East-West Read online

  When the crash came the banks were saved. But the cuts to public services and the Corporation Tax cuts for the rich mean that the City will continue to feel a need to ‘support good causes’ for some time to come. However, it is unlikely to support ‘charity’ quite as much as before. Not if it has to trim its own excesses a little.

  The man at Chancery Lane may find he is taking his pension a little earlier than he had expected, while others who are younger and poorer will have to take theirs much later in life, or will die before they can.

  Life in the months after April 2011 changed most for the woman who used to beg around the cathedral. Her pitch became a city of tents. Suddenly, for a few months, she was no longer so unusual, but when she tried to beg again at the end of February, after the tents had gone, she found she was quickly moved away by the new security guards who were even more watchful for anyone trying to pitch up.

  The homeless woman would die soon after, and her death would be followed shortly by that of the woman who had behaved well all her life, but was living in a flat with one too many bedrooms and who took the pills because she couldn’t face leaving her home.

  Bethnal Green, 6.00 p.m.

  ‘What do you mean you’re not too old to have a baby?!’ she shouted at her daughter. ‘You’re almost 50. You have two children. What do you want another one for? I had you when I was 23. That was a respectable age to become a mother! That was a good age for you too, wasn’t it? But you should have stayed with that man. He was not a bad man!’

  ‘But I didn’t love him, Mum,’ her daughter responded.

  ‘So what? I didn’t love your father,’ the 72-year-old grandmother-to-be replied.

  ‘Yeah, but your marriage was arranged. You didn’t expect to love him,’ came the reply the older woman had heard too often before.

  ‘That’s how marriages were then. Things were simpler then. We didn’t have much but we didn’t want for much. Now they say half the children round here are poor and the other half might as well be.85 But it’s a different kind of poverty to the one I grew up with. We thought everyone in Britain was rich. When we got here we got a shock, but it was nothing like Germany. Do you know what I first remember, from during the war?’

  She had begun telling her story again. Her daughter had to stop her.

  ‘Mum, I’ve heard it all before. You were Kindertransport, except you can’t have been, that was for children just before the war. They call them unaccompanied asylum seekers nowadays. They’re trying to make sure none of them get locked up in detention centres,’ her daughter gabbled on, attempting to change the subject.

  Her mother always warmed to darker subjects. Her mother was not to be silenced.

  ‘Round here, after the war, things changed. The new prime minister, he was MP for Limehouse, you know, he made sure we got things – got doctors for free, got spectacles, got food. It was rationed all the time I was growing up, which was great, as the ration for children was large. We didn’t go hungry, and by the time I married your father there was work for everyone, and new homes. They were building more homes then than they’d ever built …’

  Her mother could have carried on and on. Her daughter interrupted.

  ‘Yeah, but look at the place now. Who stayed? There’s only you here now, everyone else is an immigrant. And look at the blocks now, finally they are having a makeover, finally something is being done about the kitchens, finally PVC window frames are being put in. But this block is 60 years old. Who wants to live round here now?’

  Her daughter was sick of hearing about how good the good old times were. She thought of saying that the new windows should be double-glazed too, but she didn’t want to rub it in.

  ‘But I’m an immigrant,’ her mother replied. ‘This is where I belong.’

  Mile End, 6.30 p.m.

  They’d always lived here, generations of them. They had an Irish name, but that practically made them cockneys. He’d been born at the worst time, 1937. Amazingly he was still alive. Maybe it was something in the water – or something not in the water any more. This was his joke. They didn’t get it, the youngsters, didn’t know that water hadn’t always been piped, didn’t know what potable water meant, but then there was a lot they didn’t know.

  It was the schools here. Everyone said they were bad,86 but generation after generation of his family had gone to the same ones. And the next generation would too. The next generation was coming. His grandson (or was it his great-grandson?) was 19 years old and had just become a dad.

  When he was 19 it had been military service and he would have been shot had he gotten a girl pregnant, or there’d have been a shotgun wedding. People had different values then. Everything was a bit simpler, he thought.

  Now there was the college. Queen Mary ‘University’, they called it. He could remember when it started to be built on the bomb sites and then expanded and expanded. But it was only recently that it had got so huge. It was funny, he thought, funny that there was an enormous university here, but that the kids who went to school here still didn’t pass their exams. He guessed some must have passed, but people didn’t seem to want to live here unless they were students or had no choice or both. Funny, that.

  Mile End was so near to the City and to Canary Wharf. He couldn’t really work out what it was. What were they afraid of? Was it the schools? Was it all the immigrants? There was something about Mile End. Even his own children had left the area (those that could), moved out to bigger homes in Essex.

  It was the younger generations that remained until they made good. The phone rang. It would be his son. He always called at 6.40 on a Saturday. Just after You’ve Been Framed (on ITV) and just before Dad’s Army (on BBC). It was the immigrants, he thought. No immigrants in Dad’s Army.

  Stratford, 7.00 p.m.

