Lowborn

It is half a year since I wrote anything on this blog.  Is anyone still out there??!  Apologies if anyone (!) has been looking out for my musings.

I wasn't in a great place at the beginning of the year and then it all just felt too overwhelming.  I didn't seem to be able to write concisely or in a reasonable fashion.  Brexit, Trump, austerity, the climate, it all just felt too much.  So I concentrated more on trying to stay happy in my small place in the world.

However, I am just reading a book which has spurred me into blogging action finally.  It is called Lowborn and is by a brilliant writer called Kerry Hudson.  You may have seen it around - in the UK for sure - as it is hotly tipped for all sorts of non-fiction prizes.

Kerry Hudson was brought up be a mainly single mother who dragged her to towns in all parts of the UK.  She says she attended 9 primary schools, for example  She experienced a grinding, seemingly never-ending kind of poverty which has, I believe, rarely been written about in this country - for the reasons that she details from the beginning of the book.  Namely being in a class who are considered worthless and feckless.  People rarely drag themselves out and even more rarely discuss their pasts if they do. 

Reading her story is an incredibly sobering experience.  I would like to think of myself as a caring person.  Someone who tries to be aware of differences between people.  To be sensitive.  To give what I can when I can.  But reading this book makes you all too aware how almost impossible it is to offer much respite to those living such lives unless you could house them, give them bank accounts, give them jobs.  Simply the act of sending your own child to school well-fed and in a clean uniform gives daily pain to those who are hungry and whose uniforms are too small, too dirty.

And then how much difference would that make in the end because so much is ingrained in terms of lack of parenting, alcohol and substance abuse, casual violence and abuse.  The cycle goes on and is difficult to break.  Yet Kerry Hudson came through and others have too.  There are ways to turn this section of society around and as I have argued many times on this blog, the UK is not a poor country - despite what many in government would have us believe.  There is money, a great deal of money.  But there is no desire to make any real change.  Thousands and thousands of people are living below the poverty line.  Daily forced to choose between food or heat, bills or school shoes, etc etc ad infinitum.  Food banks report that they can barely cope with the onset of school holidays - the loss of free school meals for six weeks simply breaks the delicate finances of many families.  

This is the twenty first century, people.  Weren't we all supposed to be equal and disease-free and living in high tech, violence-free communities by now?  Some the most terrifying parts of Kerry's book are when she revisits the towns that she lived in during her childhood.  Most have not changed, many are worse off than thirty years ago.  No wonder so many of such places voted for the grotesque clowns who promised that the EU was the root of all their troubles and that leaving the EU would bring endless cash injections.  'Beware men bearing gifts'...

Read Lowborn, I urge you.  It will probably make you weep.  But I hope it spurs you to action too.  Protest.  Donate.  But most of all, start trying to think differently about why someone might be where they, looking like they do or behaving in a certain way.  

Live Long and Prosper - wherever you are

Today I did consider the Orlando mass shooting as a blog subject but whichever way I attempted to approach this awful event, I felt unqualified to write about it.  Suffice to say, it was, and is, horrible seeing the details unfold and I send condolences to all.

 

Instead then, this weekend I finished reading The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell.  I am very late to this book - it won the Costa prize in 2010 - but since Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel, This Must Be The Place, has just been released to very good reviews, I thought I should read some of her earlier work, in an attempt to look at her progression as a novelist (now doesn't that sounds grown up?!) when I read the new book.

 

I was not prepared for the effect The Hand That First Held Mine had on me.  I gather from a recent profile in Writing magazine that Ms O'Farrell does have young children but her writing about the immediate aftermath of bringing a baby home touched me very deeply.  One of the main characters has had an emergency caesarean section and is completely disorientated once at home alone with the baby.  I found it very very poignant.  In fact, as I was reading some passages, I felt as if I was once again standing in the dark hallway of the house to which we brought our eldest home.  So sleepless I was basically hallucinating.  No idea what I was doing but very aware of having to keep another human being alive (my only previous 'live responsibility' having been a hamster).  It was like the author had delved into my head and taken my deepest, darkest thoughts.  I remember, for example, being obsessed with hearing one of the emergency surgeons referring to it being the end of their shift while they were sewing me up.  I became convinced I had been 'deprived' of a natural birth because they were in a hurry.  Not because they were saving my child's life obviously.

 

What kept me going through those confusing months was friends, a plethora of 'what to do with babies' books and the then fledgling internet resources like Mumsnet.  I am still close to some of the friends I made as I dragged my hugely pregnant and then just completely knackered self around our new home city.  Looking back, Eldest was actually not that difficult a baby either...

 

And how on earth did women manage before NCT groups, playgroups, self-help books, Mumsnet, etc.  As children, my brother and I used to laugh at my mother's reliance on her Dr Spock for diagnosing illnesses.  Now I can see that there was very little else available.  She did not live round the corner from either of our grandmothers and frankly, I am not sure what use they would have been anyway.  We had a neighbour who actually saved my brother' life when he had convulsions.  She also had older children so had been there, done that.  But it was not exactly a meeting of minds for my mother, to say the least.

 

Parenting is the hardest job I have ever, without question, done.  I have worked with politicians, TV people, investment bankers, all sorts.  But I am into my thirteenth year of parenting now and although it changes constantly, it does not get easier.  Yes, I am now one of those who looks at a new baby and hands it back saying 'just you wait, this is the easy part'.

 

However, in countries like the UK, when we look back over our family history, we can see, mostly, the progressions in ante- and post-natal health.  In contraception.  In life expectancy.  There are still far too many countries in the world, though, where parenting of the type I have attempted to describe is a complete luxury.  Daily survival, hand-to-mouth, is the priority in these places.  If your child is lucky enough to survive to its teens, you will have been expecting them to have been paying their own way for a long time.

 

Of course, poverty, neglect etc can be found everywhere in the world.  But as I read The Hand That First Held Mine and was transported back to my own personal battles - which still continue as far as depression is concerned - I wondered how so many parents but women especially manage to keep mind and body together in physical circumstances far beyond our imagining.  From war zones and refugees to drug addictions and slavery to 'just' lack of what we consider basic resources.  They are all amazing.  And they deserve our help.

 

[If you would like to help with such issues, my suggested charity would be http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/issues-we-work-on but there are many others if you google.]