The worst thing that happened...

'Daft' Peter aka Bruce George Lee

My memory of daft Peter Dinsdale, for what it is worth, is of skinny boy in a stripy hat and an anorak. He had a thin arm not quite fully formed, and was, therefore, a bit lopsided when you looked at him from the back. I didn't know him, but I'd seen him. Everyone had seen him and his rickety old bike. He was one of a number of local oddballs - the old fella who picked up tab ends, Wiggy, the old lady who stank of cat piss, the enormously fat boy (who killed himself by over-eating, and who I now realise must have had prader-willi syndrome), Eamon who waved to me (and everyone) from the Cider Bar - that an old bus shelter at the Hessle Road end of the Boulevard. It was rich in detail where I grew up, even Horace next door with his florescent socks and his large model of a submarine in his middle room, was averagely strange and all, all were the antithesis of the quiet cul-de-sacs and semi-detached lives of the people I was in top set German with.

Peter Dinsdale, who had his name changed by deed poll to Bruce Lee was a delusional, sad case. In 1979, he became, for a time, the most prolific serial killer in England. His notoriety did not last, detained as he was under the mental health act (presumably til he dies) ensuring that he disappeared from the public domain almost as quickly as he appeared. But if you are from Hull, and west Hull in particular the memory of what daft Peter did (or was supposed to do) lives vivid in the memory.

Daft Peter, by his own confession on the 4th December, 1979, poured paraffin through the door of a notorious family's house and the subsequent fire killed three of the boys who slept there. The marriage of these two things - the arson attack and the fact it was this family, reverberated around the neighbourhood like a slow rhythmic drum beat. The shock was palpable.

I knew this family. I knew them from a distance as most people did, and I also knew them up close and personal as they threatened to beat the living shit out of me. I knew them, as everyone did by reputation, and by experience. There is a certain irony I cannot help feeling about modern politicians and their pronouncements about feral children and broken societies... as though these things are new, when the truth is there has always been an element who were best avoided, who always existed outside the system - occasionally falling foul of it, always an element who ran wild... The Hastie family were that family. I want, and am passionate advocate for equality of opportunity and for those on the margins to be offered the same chances as those in power but I am also a realist and some people will never want this for themselves.

Edith Hastie and her husband Charles senior were notorious rabble rousers. At 34, Edith was the mother of 7 children, four boys and three girls and she was not, to put it bluntly, to be fucked with.

My clearest memory of her was on a bright autumnal, sunny day. I was charged, by the vicar, along with my sister (I think) and some other girls with clearing the back of the church hall of rubbish. We worked at our task quite methodically, throwing old bits of wood and other things onto a fire. The centre piece of the waste ground was an old wooden door propped against some bricks, and, sure this was heavy and would require a group effort we seemed to skirt around it.

As the afternoon wore on, and the sun got higher and the cold came in, I felt, and then noticed, that we were being watched. First one Hastie boy was there, and then another, and finally a third, each similar looking and slightly bigger than the last, a sort of star-jumpered version of russian dolls.

I don't remember the precise configuration of Charlie junior's expletives but it was very clear that he was unhappy. We continued, safe in the knowledge that the vicar would protect us and that we would surely go to heaven for our efforts, and continued to move wood and other broken items to the fire.

Finally the centrepiece door was the only thing that remained of our effort. We gathered round it and lifted it up.

"You'd better fucking leave that alone," Charlie said, or words to that effect

The truth is, I was happy to do that, I was happy to leave it. I was not brave then and I am not brave now. I did not want to fight with Charlie and his unwieldy family - particularly Angelina who I had encountered before, and who I knew packed a punch. I did not want to fight with any of them. I had been on the wrong end of Charlie's wrath too - when me and a scout I knew found his cache of porno mags behind the church. I didn't want trouble.

I looked down behind the door and saw that beneath lay cigarettes, and alcohol and a range of other contraband that I assumed had not been gathered by legal means. This would, ordinarily have been a good hiding place if an interfering vicar and a bunch of guides hadn't bumbled their way to a discovery.

The vicar, who up until that point, had always seemed to me to be a total wimp, suddenly was overcome with something akin to bravery. "Obviously," he began, "If they're on church property - they belong..." He didn't quite finish his sentence, because by this time Charlie was spitting feathers, threatening Armageddon and a bit more besides.

