Common People

by Kit de Waal

  My dad was earning well by this time. It was an era where you didn’t have to be able to read and write if you could do difficult, dirty and dangerous things and organise other men to do them, too. Dad wanted to take Mum and her parents out for a meal. It wasn’t something any of them were used to. He chose the Fox and Hounds at Scorrier and dressed up in his white denim suit, which he had professionally cleaned every week. Dropping the suit off and picking it up would always remind him of standing in the pawn-shop queue with his mother. That too was a weekly process. When his father was paid, his mother would redeem his suit so he could go to the pub in it. After the weekend she’d be putting it back in so they could eat for the rest of the week. Each time my dad paid for his cleaning he felt he’d come a long way from the poverty of his childhood, and he loved having money in his pocket. He was looking forward to spending some of it when he walked into the lounge bar of the Fox and Hounds, but there was a flurry of concern among the staff. The landlord came up to him: ‘We don’t serve the likes of you in here,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to go in the public bar.’ They didn’t. They went back to the Stag Hunt in their own village and played darts instead.

  My parents got married the day after Mum’s last A-level exam and she did Open University while my brother Matty and I were small. There are still some of her books knocking around with our scribbles in them. Dad became a tin miner and we used to go to the working-men’s club on Friday nights. One of my earliest memories is being put down to sleep with Matty in a corner under a pile of coats. Another is running out to meet Dad when he came in off night shift. I slipped in the snow and bashed my cheek into the step. I still have a little scar.

  By the time the stolen darts finally fell apart we were living in Yorkshire. The tin mines had closed down and we’d moved north for Selby coalfield. Now when Dad came home from work he had coal dust round his eyes that would never quite wash off, so he always looked as though he was wearing mascara. It took him a long time to find a set of darts he liked as much as the old ones. When he did, he bought two sets, so he’d always have a replacement. He got me some, too. We had a dartboard up in our house and we’d play when I got home from school and before he went off on night shift. He’d give me a one-hundred start and the off, which meant I could sometimes win. When he was on day shift and had his evenings free, he’d go down to the pub in the next village, the Bell and Crown, where he played for the team. On weekends we’d go off to tournaments, big knockouts that smelled of ale and fags.

  When I was sixteen the Bell and Crown came up for sale. Dad felt he’d had enough of doing difficult, dirty and dangerous work underground. My parents had always saved most of what they earned, and they borrowed from the bank and from breweries so that we could buy it. Moving in was highly exciting and I loved working behind the bar, listening to the jokes and the stories. Weekends were manic and it was a matter of getting drink to people as efficiently as possible, but the weeknights were all about games and chat. Men’s darts on Mondays and Thursdays, dominoes on Tuesdays, ladies’ darts on Wednesdays. I signed up for the ladies’ team and so it was that a few months later I won my two trophies, one of which had a little gold figure on the top, in a skirt, with an outstretched arm poised to throw a dart.

  I am sadly out of practice at darts. Rusty. You have to play a lot to keep the hand and eye in. I don’t look like the type of person who plays darts. There’s a lot going on in that sentence, isn’t there? What does the type of person who plays darts look like and why don’t I? I don’t think I did at the time, either. There weren’t lots of seventeen-year-old bookworms competing. Most of the ladies were at least twice my age, and often more. That’s what I liked about it. The conversation. Hints about the menopause and difficult husbands. She’s the landlord’s daughter, they’d say about me, when we visited the neighbouring pubs. A couple of years later, after I’d gone to university and made lots of posh friends, they’d make up little rhymes about me: ‘She was only the landlord’s daughter, but she lay on the bar and said “pump”.’ I’d laugh and smoke another cigarette. I’d switched from Regal King Size to Marlboro Lights in my first week. I was rebranding myself along with my choice of fags.

