Common People

by Kit de Waal

  ‘Shops went years ago,’ the man says, in a voice like sandpaper on raw brick, when I tell him vaguely my business. ‘I used to live here,’ I say, at which they look me up and down and I become very aware of my brogues and manbag and my lack of tattoos. I am not particularly better dressed than the people I meet on my old estate tonight, just differently. For all I know, their authentic trackie bottoms, Superdry tops and trainers cost more than my get-up. It says more about my old habits and prejudices and mod/soul boy sensibilities that their clothes are part of a pan-generational trend of all classes that has missed me. I still assume that grown men who wear sportswear of an evening are some form of PE teacher and may well ask me to do squat thrusts or lunges at a moment’s notice. From an open window nearby, I hear what I assume at first is an argument and my heart sinks at this reinforcement of clichés about ‘us’. Then I realise that this is simply a warm, teatime family conversation, but this being Wigan, conducted at the tops of our voices in loud, challenging accents, like the Chinese.

  I move into the heart of the estate, headed for my old house. My surroundings look smart and fresh and not at all dilapidated. The grass has just been cut, perhaps by the council, although it occurs to me that many of these houses now will be owner occupied, bought under Thatcher’s relentless, hungry, almost vindictive drive to privatise the country, starting with its housing stock. Toddlers on bikes wobble around the grassy squares, and I realise that the designers of Radburn may well have had their hearts in the right place when they put kids first rather than cars.

  There are grannies, and toddlers swinging on gates, and girls still in their ties and blue pleated skirts from school, skipping and chatting. Two young couples are making plans. ‘We’ll sithee at weekend and go and have some food.’ In contrast to the typical image of a council estate, that of a cacophony of screaming kids and red-faced shouting adults direct from Jeremy Kyle and the squealing tyres of hot-wired cars, there is birdsong and the musical tinkle of children’s laughter. It is just like where the nice, ordinary people live. Because these are nice, ordinary people.

  I know these streets, I know where to turn. I get a weird emotional charge when I round the corner into Fisher Close. There is my old house. The house where my uncle Cliff passed out behind the front door one Christmas Day in the late 1970s and I couldn’t get back in after skulking out with some mates to escape the trifle and relatives and depressing late-period Morecambe and Wise. There is the little patch of grass where I slipped in the cold, wet mud and sprained my wrist dashing away from an errant jumping jack one Bonfire Night. There is the little visitors’ car park where we replayed every game of the 1974 World Cup, me always Johnny Rep after my new dashing hero of the swashbuckling Dutch national team. Here’s where I first heard ‘Floy Joy’ by the Supremes on Mike Tyrer’s transistor radio in the company of Brownie and Nidge and Clegg, Gary with his burned face and my next-door neighbours, Richard and George.

  I walk away past a children’s playground that is full and noisy at 7 p.m. and I remember the deserted, forlorn one I saw in Poundbury, Prince Charles’s model village in Dorset, a lifeless experiment in ersatz architecture and fake community. I was mulling a passage in Lynsey Hanley’s brilliant Estates that chimed perfectly with how I felt. ‘Even though I have lived away from home for a third of my life now, it continues to shape the way I think about the world outside it. Rather like rappers who continue to talk about the ghetto experience long after they have moved out and to their country ranches, it’s a state of mind.’

  Walking through them again, I realise that these little houses are in my blood. These streets made me. I know these streets. I know where to turn. And I turn up the main road toward Wigan as I have a thousand times before, to the Latics ground, to the Wigan Casino, to school, to the John Bull, to the gas showrooms to get the coach to London or the Free Trade Hall. The cliché that leapt to mind was that growing up here didn’t do me any harm. Except that, viewed objectively, it did, when you compare the life chances of the kids who grow up on these estates, compared to those who go to Eton or live in the Home Counties. But I don’t feel that way, and even framing that thought seems mean and disloyal and treacherous.

