In Search of Mary (19 page)

These dear words arrived on a day when I least felt that things were possible. Jean stuck me to it. And now here we are, California-bound. Other recipients of the email pass my message on or get back with further questions and suggestions; onwards and upwards. Until I hit a spiky roadblock – worse than no reply – a person who says:

“Oh, that. The whole working-mother debate is a crock of shit. Women of colour have been doing it for generations.”

What? This sends me into a tailspin. Into a crock, even. I’ve been planning to trace the Wollstonecraft legacy forwards in time, rolling my sleeves up to face down the hairy male oppressors and training my indignant sights on the 1970s. I wasn’t prepared for the fracturing of the movement that’s happened since then. From out of nowhere a low sliding tackle from
other women
. But then, what if it’s true? What if it is just a crock? I slump in my chair and sulk.

It’s the elephant again. The one who came and sat in the middle of the room in Norway, when Mayor Knut talked about the life of Wollstonecraft’s maid, Marguerite. I didn’t acknowledge its presence once while we were in Paris. Hello again, Elephant of Privilege. You shall henceforth be known as the Crock. For a couple of days there’s a gentle hissing noise as my motivation sinks like an aged balloon.

Wollstonecraft says: “I plead for my sex, not for myself.” Can I truthfully say the same? Who is feminism for? It goes back to the showgirls’ dressing room. Those dancers were shoved around, self-starved and mistreated. But not only did they not like feminism, they were actively hostile to the very idea. So who is it for? Is the debate just the worthiness playground of the privileged? And if so, what can validate it?

Luckily I’ve got someone to ask who will indulge me in such questions. She’s used to it. She’s my oldest friend, and we went to the same hellhole of a primary school together. I call her up.

“Lucy, can you be too poor to care about feminism?”

She laughs at me.

“Come and trail me for a day, Bee. Just come and have a look for yourself.”

OK then. I buy a return train ticket to Leeds.

Lucy does a job most people don’t know exists, in a place where few people ever go. She’s an outreach worker for a charity that connects excluded families with government services that they might need but do not know about. Lucy goes out and finds them: walking the streets, alleys and housing blocks, literally cold-calling, in one of Britain’s most deprived
communities. And I’ve hopped on a train to come up and join her, to tag along for the day.

If Britain’s broken anywhere, it’s right here in Holbeck, a notorious Leeds neighbourhood lined with red-brick back-to-backs. Despite my boasted Yorkshire roots, these days I’m basically a poncey Londoner. Scuttling through back alleys around the smashed houses it’s embarrassing how foreign it all feels. The Leeds city skyline is glittering there: we’re only a six-minute drive from downtown Harvey-Nicks glamour. But the contrast here is stunning. Derelict houses, broken windows, random dogs, no cars.

Most of the doors and lower-ground windows have heavy steel bars in front. Holbeck doesn’t have a distinguished history. Even back in 1834 it was crowned “the most crowded, most filthy and unhealthy village in the country”. Former residents of note include Hasib Hussain, the youngest of the 2005 London suicide bombers, the one who blew up the bus in Tavistock Square. And this is where Lucy does her beat.

She reaches through the steel bars to knock on a door, saying in a perky Avon-lady voice: “Hi! I’m Lucy from City and Holbeck Children’s Centre. We’re supporting families with children under five – does this apply to anyone in your household?” It’s clearly a line she’s repeated a thousand times. We keep knocking. Dogs bark at us. Some houses are empty, some obviously not, but no one answers. A sleepy man looks out, hears Lucy’s pitch, says: “No, no ta, you’re all right” and shuffles back inside.

“Sometimes they get suspicious and think we’re social workers,” she tells me, “and we say: ‘No! No,
we’re
not social
workers.’ Our job is to read the signs and refer people on: we connect them to the right agencies.”

Our next knock is more productive: a cheery Muslim bloke with a long beard opens the door. He has two young girls, he says, and takes some of our leaflets about playgroups. Lucy gives him details of the bus route and opening times. But walking away, she warns: “Don’t get excited. Most of the time no one answers. You could spend a whole morning doing this and only make one connection.”

When the cold-calling is over, we check in with people that Lucy already knows about. Our first visit is Gloria. She’s a single mum from Eritrea with refugee status.

“Hello Lucy!” She says, smiling.

