Common People Read online

  If you think champagne’s a signifier, wait till you eat this avocado

  Avocados are for wankers. Yes, they are delicious and good for you, and are reasonably priced in Aldi, but they are symbols of affluence, and mashing one to go on a slice of wholegrain toast will immediately raise the market value of every house in a half-mile radius, which no Millennial will ever be able to buy because they’re too busy wasting their wages on avocados. The salt of the earth don’t eat avocados! They’re for privileged types who have nothing better to do than worship shiny-toothed food writers and Fitstagram celebs.

  I really like avocados and until I became a published writer, and therefore indubitably middle class, I used to only eat them under cover of darkness. Working-class people are not supposed to like avocados. In order to extricate yourself from the working classes, you do not even need to enjoy the eating of avocados. Just public mention of a nice ripe Hass should do the trick.

  Writing? Well, law-di-daw!

  And so where is the working-class writer? In my experience she’s found on social media, complaining that all of the other writers are blue-bloods whose work is of dubious quality and who’d topple from their pedestals in a true meritocracy, the rules for which she’s drafted a dozen times in her head. All a working-class writer needs to do to become middle class is be published and pff! Ascended!

  Tongues extracted from cheeks, now let’s take a crabbier look. What’s irritating about this last one is that when we assume that writers are middle class by default, we can so easily absolve ourselves of any responsibility to counteract. It is true that writers are more likely to come from comfortably middle-class backgrounds for a number of reasons, not least that it’s prudent to have a safety net because there’s balls-all money in writing. But when we assume that the working-class writers aren’t there – that they’re neither in situ nor emerging – how can we support them? How do we go along to their readings, choose their works for our curricula, or, for the love of God, buy their bloody books? The contemporary class system is a capitalist conceit and, as we are still a long way from being able to dismantle it, we must use its tools. Why aren’t there more working-class writers? Why aren’t there more working-class stories? Because not enough people clamour for them, and too many have accepted alternatives as replacements.

  Middle classes inducting former wretches, working classes adopting out their successful. This moving of the goalposts may seem a fine thing, if its conclusion is a newly mutable class divide. I am not convinced. Inducting former wretches and wearing otherness has the same result: downplaying structural inequality in favour of the pretty hoax that social class involves no limitations that can’t be overcome with integrity, hard work and humility.

  In particular, the self-othering performed by working-class people, either by those who wish to reject the label and proclaim that they achieved what they achieved independently (meaning that if you don’t excel, the only reason is your own moral failures), or those who wish to disown the ambitious (meaning that if you do excel, the only reason is your own deviousness), does nothing but sell out its fellows.

  The truth is that systems that benefit the rich cannot exist without fevered maintenance carried out by the rest of us: divide et impera, and have each sub-class police the behaviour of the one below it. We’re encouraged to believe that there are few working-class artists, few working-class idealists. That creativity is the privilege of the rich because the rich have nothing else to do. So what’s more demeaned? Working-class people, or art itself?

  There’s a word for it in Ireland: notions. ‘Notions’ of course is a synonym for ‘ideas’, but in this context they’re ideas of an unwholesome kind: ideas above your station. Irish people – particularly Irish working-class people – live in terror of being accused of having ‘notions’. What sort of patience would a community need for a member intrigued by shiny things like poetry, fashion, radical politics or avocados? These are whims to be indulged, not enterprises to be implemented; they are not for people at the coalface. ‘Notions’ is the class divide seen through the lens of working-class experience; ‘notions’ is the fear of being labelled middle class. It’s a struggle no less clandestine than ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Instead of worrying people will judge your modest means, you worry that people will assume you to be a haughty class traitor, pretentious, a phoney. Or worse, that they will annul the challenges you’ve overcome or invalidate the challenges you face. What’s more indicative of ‘notions’ than making art? What, are you too good to work for a living?

  Let no mistake be made. Discouraging ‘notions’ does not defend earthy, wholesome working-class mores. It’s just another way of keeping you in your box.

