I came from a very ordinary middle of the road home.
When class came up at school when I was about 14 and I asked my mother “What class are we?” she replied memorably “Educated – and there aren’t enough of us.” She and my father devoted themselves to state education. She hated a milk bottle on the table. She said we were all working class, we worked for a living.
When I was 25 I married Michael Raeburn of relatively exotic background, whom I met cutting a film he had shot clandestinely (new word to me) in what was then Rhodesia now Zimbabwe and I learned. Because you are not born knowing. You have to learn.
People appeared and slept on the floor of our flat, had a shower and departed again. When I hesitated over shopping (my secretarial salary the only one in the house) one young woman asked me what I wanted and I told her. She returned laden.
She beamed at me and my obvious embarrassment. “C’est un vol politique” she said – a political theft. It was barely a year after the French risings of 1968, Michael (whose French was fluent) had made friends at the Sorbonne where he studied, this was my purely in passing introduction to the French left.
Nobody sat down and lectured me, the only avowed Marxist we knew had private money, I remember admiring an elegant woman at a party in Paris and MR saying she was a communist. I was at sea. I did not rush off to the library, ask for a reading list, I remained endlessly interested in people – what they looked like, where they came from, how they presented.
There is an article in the Sunday Times (25.10.26) about avowed (as opposed to “sort of”) Socialists, the Green Party, international connections and the movement behind the mobilization (Youth International Strike) including the sympathy of the National Education Union (with the proviso that the demonstrations remains peaceful) – and the overworked underpaid police who will have to try and contain it.
Is this same old, same old – or something new ? The power of social media is considerable. Like electric wooden spoons – mixing, mixing.
And the PM on a PR junket doesn’t help. There is a sense of this all happening behind his back – I am sure it isn’t but that’s how it feels.
Earlier this week I walked up the street , turning towards the bus stop where three men in their late 20s were piling scaffolding, wood and other stripped out stuff from flats. They all grinned, I grinned back and the one nearest to me asked ”You all right, love ?” So I said, not going to answer, take half and hour, he said they could do with a break. So I said” Why is Burnham talking about a new care service when the old one is in such disarray ? I admire the NHS,
most of us do, but it needs help now …” And he said memorably “It’s because they want us all dead. It used to be for the people but now it isn’t and they don’t care. They want us gone” – I know that “they” – it means everybody but the speaker and momentarily me because I am listening to him. I was struck. I said “Please take care of yourself” into his face. “ Go well.”
If he had been French or a dozen other nationalities with which I have passing acquaintance, I would have been less shocked. But here in London, on a bright morning,
sober, clear – a British voice without rancour or any particular accent or intonation. I can only measure by my own criteria – manner, sound , what does or doesn’t happen in the transaction. Has something changed in how we see our country or had I encountered an activist ? I have seen the group once more since, we all grinned. Friendly faces are in short supply, perceptions of class are no more static than any other facet of society.
It is one thing to read about history and another thing to live through it. Should I draw a connecting line between stealing from Sainsbury all those years ago and the voice on the street last week? Bad times are coming, stock up on baked beans – a can is wonderful weapon!