  I mentioned darts in my first book The Last Act of Love. It’s not a book about darts, it’s about my brother Matty and the horrible way that he died, but the backdrop is the pub, so there’s lots of darts and dominoes and the tug of war on Boxing Day gets a mention. There’s much more of this in the final version than there was in my first draft. I’d rather glossed over it. Perhaps I thought that none of that stuff really belonged in a book. That’s the problem with education, wonderful though it is. It shows you what has already been done. It’s easy to jump from the fact that there’s not much darts in literature to the idea that darts don’t belong in literature, and that people who play darts don’t belong in literature, and that people who play darts certainly can’t have a crack at trying to write literature.

  In the same letter as she describes playing darts with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath mentions a trip to Whitby. There is, she explains, something depressingly mucky about English seaside resorts. The sand is muddy and dirty. The working class, too, is dirty, strewing candy papers, gum and cigarette wrappers. We used to go to Whitby for a treat. I don’t remember it as dirty, but then I’ve never seen the New England beaches that Plath longs for. My dad used to organise an annual trip to Whitby for the men’s darts teams. All year long there would be a raffle on darts night for which we’d provide the prize – a mixed grill – and the proceeds would be saved up to pay for the coach and give every player a little brown envelope of beer money.

  My dad remembers stopping off at the Spotted Cow in Malton on the way back one year. He went to the bar and asked for twenty-eight pints of bitter and a pint of dry cider. ‘Who’s the dry cider for?’ asked the barmaid. At that moment, all six feet four of the cider drinker fell through the front door. ‘Him,’ said my dad. They both looked at him for a moment. ‘He’s not as drunk as he looks,’ said my dad. I can’t imagine Sylvia Plath would have been impressed if she’d bumped into them all barrelling down the road. I liked being on the bar when they came back, full of jokes and stories and ready for yet more drink. One year, one of them had brought a live lobster as a pet and then let it free on the bus.

  I was always encouraged by my parents, but I do remember that whenever I said to anyone outside my family that I wanted to be a writer, they told me not to be daft. Teachers told me that if I worked very hard I might be able to become a teacher. Friends told me to be careful not to show myself up. Customers in our pub told me that I sounded as if I’d swallowed a dictionary, that I was so sharp I’d cut myself, and that book learning wouldn’t get me a husband. I don’t think I’d ever have written anything if I hadn’t left the pub and the village. I’d still be pulling pints and playing darts and reading books but thinking that people like me didn’t write them. University was my Narnia. I found a door to another world. Getting a job in a bookshop was another big moment. I started looking after authors when they came in to do book signings. I began to see that there wasn’t anything all that different about them. They were only people; they weren’t that unlike me.

  Books tend to be about children who go to boarding school, not about children who play darts with their dad, but you have to not let that stop you. I’ve found class to be far more navigable than other bits of my identity. I can choose whether or not to think about it, which I don’t feel is the case with my gender or my race, or the fact that I am a mother. I feel lucky. The longer I am alive, the more I learn that the greatest possible gift and advantage in life is to have loving parents. The perspective I get from working in prisons, where so many people have been neglectfully or cruelly parented, means I don’t feel inclined to moan or feel sorry for myself about anything. I try not to succumb to envy of those people born with a different type of spoon in their mouths, who seem to have an instinctive knowledge of how to go on. What I most envy about posh people is th
eir confidence. There’s a sense of entitlement that I lack. I know I’m generalising here, but they do seem to like the sound of their own voice. Whenever I write a piece or get on a stage, I have to work so hard to overcome a chorus of jeers from my childhood: ‘Oooh, look at her, she thinks she’s someone. She likes the sound of her own voice, doesn’t she? Look at her, showing herself up again. Too clever for her own good, that’s what she is. Too clever by half.’ Sometimes I fear I’ll be on my deathbed, trying to think about all the love I have known, and instead, a sharp-featured nurse will bend over me and say in a Yorkshire accent: ‘What’s the matter with you? Did you swallow a dictionary?’

