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.

I'll take that one! Politeness/truth

When I went to University, I very quickly learned to keep quiet about a number of things. This wasn't a new experience for me -you don't mention at your nice well brought up school that you eat cereal for tea, for example, or the sex abuse scandal kicking off next door and you do not mention money. Never that. It's vulgar. Just as well my parents never had any. So far as I could tell, at university and at school, you didn't talk about anything that really mattered, and you absolutely were not allowed to suggest, even for a second, that you were in anyway different. I have encountered recently similar attempts that people have made to assimilate me into a carbon copy of their life experience perhaps because any hint of difference pulls them out of their comfort zone. (I like to think of it as the "You're like me" syndrome, and I don't like it. In much the same way that I don't like it, in equal opportunity terms, when people say, "I like to treat everyone the same." Well don't. I'm probably not the same as you, and you're probably not the same as me, and that's fine.)
Anyway, polite conversation has never been something I've excelled in, finding it awkward and silly. At 18, I had seen a lot of things and I quickly realised mentioning them in passing was the equivalent of throwing a hand grenade at a plate of vol-au-vents.
For some reason, I am reminded of a TV programme called Dear John. The conceit of this programme was the continuing life story of a man, called John, who had received a Dear John from his wife. To counter this, John had joined a lonely hearts group. The group, en masse, had attended a social event. One of their group members had an unfortunate flatulence problem. Out of politeness, each member of the group took it in turn to cover for the poor unfortunate woman by saying, "Excuse me!" or "I do apologise" as if they'd been the one who had broken wind. A crass, uncouth man from the lonely hearts group got that they were being discreet and kind, but not fully understanding how to protect her, shouted out after she had machine gunned a fart somewhere in his vicinity, "I'll take that one!" - the studio audience erupting with laughter at his (and not her) faux pas.
I mention this here because I have lived the life of this man on occasion, never quite understanding fully how to negotiate the line between politeness and truth (a line that seems to run like a fault line across the class system.) For my money, in working class culture there are two choices - a heavy, unforgiving denial or a full-frontal tits out approach that takes no prisoners. There is no room for subtlety.
My mother, for example, used to ask me what I thought about how she looked. When she asked me, she required me to tell the truth. She did not ask me because she wanted me to lie or bolster her ego. She did not want to look like mutton dressed as lamb and she did not want to get it wrong. In the first term at university, a young woman called Alex (the clues are there) asked me how she looked. Not knowing any better, I told the truth. "Terrible," I said, silencing the room in a moment. Looking round, I saw pinched faces sucking lemons, and got it immediately. I'm not an idiot.
The interesting thing is that Alex never held this against me (she was really very posh indeed.) It was my uptight, middle class peers who had the problem, berating me at length after the episode. And, funnily enough, most of them were training to be teachers. Alex, on the other hand, was doing something mickey mouse because she'd flunked her private school. And she went out in the dress anyway. What did my opinion matter to her, after all?