Charlie left the scene, and returned with what looked like a weapon and the vocal support of his mum and dad, now hanging, semi naked from the front bedroom window of their house. Edith had a sheet wrapped around her and Charles senior was just plain butt naked. Believe me, this kind of afternoon romp may have been popular in the 70s but you did not throw open your windows and advertise it. Charles senior had just been released from prison, and this was offered as an explanation of their behaviour, but I think we were all a little taken aback...

The vicar, bizarrely - stood his ground. I was hiding my face. Because I knew being seen was a bad move, and I knew that we were not going to survive any systematic campaign devised by the family and that our lives would be hell. Charlie threatened us. Peter threatened us. Paul did. Charles senior and Edith threatened us. I have no doubt that we would have got our comeuppance. We had suffered at the hands of Angelina, and Charlie had joined in for fun, Friday after Friday on our way to the guides. But the threatened revenge did not happen.

Charlie Hastie

It did not happen because Daft Peter, allegedly, took matters into his own hands. It had absolutely nothing to do with us, or what had happened on that autumnal afternoon. History tells a story of difficulties between Daft Peter Dinsdale and Charlie Hastie, but I do not believe the stories of things that happened between them in public lavatories. Charlie was a bad lad, but I find it hard to credit that he prostituted himself to Peter Dinsdale or anyone else. Or indeed that Peter Dinsdale was capable of the monstrous revenge he wrought. I may be wrong, I have been wrong before, but I just don't buy it...

Whatever the truth of any tale, the Hastie boys lay asleep in their house on Selby Street, when someone, Bruce Lee, or someone else, put lighted paraffin through their door. Edith Hastie told how Charlie threw her from the window tosave her, and returned to the bedroom of his younger brothers to save them too. They all perished.

The neighbourhood was alive with gossip and rumour. It is true to say that many people had fallen out with the Hastie family, and our little episode was a minor one compared to some of the tales of woe and campaigns of terror that came out from their immediate neighbours. But my teenage self was outraged that this could have happened, even to boys who had caused me pain, even to a family who had frightened me and who I had crossed the road to avoid.

I remembered my guide leader saying that they deserved it, because they were bad through and through and I remember thinking that if she represented God, and God supported what she thought, then that would be my last moment of believing. This sense of outrage and grief confused me, but I knew that whatever they had done, they did not deserve this terrible end - a feeling reinforced by the act of pushing their smiling faces through door after door on my paper round. Nobody deserved the revenge meted out to them.

Later, a conspiracy theory grew up around the fire - tales of drugs, drugs sellers and the wrong house being targeted, but Daft Peter Dinsdale aka Bruce George Lee remains inside for this and other crimes.

100 years of guiding, and its part in my downfall...and the substitute middle class parent...

I watched the hundred years of guiding today, and it made me think about the enormous impact the Girl Guides had on my life. I know this sounds a bit OTT - but it really did propel me into a journey I might not otherwise have taken.

In the first place, I had the (mis)fortune to be the younger sister and my guide captain - also a younger sister, decided that my sister, Kim, bullied me and then she determined because of her own experience, to find a way of getting rid of my sister from the guides. Well, I'm not sure it was quite this thought through - I don't think Audrey Lord, the captain, thought anything through (she was never still long enough), but she did engineer the situation for me to be at the guides on my own and exist without any other member of my family. Anyone who comes from a big (ish) family will tell you this - it is virtually impossible to be seen without the filter of one or other of them, especially if you happen to be third in line to the throne. You are always someone's sister or like your great aunt nellie or doing something that someone or other has done before you...

But with the guides, it was not like that. Well - it was not like that after an incident. The funny thing about this incident is that looking back I was not only fully involved in it, I may even have instigated it. What a hoot we thought, one Friday evening, if we shoved an old exhaust pipe that we'd found under Audrey's car so that when she left the guides that night it would be dangling down on the floor, and she would think her exhaust was broken. To add to the general mayhem we (myself, Kim, and our friends, Dawn and Alison) had also written 'crap car' and 'clean me' and so on all over the car in the dust, too.

Audrey wasn't fooled. she pulled the old exhaust out, cross that someone had tried to play that trick, and drove off. And we trudged home a bit disappointed. We weren't disappointed for long. We'd apparently shoved the old exhaust a bit too vigorously because two weeks later when Audrey was on holiday in Scotland her real exhaust fell off her car in quite spectacular fashion. And this, she concluded was our fault.

