The ‘Difficult We’

We are a ‘difficult we’. We are in a pub: an old(ish), largely brown pub in a part of London once rough as fuck! No-one with more than one tooth in their head! And that might be someone else’s! Later it was working class. Now it’s a place out of time and expensive, obviously. We are sitting at a wooden table – it’s round – and that roundness and the sunlight from the open door shining through our drinks makes it seem that we are together in one golden enterprise.

There are three of us; all human, all poets, all living in the same city. An upper-class man, a middle-class woman and a working-class woman. We are sitting in height
order. It’s the start of a joke; the one in the Frost Report. The upper-class man is young and tall and exudes confidence. The middle-class woman is taller than me, but shorter than him. She appears to have more confidence than me, but less than him. She is also younger than me, but older than him. The joke ends here. We are here to workshop some poems. It’s my turn. My poem contains, as mine often do, the personal pronoun ‘we’. The man says, “I find I am held up by the difficult ‘we’” and the woman agrees.

I can’t remember the poem, or what point it was striving for. It was a long time ago. I didn’t know how to answer them then. Over the years, I have used ‘we’ in many po-ems, and heard his voice ricochet round my head, saying “Oh, it’s the difficult ‘we’!”. He was a nice young man, and the woman was a friend of mine. They were also knowledgeable and well-read poets for whom poetry matters. They weren’t trying to silence or belittle me; they had my poem’s ‘best interests’ at heart. I am not raising the class difference to make some kind of cheap point at anyone’s expense, but to try understand what was going on, for me and for them, and why I must persist with ‘the difficult we’. I am writing this to them – in my head – I have no idea where they are right now:

Dear Fellow Work-shoppers

The difficulty for you both, as you articulated, was that the ‘we’ shut you out be-cause it did not reflect your views or experience. Whoever this ‘we’ was, it did not include you either as participant or reader. But in the end if I don’t use ‘we’, I shut myself out because so many of the experiences I have in life are collective. I live in social
housing, am a union member, a member of a working-class family and various oth-er groups that cluster around aspects of class, tribe and lifestyle.

I have been a member of trade unions my whole adult life. My first (from a job as
follow spot operator on the Elvis Show at the Criterion Theatre) had the additional statement ‘Incorporating the Society of Bingo Callers’ after its initials. I loved that union! And later, when it became BETA and I worked in a bar at the National Theatre, I still carried those Bingo Callers in my sense of ‘we’.

I have always been proud of that floating group of luvvies and punks – a bunch of truly ‘difficult we’, collectively triggering memos from managers {definitely ‘them’} on appropriate hairstyles, how stocking tops must be higher than skirt hems, how many earrings, language! We had a cup of tea with Arthur Miller and Inge Morath (just once) while we helped Mo from the kitchen fill out his wife’s immigration application. We played rude scrabble while the show went on, with a floating host of musical theatre actors who liked to pass through and assist us. We unhoisted the Union Jack from a flagpole late on the night before a victory flypast. We danced to buskers, and went to all- night pubs down the Old Kent Road where old men sang old songs, and we cried at each other’s untimely deaths.

The housing estate I live on is the kind that has organised coach trips to places. We (but probably not me, to be fair) go to Margate every year. The first trip I remember going on was to one of the Saturday night women’s marches that were part of the printers’ strike at The Sun newspaper when they moved their print operations from Fleet Street to Wapping in 1986. A fairly large number of households on the estate at the time had one or more print workers in them (I was to become one later – though not at Wapping). A coach was booked and filled and off we went. Among the neighbours on the coach were people who normally presented themselves as ‘respectable’. Not people I would likely run into on some of the other many demonstrations I would go on – with other groups of ‘we’. Some even worked at the M.O.D. (another relatively local employer) in the print room or as messengers. But, the point is, ‘we’ all (or more accurately, a lot of us) went and none of us read The Sun for at least another 20 years – most of us never again!