  So what’s the state of the working-class writer? The state of this one is intermittent irascibility, the constant need to feel out role and place and be OK with it, the rejection of capitalist power structures alongside the paradoxical need to be defined by roots. Class is a construct, but a construct in the same way that our roots are a construct; those aspects of ourselves we feel connect us to our families, our communities or our countries are no less indistinct and no less meaningful. Like the broadcaster deemed ‘evolved’ by his partner, my experiences will not be written over, all of those events and words and challenges and joys that informed my personality whitewashed by my decision to attempt a career in the arts. I reject the idea that culture is defined by the cultured. Of course I do: the idea is profoundly stupid.

  Slippery thing, though, working-class identity. Particularly if you want to scribble for a living. Worth keeping an eye on it. I’m only saying.

  Don’t Mention Class!

  Katy Massey

  I am working class, I am sure, but I am struggling to explain myself. It doesn’t help that the ‘me’ I am trying to describe keeps being redefined, and it is not my doing. You see, when I was growing up in Leeds in the 1970s, I was the illegitimate half-caste child of a single-parent prostitute. Today, the only part of that description that is still meaningful is ‘single parent’. As for the rest, it has mostly been reconstructed, and re-understood.

  For instance, the words polite society uses to describe my ethnic origins have graduated from ‘half-caste’ to ‘black’ to ‘multiple heritage’ and, currently, I am ‘mixed race’ and/or ‘a woman of colour’ (or perhaps person of colour?). Of course, all these reinventions happened without my permission. I didn’t get to change my subscription to any particular identity, I simply got on with growing up and older. British society and the blunt instrument of time took care of it.

  But, while language around race constantly evolves, provoked by social anxieties about difference – there are few terms for ‘illegitimate’ heard in everyday life today. ‘Love child’ still appears in some newspapers, usually related to extramarital scandal, but I can’t think of any new ones. It’s as if the idea of illegitimacy itself has atrophied and is now almost dead, as the perceived stigma of being born ‘out of wedlock’ has decreased. New words, fresh vocabulary to hide or alleviate the pain of shame are simply not needed.

  Even my mother’s former job has been dignified by resignification. She would now be called a ‘sex worker’ not a ‘prossie’, or a ‘brass’, or… but our ages-long apprehensions about sex have produced more euphemisms for members of the oldest profession than I can list here. My mother is no different from anyone else, and though in her late eighties now, she still has opinions about nomenclature. This is what she would like you to know: ‘Don’t use “brass”, love. Say “working girl” or “madam”. “Brass” sounds like we were rough, and we weren’t.’

  Were we a bit, um, rough? Perhaps. But all of the elements that go to make up a person’s social class – income, locality, race, education, parents’ profession, etc. – are impossible to separate, meaning considerations of class that limit themselves to one or two of these characteristics are horribly unreliable when applied to the individual. My first definition of my childhood circumstances may beg a di
fferent conclusion, but I know what my mother means. We weren’t rough, not really, especially if respect for education, good food and common decency mean anything.

  Perhaps I could use a points system to establish my social class? I am no statistician, so forgive the vagueness of this notion, but don’t some countries use this method to judge who is a desirable (versus non-desirable) citizen? Let’s see:

  I grew up in the city of Leeds, and am therefore a northerner – minus 10 points.

  I went to boarding school between the ages of twelve and sixteen – plus 15 points.

  My mother paid for my education via prostitution – minus 10 points.

  I make a living as a writer and arts producer – plus 15 points.

  I have brown skin – but it’s caramel-coloured, so not too dark – minus 8 points (it could have been 15).

  I am overweight by more than twenty pounds – minus 6 points (but minus 12 if present at a supper party where talk turns to the diners’ sports-related injuries or comparing their ‘PBs’).