When she got back to Hull she rang my mother up. It was one of those tense moments in the kitchen when you knew that trouble was brewing. My mother said, "My children would never write such a terrible word on your car!" and she said, "My girls would never destroy your exhaust." She was pretty angry when she got off the line. "I'd better not find out that you've done that, or your feet won't touch." (This was one of a number of phrases my mother used that I didn't quite get. She used to say, "I've been shopping like a man with no arms." I still don't understand this.)

My sister and I shifted awkwardly and tried not to meet our mother's eye. Then the expletives started to fall, and then we knew we were in trouble. "You've made me look like a prize idiot" (Could idiots win prizes?) and that was a very dangerous thing to do. I took cover (my usual reaction) and Kim fronted it out (her usual reaction.)

The next Friday we went to the guides, and Kim and Alison were both asked to leave. That was after they'd be ritually stripped of their patrol leader badges, all very solemn. Just like that, banished. For good. Dawn, dramatic and daft, left with them both. And I stayed. It was at that point that Guides started to matter.

A few weeks later, Audrey made me a patrol leader. Then she encouraged me to do badges and other stuff. Then she encouraged me to do my Queen's guide (see the marvellous picture above....) It was the first time that I had followed a path that no-one else had taken, and I liked it. I liked it very much. As an aside, when I received my Queen's Guide it was a bit of an event. The newspapers came, and I had my picture in the Hull Daily Mail (squeezed in on a page with a reflective piece about the Yorkshire Ripper...making me look like one of his victims), and in the parish magazine, I had to play second fiddle behind Charles and Diana who thoughtlessly chose to get married in the same summer. Mind, the church threw a bit of a do, so I wasn't too disappointed and enjoyed my celebrity.

The Guides opened a number of doors for me and set me off on a road of over-achieving and leadership - it certainly made me realise that I could manage people, and could get things done. I was also encountering other young women, in better companies, who intended to go on to university and whilst I couldn't lay money on it, I have a fair sense that that was where I got the idea from. I never got it from school. I was a relative failure at academia with my 3 'o' levels, and never destined for the Higher education route. In that sense, the Guides very much operated as a substitute middle class parent: offering me a raft of opportunities and allowing me to rub shoulders as an equal with other young women who took sixth form, and university as their right. The Guides gave me what they called on the TV programme a 'can do attitude' and, it allowed me to be a different kind of girl. To be honest, I do remember being very awkward in a number of situations - and whilst it's easy to dismiss this as an inferiority complex, I did always feel as often the sole representative of 68th St. Matthew's Company, like the poor relation rocking up at the superior in-laws' parties and eating the centre-piece in error. The Guides is chopped into districts, and each district is made up of a number of companies, under the leadership of a district commissioner - well, it was. Our company was attached to St. Matthew's Church, then in a pretty dodgy part of Hull. There were three other companies in our district and one of them, St Nick's were posh compared to us. From where I am now, they so clearly were not posh at all - but such was the sense of not being like them, I can remember going into events and deciding I didn't like people based on the fact that they talked posh, or were looking at us funny or they were not like us. Their leaders were young professionals, and clearly very much more dynamic than Audrey (although I did really admire Aud, who died very young and I still miss her.)

I remember once taking an instant dislike to a girl, Julie, from St. Nick's. Then, we were young leaders together on a camp and from the second I met her properly, we were absolutely firm mates. She was a blast. So it taught me that not all posh people were hideous, or other. At that point, Guides was starting to open doors that would have stayed shut for me as a girl from a working class community. I went horse riding with the guides, abseiling, rock-climbing, windsurfing, camping - supervised and unsupervised by adults,  - hiking and so on. I did fundraising, church parade, singing, first aid, looked after elders, etc etc... It afforded me privileges that I would not otherwise have had. And it made a difference, it really did. If we are talking about transgression, and the possibilities that transgressing opens up - then the Guiding movement was my ticket to crossing. It was my way of stepping over the borderline between the classes. 

So, any more transgressive stories?

Okay, this should have gone up two weeks ago...

The street where I grew up...no-one had a car then.

