Genteel Poverty

It was a perfect August Bank Holiday Sunday yesterday.  Skies were blue, seas the regulation sparkling aqua marine, sunlight sparkled, ice-creams were consumed in copious quantities as 50,000 people tried to ward off the hunger pangs that might strike if forced to walk more than a few metres through Brighton without fuelling up.

I sat on the beachfront by a pub listening to live music, watching bronzed bodies sashay past, and thought:-
"Now.  If I can get a glass of Cider for 2 quid, I might be able to afford it: - if I buy the washing up liquid at Poundland and do without the Lime Marmalade till next fortnight...." And then, surprisingly, I thought. "Wotha??  It's the face of Genteel Poverty."

Genteel Poverty, I know now, is just ordinary poverty but you're just a little more repulsed by it than others.

Its finding out that anything you can afford to buy new will fall apart within the month, so it's better to buy second-hand.  Everything. Rather than buy flour sifters that rust the first time you wash them; dishwasher liquid that doesn't raise the pallid ghost of a bubble until you've squeezed half the bottle into the bowl; towels that get damp before you've even done a full circuit of all bits that need to be dried. And not lets even get into the whole subject of toilet paper.  Who even KNEW there was such a thing a 1-ply loo paper? This is one of those sordid little facts which, in an ideal world, nobody would ever need to have to learn.

But it goes further, of course.  Like the first time you are crossing a road and holding up the traffic...and you realise that, from now on, you will ALWAYS be the one crossing.  Not the one sitting in their car sending our Dark Thoughts to bloody pedestrians.

Or, as you are watching a movie on your lap top where people are sitting in real restaurants with thick carpets, and a discreet band, and soft-footed waiters, you suddenly think: "OMG! I will never use a linen napkin again in my entire life."

It's like dying, a little bit.  You go around, swimming through the usual layers of your life and sadly, nostalgically, bidding them all good-bye. Never again will you stay in a good hotel; ride in a boat, wear shoes that smell like shoes instead of like plastic,

You'll probably never see any other place for the rest of your life where the sand is white and squeaks as you walk on it; or swim naked in the moonlight; or go to a Live Show, or buy fruit that you want as opposed to fruit you can afford.

When people take pictures of poverty its of people wearing anoraks and looking depressed who have dirty hair.  Its never of women with real leather handbags (50p from a church fete); well cut clothes (Fill a Bag for One Dollar day at St. Vincents de Paul.); who are post-Graduate educated, extensively travelled; and who would, of course, have made a killing from  Divorce and widowhood.

The world just isn't supposed to work like that.

I should like to write a book one day: - "Being Poor for Dummies". For all those people (there might even be one close-by you at this moment) who didn't start off poor.  Who got the deck shuffled just one time too many and ended up going from Up to Down and whom we find just a tad embarrassing.

If they have any sense of decently left at all,  these Genteel Povos would gradually, with dignity, remove themselves from the purlieu.  It is, after all, very difficult to find anything one has in common any more.

Yeah.  I sat in the sun and thought about all this stuff yesterday.

But hey, today I woke up and thought "Fuck 'em all".

Maybe something'll turn up.

Breathes there the man...

For most of my life, Scott's famous poem used to make me squirm with embarrassment. In the language of my Grandmother, he was 'making a cake of himself'.  In my grandmother's view, nothing was more to be frowned upon, more calculated to cast anyone beyond the Pale, than to make a cake of oneself.

I had only an imperfect knowledge of what making a cake of oneself entailed, but I had the vague idea that it meant you should not act soppy. Scott I considered was, in this poem, being soppy.

My students, however, love this poem as it fits in with their notions of hyperbole being the best way to express oneself. I have been known to ham it up disgracefully when I read it aloud: and the crowd goes wild.

But one day while reading it I found myself suddenly, and consumingly, overwhelmed. Which meant by extension that I was being soppy, of course.

Yet what I always used to dismiss as Jingoism became the impetus, finally, to waft me back to my native land.