  She liked Dad’s Army. Must have seen it hundreds of times. It reminded her of the past. All the family had watched it when it was first on; that would have been in the 1960s. It wasn’t that she found it funny. It was just that it reminded her of that time, of when they were young, of when the children were young, and of something else, of a different way of living. It was hard for her to put her finger on it.

  People round here had never had much. She’d heard wages were the lowest in London.87 The Olympic Park would change all that. Ken Livingstone had said, in his speech just after they’d won the competition to host the Olympics. He said that he had only bid for the Olympics to try to finally get some decent money into the East End.

  She could remember when there had been more money about, when everyone who wanted a job had one. Her great-granddaughter had never had a job. The youngster was 23 years old now and pregnant, so she’d become one of those ‘benefit scroungers’, the ones that they were always going on about in the papers.

  ‘Benefit scroungers’ sounded like a new phrase; but she thought she’d heard something like it before.88 When she herself was 23, back in 1957, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had told them they ‘had never had it so good’. But she thought they had it better a few years later, better when they took more of the cash off him and his lot.

  She’d always been interested in politics. Her mum had told her what it felt like not to be allowed to vote. And she’d always voted, but something big had changed during the course of her life. She’d noticed it first when she was 43, in 1977, during the Silver Jubilee. That was when the National Front had started acting up around here. Maggie Thatcher had said much the same things as the NF, but in received pronunciation and while wearing pearls. And then Maggie had cut taxes for the rich, and Labour had not reversed that. That was why she’d grown to be suspicious of them all.

  She was worried for her great-granddaughter and the new one to come. Herself, she’d lived a good life. She was 78 this year. That’s as long as most people got to live around here.89 People round here were always getting taken for a ride, by the NF, by Maggie, by Labour (when it didn’t really care), by the BNP.

  She’s heard that some 15
years ago, in 1997, when that Tony Blair had come to power, three-quarters of the richest people in Britain were rich because of old money, money they had inherited, money that her people had failed to take off them. But now three-quarters of the richest people in Britain were rich because of money they had made.90 That is money they had taken off people like her. No wonder wages here were so low, and falling.

  Using the word ‘creator’ from the Bible, they called themselves ‘wealth creators’, but they took the wealth away from most people. The new baby, her great-great-granddaughter, would not even qualify for the Labour government’s meagre Child Trust Fund. That was to be cut.

  They said they were ‘job creators’ too, but ever since they had started taking so much of the wealth once more, the jobs had begun to dry up.

  She wished she had someone to talk to again, but since her husband had died she’d had to start talking to herself a little more. Dad’s Army had finished. It was time to do the washing-up.

  Leyton, 7.30 p.m.

  More of her friends were dead than alive, but 81 was a good age to get to. Her granddaughter had told her, ‘Round here people live some of the shortest lives in London.’ That had not been very tactful, she thought, but it had been nice to see her again. She was at university now, a ‘mature student’. It was funny they called her mature at 25. She was doing a ‘dissertation’, she’d said. Such long words they used now. Queen Mary and Westfield it was called,91 the university her granddaughter went to, that is.

  ‘They only let me in because I was local, Gran,’ she’d said. ‘Something about “widening participation”, but that’s all ending now.’ Her granddaughter was the first to go to university in the family. She was ever so proud of her. But her great-granddaughter might not go ‘apparently’ (another word the youngster had not used before she’d gone to ‘uni’).

  The youngster read posh books now. In one it said that in the hour it took to go on the Central Line from its furthest point west to Leyton, on average you would have lost nearly ten years of life expectancy. She didn’t quite understand what ‘on average’ meant, or how you could lose years of life just by moving east, but ‘apparently’ you could.

  ‘Gran,’ she’d said, ‘I need to interview you for my dissertation. You’ve got to read what it says here about where you live – I got it off Wikipedia – and then I want to know what you think about it.’

  She still had the piece of paper:

  ‘It is a very diverse, ethnically mixed ward. Sixty-three per cent of Leyton’s residents come from a Black or Minority Ethnic (BME) community – mostly from the African-Caribbean and Pakistani communities. Since May 2004, however, when the European Union expanded to take in twelve new countries, there has been a rise in the number of Eastern European people coming to live in Leyton. Many have settled there to work, study and start a new life.

  Leyton is a very deprived ward. It has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Waltham Forest, the highest rate of unemployment, the highest percentage of pupils receiving free school meals, and the Beaumont Road estate – in the north of the ward – has been assessed as the fifth most deprived estate in Britain. Alongside two other large estates – the Oliver Close and the Leyton Grange – the existence of the Beaumont also makes Leyton the most densely populated ward in Waltham Forest. Some estimates are that up to forty per cent of residents are living in overcrowded conditions.

  Despite the many serious challenges it faces, Leyton has a vibrant community and a lot of hope. Half of the ward’s population is less than thirty years old.’92

  She hadn’t really known what to say to that. Then, ‘Actually …’ she began to explain to her granddaughter how it really was and why it really was …

  Bethnal Green to Leyton

  The couple talking in Bethnal Green were not typical. It is not just that very few older Jewish people still live there but that, for the daughter, 50 years old is unusual to be pregnant, although it is becoming less unusual. There are more children in the East End than in the centre of London, but – it may surprise you to hear – not quite as many are alongside this tube line as it runs through the West End of London.

