Moranthology (18 page)

 

As me and all my siblings were taught at home, the local library was the extra room of our home: it was our schoolhouse and our playground. Oh, it was a million more things besides—not least an easily-accessible toilet if you were caught short on Warstones Drive—and so when the Coalition started closing libraries—shooting out their lights and leaving the buildings to rot—I wrote this piece, which got the biggest response of any piece I've ever written for
The Times
. It ended up being included in a very worthwhile anthology about libraries,
The Library Book
, whose proceeds went to a pro-library charity.

L
IBRARIES:
C
ATHEDRALS OF
O
UR
S
OULS

H
ome educated and, by seventeen, writing for a living, the only alma mater I have ever had is Warstones Library, Pinfold Grove, Wolverhampton.

A low, red-brick box on grass that verged on wasteland, I would be there twice a day—rocking up with all the ardor of a clubber turning up to a rave. I read every book in there—not
really,
of course, but as good as: when I'd read all the funny books, I moved on to the sexy ones, then the dreamy ones, the mad ones; the ones that described distant mountains, idiots, plagues, experiments. I sat at the big table and read all the papers: in public housing in Wolverhampton, the broadsheets are as incongruous and illuminating as an Eames lamp.

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books—but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I've ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I'd heard of—then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word
Christmas
. I had to wait nearly a year for
Les Fleurs du Mal
by Baudelaire to come: even so, I was still too young to think it anything but a bit wanky, and abandoned it twenty pages in for Jilly Cooper. But
Fleurs du Mal,
man! In a building overlooked by a Kwiksave where the fags and alcohol were kept in a locked, metal cage, lest they be stolen! Simply knowing I could have it in my hand was a comfort, in this place so very very far from anything extraordinary or exultant.

Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn—lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain—which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead—Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate “need” for “stuff.” A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy's taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.

Last month, after protest, an injunction was granted to postpone library closures in Somerset. In September, both Somerset and Gloucestershire councils will be the subject of a full judicial review over their closure plans. As the cuts kick in, protesters and lawyers are fighting for individual libraries like villagers pushing stranded whales back into the sea. A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading “WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.”

While I have read a million words on the necessity for the cuts, I have not seen a single letter on what the exit plan is: what happens in four years' time, when the cuts will have succeeded, and the economy gets back to “normal” again. Do we then—prosperous once more—go round and re-open all these centers, clinics and libraries, which have sat, dark and unused, for nearly half a decade? It's hard to see how—it costs millions of pounds to re-open deserted buildings, and cash-strapped councils will have looked at billions of square feet of prime real estate with a coldly realistic eye. Unless the government
has
developed an exit strategy for the cuts, and insisted councils not sell closed properties, by the time we get back to “normal” again, our Victorian and post-war and 1960s red-brick boxy libraries will be coffee shops and pubs. No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.

And, in their place, we will have thousands more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket, rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids—poor kids—will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into “their” library and thinking, “I have read 60 percent of the books in here. I am awesome.” Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.

A trillion small doors closing.

 

Shall we do another righteous column? While I've got my serious face on? These are the ones I think of when people go, “Oh, I read your stuff! You're not bad! I think my dad likes you!” and I'm all like “Yeah, I'm changing your life with my Marxist/feminist dialectic! Check out my rad moves!”

Then it turns out, further into the conversation, they were just thinking of the funny one where I try to get Pete to call me “Puffin,” instead.

U
NLIKE
M
OST OF THE
C
OALITION,
I
W
AS
R
AISED ON
B
ENEFITS

U
nlike most of the people voting on the proposed £18b cuts to the benefits budget—as it shuttles between the Commons and the Lords—I was raised on benefits. Disability benefits—collected every Tuesday from the Post Office, in a shuffling queue of limpers, coughers, and people with their coat hoods pulled right up.

