Common People Read online

  Nonetheless, we didn’t have a sitting room; we had a lounge. In the lounge we sat not on a sofa but on a settee. We had dinner at lunchtime and the evening meal was called tea. Holidays were the same each year – a two-week break in a caravan in Devon, spent mostly sitting on a windswept, pebbled beach watching the sea while huddled into towelling tops eating cheese-and-tomato-ketchup sandwiches from a Tupperware. After a few hours of this, we would be allowed an ice cream and sit eating it in the welcome fug of the car, before returning to the campsite for our mother to make something she called ‘caravan hot pot’ – a mixture of tinned vegetable soup, tinned new potatoes and corned beef. When I went to university at the age of eighteen, I had never holidayed in a hotel, flown on an aeroplane or eaten in a restaurant.

  We were raised with the idea that thrift, hard work and sobriety were the routes to happiness. My parents were teetotal and never spent a penny they didn’t have – for both of them, what had ruined working-class families when they were growing up were the twin evils of drink and debt. Never drink and never get into debt were the pillars we were raised by, although it’s safe to say that at different phases in our lives, all three of us have blown it on both fronts.

  We were also raised as exemplars of the phrase: the world doesn’t owe you a living. Our father knew it was his duty to feed, clothe and educate us all – then we were on our own. After our local state primary school, our brother passed the eleven-plus to what was then a boys’ grammar – by the time it came to my sister and I going, the school was co-educational and charging fees. Our mother went back to work as a secretary so they could afford to send us, whereupon we found it full of crusty male teachers who – with a couple of terrific exceptions – regarded girls as the barbarians at the gate and our admission as the end of a great school. My sister and I were both, for different reasons, incredibly miserable there, we all performed indifferently and it prejudiced me for life against fee-paying education and boy-heavy classes for girls. When it came to the next stage, though, we had one of the great privileges of our generation – we all went to university with our fees paid by Leicestershire County Council and on full maintenance grants.

  When I moved to London in my mid-twenties, it astonished me to realise that some of my peers had parents who bought them fridges or holidays, or, most incredibly of all, their own places to live. For my first three years in the capital, I lived in a flat above a butcher’s shop in Camberwell, south London. There were five official tenants who paid a peppercorn rent, but a large number of other residents – boyfriends, girlfriends, friends of friends – passed through and in practice it was basically a squat. The front of the flat overlooked the main road and one day one of the windowpanes fell clean out onto pedestrians below. The kitchen was on the ground floor at the back and looked out on to a small yard where the butcher brought the carcases through and had his outside toilet. We would see him occasionally, on his way there for his regular morning visit. He would wave cheerily with a bloodstained hand, clutching a pack of Marlborough.

  I had one of the second-floor rooms, where tentacles of damp climbed down the wall from a top corner and I slept on a single mattress on the floor, using an upturned orange box as my bedside table. During this time, for a while, I dated a middle-class boyfriend who owned his own three-bedroom house in north London. The first time he came to my room in Camberwell he looked around and said, ‘Where is all your stuff – at your parents’ house?’ Stuff? I didn’t know what he meant. Later, the same boyfriend said to me, ‘You’ve got a real chip on your shoulder about class.’ ‘Chip?’ I thought. ‘I’ve got a chip the size of Ben Nevis.’

  When my first novel was published in 1995, I had, by then, got a journalism job. When one of my colleagues asked me what my novel was about, I said, ‘It’s about a group of office workers. It’s based loosely but vengefully on my two years as a part-time secretary for London Transport.’

  ‘Two years?’ he replied, surprised. ‘That’s a long time to spend researching a book.’

  I had always said I wanted to be a full-time writer by the time I was thirty. A week before my thirtieth birthday, I got my first book deal. The day before, I had a phone call from an editor for whom I had done some freelancing, inviting me to be the theatre critic of a national newspaper and naming a salary that was quadruple what I was then earning as a part-time secretary who did the odd feature and book review. I had become a full-time writer with twenty-four hours to spare. When I told my father how much I was going to be earning, he drew a breath. It was twice the salary he was receiving when, at the age of sixty-two, he was told he was being made redundant and given twenty-four hours to pack up his desk after four decades with the same firm. He started to cry with happiness. He knew about the book deal and the other bits of freelance journalism, but this was a job. All that effort and sacrifice had paid off. His daughter was getting a proper job at last.

  I left a flat-share off the Brixton Road and rented a bijou bedsit in Hampstead. I spent two and a half years going to the theatre for a living while writing my second novel. By the time it was published, I was pregnant by a BBC radio producer who had grown up in Surrey and we moved in together, into a maisonette on Tufnell Park Road. My journey from the East Midlands to full-blown member of the north London liberal elite was now complete.

  In 2008, I was a judge on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. During one of the discussions, one of the other judges said something I disagreed with. ‘Bollocks to that!’ I responded. A short silence fell, then the judge remarked, ‘You can take the girl out of the East Midlands but you can’t take the East Midlands out of the girl.’

