Common People

by Kit de Waal

  My breath drove me out of the front gate, halfway down the steep hill and all the way down the ginnel that accessed the back of the houses on our side of the street. Panic steered me through the hollow-black to the age-old granite steps that led up to our garden. I placed my palms against the rough stone walls that stood like bouncers flanking the ten steps and felt my way up the narrow enclosure to the rusty metal gate. I shoved the gate open, stumbled along the lumpy overgrown path and got scratched passing the wild thorny rosebushes. At last, my foot bumped into the grey stone steps, and the final steep climb up to the back door that opened into our kitchen.

  Night draped the house in stillness. Trepidation gripped my throat with its icy hands. My dad had locked me out. He’d upped the ante and I didn’t know what it meant or what I was meant to do next, but I knew for sure that knocking on the back door wouldn’t be wise.

  Careful not to disturb the darkness, I sat on the doorstep, rested my spine against the solid support and tried to hug and rock myself warm. As I skimmed the periphery of sleep, every nocturnal rustle triggered my eyes open. But I had no regrets. Close beneath the surface shock was a profound knowing that assured me it was worth it. This consequence of my unsanctioned hours spent revelling in life was worth it. And so, with cold stone biting through the seat of my pants, and sublime memories of music smoothing the edge of discomfort, I nodded between states of consciousness, convinced that whatever happened in the morning could never spoil the joy of this night out.

  Driftwood

  Adelle Stripe

  Outside his red-brick house, sheets of tarpaulin flap between fallen fence posts, and nettles grow in sheltered corners beneath the elderberry tree. Broken freezers, melted dustbins and a rusting wine rack are heaped by the pebbledash wall. The shed contains a bike with flat tyres, a lawnmower that hasn’t seen light in a decade, and cases of damaged crockery from 1996.

  Wearing a torn boiler suit, steel-cap wellies and a fleece hat to cover his shiny head, he spends his days carrying seasoned husks of fallen ash, birch, oak and rowan up the farm track with the gales chasing behind him. He drags driftwood from the snake-bend in the river and stacks snapped branches in funeral pyres along the banks.

  When the flood waters came, the river coughed up enough debris to cause a fault line of human detritus that extended across the corn fields: doll heads, Vaseline tins, pop bottles, syringes, children’s shoes, rusting shot-cases and stained sanitary towels. He sifts through the litter, collects it into bin bags, and hauls fractured trunks towards the house, beyond the latticed blackthorn.

  The hamlet where he lives contains seven houses. It has a bus stop (out of use), a bench, a parish council noticeboard, and a road for rat-runners, tractors and joyriders. Along the verges, which are mapped by discarded milkshake cartons and rampant convolvulus, traditionally laid hedges mark the estate boundary. In summer, red kites follow him to the river.

  When the wind changes direction, the smell from the sewage works drifts into his garden. It mixes with a heavy scent of brewing malt and diesel exhaust fumes. It is sickly; evocative of childhood bedrooms, a sepia smog that hung over the town, the stench in your hair, clothes and mouth. Live there long enough and you won’t notice it.

  There’s a reason for all this mess. The long days he spends outside, gathering.

  ‘It’s cheaper this way,’ he says. ‘All this for nowt, free hot water. Chopping wood warms you three times; sawing, lifting and burning. Nature’s gymnasium…’

  The house has a back boiler, no log fire is wasted. His pension would barely cover his heating costs. This is the alternative. Free to those who are fit enough to scavenge.

  He doesn’t own the house, of course. It’s part of the estate, for its workers. Cheap labour in exchange for a roof. No heating, mind, aside from tepid storage heaters. A farm labourer’s wage wouldn’t pay for the coal.

  Over the years he has learned to live with its nip. Ice on the inside of windows, a toilet that freezes up. A pantry colder than the £10 fridge that leaks through the floor each August. Damp sheets. Bare floors. Asthmatic coughs as the sun starts to rise. On the front doorstep, metal buckets filled with ash cool off from last night’s fire. Keeping warm is a full-time job.

  Not that he wants any pity; it’s just how country life is.

  You listen to his running commentary as he drags wood along the lane: the useless government, the National League, the loss of everything that once was. But most of all, a nostalgia for how farming used to be. His mother and father, the old ways.

