Skip to main content

Our house was a very, very, very nice house.....



It started out as a late Victorian – or perhaps early Edwardian – family home. It steadily declined until such time as, with much fanfare, it had been stripped inside and turned into flats.

The 'fanfare' was not not a figure of speech: there really was a fuss made – with coverage in the media which shows the lovely old place being officiated over by  local MP. Caroline Lucas.

Our building was presented as part of an initiative to assimilate those on Benefits into the local community. The stigma of being banished to the further reaches of town to live in seething communities  in brick blocks would not attach to the lucky occupants of this building.  Its sympathetic conversion ( one or two original ceiling roses and some restrained ceiling mouldings have been left in place), while incorporating modern interior architecture, blends well to showcase apartments that would be the envy of many of those chasing accommodation in the private sector all over Brighton and Hove.

And the fact that this delightful building was being given over to house Council tenants was a tangible reality,  empiric proof of a forward-looking, equitable strategy regarding  improved housing for the unfortunate: or the swine who loll about all day living off our taxes – whichever is one's view.

And hell, yeah! It was great.  The day I first saw it  - when we were all able to view our assigned flats – I couldn't believe my luck.  There were still a few workmen scurrying around, the building smelt of new paint, and new, virgin carpets. It wasn't just warm inside – it was toasty. Everything gleamed and sparkled in the sun that was obligingly spreading light from the beautifully big old windows onto new chrome and gleaming white walls.

I was so excited I had to keep telling myself it was real.  I'd ridden through the various council estates; gazing in horrified fascination from the top of a double-decker bus. I'd had to share an apartment in the private rental sector. An apartment which transgressed every code in the book was full of mould and ripped lino, was bone-chillingly cold, and housed also The Housemates from Hell.

 This was heaven.

I wasn't the only one who was excited either: the people in the Housing Department; those who had helped me all the way through; my case-workers; the people in  Temporary Accommodation; even the security guys - were also full of smiles and, one supposes, job satisfaction. A couple of high-fives even sprang up in that rather self-conscious British way.

After the daily grind of dealing with tales of rats and obstreperous neighbours; of shuffling desperate, whining people from one graffiti covered brick box to another, this must have been the kind of situation they had dreamed of when they joined the Department. They had truly changed people's lives, given them a new start, seen the happiness of the faces. And we  loved them for it.

But of course, they were only the Infantry. It's the moustachioed captains  and bewhiskered colonels far behind the lines who are  calling the shots.

And it wasn't long before the fact that our place in this particular theatre was made clear: we were the rag, tag, and bobble tail . Completely disposable. And if we didn't watch our Ps and Qs we became the enemy.

And we hadn't even known there was a war going on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don't Quote Me.......Failing our Children: Doesn't it Enrage You?

I subtitled a post "Don't quote me" a while back because I wanted to make it clear that what I was expressing was my own - vehement - opinion/idea which was not representative of any group or affiliation. Feel the need to to add this to the same category.     One afternoon, in 2016, I saw on my Youtube page that there was a televised debate between two American contenders for the presidency. Needing a break from the piece I was writing, and with the realisation that my outlook was becoming rather insular as I struggled to understand the Homeland I'd recently settled in, I poised my mouse and clicked. I can still remember the shock of that introduction to contemporary America; in fact I was in a state of shock for the rest of the afternoon. The spectacle of two grown - in fact elderly - people shouting, yelling, talking over each other, using personal abuse (and, dear gods, one actually stalking the other around the podium!) horrified me.  I was involved in a form of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Victorian Women. Period.

  The first time I ever acted in an historical play we were coached in the ways of walking as women of yesteryear did. Which didn’t seem at all strange to me at the time: at convent boarding schools we had been taught to walk the nunly walk: which turned out to be exactly the same method. But sanctified. I didn’t really understand why women used to walk differently then, and neither did my mother; who told me that her mother had also instructed her that a woman’s footprints should always be in a straight line: — one foot directly in front the other, as we’d been taught on both stage and in convents.  Yet it was only about 6 months ago that I suddenly had a lightbulb moment: women walked in that way because they menstruated! This thought didn’t arrive out of the blue; I had, by then, been researching the history of menstruation for months. With the help of the Brighton Museum I’d been able to start my research back in the Palaeolithic. Since then, I had become aware that apart ...
Post a Comment
Read more