The Cycle of the British Working Classes

Sirens wail into the concrete and echo deep into the night. It happens so often it barely pricks your awareness. The sound of an empty can clattering as it’s kicked by some late-night drunk—cursing a host of obscenities, with fists at the ready. Pure animosity fuelled by alcohol. Tonight the world is his to be conquered or dismissed accordingly.

Curtains twitch with the odd prying eye. Safe, like peas in a pod, behind bolted doors, their curiosity peers out into the darkness. As long as it doesn’t touch their lives the whole world could murder itself tonight. Who’d care?

On every wall the spray-can poets prophesies are in base crudity. The only statement they make, with their ugly mis-spelt squiggles, plays testament to their lack of education. Bog standard third-rate schools, where the kids don’t bother to learn and teachers don’t bother to teach—all going through the motions.

But there’s a generosity to be had. A bleak form of inner socialism. It’s easy to be a socialist when you’re poor. They share the scraps accordingly. But scraps are all there is: all there’ll ever be. Nothing is big: everything is petty.

Why do we like being working class? We wear that title like some strange badge of honour—something to be proud of. Don’t we understand that they have been the stepping stones for the rich since time immemorial? And the older ones talk about the good old bad old days, when apparently deprivation had far greater standing. Days of rickets, and mass-unemployment and soup-kitchens and the Luftwaffe! The good old days? What a strange paradox!

Days perhaps when you could vent your anger and allow it reason. But today, the anger is still everywhere. Like a seething under-current. A hungry anger! A frustrated anger! It’s there in their faces and their attitude; ready to explode. But when it does, it more implodes than explodes. They turn on one another.

Living for ever on the never-never—always hand to mouth. It’s such a time-honoured tradition. The money-lenders get richer, while the money-borrowers stay just that—money-borrowers.

Moms talks her dreams to sleep at night with fingers tightly crossed and puts all her hopes on the fragility of a bingo jackpot. ‘Eyes down look in—that was your life!’ Dads down the pub, putting the world to rights through the bottom of a glass with a slur. Alcohol is the great escape. From within that alcohol bubble, no one can get him. He feels safe and protected.

Their kids left to their own devices. Too young to understand the cynicism of their elders, but old enough to realise that they too need an escape. Looking for thrills. And the games they now play take on a more sinister guise.

Yeah, the sirens wail into the concrete as someone’s son plays ‘cops and robbers’. Only this time it’s for real. And the doll the young girl cradled in her arms, in not much more than a blink of an eye is now one that proclaims its presence with every demanding cry. Girls pregnant at fifteen and wondering where their life went. Like the mother, the baby’s born into the cradle of the welfare state—such as become the proletarian way.

Then…then the whole cycle repeats itself.