  Quiet days are spent in the past, recalling the lost elation of youth. Fights and drinking and women and clubs. Mistakes and heartbreak rubbed out. He takes comfort in the myth of the man he once was.

  He moved here twenty-four years ago, following a farming accident. A lord down south needed a man. Three months were spent working in glorious weather, tending to a Friesian herd. One morning the baling machine stopped working. He tried to fix it, to make the bastard work. And it pulled him into its ferocious jaws.

  Chomp chomp chomp.

  It took half of his foot. Sliced it clean off, and spat it out into the straw.

  The doctors said he’d never walk again, but a corset and prosthetic fixed him. He always knew farming was the most dangerous profession. More men killed than in the pits or at sea. It was only a matter of time before something happened to him. Now he walks with an awkward gait, leaning forward, hands clasped behind his back; the only indication of the plastic toes beneath his wellington boot.

  Once a month, his friend, Les, chainsaws thick chunks of wood piled up in the garden. Les has a squashed nose, tea-strainer moustache, NHS glasses held together by tape, no teeth. It’s a cartoon face that’s real. Camouflage to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length. He blends into the woodland.

  A roll-up hangs from Les’s mouth, oily fingerprints mottle the flavoured cigarette paper. Together they chop up piles of wood and talk in the way only countrymen do: stories of lost limbs; escaped heifers on the dual carriageway; floating, bloated bodies; the pigman who slit his own throat and bled to death in the sty; their friend who sleeps sitting up and hasn’t bathed for a year; the pie trade; slurry-pit drownings; petrol prices; tatters stealing gates from the land.

  They are the last of a dying breed, carrying tales from way back. Stories that have never been written down, only stored in the imaginations and memories of men who toiled the ground.

  His parents lived here long before he did, then moved into sheltered accommodation. Death Valley, as he likes to call it. He’s superstitious about that place, the old-people’s estate on the other side of town.

  ‘It’s where you go to rot,’ he says. ‘You won’t catch me moving down there, I’d rather snuff it in the fields…’

  He shakes his head and laughs. He’s as much a part of this landscape as the trees and barns and cattle grazing grass. Town is no place for a man like him.

  A framed picture of his father, holding a bull on a rope by its ring, gathers dust on the windowsill. It was taken at an agricultural show; his bull was supreme champion that year. In the faded photograph, the Queen shakes his father’s hand wearing her white, spotless gloves; he often sold pedigrees to her. That was the gift he had: he could talk to anyone. The gentry valued his cattle (all owned by a local toff), bought semen straws for ten score a shot; his father made them wealthy in return. Rosettes and trophies and hundred-guinea calves. Seven-day weeks to make it work. Never the earnings to save for a house. But free milk, eggs and wood for the stove. A whitewashed pantry of curds out the back. For that, they were grateful.

  The afternoon sun beams through the living room, where three radios are stacked on the side. One for football, one for news, the other a digital, which he hasn’t quite worked out how to use. He sits on a pile of grubby cushions, wearing a pair of knackered slippers that resemble burst sofas.

  When town folk think of country people they imagine a wardrobe of plus fours, tweed hats, expensive coats. The
reality for most is this: multiple sweaters (with holes), long johns, odd socks, a fleece jacket with a broken zip, trousers held up by knotted blue twine. And a weathered face, the farmer’s tan, which deepens each line in the brow. Or fingers stained yellow with iodine, split nails, and barbwire-scarred skin.

  You listen to him slurping tea from an ancient Happy Moo-day mug as he squints at a three-week old supplement from the Sunday Times. He’s been reading it for as long as he can remember, his favourite section being STYLE, and Shelley von Strunckel’s horoscopes.

  ‘A good week for Leo,’ he shouts. ‘Things are on the up. It’s a full moon on Friday, best day of the year for luck.’

  Beside him, several years’ worth of opened envelopes, crumpled lottery tickets and birthday cards spill on to the sooty shelf. Notepads are filled with handwriting only legible to himself. At first glance it could be Cyrillic script. The mantelpiece is cracked from the heat, where the fire burns all day, every day. You sit in front of it on a one-armed rocking chair as the ash crackles and spits.

  The view from the upstairs bedroom has barely changed since you lived here. At least it has a carpet now, an improvement on the strips of spongy underlay and random nails that lined the floorboards when you first moved in.