  P. J. O’Rourke, the American humorist, enraged by some mewling, whey-faced loon from one of our posh broadsheets, was inspired to write a fabulous piece of invective – worth looking up in full – that ended ‘I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all you Europeans’. I wouldn’t go along with that, but I feel his bristling ire against the well-behaved, well-brought-up, well-heeled commentariat who sit in judgement on the urban working class. I’d rather have grown up pretending to be Johnny Rep with a plastic football, drinking illicit Pernod with Anne Thomas and listening to ‘Floy Joy’ in a car park than to have ever set foot in the dining room of the Bullingdon Club. You had to watch out for the odd flying can of hot ash. But it was worth it.

  Which Floor?

  Loretta Ramkissoon

  No one ever tells you that, however you die in our tower block, you will leave this world upright. It’s impossible to fit a stretcher horizontally in the lift. When the paramedics come to transport the body down, they have to take the lift, just like everyone else. They wait at the door and when the lift’s trusty ping signals its arrival, the stretcher is carried across. Then they stand in the lift with the dead body. When unlucky enough to not be able to put the lift out of service, you run the risk of the door opening on another floor, the bemused faces of the people on the landing staring until the penny drops and all eyes fall to the floor out of respect and awkwardness. The CCTV captures the entire ritual. There’s no dignity in dying in a tower block. My grandfather always tells me that when he dies, he doesn’t want to die upright. He wants to be carried out lying down, preferably out of a house. ‘Always have your own front door,’ he says.

  The two lifts are situated in the middle of the building. They are our root and our core. They bring people down when they die and up when they’re born. If the block is the tree, then the flats are the branches. When a diagnosis is made and a funeral booked, we all mourn the tree’s loss. When one floor hurts, we all hurt; when one branch falls, we all feel the pain.

  Braithwaite Tower began construction in 1965 and was completed in 1967. It mainly consists of concrete, steel, glass and bricks. It has twenty-two floors, twenty of which are habitable. The original lift shafts are still in place, though the lifts themselves have been upgraded once. In the last fifty-one years, the lifts have carried people up and down an estimated 13,292,640 times.

  My grandparents were thirty years old when they moved in in April 1967. For the first time in their lives, after ten years of living in one room with two small children, they had their own place to call home. My mum and uncle were ten and nine years old respectively, and for the first time in their lives they had a room each to sleep in. In fact, I still sleep in my mum’s old room. It was her childhood bedroom and then it became mine. I wonder if we used to lie in bed at night dreaming of the same things growing up; of best friends and passing exams, travelling far and wide, first loves and finding jobs, home ownership and lasting marriages.

  My grandparents were one of the original families that moved in. Let’s call them one of the founding families. Out of the eighty flats, they are one of the few founding families still there. My grandparents care about our estate; they witness the number of founders decrease every year as members move on and pass away. But they are never forgotten. Their stories continue to live on in these walls, even when new families have taken their place. One day there will be no founding families left, which fills me with sadness. Who will be left to tell our story when the lift shafts are all that remain?

  We know when a new family moves in. Word spreads through the vines and we become aware that the lifts are straining under the transportation of new furniture emanating from the removal vans parked outside. New families are often encountered in the lifts. They are analysed, and established
residents later speak about them on the landings by the bin chutes. Once these families have proven their commitment to the block, they are accepted, welcomed as members.

  My family has seen many people pass into the afterlife over the years and we have been to countless funerals of people in our block, covering almost every religion, or none at all. We become known by our floor numbers, our personal identification numbers, as if we were all different regiments within the same army. Mrs Poole on our floor, Mrs Miah on the seventh, Mr Girgis on the fourth, Mr Jiménez on the nineteenth, the drugs overdose on the twelfth, the cardiac arrest on the second. We have visited Muslim burial areas; we have eaten hummus and kebabs with the Coptic Egyptians; we have been to Spanish churches, Filipino masses, Jewish synagogues, Greek Orthodox parishes, Hindu temples, Christian cremations and have attended many wakes in Irish pubs on the way back from Kensal Green Cemetery. The cuisines we’ve sampled have all varied, but there is one constant… Grief brings people together. Whoever we are in Braithwaite Tower, we all take the same vessel to our resting place and we all go to meet our makers when the lift reaches the ground floor.

