This has been a strange month.
At the beginning I was asked – in spite of being a pagan – to be godmother to the deliciously new and beautiful baby girl born to Leanne, a very young mum that I have known for several years. It was hard to think of her as a mother. At 16, she seems still to be a child. I recognised her new status when she looked me in the eye and said, ‘I will make sure my baby has a better life than me and that she gets an education’. I hope that she is given the support to enable her to be the kind of parent she wants to be.
Three weeks ago I sat with a dear friend while her bright and beautiful 27-year-old daughter died, and with her all the potential for the future that she possessed. She was the same age as my own daughter so this was a very poignant and frightening time for me. A few days ago I sat with another friend’s daughters while their mother, Anne, was dying. Anne was a fantastic woman who suffered poverty all her life. She was an activist who fought poverty with ATD Fourth World, the organisation she and I had both received support from. She had met Kofi Annan and the Dalai Lama, had spoken at international conferences and had an article written about her achievements in a national newspaper. For all that, her greatest pride was that she had created the warm, loving family who sat around her bed tenderly talking to her, touching her and keeping her comfortable to the last. They will be her lasting tribute. Life and death are such mysteries that I am overwhelmed.
I found myself sharing my feelings with an African friend, Adam, who told me of his constant turmoil and guilt at having survived a massacre in which many of his friends and family died. He asked me, ‘Who decided I should live, why me?’ It is a strange dilemma: does some eternal power have choice of life or death over us or are we just animal life forms that die at the whim of fate? I do not profess to know and so I proffer no answer. Feeling sorry for myself, I told Adam that I prayed I would not spend the rest of my life trapped on this estate and that I don’t want to die here. He looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, ‘You have a secure home and income. You do not starve or thirst; your children did not die of hunger; you are not under threat of being raided, raped and murdered. You are blessed to live here and it is not a bad place to die.’ He is right. I am humbled.
That conversation started me pondering, questioning, who lives on this estate, in this area? I realised what a diverse population I live amongst.
When I arrived here 15 years ago, my first impression was of a run-down estate full of people too poor to live anywhere else. Of course I had been prejudiced by the reaction of friends and family to the news of our destination – but as it was an emergency move, I had no choice. There were and are still a great many poor and excluded people living here. Shockingly, many of the households here 15 years ago were headed by people in work but earning so little that they were living on or below the poverty line. More shockingly, that is still true today too.
Within a short time of arriving, I became aware that there were a considerable number of older people who chose to stay on the estate. Despite constantly telling me what a nice estate this ‘used’ to be, how it had gone downhill and that they planned to move away very soon, many are still here. I have a lovely neighbour, a Godsend to me, who has been living here with her husband for ‘donkey’s years’ and – except for the occasional rumbling noise about heading for the coast – seems set to stay here forever. She explains that there used to be a sense of community here that bred friendships that have lasted across the years and, after a certain age ‘you don’t want to leave your friends and start again’.
In the current atmosphere of suspicion and defensiveness, where different generations and specific groups are living such separate lives and being set against each other, how can we build such a sense of community today?
Several of my neighbours, like Adam, are from Africa. Their reasons for coming to England are varied, from escaping torture and death to seeking better economic opportunities for themselves and their children. One man often speaks to me as I tend the pots of plants that line my wheelchair ramp, telling me how much he misses the acres of gardens that surrounded his house ‘back home’. Because of his political beliefs he had to flee his country and leave behind all that he had worked for over many years. He knows he may never be able to go home and, if he did, would never have the wealth and position he had before – yet he is thankful for life, work, his wife and children. We have much to learn from those who have lost everything.
There are many asylum seekers and refugees on this estate, from many countries in our troubled world, and each has a story to tell. There are also many economic migrants from the EU states, trying to escape poverty and unemployment in their own countries but encountering hostility from local poor people who see them as a threat to their own struggle for work or access to benefits. I used to see a number of young men from Poland around. They gathered at the entrance to the estate on Mondays, waiting to be collected by a white van that would pick them up then drop them back off on Fridays. One of them, Joseph, told me that he had paid a lot of money to come to England on the promise of a legal work permit, a job and accommodation. ‘I wanted to be legal, to work and send money for my mother, I work hard.’
He and several others were transported to England in the back of a lorry then found themselves dumped in London with no money, just the address of a man who showed them a flat they could squat in and arranged for the white van to take them to work. During the week they worked on farms, slept in rows of bunk-beds in outbuildings better suited to animals, were fed lots of soup or chips and were paid £1-£1.50 per hour. On top of all that – they were illegal immigrants and so had no rights. One day they all disappeared. I suppose they either went home or were caught at work and sent home. Perhaps they got immunity and legal status, I hope so, as it would be a shame if their only experience of being here in England was one of exploitation.
For women brought here illegally, the outcome is often much worse as they find themselves trapped in the sex trade, sex-slaves with no recourse to help. Who can they turn to when no one wants to know and their lives are so cheap that asking for help could mean disfigurement, death or reprisals against their family back home? I think of that each time I see a young, foreign girl standing on the street corners, by the train station, or on the pavements outside the estates.
There are less squatters on our estate since we were taken over by a housing association, sad really as some of the young people who squatted were really nice. As singles with no dependent children, no learning difficulties and no mental illness or physical disabilities, they had no chance of getting social housing but could not afford private market prices. Several of them had jobs, but on low incomes, others were doing ad hoc work or were studying. Of course, some just spent their time giving in to their addictions – but who am I to judge them?
There are a lot of young mothers about, but not the tabloid stereotypical ‘teeny-terror mums’. Most have husbands or partners living with them or supporting them in some way. A lot live at home with their parents, disproving the myth that they have children to get a flat. They cope well and their children thrive. I do feel sorry for the younger ones who look so exhausted and fed up, their shoulders down and feet dragging as they push their buggies along. Obviously motherhood is not all that they expected, but they are not dumping their children into local authority care, they are just getting on with it. Sadly, the Government just sees them as the producers of ‘ASBO babies’ and does not recognise their efforts. It is true, babies should not be having babies but, once they have, they should be given the support to grow up and be good parents. That is not just the job of social workers, but of all of us.
The most astonishing recent arrivals are young, upwardly mobile first-time buyers. They are most visible by their cars, very new and upmarket compared to the family bangers that surround them. I wondered, what on earth they were thinking of when they decided that this was the place for them? Of course, it is near to the city for jobs, to the West-End for entertainment and to the M25 for getting out of London at the weekend – but still? One young man told me that his parents had got a flat for him, to make him move out of their home. ‘It’s an investment for them and it gets me out from under their feet.’ I ponder on how much impact it will have if the estate becomes as much of a financial mix as it is a racial, religious and cultural mix. Also, I am concerned that, if the social housing is sold off, where will future generations of low-income families be housed?
I suppose the answer to my earlier question of who lives in a place like this, is that people do. People of all ages; of many countries, beliefs and cultures; students; people in work and not, disabled and non-disabled; mentally ill or not; married and single; living alone or in families; choosing to live here or forced to. Human beings live separate lives in places like this, so future planners need to build places that are designed for human beings to live together in and make friendships that cross the barriers and last for years. Then we will have ‘a sense of community’.
Moraene is a 53-year-old disabled mother of three who lives on a local Council estate. She describes her hobby as ‘observing’. |
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