house

Something I wrote about housing and property when I started to become good friends with my flatmates finally in the middle of lockdown, felt like we could make a life together. Since I just signed the lease on a council flat myself it feels relevant again.

 

 

CW: miscarriage, landlords (lol)

Now I’m trying to live consciously and well with others (also thinking about the massive invisible lightness that such a possibility gives to me) I keep coming back to my mother living in social housing in the early 90’s.

Certainly, I’ve said this before. Here, again.

Living in their little flat with the Jesus child Romy and cockroaches, not much else. My dear parents lit up by their mission, working 14 hour days at the Org for £25 each - yes, really - a week. I think they understood that they were poor but it was holy.

Romy lived a lot at my Grandma's at this time.

In Leather Lane - near the Barbican, do you remember? My parents take me walking there each time and point to their block which still stands - my mother was part of the tenants union. My mother was one of the only white ladies, certainly unique in her class and her accent. She was the representative in the interminable meetings where the tenants wanted more and even then the landlords would have wanted the churning block down or at least brought to a shell.

In her role she negotiated new channels on TVs, fixed windows, helped mothers get their kids into school when they didn’t speak the language. People wanted a lot from her: they called her in the night, knocked on her door and put in slips of paper through her letterbox. Why is it cold? Why are there mites in the rice? Can you move my bookshelf? Can you tell the landlord to wait next week for rent?

My mother told me this with resentment at the demands on her time but it checks out perfectly to me. She likes to be important. She is a martyr. In her head she is above and separate always from Them. She would come in and save Them. She still does.

So at this time Thatcher’s right to buy was still knocking about and they came into a pinch of money through Nell I think. My dad set up a fake business and paid my mum for a month to make an ice sculpture of income that would last long enough for them to sign the mortgage.

The government bought it, and they bought the flat.

The point of the story is this: when word got out that my mother owned property, the other residents stopped speaking to her all together and she got a miscarriage.

I choose to see this event and the lost belly as a qualitative rupture in how my parents lived. Perhaps I have a little more sympathy for my father, who grew up poor, but they became people of property through gentle scamming and thus erected this fibreglass wall cutting off the chance of existing wholly with others.

Surely they’re not happier now. It was a devilish exchange. My mother losing the baby - she said that her and Dad were trying a new handyman business to pay for the mortgage and also that the stress of being isolated suddenly after the work she’d done - I don’t know. I know they sold the house quite quickly after they bought it and thus embarked upon the glorious upward climb of meritocracy and land lording.

It also makes me think back and forward to what it means to inhabit somewhere.

A house is surely a dream of a life, a dream with a hole in the side for our generation. Having such a heavy thing must do something to you. Every new owning comes with a price. Fear, because you have to protect what’s yours. You draw a line.

The weight of the house is a gravity that distorts your own thick space time fabric and makes you think around it. Its windows mediate your vision and its walls become your own craggy skin.

We have never had visitors. Very clearly it has kept people out. Simultaneously I have been told a little desperately that nothing in your life can be done without property.

 

(I know to own a house isn’t inherently evil. I also know that in some obscure way it hurt my parents.)

 

Anyway. Not that this is a finished thought but looking ahead I am asking for the unimportant, mundane, everyday grass-scented ability to keep remembering that housing is a fucking human right and a life lived alone or in fear is really a shaved down edge of a life. I invite into my mind and soul the continual jostling of others and the bravery to commit class suicide and upturn myself.

I put my knees on the ground and my hands to the sweaty walls in my kitchen after we have made a meal together and I pray to live for ever and ever with other people and to not be trapped by what I own, amen.