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.