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?

A note about the blog

This is the working title of my PhD. In this blog my intention is to create a series of stories where my sense of class came into focus. I also think that moments of 'transgression' may occasionally blur into moments of a dawning realisation of 'difference' and I hope to unpick and evidence that here, and then develop a more refined version of this for the narrative inquiry stage of my PhD. The key to that is the development of a piece of narrative work and some commentary, and this seems as good a place as any to do it.

Oh yeah, I'm new to this.

First Day At School

It is April 1969. I am walked at speed by my mother who is in a hurry to have no children at home for the first time in 8 years. She is walking faster than my feet can move. I want her to stop - tip-toe instead to our destination. I am stepping towards an execution of sorts and want the last moments of freedom to be lived more slowly. I am at odds. My feet move like rotating comic feet, my body behind the pace, tilting backwards. It is amazing that I have not fallen over. My brain is in slow motion.
The business of the day, ongoing moments in the street, bear witness. Someone is sweeping their front, the brush, rhythmically beating the dust and dirt into the gutter. Another woman has hoisted her bosom to her chin, while she nods in a agreement about a piece of received gossip. Her companion moves closer, and both women whistle out a long, "She didn't!" as we pass. The milk man and his Lassie dogs are finishing their round - he pushes the trolley of milk towards St. Matthew's Street with the expertise of a man who does it every day. We reach the butcher's. The Butcher is hardy and pink like the sausages he folds into threes. He whistles and waves, and the rich smell of blood fills the air, acrid and heavy. It congeals in globules in sawdust beneath the carcasses of dead pigs. We pass the house of the lady with the purple hair and the blue shop I am not allowed to go to because my mother has fallen out with them over some long forgotten matter. I determine that rushing this way is the not the best way to go. I want to raise an objection, but my mother is tall and I am small. I debate tugging on her yellow dress but do not.
"Awright Joyce?," someone salutes her but my mother is not to be waylaid. She waves quickly and keeps up the pace. She drives on. She pulls my arm, and then, after Charlie Lollipop has let us cross, we've arrived.
The building is imposing, Victorian. The entrance is a dark archway like something from a Dickens' novel, cavernous and sinister. Children are swallowed in small gulps, pulled into a secret world I am yet to join.

"Come on then," My mother manages, addressing me directly for the first time. I can sense her enthusiasm for moving on, for moving me on. We are to step into the playground and I know that from that moment, everything will be changed.
In the hall, I have a badge pinned on me and I am led away. My mother leaves. I do not cry and nor does she. We are not those kind of people.
It is a few hours later, the morning having passed in a blur of rooms and paints and water tables, that I am back home from school at lunch time. I have been bamboozled by finding I do not really exist at all. All morning, I have been called a name I have never heard before, a person I am not. I know it is not my place to mention this, so I have gone along with it. The kindly older woman who I take to be my teacher keeps calling me Amanda. At least I think that's what she's calling me, and a nod of acknowledgement from me seems to have satisfied her for the time being, seems to have kept her from shouting it across the room.
I eat quickly because something I do not fully understand has happened and my mother is suddenly pacing up and down our kitchen. It is a big kitchen, and it needs to be. She is like a dinosaur in need of prey, caged and ready for attack. Before I have fully finished she is pushing me back towards school, saying over and over again that she's going to kill them. I have no idea what is motivating her to push me like this through the streets, as if her newly found freedom is under threat, but I am being propelled quicker than my t-bar sandals have ever known. They slap the pavement and echo around the now deserted street (as though all in it know Joyce is on the rampage and have hidden.)
My mother is an enigma to me - shy and furious by turns. There are many moments when I do not recognise her, do not know the storm of rage that overcomes her. This is one of those moments. This is not the woman who sets up the sleeve board on the table and lets me iron with her, or who makes me a bacon butty in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep. This angry, spitting wild woman is an imposter.
The head teacher is in her office. My mother, uninvited, throws open the door. She is suddenly a fish wife, throwing out swear words like confetti, the last one barely formed before the next spills from her. The head teacher looks visibly shaken. I know how she feels.
"Take this bloody thing off!" she yells, standing toe to toe with the head, whose brown brogues are so shiny I can see my face looking back at me. I have forgotten to breathe. I look like a ghost. The world, which has changed beyond all recognition since 8:30 am is surely going to end. "I mean now," my mother yells, "I take it there are children in this school who can read?"
"Mrs Precious," the head teacher gets a word in. "Mrs Precious it is really important that the teachers know."
It is now that I realise that the lable says Amanda and that this is somehow a terrible mistake because I am not her at all. This is a proper name. A posh name. A name that school have given. It is the name I am to be known by even though this is a name I have never heard before. It is school given and I must accept it. In my child logic, I can see why this might be a problem for my mother and why she is so cross. She of course she has called me Lou, Lou for so long it's hardly surprising that she's miffed. I am Mandy to her, not this.
"Please remove it NOW" she says again. Her anger has barely subsided which surprises me because even though I don't like it much, it's not the worst thing in the world.
"What were you thinking of?" My mother asks, a hint of weakness coming into her voice, "It's probably already too late."
Sensing a change of tone, Mrs Dosser, the head, is suddenly on the offensive. "Amanda does have fits, Mrs Precious?"
"Yes. She. Does. But does the entire school need to know?"
"This is a matter of safety. We wouldn't want Amanda to have one of her fits and for people to not be aware."
I am looking between the two of them understanding that Amanda is not the issue after all. I am Amanda and this is the school name that I am to use. it is proper and the name I am to be known as. I am sure of only one thing. School is not at all like home. School is different.
The offending badge is removed.

Later that afternoon, two things happen. Firstly, Mrs Dosser comes into the reception class and pins another badge onto me. She is not gentle and I sense the start my mother and I have made is not a favourable one. I determined to disappear. Secondly, at playtime Wiggy, a bald girl who some days wears an ill-fitting wig, and others a blue knitted bonnet, and her cousin Dee Dee, corner me in the outside toilet.
"Go on," Wiggy says looming over me, like a half finished monster.
"What?" I ask, aware suddenly that the toilets smell.
"Go ON!"
Dee Dee is tough, a hard girl who grows up into a recidivist prisoner, and who, 15 years later, I witness getting arrested in Bransholme Shopping Centre - rugby tackled by a police officer, the biscuits she'd nicked to feed her children spilling out of her jacket in a million crumbs.
She moves closer in. "Have a fit!" Dee Dee says. I can see the spittle spraying from her mouth. She is animal.
"A fit?" I ask.
Dee Dee has 23 brothers and sisters, including bone fide lock-awayable-madman who everyone crosses the street to avoid, so I knew that it was not wise to argue.
"Now!" She shouts.
And finally, the penny drops. My mother hadn't noticed my name had changed, she hadn't even noticed that Mandy, the real me, did not belong here...her despair had been about something much more tangible. What had bothered her was a deeper pain - the shame I would be made to feel for fits I had so infrequently I did not remember the last one.
"Now?" I ask, buying a bit of time.
I looked at Dee Dee, her unsmiling face without a hint of humanity, and Wiggy's moon head, impossible to read.
I lay down on the hard, concrete floor and shook a bit. And that seemed to satisfy them.

I was 16 before I had the courage to call myself the name I thought myself. The name my family called me.