  What is more usual along this part of the line is to have children earlier and for generations to be more compact. It is grandchildren and great-grandchildren who have been becoming parents at 19, 23, 25 and, a little further east, at 28 between Mile End and Leytonstone (inclusive).

  Along this section of the line the residents have not been typical of much of the population, but then most people are in some ways not typical of most of those who live around them. Here it has been the old age of the people (whose half-hours we have invaded) that has made them stand out. By the time we get to Leyton we have met the first person who has lived for longer than most people around her ever get to live. This will continue as we move north-east, as, although life expectancy jumps up with each of the next three tube stops, it doesn’t rise as fast as the extra three years of life between each person we will visit. However, despite this rapid ageing, the next few residents will become more typical again, as far higher numbers of older people are found in outer London than inner.

  What does stand out about this part of the line is how, along the long course of four widely spaced tube stops, between 40 per cent and almost half of all children are growing up in poverty. Entire families in block after block are living in poverty and many of the elderly will be poor too. Here it is not like the encircled White City Estate and parts of Shepherd’s Bush to the west, places surrounded by riches on either side, a high-turnover enclave for the few without much to call home.

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  Here, and for many miles to the south and a few to the north of the Central Line, poverty is normal. But then, as we move up the line and out towards Essex, very soon we come to stops where less than one child in ten is living in poverty; we soon come to the lowest rates found anywhere along the line. Poverty is least common in the far north-east of London, not – perhaps – where you might have expected it to be most absent. No great riches are found further out, but little desperation either. And next, between there and here, on the border, comes Leytonstone and the last new beginning of life in this story of the line.

  Leytonstone, 8.00 p.m.

  He was going to be a great-grandfather. He was 85 and his oldest granddaughter was 28. She was very pregnant. He’d come over on a ship from Jamaica. Not that ship, not the one everyone talks about, but a troop ship returning to Southampton. He had been 18 and a stowaway. They found him after a day at sea spent steaming back across the Atlantic, having dropped the troops home in Kingston, Jamaica.

  He’d got to London early, in the 1940s, before it was that usual to see black men here, apart from on the docks. It had been hard, but it got better. However, he was worried for his granddaughter. Her boyfriend wasn’t working. He was black too. He liked to think she’d gone for him because he reminded her of her grandfather. But the boy didn’t have a job. It was hard, he kept on thinking, without a job. She’d said half the black men in Britain didn’t have a job, but could that be true?93

  He lived on his own now, in sheltered housing. He was reading a letter from a friend in Jamaica. Some of his friends had gone back there, back to retire. But he wanted to be near his family here. He’d have liked to live with his family, but no one did that any more (apparently).

  He didn’t like the word ‘apparently’. He’d noticed how the way people spoke was changing. There had been a time when people had been proud to speak according to where they were from, and then a time when they pretended to speak as if they were from Jamaica.

  ‘Rastafari’. It made him laugh. But now youngsters were careful to try to talk better. They wanted to be winners. Only a few people got all the money. Most black men, young black men at least, were not seen as worth employing at all, even though over half lived in London, where everything was booming still. It was funny, that. It wasn’t as if there wasn
’t enough money.

  He could remember the 1980s. Just like now, half of all young black men had had no work. He had been at the end of his working life then. He was at the end of his retired life now. It had made him angry then, but not as angry as the younger ones. But he’d done OK. He’d bought his houses. Cheap houses in cheap places, but they’d gone up in value. That’s why he could be here in his last years. Not somewhere cheaper and not so nice. It wasn’t that he’d worked for it, just luck. He’d come at the right time, been in the right places. It made him sad now. His grandson-in-law-to-be had been unlucky. Perhaps the granddaughter and her boyfriend should emigrate?

  Snaresbrook, 8.30 p.m.

  In the care home at Snaresbrook they got the Mirror and the Mail. She always read the Mirror first, but there was more in the Mail. In the paper a well-off couple were complaining about losing their £20.30 Child Benefit per week, or the possibility of that. She’d never had that much money when she was bringing up the kids. It had been shillings and pence then. Full Family Allowances had not come in until the 1970s, she thought; she was not quite sure, but she knew it was after her kids had grown up, after decimalization. She was 87 now.

  She could remember the children growing up. She often couldn’t remember other things. Sometimes she thought they were humouring her. She caught them just agreeing with her to shut her up. They were trying to put her off going outside.

  Where was she living? She’d been put in this home when she’d got too angry with her daughter. It wasn’t really her choice. She knew there was a tube stop nearby. Could she get to that on foot? She thought it was her fault that they didn’t visit. Maybe they were afraid of the area. Was it safe to park? Why didn’t they come by tube? And £20.30 a week is a lot of money. She didn’t really have much use for money now, but she wanted to leave them something.