But I'm finding that bellowing out "This is my own, my native land" and letting one's heart swell is not an automatic process.

 I remember coming back to England when I was 26. I stood on the upper deck of the ship as the Dover cliffs grew into view and howled my eyes out; while when one of the baggage handlers called me "Darlin'" I felt instantly accepted.

 I thought that was how it would be this time around too, but it isn't.

Perhaps too much water has flowed under too damn many bridges since I was 26.  There's been so many times I thought I was home and found I was mistaken. I just can't seem to adjust to the fact that I'm not passing through.  I'm not a foreigner.  For the first time in my life.

Like many other Expats, I grew up living in postings in various countries, but always regarded England as Home.  The place you go to between postings, and for holidays, or on Long Leave. Through all of my wanderings since then England has always remained Home.  The one with the capital H.

No matter where I've lived I've always been English.  It's part of what defines me.  It's a part of establishing my identity on a thousand documents. It's one of life's incontrovertible truths: I'm English.

So when I arrived here and found I had to fight for the right to come and live at Home again, I was both frightened and disbelieving. And this culminated when I was told rather sneeringly that, as I had never worked - i.e. paid taxes - in this country I was hardly English now, was I?

If I was 'hardly English' then what the hell was I?  Ever since, it seems, I can remember knowing I was "Cireena", I've also known I was English.  Without that, I'm only half me.  And, more prosaically, if I'm not English then where on earth would I go from here?

It did not seem to be the time to point out that my grandfather was a Gypsey - albeit an English Gypsey.

I've had the experience of having to get a plane out of one country and not knowing where on earth one is going to go to. It was scary. I'd thought that by coming to England I'd never have to be in that position again.  I'd never have to get on a plane and not know where to go. I'd have a permanent address.

However; slowly, slowly, in almost imperceptible increments, I'm starting to burrow in.   I finally was given a Social Security number. I now have an NHS number. And last week, though I've been here since October, I at last was able to open a bank account.  I'm becoming English.

The problem is that I don't actually feel English.  I am so used not to being part of the dominant population group; to being Other, that I just can't slip into Englishness as one would a pair of favourite old jeans. I don't feel like Us.  I still feel as though I'm Them in comparison to the 'real' English. The tax-paying English. With them I feel like an impostor.

Then to-day I forced myself out of the flat. Over the last 10 days or so the temperature has gone up a few degrees.  Not that I would have noticed this too much but the English certainly have.
Suddenly there are more cars on King's Road in front of the flat, and one has to use the lights to cross.  People are to be seen here and there in short sleeves. The occasional slices of pallid, white thigh can be seen slipping through the breeze.

 From getting dark at 4 in the afternoon it's now staying light till around 6.30.  This obviously is the timer; the signal to all that this is Spring.  Since the last time I walked in the Pavillion grounds crocus and snowdrops have joined the daffodils and colour is thrusting through the greys ad the browns. And  Brighton is coming to life.

Workers are erecting the Carousel.  Art galleries and shops have pulled up their shutters, beach umbrellas and chairs have sprouted up, music is playing, and people are walking on the shingle in bare feet.

The skeleton of the burnt pier just up from my flat was set, black and stark, in flat, pearl grey sea while the gulls circled noisily around and the Worthing headland was green instead of grey. So, just like a true born English man, I pushed a chair under an umbrella and sat in the light drizzle, outside, with a hot chocolate warming my hands and gazed around.

For the very first time I got a glimmer of what it was like to feel part of - if not the entire country - at least this small part of it.  That was my headland, and my pier.  I was not a visitor or tourist.  I'm not passing through - this is where I live.

Things are still precarious and I still remain poised, ready for something else to happen to cause me to leave. To have to move.  To be made, by circumstances, to go away.

But that glimmer of feeling must have meant something.  While not quite feeling as though I can claim the whole country, at least I can foresee the possibility (if I'm good; if the gods don't decide to 'ave a larf; if things don't take a sudden turn for the pear-shaped once more) that one day I will start to spell Brighton with a capital H.
                                                    ........................................

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.