  The lifts themselves are small, silver, mirrorless rectangles, cold and uninviting. In a way they are coffins in themselves and sometimes even they die. There are a few rare occasions where both lifts break down at the same time. A mass panic ensues. People crawl out of their flats like woodworm; everyone congregates on the landing to discuss how terrible it is. It makes us appreciate the value of the lifts in our lives. Our community comes together when this happens. We meet people en route as they race up and down the twenty flights of stairs. Children are sent out to carry the Tesco shopping bags upstairs for the elderly. People stop to catch their breath and are overtaken by others. The groups of youths smoking weed on the stairs have their habits disrupted. (The stairs are usually forbidden territory, only used to do something illegal, or when one doesn’t want to encounter anyone. The lifts are too transparent for anything like that.)

  Newborns, too, get their first taste of tower life via the lifts. Babies are carried over the communal threshold and welcomed into their new home. For the young, the lift is a fun plaything. It was for me too. A vehicle that generated envy, as few other school friends had to use one to get home. Children grasp no concept of wealth.

  I don’t remember the first time entering Braithwaite Tower. But I do remember being a four-year-old and looking up at the main entrance. Hearing the buzz of the intercom, pressing the lift button (it used to make a clicking sound, then light up yellow, not the sleek blue digital button that was recently fitted). The excitement I would feel getting into that rickety, sterile old lift was second to none as I watched the red LED numbers counting down (or up), getting closer to the sixteenth floor. Of course, the main excitement wasn’t the lift itself (although that was thrilling), but the thought of getting off at my grandparents’ floor and seeing their familiar green door open up to a home full of warmth and love. I would cry and scream when it was time to leave and beg my mum to let me stay the weekend.

  When my mum’s illness took over, Braithwaite Tower became my permanent home. I slowly went from child to adolescent and my feelings evolved in parallel. I started to hate it. My eyes were opened to a world of wealth as I went from school to university. Houses with gardens worthy of bringing friends over, huge double beds perfect for sleepovers, living rooms capable of hosting movie nights. When I lived at home throughout university, one of only two students with a state education in my entire course, I omitted Braithwaite Tower when talking about my life, and I’m ashamed of that now.

  I saw country manors with Land Rovers in the drive, horses in stables and riding boots in conservatories. This new world became my focus, and I resented where I was from and what I had to compete against in order to survive in my surroundings. My generation in Braithwaite Tower is almost all still living at home, still in our box rooms, in our single beds at thirty. We age both slowly and rapidly here. Our lives are fragmented, told in brief glimpses up and down in lifts. The encounters here leave no room for hiding. The lift traps you. We meet, we greet, we depart, we repeat. I have seen people grow up through snapshots in the lift. From being a seed in the womb, a bump in the stomach, a baby in a pram, to a schoolchild coming home in their sports kit who now leaves the house every morning in a suit and shirt, ready for office life. Then some disappear… to university, to go abroad, to get married, to have children of their own. But they usually all come back. Some to bring their children to visit grandparents, some when romances abroad end or marriages disintegrate. Sometimes when someone dies upright. They come back for another snippet of their story. Other factors may change: grey tiles on the walls, new carpet in the reception, new stickers on the bin chutes, new placards outside warning people not to feed the pigeons or to play ball games (usually knocked down and replaced after a heavy football match).

  On average you will see the same person in the lift twice a year. It’s quite possible to only see someone once a year. This is the case with Gianni on the eighteenth floor. We have an annual catch-up that lasts sixteen floors and approximately forty-five seconds. It’s enough to update on the snapshots of our lives. Ours is a community that builds relationships in a silver vessel, a community that develops attachments when we pile into the lift and ask each other: ‘Which floor?’

  When you get into the lift with someone from your peer group, there’s an unspoken exchange that takes place in your head:

  ‘So you’re still at home too. Of course you are, guess it makes sense.’

  ‘Yeah, but I have a good job – look at my handbag, I hope you’ve noticed my handbag/car keys/watch.’