  And so on. But I am writing about the past, and this list speaks to the present. I think my mother maintains that we weren’t rough because she was never a street prostitute – more of an escort. She even ran a successful brothel for a while, opening Aristotle’s in the mid-1980s, when the country was high on money and strong women. Two in particular showed her the way: Margaret Thatcher and, madame par excellence, Cynthia Payne. Later, a Crown Court judge would pompously comment: ‘I’m sure Aristotle would be spinning in his grave had he known his name was to become synonymous with a massage parlour.’ I give him more credit. I was only just a teenager then, but I was seriously impressed with what she achieved.

  Actually, my mother wasn’t new to running her own operation. She’d had a café, called the Wheel, and an ice-cream van with a name nobody can remember, and a marriage bureau, as dating agencies were called in the sixties. But Aristotle’s was the first of her businesses I remember clearly. And its existence was, though not the first lie of my life, certainly the biggest.

  Because nobody was ‘out’ about selling sex thirty-five years ago – decades before the Belle de Jour blog and reality shows set in escort agencies. It was also before sex trafficking and the exploitation of women and girls was a widespread moral concern, so it was a very hidden world. The environment Aristotle’s emerged from was a tough one. Only a couple of years before my mother opened the doors, the Yorkshire Ripper – a prolific client of Leeds’ prostitutes – was convicted of twelve murders, mostly of working girls. He is still suspected of having committed many more. Women mostly had to protect each other and police themselves.

  In the same decade, but down in London, Cynthia Payne had turned the selling of sex into something that was more naughtily suburban than urban seedy. In her leafy Streatham street Cynthia serviced a desire for sex and strong discipline with humour and charm. Like Thatcher, she had a bit of a ‘sexy matron’ persona, freeze-dried hair and instinctive respect for entrepreneurship. The collision of harlotry and industry was all around, and my mother, in early middle age with an apprenticeship of cottage-industry prostitution behind her, was perfectly placed to exploit it.

  Following Payne’s example, she sought to make the place as respectable as possible. The location helped: next door was, handily, a sandwich shop. Opposite was quite a smart pub, one of those new ones just starting to call themselves ‘wine bars’, and a little way down the street was an advertising firm that had produced a series of iconic ads for Porsche. As a result, there was a string of tulip-red Porsches parked along the road. The location was perfect for the purposes of selling sex: classy, close to the market but not in anyone’s backyard.

  The outside looked as smart as the interior. Above the front door, Mam had invested in a smart, tan-coloured awning, with Aristotle’s writ large in curly font. There was a reception and waiting room, from which stairs took clients up to the first floor. Here were two ‘treatment rooms’, a hand-built Scandinavian pine sauna and a shower. It was all very tastefully done, with white walls and heavy, gilt-framed prints of romantic paintings. It was also spotlessly clean and very well organised.

  Aristotle’s opened around 10 a.m. and closed some twelve hours later, and it quickly became the centre of my world when I wasn’t at boarding school. On duty were two sex workers and they needed a receptionist. When Mam offered to pay me £5 a time to work as the receptionist on a strictly casual basis, I jumped at the chance. This role required little of me: I would tell the punters who was working that day, as most had their favourites, take their money as they came in through the door and direct them upstairs. The rest of the time I would sit and talk to the girls. It was a free education.

  Aristotle’s taught me that selling sex is as sophisticated a process as selling any other product. Sex needs branding and Aristotle’s, if not the Selfridges of the sex trade, could easily have claimed to be its John Lewis: honest value reliably supplied. Sex is not simply sex: it has to be branded so that the consumer knows exactly what they are buying. Street trade was visible then in Spencer Place, a few miles away in Chapeltown and the centre of Leeds’ red-light district. Sex was more available there and cheaper, so Aristotle’s had to offer something more, and it did. Privacy, cleanliness and safety from robbery and attack. It provided these things as much for the girls who worked there as it did for the punters who quickly began to seek the place out.

  Mam soon found that the key to staffing Aristotle’s was variety. There were fat women and thin women, big-breasted and small, black, brown and white, older and younger (the lower age limit was early twenties and the upper late forties). Each had their own rules about the services they offered, and this was negotiated between them and their clients. In the time-honoured tradition they split their earnings with my mother. Punters were also charged an entry fee.