I have just come back from a rather lovely holiday in a cottage in Wales. No ordinary cottage being a fan of The Landmark Trust - this one had an enormous fowl house attached to it - bigger than the cottage; the result of the vision of a Victorian Industrialist! That's the Victorians for you - doing it properly. Okay, so class was absolutely clear then but the cottage we stayed in was where the poultry keeper lived, and I could have lived with that, I think. Although it would of course, being work for a man. Still, a girl can dream.

The fowl house at Poultry Cottage, Welshpool

It was bitterly cold there though. The Landmark Trust develop abandoned historical properties of interest, and they do it sympathetically. No central heating, and no double glazing. One of the things that was really noticeable with this was that the bathroom was absolutely freezing. No hanging around in there when it's minus 12 outside!

The bathroom and bathroom activities at Poultry cottage were very reminiscent of baths as a child. In and out in three seconds flat and then throwing on every single piece of clothing you can find in under a minute, as if a time penalty kicked in if you failed. I remember my older brother (the wag) saying in response to my, "Oi - it's chilly in here" when he opened the door, "Very strange, it's England our here!" I feel duty bound to report that he is a comedian now.

The other thing that poultry cottage had in common with the house I grew up in as a child was that the toilet was approximately 4 days away from the bedroom. My sister, Kim (aka the long-suffering one) was woken up to accompany me on the long journey when I wanted to go. I was literally afraid of my own reflection when the kitchen light was switched on - always surprised even though I knew it was coming, to see myself looking back, slightly disheveled and a little skeletal. Our toilet was in the furthest reaches of the house - down a landing, down two stairs, across a short landing to the main stairs, down a hallway and across the aforementioned kitchen. It was, in other words, practically outside (where it had been originally) and it was regularly beyond perishing cold. It was equivalent to entering the Arctic Time Zone. Next door to the toilet, my dad used the original scullery as a shed - an indoor shed, a place he stored things of purpose. There was something about the grime and the blackness of that room with its shadowy tools (and once a couple of dead rabbits that uncle Keith had brought) that scared me too. It was a male, unfinished sort of place, cold and unforgiving. There was a mirror behind the toilet door but it was possible with skill and careful thought to manoeuvre yourself out of it without catching a glimpse of your own ghostly presence.

The house I grew up in...

A story springs to mind. My grandfather Jarvis, (my mother's father) arrived once to look after us when my mum was doing a shift at Smith and Nephews. He walked towards the house with his trilby cocked at a rakish angle, with a practiced nonchalance in his stride. BUT children had changed since his own had grown up, and he had not reckoned with our wind-up record player or the half a dozen orange vinyl classics we possessed: 'Skip to my Lou' being the one I remember most vividly. We played it incessantly throughout the evening and did precisely as we assumed it asked - 'skipped to the loo' - which we clearly thought hilarious. On and on we skipped in spite of Granddad's protestations (as an aside I was probably 20 before I realised that the first line: 'shoo fly don't bother me' didn't relate to a fly that liked your laces. I had similar problems with 'this cross eyed bear' in the song at church.) Anyway, the upshot of all the skipping and the repeated Arctic blasts as the door opened and then banged shut, was that Grandma Jarvis looked after us after that and she taught us how to knit; the kind of thing girls are supposed to know.

A journey back in time...

So, here we are and I should really be off doing clever Trevor type things, but actually it's late and I have done a lot already in the last 2 weeks. I have, first of all, been pretending to be a proper PhD student and that has given me time to reflect on a lot of my own history, in relation to inquiring about other people's (of which more much, much later)

I spent my first day of PhDness taking photographs of where I used to live as a kid. Naturally enough this really got me thinking. About all sorts. I went with my sister to some of our old haunts and in a sort of circling way, we went all over the place for an hour or so until we finally made it to our old house. The centre of our lives until I was 18 (and she was 19). It was a weird old day because it was bitterly, bitterly cold in the way that it only can be in Hull with the wind whipping off the North sea, and because we remembered many of the same things, and that sense of shared memory gives you a sense that in spite of what people say or imagine you are, your siblings can confirm your sense of self when you start to think you may have imagined it. This is certainly true of Kim and myself, separated by one school year and nearly always together in a way that must have been quite aggravating for her, and really quite handy for me. Because she was tough, and I most certainly was not. She is better at the detail than me, the names of people and so on, and I have the benefit of having been away, and come back, which allows me a kind of distance - something a little more in the round.