  ‘How are you able to afford a Mercedes? Guess we can: not paying market rent has its perks.’

  Conversation that actually takes place:

  ‘Hey, how are you?’

  ‘All good thanks, how are you? Haven’t seen your grandmother in a while – is she OK?’

  ‘Too cold for her to go out at the moment. I’m doing OK. Your mum told me your sister moved to New Zealand?’

  ‘Yeah, she did. Didn’t work out though, so she’s back now.’

  ‘Must have been a good experience. Any plans to move out?’

  ‘Nah, can’t afford it.’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘This is my floor, take care.’

  ‘See you soon, bye.’

  One year later the same encounter is likely to take place.

  ‘Hey, how are you doing?’

  ‘I’m good. Work’s taken over my life; so tiring… How are you?’

  ‘I’m good, finally moving out next week.’

  ‘Wow, good luck. Freedom!’

  The following year:

  ‘Hey, long time no see.’

  ‘I know. I moved out for a bit. I’m back home now, though.’

  (Nodding) ‘Cool. How’s work?’

  ‘Not bad. I’m retraining at college at the moment; hopefully will become an electrician soon.’

  ‘Amazing. I’m really sorry to hear about your dad…’

  ‘Yeah… thanks. Mum’s not taking it too well. We’ll be OK, though.’

  We have a bond in the tower. We know what it’s like to be the Rapunzels and the princes of our own fate. No princes or princesses come to rescue us here; we can only save ourselves. There’s nothing in life like having your own front door, my grandfather says. I still have hope that maybe one day I’ll have that, but for now I appreciate Braithwaite Tower more than ever. The shame I felt is now pride.

  Some residents have a regular routine. My grandfather leaves every morning at 8 a.m. to get milk and the newspaper. The school run between 8.30 and 8.45 a.m. is the slot to avoid when you need to go to work in a hurry (the lift is usually full of prams and children, so you’ll have to take the next one). Paul from the eleventh floor always goes down to the betting shop at 11 a.m. on Saturday mornings, singing in patois for good luck. Darragh gets the lift at 8.55 a.m. every weekday for his morning walk. We
usually meet in the lift (I get the lift at 8.55 a.m. every morning too). He’s on the twentieth floor, so it picks him up first. I watch the lift pop up to the twentieth to collect him before coming down for me. We discuss the weather, films, his grandchildren, my grandparents.

  One morning I got into the lift at my normal time, but Darragh wasn’t there. I guessed he was away or feeling under the weather. That evening I returned home and my grandparents said: ‘Darragh died last night.’ Cancer. The news had slowly filtered down through the floors. We soaked it up and collectively grieved. He had known how long he had left but chose not to tell anyone. Now when I take the lift in the morning, I watch as the little blue LED lights blink and hover on sixteen, then open their doors. They pick me up first now.

  Our winning feature was that we stood above the rest of the world, gazing down at the worker ants, cars stuck in traffic, aeroplanes disappearing into the horizon, umbrellas blossoming in the rain. We used to be one of a kind. We used to watch the world from above. No one wanted to live in such an ugly construction. ‘Who would want to live in a place like that?’ they chanted.

  But they don’t see the sky ablaze with fireworks on Bonfire Night. They don’t see the sunset turn London peachy pink and reveal its kinder, more empathetic side. They don’t see the double rainbows that dissolve through the clouds. When people remark at how high up we live – ‘Sixteenth floor, please’ – my grandmother always responds with a smile and says, ‘Closer to the angels.’ Until now… They are even blocking us from getting to them.

  With every day that passes there are glossy constructions rising above us in droves. A new range of vocabulary: thirty floors, forty floors, sixty floors, luxury apartments, Manhattans starting from £750,000, first phase sold out off plan. We watch as the towers no one wanted to live in become the most desirable properties on the market. Yet we remain strong, even though the new towers’ lifts may be classier, their look glossier, mirrors of fame and glory, we know we were the originals. I now stand on my balcony and watch the cranes and skyscrapers scrape past us. We may be neighbours, but their starting prices are four times the worth of ours.