We step inside. Lucy doesn’t explain my presence, and I just smile too, as though I’m a useful person here in an official capacity. Gloria has baby twins and rotten window frames. Vigorous black mould flourishes up her walls and curtains. It looks like some kind of prize-winning dark harvest. Curious, I reach out and rub a patch. It comes away easily. “It always come back though,” says Gloria, adjusting the towel she has hung over the mould growing next to where her two babies sleep. They are five months old.

Gloria shows us around her house. This is where she’s tried to secure her loose kitchen window after being burgled. She’s hammered three flimsy planks of wood across the window frame.

“Lucy, I’m so scared they’ll come back.” she says, and her voice changes. Up until this moment she’s had the tired demeanour of someone who’s just sat down but can’t find the TV remote. Now she starts wiping her eyes. She’s crying.

“Every night I sit on the stairs with Emergency Call ready on my phone.” I examine the pathetic woodwork job. About as helpful as spaghetti. Any self-respecting burglar would be through it in a trice.

The twins wake up, and Gloria hands one of them to me. Holding a small baby and hearing a weeping mother describe four years with broken windows is too much. I carry the baby to the window and look out, rocking him while my eyes blur over with tears. Thank God I never tried to be a war correspondent or report on famines. I try to muster a more professional aspect while Lucy briskly checks the records of contact with the council and puts in some phone calls. Gloria’s windows have apparently been subcontracted out, then subcontracted out by those subcontractors. This goes onto Lucy’s “follow up” list.

Gloria and Lucy then do a baby massage session together, and by the end Gloria is playing with the twins on a blanket. “Sun and moon! Sun and moon!” we sing to the babies, and they wriggle around and laugh. Gloria is doing the best she can. I’m pretty sure she just wants us to see that she’s doing her best. Isn’t that what we all want, after all.

As we leave, though, she grabs Lucy’s arm, pleading: “Please, come soon, I have no one, Lucy, please come back!” But we have to leave. Back out on the street afterwards, it feels like we’ve come up from under water. Gloria’s small polite voice is still in my ears. I shake away the thought of that mould clinging on, bright-black and alive.

“Bloody hell, Lucy. How do you deal with it?”

“It took about a year to be able to leave work and not worry about them,” she says. “Sometimes they’re right up against it. It can be so desperate you want to rush out and buy a pint of milk and some bread, but you can’t do that. I just keep my manner professional.”

The next visit is even more challenging. On our way there Lucy tells me that this mum has nearly had her baby taken into care, because she was unable to clean up her house. I suppress a snigger – how bad can it be? I think about the state of the floor after my own kids’ dinner. We pick our way past tipped-over wheely bins and a burnt-out car. Some of the homes are well cared for, though. Holbeck’s back-to-backs may be small, but they once were very pretty houses.

“Here we are.”

The front door’s open.

“Hello!” calls Lucy, and pushes our way in.

We walk through a crowd of flies – the air makes my throat ache. Piles of stuff crowd inwards around a narrow pathway between the sofa, the TV and the door. It smells like the lower colon of hell. We are dwarfed by towers of fizzy drinks in crates on all sides and mounds of boxes cramming up the walls. I freeze. I’m battling hard to keep my facial features set to neutral.

“Well done!” cheers Lucy. “You’ve even got the curtains open – it’s much nicer.”

Sarah is sitting on the sofa with her baby, complaining. Someone reported her to social services. She feels persecuted, and she’s sick of being bossed around by family-support workers. She grudgingly acknowledges that one of them did bring her
some fly spray though. I immediately feel the fly spray entering my lungs and poisonously coating my innards. Lucy talks animatedly about playgroups for the baby, and how it’s great for mums as well as kids. Sarah says she doesn’t want to go out. She’s extremely fat and can’t walk far.

My heart droops as Lucy reels off the details of Sarah’s nearest playgroup. This is hard to process: I’m crashing into my own prejudices on every side.
Her baby is drinking Diet Coke
. When we head outside, I try to gulp in some clear thinking with the fresh air. A Coke-guzzling baby can’t be the worst thing I’ve seen today, but somehow I can’t get over it. Diet Coke too, not even full fat. My mind scrambles to recalibrate what should constitute the basic human rights of Sarah’s world. My world has an altar piled high with organic vegetables.

