had erected a ‘crime prevention marquee’ at the tube station and one at his old primary school. They told everyone about the new infrared CCTV camera being put up on the cycle path, the camera that could see in the dark, the ‘first of its sort to be installed in your borough.’19 Now that he was 15 it was not so funny.

  ‘This is a nice area,’ his mum said. ‘That’s why we live here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he muttered in reply.

  ‘So why do some people have to spoil it all the time?’ she continued. ‘It will lower the tone of the neighbourhood. People will think we have problems here, they won’t know how good the school is, and they’ll see the signs and think we have problems. You know – problems.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he muttered, again.

  ‘I blame the parents,’ she said. ‘Some of them aren’t old enough to be parents. I was 38 when I had you. We saved up. You should have children only if and when you can afford them. That’s the problem, all those young mums on benefit. It’s their children and ones coming from outside the borough, that’s why they’ve had to put the signs up, that’s why the tone of the neighbourhood is going down.’

  He glanced at the sign: ‘Controlled Drinking Zone: It is an offence to drink alcohol in this controlled drinking zone if warned not to do so by the police’.20 His mum would kill him if she found out he’d been drinking in the zone. He and his mates had forgotten about the infrared CCTV, just for a few minutes. That was all it took. They only drank there because the signs were there, because it made them look tougher.

  ‘It isn’t illegal,’ his friend had said. ‘It means you can drink as long as the police don’t ask you not to.’ But he wasn’t so sure. They had his face now, drinking, taken by that camera. He’d seen how it worked in the marquee. They store all the images forever on computer. They can see in the dark. They’d show his picture to the teachers at school. The teachers would identify him. The police would be at the door. He was already in trouble at school. What was the point? They had him trapped.

  ‘I don’t know why we came here,’ she said, talking as much to herself as to him.

  ‘Your dad works all hours to pay the mortgage. They’re taking away your Child Benefit too – they say Dad earns too much. That’s my gym money. Now they’re talking about putting those high-speed trains though here. That’ll hurt the house prices too. Thank God we don’t live right by the line, but it will have an effect. Out at Ruislip they’re campaigning for a tunnel, almost three miles’ worth of tunnel! They’ll get it too. No one will say, but it’s because they’re white out there, mostly white, not like us here. And look the other way, Hanger Lane’s the same. We’re squeezed in between. We might work hard, behave well, bring our children up right, but we won’t get Child Benefit if they cut it like they say they will (Dad earns too much) and we won’t get a tunnel, not through Perivale. Then we’ll never be able to move out to Ruislip, no matter how hard your dad works, or how hard I work. I won’t be able to go to the gym.

  ‘You just see you work hard at school and don’t get in any trouble.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  Hanger Lane, 9.00 a.m.

  ‘Hanger Hill ward is without doubt the most charming of all the wards in Ealing. It can boast of its wonderful parks, its golf course, its quality schools, its tree-lined streets and its thriving Conservative supporter base. Community involvement and participation is what Hanger Hill residents are all about. We welcome with open arms anyone wanting to help ensure that Hanger Hill ward is and remains at the top of the hill!’21

  ‘Yuck,’ she said, as she looked at the smug faces of her two local councillors. ‘Yuck, yuck, yuck,’ she repeated for effect. She was determined to wind up her father this morning. ‘Who delivers these leaflets so early on a Saturday? They must be paying them.’22

  They were having breakfast in the conservatory: marmalade on toast. She was embarking on her favourite sport – goading Father. He was studiously ignoring her. He was not going to rise to the challenge, not when they ha
d paid so much for her education. It wasn’t as if they had relied on the state. That left more for everyone else, didn’t it, all those not at the ‘top of the hill’? And it was a hill, for God’s sake, only a few could be at the top of it. Why was she so ungrateful? He pretended to be reading the paper.

  ‘I wish we didn’t live here,’ she said, determined to get a response.

  ‘You won’t have to soon, not if you pass your A-levels,’ he replied coolly.

  ‘I might defer for a year. I might live a little – you know, work, travel …’ She was going to crack him, whatever it took.

  ‘You can pay board and lodging,’ he said calmly, his eyes moving across the type as if he were taking the words of the newspaper in.

  ‘I’ll leave and claim Housing Benefit,’ she replied.

  ‘No daughter of mine is claiming handouts while I’m alive!’ he declared.

  ‘I can do what I want now I’m eighteen,’ she said deftly.

  ‘Not under this roof you cannot,’ he countered, ‘and anyway, if you take a year out now it will cost you £27,000 to go to university.’23

  ‘So?’ she said. ‘That will just mean I am not taking a handout.’

  ‘It’s not a handout!’ he almost shouted. ‘Your mother and I have paid all these years for your schooling. The least we should get in return is knowing you are not in crippling debt when you go to university. It’s daylight robbery,’ he announced.

  ‘They are your yucky Tories who are charging £9,000 a year,’ she said.

  ‘Only because Labour wasted so much money on drop-in centres for druggies and Nelson Mandela buildings for other wasters, and anyway, when you go to university THIS YEAR, you will only have to pay £3,000!’ he declared.