welcome to the middle classes: please leave all doubts at the door

When you live in social housing, in a council flat, judgements are made. Not by everyone, but by some, including a large percentage whose job it is to provide said social housing. It’s the tone of voice on the phone, the quick questions about employment and bank accounts because ‘I just need to know a few more things before I can get into your file’, the suspicion with which every enquiry is greeted and the assumption that you are, no doubt, trying to find a greasy loophole through which you and the hard earned tax payers money that subsidises your home, can slip.

So - the boy has moved in. Or shall I say, theoretically, he might move in sometime in the near or distant future. Or shall I say nothing at all as any and all incriminating evidence will be held against me when I am called to account for my dubious lifestyle.

He is/was/might be moving in because we want to live together, things are good and it’s all mushy like that. It’s one of those things. But not so, it seems, for a lowly Social Housing Tenant (or SHiT for short).

I don’t care how ‘happy to help you’ and customer focussed social housing providers want to tell themselves they’ve become - - with the exception of certain individuals, they more often than not seem to relate to their SHiTs through a fog of impatience, distrust and scorn.

You see my dears, if you are a SHiT, you duck, you dive, you fenangle, you lie, you cheat, you scam, you slip, you skip out on everything you can and you care about nothing and no one. You are a cold mean machine of a person, not human, and certainly not capable of wanting to do something as simple and above board as move in with the person you are in love with and let your landlord know about it so your beloved doesn’t get evicted in the event of your untimely death. No. Not you, you little SHiT.

It was like no one had ever asked them about this before. The Housing On Call operator calmly reached under her desk to press the red ‘Potential Cheat – release the dogs/bailiffs’ alert button, changing her voice to a metallic facsimile of her previous tone to indicate that we were now treading a fine line, asking about tenancy rights and dubious things like that. A million questions rained down before a form came through the post several days later, bearing the confusingly inappropriate title ‘Application To Take Over A Tenancy’.

The wrong form. So then we….(insert several more turns here involving phone calls, questions, anxiety, insults, insinuations, and feelings of being 5 inches tall, mixed with general misinformation and hold music).

* * *

That was the wave. This is the backsplash:

It started the other night, somehow, somewhere between ‘so glad to see you’ and home. We were talking, me and my friend – talking in that rambling way that shifts easily and listens carefully, like a bubble of bonding and shared moments – warm and easy right up till the second it popped.

I don't remember how, but there we were, suddenly, in the middle of the rant you see above you – talking in detail about the housing situation, while a little Elaine in my head shouted ‘STOP!!!’ uselessly through the plate glass.

See, I might be a SHiT, but I’m not stupid. I know – don’t talk about stuff like this, unless you want to find out exactly who sleeps at night on a pillow of moral judgements about the deserving and undeserving poor. I know.

I really have no idea how it happened…but there I was talking, and there she was listening, because we’re friends, and then there she was telling me it’s bureaucracy and it’s protection of the public purse and loads of people work the system and they’re just doing their jobs and I can make the decision to live in the world of adults or I can keep looking for ways round it, the choice is mine.

And my eyes stung.

I dropped it, she kicked it about a little more, and I gave up. I think she knew how I’d taken it, and she hadn’t meant it that way. She tried to make it up. She voiced their thinking which would be that my partner moving in with me and sharing the tenancy would potentially double the burden, were we to split up and then both be eligible for housing. That’s not what she thinks. She was trying to be helpful. She was on my side.

When I confide about certain things to certain friends, I realise too late that instead of sharing a close conversation, we’re shouting half sentences across a chasm into the wind.

I love you, and I can see you’re trying to tell me something, but I’ve no idea what it is.

* * *

If I was loaded - if I worked in financial services and drove a shiny big car and went to St Lucia on holiday when I was having the kitchen re-done to avoid the stress - I would be praised for not accepting the first thing I’m told, for pushing for answers. Tenacity! Drive! I would pay other people to find loopholes through which I could drive my Jag all the way to the Channel Islands, en route to a shrewd Swiss investment and the knowledge that I deserve it because I work hard.

I would tut about benefit cheats and undeclared earnings and people who don’t try to get on the property ladder via the Right to Buy because they’re just not smart enough to make that commitment. I would talk about council tax and how it shouldn’t be proportional to income because why should the wealthy areas subsidise need for service in poorer areas which are just largely full of ASBOs, drug addicts, unemployed single mothers and other feckless ne’er do wells with bad teeth.

If I was loaded, I’d say it’s about hard graft and putting in the hours and making a commitment and pulling yourself up by your socks. I’d say ‘I did it, so can anyone else who wants to’. But I’m not loaded - and later on after ranting, upset, to the boy, I realise that it’s not (just) about being loaded. It’s about class.

Class:

- the word that no one I ever knew in Canada would admit to as they wrinkled their noses at my parents dodgy fixer upper home, telling me they were glad for me when I moved to a ‘better area’, on top of the old landfill, but at least closer to fine.

- the word that my friend L brings up when we talk about how when someone keeps telling you that you should do this, apply for this grant, get this money, go on this course, because you OWE IT TO YOURSELF, they are actually telling you more about themselves and their solid sense of entitlement than they are about how much they want to help you ‘up’.

- the word that shifts in my head, unsure of where to sit, looking around to see who else is there.

Most of the time I see myself as possibly middle class - - I have a whole host of privileges, a degree, access to all kinds of things and opportunities based on my education and the confidence I have had encouraged in me. I have so much. I see that my life is SO different to my parents, who, despite having worked their way to a (pretty much) permanent house and car and regular holiday, still duck their heads when education is mentioned, and sometimes but not always blame themselves as being crap with money rather than blaming the system that makes it so.*

Then sometimes, in certain company, I am reminded that there is something else in me, as well as the privilege and opportunity. A conversation about social housing, about being a SHiT who should remember that the housing office is a really stressful place to work and at least I’m lucky I’ve got a flat (I am. I remember.) - - persistent urges from friends to quit my low paid office job and write a novel instead - - the stream of emails from rich activists who are heading off to a protest halfway round the world and want to know if I will be freeing up a week and £400 to go too.

There is something else in me that recoils at these kinds of situations – that loses the words to articulate exactly what it is that’s vexing me – and that hurts when I realise that a friend, someone I hold close, has never stopped to imagine a world where they can’t assume that if anything goes horribly wrong, someone will fix it for them.

I guess I am something like first generation middle class, or lower middle class, or, or, or…some kind of combination that points to the missing piece and the gap where my sense of unshakable certainty and entitlement is supposed to be.

I guess that’s what I’ll say next time someone - a friend - tries coaching me from across the chasm.

* * *

*One of the best memories of my dad is him, two years ago, standing in his kitchen telling me that he’s known for a long time now that the social and economic system that we live in and are part of is built so that those with money, power and opportunity amass more and more, and those without get poorer - that the system is fixed against him - and so, after years of experience and careful consideration of all of this (and with arms crossed and raised eyebrow righteousness): ‘me and your mum have gone right off capitalism’.