  I have multitudinous insecurities but I try not to let them stop me doing things. I may not always know what the rules are, I tell myself, but nor did my dad when he was first off the boat, nor do lots of people. I do wonder what I might achieve if I didn’t have to expend so much energy on fear management. Back in Yorkshire, we had a practice dartboard called a champion’s choice board. The treble and double segments were all smaller than they were on a matchboard. The idea was that if you practised in tougher conditions, then when you came to a match it would be much easier: the trebles would look massive, the green of the double one really would look like a big field. It worked then and made me a better darts player, and it works for me now as a metaphor. Whenever I do anything that seems like a huge stretch, I calm myself down by thinking of the champion’s choice board and reminding myself that if I can do this, if I can cope with whatever is scaring me now, then in the future everything will feel easier.

  People conflate class and intelligence. These days people assume I’m middle class precisely because I write books and can string a sentence together. I talk about books on Radio 4, so I must be middle class, surely? How could I be anything else? The Times recently put my book in a list called ‘Middle-Class Misery Memoirs’. ‘But didn’t you notice the darts?’ I wanted to say. Sometimes I get ‘accused’ of being middle class. ‘Typical middle-class whining,’ some man tweeted at me about an article I wrote about motherhood. I ignored him, which was probably the best thing to do, though if I’d channelled my Yorkshire barmaid self, the girl who used to keep very good order in the Bell and Crown, I’d have told him to fuck off. I do think I’ve become a bit soft, sometimes, a bit too well-behaved. I had to learn table manners along the way so I knew what to do at lunches and dinners. Maybe I picked up an excess of civility at the same time as I was learning that you wait for everyone else to get their food before you tuck in. And you don’t eat or drink the contents of the finger bowl – but I already knew that from reading The Bell Jar. Books are very helpful when it comes to social mobility.

  The Snaith and District Ladies’ Darts Championship is still the only thing I’ve ever won. I’ve been shortlisted for a few bookish things but have never walked away with the trophy. If I ever do win anything I think I’ll mention the darts. It will be a strange thing for a literary type to say, ‘This is the first thing I’ve won since the Snaith and District Ladies’ Darts Championship.’ Writers tend not to have grown up playing darts because they didn’t grow up in the sort of houses where there was a dartboard on the wall. Good that I’ll say it, I think. Good that I’m allowing myself to think I might win something book-related one day. People like me can write books. People like anyone can write books. You have to learn to like the sound of your own voice; you have to trust that your perspective is interesting because it is yours, that you are seeing the world through your own eyes and can use your own words to describe it. It doesn’t matter what came before: it matters that you are here now and have something to say. And, while writing might be hard and can often feel like a madhouse, you don’t get coal dust lodged in your eyelashes and you never have the indignity of getting stuck on double one.

  This Place Is Going to the Dogs

  Louise Powell

  While other children went to Florida, I went flapping. To the uninitiated, going ‘flapping’ might sound like travelling to a holiday camp where ‘The Birdie Song’ is constantly on repeat, meals consist of millet, and the signature dance involves waving the arms up and down all night. As exciting as that prospect is, the truth is even better.

  ‘Flapping’ has nothing to do with birds and everything to do with dogs – more specifically greyhounds. When you go ‘flapping’, you visit one of the unlicensed greyhound tracks that operate around the country, where every man and our mam can race their dogs with hardly any questions asked. There are few rules, even fewer regulations, and better still, you can even bet on the outcome of each race.

  It’s the greyhound equivalent of the Wild West, tinged with the same lure of freedom and big rewards. The people flock to flapping tracks in their hundreds to pan for the little nuggets of gold from deep within the bookies’ satchels. They climb out of their battered five-door saloons with a fistful of coins jangling in their tracksuit pockets, ready to duel to the death with the men standing by the rails who shout out odds like threats. There’s cigarette smoke rather than gun smoke, but the fight is just as fierce: it could be the night that they win enough money to get the family through Christmas, but that prospect could just as easily turn out to be a mirage.