  Your old single bed faced the doorway; you warmed the room up with a hairdryer each morning and could see your breath in the air. Baths were even worse; you’d submerge your entire body underwater and leap out into the towel to stop yourself pissing from the chill.

  In this bedroom, a record player sat in the corner, and piles of charity-shop vinyl were stacked against the wall. Music was the only way out, some brief relief from the teenage rut. Back then you earned just enough to get by. Call centres. Pubs. Fitting rooms. Tills.

  You staggered home in the dark through the woods, washed your tights in the sink. Socks streaked by Daz powder, your hands red raw from scrubbing. Wet clothes were hung on the fire grate, steam-dried at first light by the embers.

  Downstairs, he’d be shouting at the television; it was the last thing you heard before drifting to sleep. That, and the widow-makers creaking outside.

  It was home for a long time. Still is.

  He looked after you here, in this house. Fed you tins of spaghetti hoops on toast, bulk-bought from Netto as a damaged batch. Thirty-pence loaves of white bread. Value packs of watery ham. Own-brand digestives. The occasional Battenberg. That was tea, most nights.

  ‘Always thought you’d be a writer,’ he used to say. ‘All of them stories you wrote as a kid.’

  You felt ashamed that words had abandoned you.

  Books gathered dust in a box by the bed.

  Out here, the stasis is comforting. From this house, on clear days, you can see cooling towers on the horizon, structures that once belched out steam. They are slowly being dismantled, alongside the pits that surrounded them.

  He is preserved in time. Even in retirement he’s re-created the daily burden that his body and mind are conditioned to. Slogging is second nature. For as long as he’s capable, he will sweat each day until he can no longer lift an axe. The fire in his hearth reminds him he’s alive. He dreads the day he can no longer light it.

  You walk out into the garden, stepping over the rubble, and walk up a mound of ash, now covered in grass and dandelions.

  ‘Shall I help you sort this mess?’

  He pauses as he fills a bucket with damp kindling.

  ‘If you want,’ he says. ‘Best leave it until later in the year, though. I’ll have cleared some of it out by then.’

  Three faded bath towels flap in the wind, pegged to a rope that runs from hedge to house. It is propped by a corroded stepladder. He pulls a cloth handkerchief from his boiler suit, blows, and wipes the permanent drip from his nose.

  ‘What about the outhouse? It’s full of bin bags, stuff from when you and Mum were together. Mouldy books… a foot spa. As if you’ve ever used that. You could fill it with seasoned wood.’

  ‘I’ll get round to it,’ he replies. ‘Just haven’t had the time.’

  ‘Maybe we could do a tip run,’ you ask. ‘Clear the beer bottles out. You could do with a new freezer; it’s leaking again.’

  He rubs his hands and stares out across the fields.

  ‘Might see if I can get one off Emmaus,’ he says. ‘Can’t afford ’em new.’

  ‘The last few you’ve bought have been used and look what’s happened to them.’

  You point at the pile of abandoned fridges stacked up next to the shed.

  ‘It’s like a bloody scrapyard out here.’

  His insistence on paying the lowest amount possible is not only an economic necessity. It’s a habit that started when he was a young man and continues into old age. It pains you to see yourself turning into him. Each scrap in his garden symbolic of the person you could become.

  Your attempt at restoring some sense of order falls on deaf ears, like it always has done. He’ll only clear up when he’s ready. And besides, there’s work to be done. The fire won’t light itself.

  A tractor pulls up outside the house, and parks next to the front gate. A clatter sounds from the garden as a pile of pallets are lobbed over the fence. He smiles and nods his head.

  ‘More wood,’ he shouts. ‘That’ll keep me busy.’

  Matoose Rowsay

  Jenny Knight

  It happened every year during muck-spreading season. And every year, Mum smothered our crunchy, air-dried clothes in some choking freebie from one of her elderly district patients to try and disguise it. But pig manure is not a fragrance easily bullied into submission. Lenthéric’s Panache didn’t touch it, Hartnell’s In Love only gave it a fag-breath/Polo-mint twist, and Yardley’s Tweed – which should have had it in a headlock, screaming surrender – merely frosted its edges, like egg white and sugar on a glass. More often than not, our already pungent laundry just ended up doubly infused with the sickly, powdery scent of Geriatric. That particular spring – 1978, the year I turned eleven – she’d been given a particularly foul lemon-scented toxin that looked exactly like urine sloshing around in its column of corrugated glass. I hated it so much I forgot about it only with the big news that Aunt Heather was coming to visit.