We went to the church where we spent many a Sunday arguing over who was going to carry the flag on Church Parade day, and where we found pornography, where we were chased by the Hastie family and where we used to (allegedly - you're lying about this one Kim) met so that we could deliver our difficult (mine were much worse) papers together. My paper round took me down behind the bus station, and down Coltman street where the old woman who lived there would invite you into to her cat-piss stinking house, given half a chance and on St. Pancras Close where opposite the flat I delivered to was a young man with learning disabilities who, in my ignorance, scared the living shit out of me. It wasn't a million miles away from where baby Harry used to chase us either ("It's not me you want, it's me sister!" we each used to say, and because they weren't that bright, they seemed to believe us. Once, they threatened to beat me up because they said my picture was in Jacky magazine, because I had never had a boyfriend, oh alas, as if it mattered - BUT it wasn't my picture, I swear.) Are you sensing a pattern? I was chased a lot as a young person, better, I thought, and still do, to run and live to fight another day, then have your head kicked in by baby Harry's sisters. I used to run away from the ugly girl most nights after school, and she stayed ugly and I stayed safe (ish) - another Kim thing there - telling me that I should call her ugly TO HER FACE... and I was stupid enough to do it...



Our journey back in time moved from the church then down the Boulevard (less up market than it sounds, but more up market than it used to be...) We deviated and went to my mum's old work place - a chippie down Airlie Street. Okay, let me tell you about how not to regenerate a place. Do not take the main reason for a place's existence away and leave nothing in its stead. They built a fancy dan stadium for Hull City and Hull FC on the old cricket field, and the old ground of Hull FC, down Airlie Street was left literally to the dogs (greyhounds) until they buggered off somewhere else too. Everything just looked like it had had enough. The ghost given up and gone. These streets were sagged and ragged.

The chippie was boarded up. All those nights standing in there chewing the fat and all those scraps scoffed on the way home from Guides. All of that time, and all of those people who came and went and who enjoyed one another's company in that place: dead. Okay, I accept that I am being nostalgic - and with good reason, but communities need something to centre on, and shops form part of that. In the geographical area that I was brought up my sister and I calculated that there were 10-12 shops and small businesses that we used, depended on, and that depended on us. There was precisely one left. One.



It was worse than that. My sister and I used to go into Hull FC's ground at half time for nothing, have our faces blasted with gravel from the speedway, and as we got older, join our parents occasionally in the social club that stood beside it. My sister even held her children's christening parties in that place. This is it now: a pile of rubble. Okay, nothing is forever - I know that, but there is value to understanding what these communities meant to people and why we were close-knit. We had commonality. And if we want it in the future, we'd better look at what it might look like...for I honestly believe that if there's not enough to bind us altogether in a sense of common good, we are going to Hell in a hand-cart.


A cheery thought. That's not how it started. Or indeed how it will continue...

Four Yorkshire Men. Competitive impoverishment. Redistribution vs Recogniton

A comment on my blog got me thinking - someone wrote that her childhood had been more impoverished (than mine, presumably.) I have found this quite common - this competitive 'onedownmanship' ... "Oh you had it bad! But, I had it worse!" I am reminded of the Four Yorkshire Men sketch:

"GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!"