  He had a point. Geographically, I had migrated no further than one hundred miles south, but at times, it has felt like crossing continents. I have lost track of the number of occasions I have been asked whether I went to Oxford or Cambridge and the look I have got when I reply, ‘Neither,’ usually followed by a swift, ‘Oh, but that’s OK.’

  I am still startled when I realise that the writer or journalist I am talking to is related to another writer or journalist I have heard about. ‘Any relation to Charles Montagu Doughty?’ I have been asked, several times. The author of Travels in Arabia Deserta is little known now, but he’s the only Doughty literary types can call to mind. The last person to ask me this question was an elderly drama producer I met some years ago, when my first radio play was about to be broadcast on Radio 3. When I replied that no, I was no relation, he responded cheerily, ‘Oh gosh, you know, I’m so old I remember when having a play on the Third Programme meant you were really something. Now they’ll let anyone on!’

  I find such small encounters funny – and take great pleasure, in my chippy, East Midlands way, in telling such people about my ancestors raised in workhouses, although sometimes I think about how my father would have been mortified by my talking publicly about it. He would have much preferred it if I was able to respond to the Charles Montagu Doughty question with a cheery, ‘Oh yes, dear old Great-Uncle Charles!’

  Few things make me more proud than not having those kinds of connections. And yet, chippiness aside, I have to concede one great and invaluable advantage, born directly from my parents’ lack of material help or significant surnames. We were raised with the most stringent work ethic: a belief hammered into us all, on an almost daily business, that the world didn’t owe us a living, that nothing would come to us unless we strived for it, that we would always have to press and push for what we wanted, because it wasn’t coming any other way. My parents worked every day of their lives in the belief that their lives and ours could be bettered. Nothing irritates me more than the characterisation of working-class people as lazy or feckless. Hello? The clue is in the title.

  Nowhere is such a work ethic more useful than in the field of novel-writing: because yes, you may have been born with a modicum of talent and/or a significant surname, but unless you sit down and churn out those words, again and again, for year after year, you ain’t producing anything. This
is surely true for all forms of artistic expression. And so, despite my inverted snobbery, there is this that I inherited: my father’s and mother’s sense that hard work was everything and there was no sitting back to be done, no time to be wasted.

  I was also lucky enough to have been born at a time when that kind of work seemed to be rewarded, when social mobility felt possible for people like my mother and father. Our bungalow was built in the sixties. When our parents wanted to house their growing family, they, as a working-class couple with one income, were able to buy a plot of land on the edge of a town and get a local builder to build it. My father once told me they were terrified at the prospect of taking on a mortgage of £4,386. Because of the size of the plots, that same road is now considered posh, suburban, way beyond the means of my parents’ present-day equivalent. The same mortgage today would be around £80,000. That wouldn't even get you a one-bed flat in the same town now, let alone a family bungalow with a large garden.

  I grew up with a bunch of kids like myself – the children of aspirational families. We all played together on the waste ground at the end of our road, where more houses had yet to be built. There are no young families on that housing estate now, only retired couples who bought their homes decades ago. Above all, my parents were able to send all three of their children to university on full grants – given their anxiety about debt, we were exactly the kind of family that would have been heavily discouraged from higher education under the current system.

  So for all my showing off about our backgrounds, not only did I inherit my parents’ sense that you work for what you want, I inherited it at a time when the possibilities that work might be rewarded were much more firmly embedded in our social structures than they are now. They were certain – and they were right – that their children would grow up more advantaged than them in every respect, because that was the way it worked. This is my bequest from them, and it is invaluable, but my generation is the first generation that knows its children are likely to be worse off than themselves. My parents would be horrified, and baffled, by that idea – something has gone wrong, they would have thought. And they’d be right.

  I Am Not Your Tituba

  Eva Verde

  ‘Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.’

  — Ray Bradbury

  I was born in 1980 in Newham, one of the most impoverished boroughs of London. A girl. Father unknown and a teenage mum. Brown. Violins, please. I left the maternity ward on a snowy January night, wrapped in two stolen NHS blankets.

  Our life was simple, yet it rarely occurred to me how much we financially struggled. Our permanent party of two meant I had privileges that kids with working parents and other siblings didn’t – time.

  Weeks were ordered, routine, peppered with visits to my nan, window shopping and hours lost in Forest Gate Branch Library, which was on the first floor of an old brick building tucked off the busy High Street. We’d push at the library’s heavyweight doors in unison, our efforts granting us entry to a mammoth room of hushed silence and warm natural light, a full removal from real life outside, speeding noisily on without us. The snug, homely bookishness of the space was my personal version of heaven. By five or six I was a familiar face to the kind yet superior lady librarians nestled behind the front desk, their glasses hanging from necklaces, resting on knitwear-encased bosoms. If there was anything I wanted to be when I grew up (other than She-Ra) it was to become one of them. Stamping books and talking in intelligent whispers. For a small person, I had purpose.