  Though they may have been busy in the evening and perhaps had a mini-rush at lunchtime, there were long days to fill when there were few customers. So, ‘the girls’ (as everyone called them) talked and talked. Not many of them worked more than a couple of days a week, and in their own time the majority were mothers and grandmothers, as well as wives and girlfriends, so there was plenty to talk about.

  It is difficult to describe just how normal everyday life at Aristotle’s was for me as a teenager. With little else to do but talk, smoke and eat, we set sail on rivers of words. Pamela talked for hours about other places she had worked, jobs she had had, and about her wonderfully camp little boy Richard, for whom I babysat. Rose told me about working in London and Glasgow from a shared flat with other girls or on the streets – far from home, and far from judging neighbours and her huge Catholic family. One girl, Ada, whose boyfriend was a writer whom she worked to keep, would bring his poetry in for us to read. I was sometimes goggle-eyed at their tales, but I at least had the sense to shut up and listen, especially when conversations took a more surreal turn.

  ‘You know him has the newsagent’s at the back of Morrisons?’

  ‘I don’t know him. Go on, though.’

  ‘You do! Big fat man. Swaps the dodgy videos.’

  ‘I don’t. Go on!’

  ‘You do… Anyway, you know he’s selling soiled knickers for four pounds a pair?’

  ‘Why? Can’t you just buy them in a shop?’

  ‘No, these are worn. “Soiled” is what he calls them in the ad.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, I went into the shop the other day and nobody’s behind the counter. I wander up to the stockroom door, and there he his, hunched in the corner like Rumpelstiltskin, rubbing Gorgonzola cheese into the gusset of some pound-shop pants.’

  ‘God! What did you do?’

  ‘I asked him what he was doing. He knows I do this, so I suppose he isn’t bothered about telling me. So he says, “I’m rubbing cheese into these knickers.” Then he stops, looks up at me and says, “You won’t tell anyone though, will you?”’

  We had a good laugh, but really it was characters like
this who peopled the day there. There were so many men and women on the fringes of the sex industry, keeping their heads down, breaking bread with their families, and buying the Daily Mail while living off immoral earnings. There are the strictly legit types: the accountants, landlords and suppliers that come with any business (stocks of baby oil, talcum powder and condoms need to be maintained). And there were people, mostly men, who just liked hanging around.

  Men like Eddie the Spiv, who sold ludicrously overpriced ‘contact’ mags full of ads for gorgeous nymphomaniacs seeking discreet, adult fun. The adverts were entirely fictional. Nevertheless, his box numbers received plenty of mail, all containing hopeful stamped, addressed envelopes. This meant that Eddie, to avoid arrest or just a good beating, had to reply to at least some. He wrote many himself, but the risk of sending several similar letters in an identical hand to the same punter was ever-present. His solution was to take writing pads, pens and the SAEs down to his local pub and get the middle-aged alkies who propped up the bar to write the letters he needed in exchange for free drinks. More than once he gave me a bundle to post on the way back to boarding school so that the postmarks would show they had come from across the North, and not solely from East Leeds.

  Aristotle’s was something of a community and my mother was its matriarch. Thanks in large part to her judgement, there were no fights and almost no thieving (and I am willing to bet that the incidents of STIs, mental illness and addiction at the sauna were less than on the streets outside the door). The stigma of what the women did for a living meant that I heard many conversations I could only have heard in that back room, among people who understood the business. And I believe this inside perspective meant I saw Aristotle’s for what it was: a place where good-looking, decent women who could hold a conversation offered various sexual services in exchange for money. They could work hours that fitted around childcare and earn enough to live well above the breadline. For the punters, Aristotle’s was something forbidden, a trip to the edge of criminality and deceit, a sophisticated artifice, and perhaps the best brothel in Leeds for a while.