There Is Nothing for You Here, page 5
For kids in Bishop Auckland in the 1970s and 1980s, opportunities for entertainment or out-of-school activities were limited. There was a distinct lack of somewhere, anywhere, to go and something to do if you didn’t have a car and were restricted by how far you could walk or cycle. There was a town swimming pool, “the Baths,” but limited space and times for taking a plunge. A few of the churches had youth clubs. Most of the public space in the town parks was vandalized, except for the bowling greens and tennis courts, which you had to pay to use and were fenced off. Many families, like ours, couldn’t afford the fees.
We found ways to entertain ourselves all the same, but even these were sometimes tinged with despair. In Bishop Auckland we were steeped in alternative and rock music. It was what kept us going: saving up to buy singles for our cheap record player, listening to the radio and taping cassettes of our favorite bands. Our favored songs and lyrics were a response to all the decay around us. Angela and I would sing them out loud in our tiny shared bedroom until Mam and Dad begged us to shut up. In the UK, bands like the Specials and their anthem, “Ghost Town,” captured the emptiness of everyone’s hometown “as all the shops [were] being closed down.” Other bands called out political injustices, urging change through social activism or by somehow getting rid of Margaret Thatcher, as if that would miraculously make a difference.
The downturn in the town’s fortunes seemed to have brought out the worst in some people—certainly in terms of exacerbating things and feeding into pernicious stereotypes about the slovenly behavior of the working class and the parlous state of low-income neighborhoods. Dad said that a small number of people did all the damage because they had no pride in themselves or their surroundings. They had lost their self-esteem along with their livelihoods. When he was growing up in Roddymoor and the mines were open and everyone was in work, there was plenty of personal and civic pride and community pressure to pitch in and clean things up. He never saw litter or dogs fouling the streets when he was growing up.
It was different when the decline set in. The park closest to my house, in the neighborhood of Cockton Hill, was grim enough to be dubbed a “wreck-reation” ground by me and my friends, but we went there anyway. The area around the swings, seesaw, and roundabout was covered in glass from broken bottles and smeared with dog dirt. The local council had few resources for regular repairs, so actually trying to use the playground could be both unpleasant and dangerous. A lot of time was spent, as a result, hanging around with friends near the Cockton Hill “wreck,” on a white metal barrier that divided the older part of town from the newer housing.
The view of our individual and collective futures from sitting on top of the white barrier wasn’t particularly edifying or encouraging. In the 1980s, Dad used to say that parts of Bishop Auckland, and certainly Roddymoor, might as well be in a war zone. We were refugees in our own land, but there was no one there to help. “Perhaps we should call the United Nations,” he’d joke. “You could do that one day, Fiona.”
For a while I fantasized about becoming the UN secretary-general so I might be able to fix things. I had no idea, of course, how anybody would go about doing that. Just how did you get a job with the United Nations? My friends told me I was mad to even contemplate it. No one from Bishop Auckland was ever likely to get a job like that.
2
Grasping at the Future
There were in fact some jobs to be had in the midst of all the decline in County Durham from the 1960s to the 1980s, but they weren’t likely to put anyone on a career ladder headed toward a position in a major international organization. Nonetheless, the region and my town still had some infrastructure of opportunity. It was not as extensive as before, but there were systems and mechanisms and even networks for finding a way forward. The situation was bleak, but not hopeless.
After the mines, foundries, and factories closed in Bishop Auckland, the biggest employer outside the retail sector was Bishop Auckland General Hospital (BAGH). Part of Britain’s National Health Service—the much-beloved public health-care system that was set up at the end of the Second World War—the hospital became the main source of reliable full-time and part-time work, the locus of opportunity. In addition to Mam and Dad, some of my friends’ parents worked there. I later took a cleaning job at the hospital to cover for regular workers during holidays.
When Dad started at Bishop Auckland hospital, he found that most of the porters were also ex-miners. But whatever their backgrounds, none of the men had chosen their porter job as a profession. They had rolled with the punches and taken whatever work was locally available, even if it was poor compensation for the loss of work down at the coal face. Overtime in the mines got you decent extra pay; overtime in the hospital might get you the minimum living wage, if you were lucky. Everyone knew what a coal miner did. People respected you. What did a hospital porter do, exactly? Push people around in a wheelchair? It was telling that although Dad eventually worked in the hospital for more than thirty years, he was once and for all a miner. It was his basic identity. He was proud of it. He always said there was dignity in his work in the coal mines of County Durham. You belonged to something bigger than yourself.
For her part, Mam went to BAGH after working in other large hospitals across the North East. Her rise as a nurse had tracked the development of the NHS itself. In 1950, when June started her training as a nurse aide at the Carter Bequest Hospital in Middlesbrough, the hospital was in the process of transitioning from an entirely private hospital to creating public facilities. In 1952 she became a general nurse at Sunderland Royal Infirmary, before beginning her career as a midwife. For several years she was a district midwife, moving between Middlesbrough and Sunderland, delivering babies in working-class areas, slums, and Travellers’ camps. She came to Bishop Auckland as a ward sister and lived in the nurses’ hostel attached to the hospital.