  Aunt Heather lived in a place called Georgia, in the USA, with her millionaire husband, Mac. She had a big white house with pillars and maids, a lake with a little white wooden boat on it, and a brand new, cherry-red Cadillac – all of which I’d only seen in photographs. I didn’t know anybody like her. Nobody did.

  ‘My dad says your uncle Russell’s a pisshead, your uncle Harry is a jailbird and your uncle Frankie smacks his wife and kids about,’ said my school nemesis, Gillian Webb, when she heard. ‘So how come your aunt married a millionaire?’

  ‘She was a GI bride, ac-tually,’ I told her.

  ‘Well, my mum says your aunt Jean was a mouthy old cow, your aunt Violet was a tart and your aunt Blanche was up herself,’ continued Gillian, her fat face puckered and narrow-eyed with suspicion. ‘But she din’t say nothin’ about no Heather.’

  I’d given her my best Miss Piggy hair flounce at the time, obviously. But for once, the mottled infamy of my father’s vast tribe of siblings didn’t matter. Gillian Webb – whose dad was only one of three, not nine – constantly boasted she was related to Cliff Richard, purely on the basis his real name was Harry Webb, but no one believed her. I, however, really did have an aunt with a mink coat and a Polaroid camera. Proof – and glory – would be mine. I’d had enough of wearing clothes steeped in the smell of old lady and loved-up fox.

  ‘Heard that saying about polishing turds?’ my big sister Jane whispered one morning, gurning with disgust as she sniffed her school jumper. It was the first time she’d ever sworn in front of our parents, and it won her a fringe-swinging clip on the ear. For my part, I dropped that wretched bottle as far as I dared – out of the bathroom window onto the hard, lichen-spattered tiles of the outhouse – but it refused to break. Rough materials do that, I’ve le
arned since. The finer they are, the quicker to shatter against life’s hard surfaces.

  Every fibre of me strained to meet Heather; every reference to her visit made my imagination growl with hunger. Dad was collecting them from the airport in an ‘automatic’, he told Mum, because Heather wouldn’t drive ‘a manual’. I wasn’t sure what that meant, except I’d seen Dad put ‘manual labour’ on the sort of forms that made his face scrunch up like paper in a fist. ‘Automatic’, on the other hand, sounded very Shirley Bassey. A world away from the pickup Dad drove, which belonged to the farm. But then, everything belonged to the farm: our house, our phone – and, pretty much all year, except deepest winter, Dad.

  I wondered if Heather’s kids got told they were ‘a breath of fresh air’, like posh old people said to me when I read to them while Mum scoured their feet in the summer holidays if Gloria-next-door couldn’t look after me. I was quite flattered, until Gillian Webb told me her mum said it meant I was common. Her mum cleaned for posh people, so her mum knew. Posh people had grannies, not nannas, she said; ‘extension’ phones in their bedrooms. They didn’t have mugs of tea on the table with a meal, and they definitely did not smell of pig shit.

  ‘My mum says you’ll never be like them,’ she said. ‘Not lest there’s another war and you get to marry a Yank like your aunt.’

  I wanted to ask if Gillian Webb’s mum had the same sort of strangling struggle I did when she spoke to them, these people with their off-the-telly voices, but I didn’t. It was too confusing. When we went to visit Mum’s family up north, I got called posh for saying ‘barth’ not ‘bath’. Jane still went to Mum’s sister in Lincoln for two or three weeks every summer while Dad did harvest – Mum was one of five, so there were plenty of cousins – but I’d stopped going. I blamed it on not liking cities, street lights, stuffy nights full of central heating, but the truth was I was sick of being called ‘mardy’ for wanting to read instead of going to the Forum shops to do nothing, or the Malleable Club to watch uncles get drunk. I didn’t understand. Not when another time I seemed so celebrated, all ‘Ask our mastermind over theer!’ for the answer to a quiz, a crossword clue.