Remaining firmly in knee-jerk territory, I wonder out loud how come poor people have such big tellies. Lucy frowns and says being vulnerable has nothing to do with material possessions. But she’s far from humourless about her work. She tells me about her sessions at the children’s centre, where parents learn to discuss sexuality and relationships. There’s a special ice-breaking exercise to tackle awkwardness:

“We get them to write down all the slang words for genitals, and we stick them up on the walls – it just gets it all out there: everyone has a laugh, and then we can talk properly. But one time a council inspector came by.” She shakes with laughter. “He walks through the door, right in between big signs saying cock and beef curtains…”

We rush to make picking-up time at the nearby primary school, for some leafleting. The leaflets she hands out could be
on anything from healthy eating to road safety. What doesn’t change is Lucy being there, rain or shine. It’s drizzling as the parents start arriving at the school gate. Some ignore her, others greet her, one comes up and whispers urgently. She’s showing Lucy her black eye: the boyfriend breached his restraining order. Another comes and rages about nursery provision. Lucy has to remember all this so it can be followed up.

The leafleting is a way for Lucy to maintain regular contact with her mums, but they don’t all love her. When one mum said she’d punished her kid by washing his mouth with soap, Lucy told the health visitor. “That mum won’t go near me now.” By now I feel exhausted and out of my depth. There’s no way I could do this job: I’m just weakly grateful that there are people out there who can.

We walk quickly back to Lucy’s office: she has to finish the follow-up paperwork before collecting her own kids. It’s at this point that she drops a bombshell. Lucy was recently told that her tax credits are being cut. Her pre-tax salary is below £18K; without the credits she won’t be able to pay for her kids’ after-school care. In short, she can’t afford to keep doing this job.

She’s considering going part-time, but worries: “I’m already fighting to get time to help these families – what will it be like if I go part-time?” There’s a pause, and Lucy’s voice drops almost to a whisper. “They’ll probably think that I’m not bothered, that I don’t care about them. I’ll still be thinking about them when I’m not working. And I’ll just have to get used to that.”

The urgency of the question of what Gloria, Sarah and the other mums have got to say about feminism seems to have withered somewhat throughout this day of mould and fly
spray and black eyes. But I ask anyway: “Feminism is surely about helping these women, so why is it women like me who are the ones talking about it?”

Lucy looks at me and points out: “They’ve got quite a lot on their plates, Bee.” She adds: “I asked some of the school-dinner ladies about feminism. One of them’s a granny, and she goes: ‘Well, if you’re talking about bra burning, I’ll tell you what: if I burn my bra you won’t see my wrinkles no more, cos it’ll all go south, love.’” Lucy laughs so hard that people look over from the other side of the office.

“But I think the others, especially the younger ones, they haven’t got a clue what it means, and they aren’t bothered. They’ll just say: ‘You talk about inequality: at the end of the day it’s all about kids and work and getting by. Someone’s got to do it, so you do it for yourself.’ For them it boils down to just getting by.” She pauses. “But I don’t even think I’d class myself as a feminist, to be honest: to be a feminist don’t you need to read about it and know what it is? Anyway. I’m off to take my bra off so I won’t have any wrinkles.”

She laughs again, scoops up her bags and gets hurrying. Lucy’s got her own kids to worry about on top of other people’s. Every day they’re dropped at pre-school club early and collected late. “I just want to see them in daylight,” she says, as we hug goodbye.

I walk through the light rain back to the station and board the 18.03 from Leeds to London King’s Cross. I drink two huge cups of buffet-car tea in a row, then go back for a mini-bottle of red wine and a Snickers. The wooden bars over Gloria’s windows keep floating into vision. I have never
seen people living like this in my own country. How have I not seen it? Most of the country doesn’t see it. It’s not only the privileged of London: plenty of ordinary people in Leeds will drive right past the end of Holbeck daily, never once seeing what’s inside.

I knock back the last of the wine with the bitter insight that Wollstonecraft’s primary motivation, her obsession with usefulness, is far better served by what Lucy is doing than by me prancing around the world admiring my fantastic baby. But at least Lucy is doing it. And even if none of Lucy’s mums see her work, the support, the networks, the policies and laws designed to support them – if they don’t see any of this as feminism, then it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s still happening.