And on it goes - reaching the heights of "lick road clean wit tongue!...and when we got home our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing, "Hallelujah!"... #class matters. It matters so much that people are competitive about it. I am very curious about this, about this fractioning up of poverty. For me, the working class don't need to be divided among themselves - which of course they are. Look at the invention of the 'underclass' by the political class. There is no such thing as an underclass. They mean the unemployed. They mean people who do not work and have never worked. To call a group an underclass is to deny them any kind of status. The underclass are better called the non-working working class.
Years ago, my brother - a very articulate, capable bloke - was talking about his working class background when some guy said to him "You're not working class." His answer sticks in my mind. "I shared a bed with my younger brother for 3 years, and ate weetabix for tea, how working class do you want me to be?" Mind, he was talking to a bloke with the word FUCK tattoed on his forehead. But the point is ... how working class do you want me to be? Funny how we argue the toss about this, dividing and sub-dividing ourselves. For class read power/powerless. It's not one another we should be worrying about in the class wars - it's those who have power, wield it and continue to self-perpetuate their and their family's position. David Cameron. I am not saying any more than that.
This is also an argument about class vs identity (politics) and so far as I am concerned there is no argument. Nancy Fraser argues that the preoccupation with identity is detrimental to the redistribution of wealth (redistribution vs recognition.) Some have even called the preoccupation with identity a top-down tactic to keep the bastards down. The redistribution of wealth and power would bring real change for most - identity is a smoke-screen, recognition is all well and good but how far does that get you? Identity divides and separates, builds barriers where none were.
I make no claims to be working class now. How could I? I am a professional, and part of a professional class. But my heritage is my heritage is my heritage. My father was a printer, but he might just have easily have been a ship's rigger if his father had lived and he had followed in his footsteps. He might also, just as easily have been a grammar school boy if he hadn't failed the 11+. My mother worked in Smith and Nephew filling Nivea tubs with cream (she fell asleep doing it, too - but that is a whole other story.) Later, her working life was a succession of chip shops - wages that paid directly for my university degree, sent to me each week in an envelope. I'm not being melodramatic, that's a fact.
Harvey Gillman, a Gay culturally Jewish Quaker said that we are all "a minority of one.", and no-one is denying individual differences, that's what makes us uniquely human, and ourselves (taking full note of society's current obsession with personal fulfillment and our obsession with 'living our dreams') But I honestly believe that there is more that joins than separates us, and divisions - the poor are the poor, whatever the flavour and uniqueness of their sense of self - leads powerless. Knowing who you are, and being recognised and acknowledged doesn't mean that you are suddenly able to participate at every level of society equally, and it doesn't mean that you will reach parity with those in power (a lack of recognition is often dependent on a lack of economic power.) I'm not belittling difference, or assimilation either, I'm just not willing to give up on social politics. And I believe that true recognition ultimately requires economic equity.

Mother's culture

Here we are as children, doing as children do at parties -sausages on sticks, and cheese and pineapple I shouldn't wonder. This picture is taken on North Hull Estate. It was a long way from our house, and I was always very aware that all the house sort of looked the same. And not like ours. Even though aunt Joan had a big garden (we didn't) I knew that this was a corporation house. It was something about the colour of the doors. They were mostly the same colour. I was bandying about a theory the other day (mostly in my own head) that you learn a lot about your culture via your mother. The thought was born out of one of the respondents of my survey, who said that culturally he felt he was his mother's culture, but his class was determined by his father. Does this stem from the fact that culture revolves around food, and the things you learn with regard to it in the early stages of life - beliefs, values, attitudes, customs, institutions and social relations (and class was always your father's job)? Obviously it is more complex than that - but I am struck by the fact that the purity of my mother's class is never disputed - (and recall that if your mother was jewish for the Nazis then so were you no matter what else was thrown into the mix.) In the time this relates to - my life story anyway, the 1970s, mothers really did spend most of their time with you, choosing what you wore, what books you read (if any), and generally taking care of you, including all of your interests and establishing how things were to be and ensuring that you adopted the rules. My mother was a bit of a harridan so there was no transgressing what she said without consequence. And the consequence? Often she would say, "Just you wait til your father gets home" and this was usually enough. My mother was quite interested in us being occupied. That was why we went to the guides, and the swim club (not to learn to swim from teachers - for some random reason we went to play as part of the railway man's children's night. We weren't, and never have been railway man's children so I have no idea why this was allowed, but we certainly benefitted from it), Tuesday club and Sunday school (and because they handed out free cakes, and my sister and I liked that.) We went to the panto every year because of my dad's work. Things are evidently not this straight forward though because some people don't live with their parents, or indeed their mother... but I suppose so far as I am concerned with regard to a lot of what I learnt, my mother was central. I have often thought that my father only really came into full focus as I got older (though I was and probably still am, a daddy's girl.)
The second picture is of my grandparents, standing outside their back way. The entrance with the towel leads to the outside/inside toilet on one side and the kitchen on the other side. Their toilet always either had newspaper or izal medicated hanging behind the door - and it was freezing in there even in the height of summer. It wasn't the first choice in terms of toilet, and I think we waited until we got to Aunt Joan's (who lived round the corner) to make use of her facilities. I loved my grandmother and grandfather's house. He sat in a big chair, and beside him was the latest Guiness book of records, something he bought more regularly in the later years of his life. He loved that book. The fire was usually blazing, and above it there was a mirror, reflecting into another mirror opposite so that you head and face when you looked in one was reflected back and forth dozens of times to infinity (and beyond?) There wasn't much else in the room - a side board, a couch, and a table and chairs.
The kitchen was always dark and almost always smelt of carbolic soap; bits of it saved in a jam jar.
There was a pantry and a coal shed off this kitchen, and in the coal shed you could see my granddad's lollipop stick - he spent his last few working years as a lollipop man. I always think of him when I pass lollipop people, unsurprisingly. There was a cooker, and a small table and a table on which grandma baked cakes and buns. Nothing was fitted - they weren't those sorts of people.
They are long dead now - she died when I first began teaching, and he died many years before that - the fags that he smoked constantly finally catching up with him. He died on my older sister's 14th birthday.