Perhaps if you drove past the queue, you would presume the ones hiding their faces were doing it because they were on the fiddle—“playing the books.” In reality, they were the scared kids with mental problems on Incapacity Benefit, who you'd see trying three times, and ultimately failing, to get on a bus. Good luck with getting them on a Re-Start scheme, you would think. Good luck with trying to funnel that terror into a cardboard hat in McDonald's.

Public housing on benefits isn't what you think—if you must imagine it, rather than remember, or just look out of the window. Popular imagination has it that it's full of obese, track-suit–wearing peasants smoking Rothmans on the front doorstep, rehearsing for their spot on
Jerry Springer
while spending their fraudulent benefits on a plasma TV.

Benefits spent on plasma TVs is the totemic fury-provoker of the professionally angry social commentator—“They're spending YOUR taxes on A FORTY-TWO INCH SONY!!! You couldn't MAKE IT UP!”— ignoring the fact that if you live somewhere with broken-glass parks and looming teen-clusters on each street corner, and gave up on the idea of having a car or a vacation long, long ago, then staying at home, safe, together as a family, and watching fifteen hours of TV a day is a peerlessly cost-effective, gentle and harmless way of trying to buy happiness.

Besides, they almost certainly won't have spent “your” taxes on it. They'll have incurred a massive overdraft, like everyone else in the Western World. They'll have gotten your telly the way you got your telly. People on benefits are just people—on benefits. Some of them are dodgy, most of them are doing their best, and a few need more help than we could ever imagine. The mix is about the same as on your street. If you are having to imagine it—rather than remember it, or look out of the window.

What's it like, being on benefits? Being on Disability Benefits—“I've had a hard day's limping, to put that tea on the table!” my dad would say, as we sat down to eat something based around a lot of potatoes, and ketchup. Well, mainly, you're scared. You're scared that the benefits will be frozen, or cut, or done away with completely. I don't remember an age where I wasn't scared our benefits would be taken away. It was an anxiety that felt like a physical presence, in my chest—a small, black, eyeless insect that hung off my ribs. Every Tory budget that announced a freezing of benefits—new means-testing, new grading—made the insect drill its face into the bone. They froze benefits for four years in a row, as I recall: “freezing” being the news's way of telling you that you—already poor—will be at the checkout, apologizing as you take jam and squash out of your bag, put them back on the shelves, and ask them to add it up again. Every week you fear that this is the week the pennies won't stretch any further, and something will disappear: gas, food. Your home.

Eventually—and presumably to the endless gratification of Richard Littlejohn, a right-wing columnist whose love of assailing the disadvantaged in print runs through women, prostitutes, the poor, homosexuals, lesbians and immigrants, and will presumably, one day, continue on to mete out a thorough chiding to the ill, suicidal, and dead—they did take the telly away; halfway through
Twin Peaks.
All the kids cried and cried and cried. There wasn't really anything left to do. I invented a game where you lay on the bed staring at the telegraph lines outside the house for so long, without blinking, that you would start crying. The house was very cold. Dad spent whole days in bed—huge white plastic jar of painkillers on the floor beside him, looking like a ghostly barrel.

All through history, those who can't earn money have had to rely on mercy: fearful, changeable mercy that can dissolve overnight if circumstances change, or opinions alter. Parish handouts, workhouses, almshouses—
ad hoc
, make-shift solutions that make the helpless constantly re-audition in front of their benefactors, exhaustingly trying to reinvoke pity for a lifetime of bread and cheese.

That's why the invention of the Welfare State is one of the most glorious events in history: the moral equivalency of the Moon Landings. Something not fearful or changeable, like mercy, but certain and constant—a right. Correct and efficient: disability benefit fraud is just 0.5 per cent. A system that allows dignity and certainty to lives otherwise chaotic with poverty and illness.

Certainty, that is, until you cut the budget so savagely, some benefits disappear all together. Then, you bring back all the fear of the alms house, and the parish dole. Then, you cut this country back to Victorian times.

I remember it, from my childhood. I can feel the dreary terror from here.