  I never gave my appearance much thought. My ethnicity less. Every other person in my world was one shade of brown or another; my classroom could have been the poster for diversity. In 1988 my school held a multicultural event, encouraging children from local schools to participate in an evening of sharing food, songs and dancing from around the world. An audience of proud parents watched us perform dances and poetry in the national costumes of their homelands. My class was selected to perform a Celtic dance; school shirts, borrowed maxi skirts, and garish scarves and shawls were our haphazard attempts at costumes. This Technicolor explosion, vivid African prints alongside the silks and sequins of saris, the unity and respect for others’ beliefs, rituals and traditions has never been forgotten.

  It can’t be. I have it on VHS.

  My mum married a lovely man, who became my dad and gave me sisters. We grew to a family of six and, with the lure of green spaces and cheaper housing, left London for Essex. In November 1990, I enrolled in my new school, and was first shocked then rather alarmed to find myself the sole brown child there.

  Chelmsford was alien territory, learning a different world all over again. Regular words and phrases took on new meanings; both ‘up town’ and ‘down the town’ referred to the modest shopping centre, where the buildings sat flat and unremarkable with not even a double-decker bus passing by for a fleeting hot splash of colour. My ‘up town’ had been impromptu visits to Parliament Square with my nan and uncle, plum skies hugging an illuminated Big Ben as I dragged my fingers along the black iron fencing, admiring it. I clung to these memories, the old life’s events, as my new life felt ever more a wilderness.

  And the shame started.

  In my Letts page-a-day diary, because the ten-year-old me had much to say, I wrote: I’m hung like a picture. It’s like I got off a spaceship. You move for the better but nothing’s better and I don’t count.

  I’d been in Chelmsford three weeks. A month later the shame grew spores: I feel stupid. Asked Mum if I was adopted. She said why would she adopt a kid, being a kid herself. I don’t feel belonging inside me, though. Not even to my family. I don’t remember feeling it before, but I don’t and everywhere I go there’s eyes like nasty question marks on us.

  Being the only brown face in my white family meant outside of the home I was set apart. Once, at the checkout in Sainsbury’s, we’d stood patiently waiting with a heaving trolley. Being only thirteen, rather than assist Mum to load the shopping on the conveyor belt, I’d amused myself looking at the chocolate bars and magazines, wondering whether I could chance asking for a Big! or Smash Hits, while ignoring my youngest sister’s screams to be released from her chair.

  A greying man queuing behind us had nudged me sharply, snapping, ‘Do what you’re paid for and quiet that baby down.’ His vexed authoritarian tone made my throat shrink as I stood by awkwardly, unsure of how to respond. My discomfort was lost on the checkout lady, who chipped in to say how lovely it must be for my mother to have an au pair.

  ‘She’s my daughter,’ Mum bit, laser-beam quickly. ‘If I could afford an au pair, love, d’you think I’d be buying basics?’

  The checkout woman, recognising her mistake, had winced, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. But the man. He stepped back, unwilling even to set his eyes on me. I’d had similar moments moons ago; old ladies with sour faces moving away from me and my mum on the bus. Never from a man, though. And I’d never been nudged. It hadn’t hurt, but it left an imprint that lasted for years.

  Moments like this became routine. I began to dread the family outings, wishing I didn’t stand out so we wouldn’t get the nasty question marks. Paranoia held me close, dominating every decision. Where am I from? What am I? The passive-aggressive diatribe of how I came to be was asked almost daily. But to explain was impossible, without articulating the truth – illegitimate, disconnected from any cultural bond to my ethnicity. I was ashamed by how these people viewed me, believing their way the right way. Being brown and different was my fault.

  It was hard to shut off from the boy who liked to use his stick across my back, shouting the N-word as I legged it home from school. And from the girls who, now we’d advanced to secondary, had become coarser with their insults. I was ‘pubic-head’ when my Afro roots grew through, because we could only afford to have my hair relaxed twice a year. Instead of embracing the curl, I’d still rather have the three inches of straight at the end of the bulky frizz, to fit and feel comforted by w
ords such as, ‘I always think of you as white.’ By fourteen, on the single occasion a boy my own age showed interest, the cackling hordes of girls awarded me another fabulous nickname, Divine Brown, Hugh Grant’s indiscretion. Any reference to the darkness and difference of me was categorically negative. The only times I became visible, useful, was at the high jump on sports day, and on one occasion (before they knew any better), choir. I was a walking stereotype of all the snippets they’d cobbled from their limited experiences of people of colour.

  But in books, and through writing, none of it mattered. I began keeping my diary of the way I wished the day had progressed, starring a far more accomplished and desirable version of myself. My hair flowed fluid and Timotei-shiny down my svelte Topshop-adorned back. Our pebble-dashed, ex-council, end-of-terrace transformed into one of the 1930s detached delights down the tree-lined street I admired on my journey to school. And everyone, from the sixth-former with amazing eyes and cross-body bag that I borderline stalked, to Keanu Reeves and Kurt Cobain, fancied me rotten. Fantasy ruled my waves.