Houses are not just for living in.

Here we are in Richmond, Yorkshire. A place I haven’t visited since I was 17 or 18 about 3,000,000 years ago. As we get closer, I say, ‘My memory of it is that it is very posh.’ –realising, almost immediately, that this was, at the time, because I wasn’t. It is a standard market town, much like many in Yorkshire and it is interesting going around it today to realise that I have in fact, moved on, and that it is not so much posh (although there is a Hunter Welly Shop) as different, and that for a girl from the City, that difference was a world a way from my experience. The town is a hive of activity – but there are properties, and shops standing empty, and in the half rain there is something a bit bleak here. Older women are doing lunch – and I am guessing they are making moves to put the world to rights. These are the kind of women who fix things, hold fetes and are part of the Women’s Institute.

There is that green/brown woollen jumperness to it. The Barbour Jacketness of the place just rings out, so far as it is possible for Barbour Jackets to ring. In essence the difference is not in monetary terms (although it is richer here, and I am certain there is also poverty), but the real differences lie in class, and in terms of politics (William Hague) and in terms of expectation as to what you do. (There are no factories here, and no fishing industry.) It is not like Hull. People do not come from generations of unemployment. (They do move out to find things to do, and I can and do accept that that is a difficult thing to have to come to terms with. This is not better or worse, necessarily, but it certainly is different.)

As we walk back to the car (we are those sort of tourists) we notice an enormously large house. It is a huge mansion of a place, with Virginia creeper dying back, with something slightly unkempt about it, and yet it is singing money, and it reminds me of something that happened years and years ago after returning from a Rangers camp in Durham.

We were travelling back on a mini-bus, and dropping off young women as we got closer and closer to the centre of Hull. This was not my first trip to places like Cherry Burton, and Swanland, and Willerby and so on, after all I had been cycling for a number of years through these places and onto other equally exotic places like Welton, Malton and Wetwang for years and years, and yet somehow, this was the first time I had ever really noticed that people lived there. It was, as we dropped off each of these lovely, well-spoken girls, the first time I realised that people lived in the whole of these houses. And it was the first time I noticed just how big they were. And how they were not joined together, with shared back alleys and ten-foots. It was the first time I really noticed how different the world was from this angle. I’m not suggesting, either, that we lived in a minute, shrunken property by comparison (although, in comparison to these properties we did), only that it was evidently a different kind of world.

Looking towards the houses, as girls carried rucksacks up their paths, it occurred to me that they did not share bedrooms, did not have to go to the park to get some space, or buy the opportunity to ride a horse (although, to be fair, I would rather have eaten my own head than ridden a horse). These girls did not have to run the gamut of the Tilsons, or the Fureys to get to their house, or pick their way through wild running dogs and their shit. These girls’ mothers did not, I was guessing, go out of an afternoon and wash the step and/or windowsills, or sweep the front yard. I realised that quite probably these girls’ mothers did not pick up the gossip in this way. I sensed their fathers did not cycle to and from work, either. And I noticed there were no bloody shops. Where did they do their paper rounds from? Where did they run to if they’d forgotten something? How did it work? No one was playing in the streets. No one was in the street at all – it was like a ghost town. How then did news travel?

The world is different now of course, but those girls’ mothers, like the women doing lunch, did not let the news come to them, but affected it where possible. They did not wait for the world to change around them as bystanders, but found ways of developing a commentary, or manoeuvred themselves into positions that enabled them to support their communities in ways that mattered. And they drove cars, and had a freedom mothers like my mother did not enjoy. And I was guessing, they did not work in Smith and Nephew putting the lids on Nivea, or serving fish and chips.