  It might not seem like the ideal place to take a little girl of six, but my parents couldn’t afford to be picky about our family outings. Holidays were like drinking wine and buying new cars, mythical things that other families did, not us. Before you start feeling sorry for me, I was extremely proud that we were so different. If anyone had offered six-year-old me a choice between going to Disney World in Florida and going flapping, I’d have thought that you were taking the mickey: who would want to spend their time in a theme park meeting humans dressed up as dogs when they could go flapping and see the real thing for themselves? Greyhound racing flowed through my veins and warmed my little heart right through.

  Good job too, because Easington Greyhound Stadium felt like the coldest place on earth between November and March. Lying on the outskirts of the ex-pit village of the same name, it was an independently owned flapping track bordered by open land that stretched west towards the A19 and east to meet the North Sea. The blunt brick building hunkered down into the sloping land, desperately seeking warmth from the scant grass it offered. There was a sandy oval to the front and a car park of loose stony chips to the back; when vehicles pulled in on winter nights, their headlights caught the dust from the stones as it streamed upwards, as if the land itself were exhaling.

  We breathed a sigh of relief ourselves when we reached the track in our clapped-out C-reg car. Braving the cold for the dogs was part of the fun, but a breakdown in this weather was the stuff of nightmares. Easington Greyhound Stadium was a sanctuary from the horror of the hard shoulder, the fear of breakdown and its unpayable expense. As the car door squeaked open, the noise coming from the track was profane. Hot-blooded howls from the hyped-up greyhounds punctured the air as sharply as the frost, while men and women greeted each other in lower, louder tones. Geordie, Mackem, Smoggie and Sand-dancer voices intermingled, so that only the occasional word could be made out, and underpinning the cacophony was the crackling, static-filled sound of the track tannoy doing its usual pre-race check. With the wind wailing at our backs and friends hailing us, we half ran, half sauntered to the turnstiles, where I was lifted over the clanking monster and into relative tranquillity.

  To my childish eyes, my parents and brothers emerged from their battle with the turnstiles clutching the true marker of adulthood: a white race card with an oval photograph of a greyhound on its front. It was only three or four pieces of A4 paper folded in half, a thing so basic that it wasn’t even considered worthy of a staple, yet I adored it all the same. I had a pocket dictionary at home, but encyclopaedias were expensive, and this little booklet was the closest I could get to one. With two races spread over half of each A4 sheet, it was a mine of information. There were race times, lists of data about previous performances that everyone called the ‘form’, and nam
es of owners, but I was most entranced by the race names of the greyhounds who were running that night.

  In a world populated by Rovers, Tysons and Busters, a race name was something of a necessary evil. It was supposed to be reflective of the dog’s abilities or the owner’s personality, so of course there were grand-sounding names like King Kong and Diamond Girl. But when King Kong’s only rampage came at feeding time and Diamond Girl showed no sparkle on the track, the race card bearing the dog’s name and form made the joke crystal clear to all. I could read the form as well as the names, and I enjoyed these little ironies more than a six-year-old child probably should. But what I loved more were the race names that made images in my mind, ones like Money Tree and Bird of Paradise. I would show my approval of such monikers by drawing tiny pictures next to them in our mam’s card, until the night when one of my brothers grabbed it suddenly in astonishment.

  ‘Every dog that you’ve drawn a picture next to has won tonight,’ he gasped, and my artwork was circulated around the family to cries of surprise. When he eventually passed the card back to me, envy tinged his voice. ‘That’s eight out of eight races. How did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, spooked. Scared that I was having some preternatural influence over the dogs that were running, I decided from then on to wait until a race had passed before I judged the names of the greyhounds. And no, I didn’t always vote in favour of the victor.

  It might seem harsh of my brother, but really he had every right to be put out. He was winless despite scrutinising each variable of the form, and all I did was draw a picture to choose a winner. And therein lay the frustration and the attraction of a flapping track: when the form worked out, you were in clover, but when it didn’t, you were knee-deep in something much less pleasant.