The NHS was a great social leveler in the UK after World War II. In theory everyone had equal access to health care; anyone could call a midwife like my mam. In fact the UK health-care sector remained a quasi-private public system, and treatment was difficult to obtain if no NHS doctor or hospital was nearby, as was the case for Granny and Grandad in Roddymoor. But at least access to a doctor and a hospital was no longer tied to a person’s capacity to pay.
For Mam and Dad, the creation of the NHS provided significant opportunity in many ways. It contributed to their health and well-being, and it gave them both jobs and brought them to Bishop Auckland. Ultimately, it also gave them the chance to buy a house: a small, semidetached home at the open end of a tiny cul-de-sac in a new neighborhood on the edge of Bishop Auckland, built over the remains of a colliery. At the end of our street, beyond a patch of grass and another row of houses, were what was left of the old mine workings—piles of bricks originally from a cable house for pulling coal tubs and some mine tailings or slag, mounds of discarded pieces of coal and other materials. Until this too was “reclaimed,” we played hide-and-seek among the rubble and the tall weeds. Now and then a couple of horses would be tethered there to eat dandelions and nettles.
Buying a house was a big deal for all of us. In addition to providing a source of security as a permanent place to live, it put more opportunity within our grasp. In the United Kingdom, just as in the United States, homeownership was directly connected to the prospect of building up generational wealth. Both Mam and Dad had grown up or lived in rented workers’ housing and council houses. No one in their direct lines of descent had ever owned a house. They knew from experience—given the fact that Dad had been homeless, lived in a condemned building, and frequently had to miss school—that living in your own house improved children’s life chances. In this sense, my parents’ purchase of a home was a critical factor in putting me on a different path from theirs.
Alf did not actually make enough in his new NHS job to qualify for a mortgage, but marrying June was the ticket to buying the house. No one ever seemed to ask what your mother did when they interrogated you with the three questions that put you in your little social-class box—everyone assumed that your mam was staying home to look after the kids; perhaps she might have a small job on the side. My mam had a full-time job when she met Dad. June was thirty when they married, and Alf was thirty-two. June had done well in nursing school. She rose up the ranks as a district midwife, becoming a Queen’s Nurse and a senior sister in charge of a maternity ward. She had the better-paying job and built up a small nest egg. As a district nurse, she had also owned a car, which she sold when they got married. Mam and Dad used her savings and the money from the car to make the down payment on our home.
Our house was Mam and Dad’s investment in the future—our future—and they put everything into making the mortgage payments. Often this came at the cost of meeting our other expenses.
Lights Out
Mam and Dad purchased our home in 1964. I was born the following year, and my sister, Angela, was born in 1968. It became too difficult for Mam to work and look after us at the same time. There was no state-provided child care and not much flexibility in her work hours at the hospital. Most of her shifts were night shifts, which Dad worked too. They could hardly leave us at home alone at night.
So for a time Mam left her job. Without her income, we immediately descended into the precarious stratum of the working class. Dad’s meager salary was barely enough to support us; in the 1970s, the wages for hospital ancillary workers—porters, cleaners, cooks, and laundry workers—were among the lowest in the country, lower than those of the average unskilled worker as well as the average manual worker. How much you earned depended on the shift you were assigned. You got time and a half for Saturdays and double time for Sundays and major holidays. Dad might make £20 ($25–$26) some weeks and £30 if he worked overtime, which he did if he could. He always worked weekends and holidays. At times we barely saw him. Adjusted for inflation and factoring in overtime, Dad made around $17,500 a year in 2021 dollars. For comparison, the official 2021 U.S. federal government poverty level for a family of four is an annual income of $26,500.
It soon got worse. Between 1975 and 1978, under Prime Minister James Callaghan, the Labour government held down wages for hospital and council workers to curb runaway inflation. Real wages dropped by 21 percent. We were hovering on the edge of absolute poverty—what was called the breadline, where you might find yourself dependent on donated food. In 1977 this proved to be an ironic term when the country’s bakery workers went out on strike. Everyone was suddenly in a breadline, queuing outside shops to buy scarce loaves or flour, which had to be rationed. Mam decided to make her own bread in response. Dad had to contend with bricklike loaves that defied cutting and toasting for his work sandwiches. Angela and I declared that we no longer ate bread.
Paying the mortgage meant that we frequently had to turn off the electricity when Dad’s paycheck didn’t carry us to the end of the month. Admittedly, in the 1970s all the industrial strikes usually ended up in a power cut when the workers at the power plants eventually went out on strike and the plants shut down. The so-called Winter of Discontent of 1978–1979—the biggest strike action since the General Strike of 1926, which brought out Dad and the other hospital workers alongside what was left of Durham’s miners—was a particularly dark period. Picket lines, protests, and power cuts brought the country to a standstill. Everyone’s electricity was off. We did our homework by candlelight. In the 1970s we didn’t always notice the difference between the “pay cut” and the “power cut” (one of Dad’s jokes), which was an odd sort of bonus. The electricity didn’t matter so much, as we had a gas fire in the living room and natural gas for cooking and heating the water. We usually scraped up some money to pay the gas bill, and we didn’t have a washing machine or any other major electrical appliance (except eventually a TV). We washed everything in the kitchen sink or the bath and dried clothes on an outside line or a clotheshorse beside the gas fire. If we had enough change, Dad would load big bulky items like sheets in a backpack to take down to the town’s sole laundromat.