 

One more.

I
K
NOW
W
HAT
I
T'S
L
IKE TO
B
E
P
OOR.
T
HEY
T
OOK
A
WAY THE
TV
, AND
W
E
C
RIED.

W
e've recently heard a lot about the gulf between the rich and the poor—the difference between those with money, and those without.

Well, I've been poor, and I've been rich. When I was poor, I knew I was poor because we lived on benefits, slept on mattresses on the floor, and would share a Mars Bar between ten for dessert.

Now I'm rich, I know I'm rich because I've got underfloor heating, and could afford to eat out at Pizza Express up to three times a week, if I so chose. I'm basically living the life of a billionaire. I am loaded.

So, having been a rich person and a poor person, what I notice is how similar they both are, really. There's not that much difference at all. Everyone cheerfully plays the system they find themselves in.

In Wolverhampton, when you needed dodgy inspection papers for the car, an uncle's mate would be given a tenner “for a pint,” and an exhaust pipe would magically appear out of somewhere—to the ultimate financial detriment of the garage it had been lifted from, but hey-ho.

Now I'm in London, friends of friends recommend good accountants who will “sort out” your VAT problem for a pint-equivalent fee—to the ultimate economic detriment of the country, but hey-ho.

We're all just monkeys using sticks to get grubs out of logs, really. However. There is one, massive difference between being rich and being poor, and it is this: when you are poor, you feel heavy. Heavy like your limbs are filled with water. Perhaps it is rain water—there is a lot more rain in your life, when you are poor. Rain that can't be escaped in a cab. Rain that has to be stood in, until the bus comes. Rain that gets into cheap shoes and coats, and through old windows—often followed by cold, and then mildew. A little bit damp, a little bit dirty, a little bit cold—you are never at your best, or ready to shine. You always need something to pep you up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.

But the heaviness is not really, of course, from the rain. The heaviness comes from the sclerosis of being broke. Because when you're poor, nothing ever changes. Every idea you have for moving things on is quashed through there never being any money. You dream of a house with sky-blue walls; wearing a coat with red buttons; going out on Saturday and walking by a river. Instead, you see the same crack in the same wall, push-start the same car down the same hill, and nothing ever changes, except for the worse: the things you originally had are now slowly wearing out—breaking under your fingertips, and left unreplaced.

This has the effect of making your limbs feel heavy; like you're perpetually slightly drowning. You're dragging ten years of non-progress behind you like a wheel-less cart. Perhaps there's something out there you would be superlatively good at—something that would give you so much joy, you feel like you are flying. But you'll never find out: the world is a shop and it is closed to your empty pockets, and you are standing still, heavy, in the dead center of your life. You look around, and start to suspect you might not exist. After all, you appear not to be able to make an impression on the world—you can't even change the color of your front door. Twenty-six years, now; forty-two, and you've never even been to your neighboring town—it's too far away. And so you sit. You sit still. Because your limbs are so heavy. They are full of rain.

If you've never been poor, I don't think you could imagine what it's like—simply because of the timescale. You could envision a day, maybe, or a year—but not a lifetime. Not generations of it, passed down like drizzle, or a blindness. Not how, if kids from a poor background achieve something, it's while dragging this weight behind them. How it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode.

My children can't imagine it. They love to play at their Sylvanian Family rabbits being “poor”: they love the ingenuity of a sofa turning into a bed for five rabbits; of having only one thing wear.

“It's all cosy,” they say. “It's all—little.”

I can see how if you were—say—a Coalition government consisting of public school kids and millionaires, you could convince yourself that the poor are snug in their motor homes. That all they need to bridge the “gulf” between them and the rich is for things to be less cosy. That making
their
life harder—withdrawing benefits and council housing—incentivizes them in a way making life harder for the wealthy—imposing higher tax-rates—would apparently
disincentivize
them.

But the last thing—the very last thing—anyone poor needs is for things to be harder. These limbs are full to bursting.