We had no car, no telephone, and at first no TV. These were far too expensive and entailed all kinds of hidden taxes and licensing fees. A TV was a luxury item, but its lack caused practical difficulties. The royal wedding of Queen Elizabeth II’s daughter, Princess Anne, to Captain Mark Phillips in 1973 was a personal and family watershed, because it was the event that precipitated our rental of a black-and-white TV. I was in primary school. We were assigned to watch the wedding “on telly” as a school project and then draw a picture and write about what we saw. Mam and some other parents complained to the teacher. How could children watch the wedding if their family didn’t have a TV? The teacher stood firm. “If they can’t watch it, then I suppose they’ll fail.”
I did not want to fail. So I took Dad’s little radio to listen to the commentary and the music, stood on a piece of grass, and watched the wedding on telly through a neighbor’s window. I was too embarrassed to ask them if I could come inside and mortified at the thought that they might spot me. They had a color TV, one of the first in the neighborhood. They’d once seen me and Angela standing on the grass mesmerized by an obviously silent episode of the original Star Trek series. “Who is the man with pointed ears? Is that Mr. Spock?” The neighbors closed the curtains. They later yelled at us to go away when we tried to see what the famous British sci-fi series Dr. Who was like and why everyone at school was pretending to be Daleks at playtime. In my teens we got a color TV of our own from neighbors who were upgrading. But by then I could only guess at what I’d missed.
Home Economics
My maternal grandmother, Grandma Vi, had plenty of tips to share and sometimes some extra money she had saved to help out. Her husband died early from cancer, and Grandma had long mastered the miraculous art of getting by and keeping up appearances on less than a shoestring. We always joked that she looked like the Queen in her few smartly kept hats and scarves. Her life trajectory had taken her from surviving the German navy’s shelling of her coastal hometown, Hartlepool, in 1914, through “downstairs” maid service in a “big house,” to helping in a dairy and delivering milk and working in a grocery store managing the food rations during World War II. Grandma had grown up on a farm and knew how to forage for berries, mushrooms, and edible plants in the local countryside. She grew all kinds of herbs. Her house smelled of lavender, from little sachets that she made from the flowers on the bushes in her tiny garden to place in drawers and behind pillows. Grandma also kept up with a dwindling network of farming families from the old days, who would give her some eggs, a snared field rabbit, or the odd chicken on special occasions. We once came home to Grandma’s house in Billingham on the bus from a visit to our Great-Aunt Florrie, who still ran a small farm nearby, with a live chicken trussed and stuffed in Grandma’s bag. Back at her house, Grandma dashed into the kitchen, took out the chicken, and chopped its head off before Angela and I had even taken our coats off. The chicken was as shocked as we were. Not realizing that it was dead, it ran around the kitchen without its head for a few seconds, sending Angela and me squealing back toward the front door.
Grandma Vi encouraged Mam to make all our clothes that didn’t come from thrift stores, relatives, or neighbors with older girls. Mam had taken a tailoring course at a local technical college, and Grandma gave her a hand-cranked Singer sewing machine. At some point she got a secondhand electric machine. Mam often economized by using the same bolt of fabric for clothes and household accessories. After one mammoth batch of sewing that produced some new kitchen and front-room curtains, she had just enough left to make me a pair of trousers. Sadly, the fabric was strangely textured and a peculiar dark shade of blue—a sale remnant from Doggarts. Mam distinguished the trousers from the curtains with a tasseled fringe (it was the 1970s, after all). The fringe caught on the buckle of my shoes as I walked to school and unraveled. I was always having to trim off the threads so Mam wouldn’t see and accuse me of trying to pull it off. I hated the fringe. It looked silly. As a disguise, it fooled no one. The twin girls who lived across the road (in the house with the TV) immediately spotted the similarity with the front-room curtains. I was “Curtain Legs” for a whole year at school.
Grandma Vi taught us to overcome adversity and “just get on with it.” And getting on with it in County Durham meant grappling with questions of physical mobility. The operative question was, if you didn’t have a car, how far could you go to find a job? Would the bus get you where you needed to be? Would you be on time if it ran only once or twice a day and stopped every half mile? How many times did you have to change buses to get somewhere? What if you missed the bus back? An updated bus schedule was a much-prized possession. Grandma took the bus everywhere. She had a pensioner’s pass but always made sure we had a schedule in our pocket along with some bus money in case of emergency. The posted times on the bus stops were always vandalized and illegible. If there was no bus for the route you needed, how far could you cycle or walk every day?