(Uz! Tony Harrison’s working-class Yorkshire men – the ones Shakespeare gives the comic bits to. For London working class wom-en, Uz is Uss and ‘we’ are Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Mrs ‘Arris, countless servants and Eliza Doolittle amongst others! At our best we are Dog Woman and Fevvers!)

Aside from the Saturday evening marches, we also went together to a fundraiser for the strikers at a West End theatre. Perhaps not as successful a night for the ‘difficult we’, as the swearing from some of the comedians did not go down too well with
everyone. But these are the kind of narratives that are ours collectively and, as a result, they are also mine. Narratives that I might want to shape a poem from.

And for me, a key question is – if I am not ‘we’, then who am I?

I am on holiday, travelling alone. I am In a field in Dorset, on a
footpath, and my feet are wary. My feet are always wary – finding shoes is a proper mare. A woman stops me – brown skirt – mud smeared across bare breasts – her eyes are wild grey sea and are outside time. If you met someone on a city street with those eyes you might not quite see them or their questions. If the woman speaks to you, she says ‘who are you?’. She asks this wherever and whenever it is that you meet. I answer with my name. “But who are you?” she replies. And however I answer that, it is this same chorus that repeats “But who are you?” I don’t know what she wants me to say and that might be one answer; that I am someone who needs to know what you want from me.

I know that I am lucky and that thousands/millions would love to be in my situation. To have a cheap(ish) and protected rent on a friendly estate in the heart of the city I was born in – a city that feels like home – even if there’s no such thing. To not have to share a room with an adult stranger because I am not from here and don’t earn enough to rent a whole room. To not have to sofa-surf until I am forced out to somewhere hard to come back from. It’s my peculiar and particular piece of luck, but it also creates another ‘we’ as my neighbours are all in the same happy boat. However much the housing officer harasses us – and it does often feel that way as she has a style to her bordering on rude – we stick it out because we know it doesn’t get any better than this, outside of a massive lottery win!

I am eight years old and standing in the middle of the road with mum and the neighbour from opposite. She, the neighbour, has a hare lip and as she speaks, I am struck by a realisation. “Oh,” I say, “that’s why they call it a hare lip, it’s got hair in it!” Later, unsure as to why I am in such trouble, I feel my first shame. It flushes across me in waves, not crashing – more consistent, like I am being blow-dried with even sweeps. If the woman with sea-coloured eyes had found me then, I could have told her “I am a bad person!”

The thing about housing estate life is that large areas of what we consider our home space is shared with other households. The hallway between my flat door and the street, the communal back yard, the bin sheds – all daily domestic space that is not ‘mine’ but ‘ours’, and if we forget that it causes no end of trouble. Noise and smells travel in and out of our homes from other people’s homes. Architect Juhani Pallasmaa uses the phrase ‘acoustic intimacy’ to discuss the way we hear architecture. ‘The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculpt-ed directly in the interior of the mind’. The sounds our homes make are strange ones. I have rarely slept in the almost totally private space that is a house and, even more rarely, alone in a house as the only living human occupant. On those rare oc-casions (two), I have lain awake, rigid and terrified, as a range of sounds that could be the tread of a stranger on the stairs present every threat possible. Blocks of flats almost certainly make those sounds; but hearing them is a shared experience, and those other people (your neighbours) give rational and innocent possibilities for the sounds we all are hearing: someone upstairs walking, slow dripping water, the preparing of a recipe that involves bashing meat with a hammer at one-minute in-tervals. We can rarely literally know what the noises are, even if we think we do. My difficult ‘we’ knows where we are. My lone and frankly equally difficult ‘I’ is too scared to fathom it.

A few years ago, the woman who lived upstairs died. It was around 3 a.m. – no one was looking at the clock. Her death was like a loud sigh, followed by the sobs of her son and her cousin. We all heard. We all said so the next day. We all had known without knowing. Be-cause we are ‘we’.

When our father, in his northern children’s home, decided he liked reading poetry and wanted to try writing some, he also had to take up boxing. His childhood ‘we’ was not poetic. Our mother’s love of poetry was nurtured by a children’s librarian in her northern village. Yes – ‘our’ parents – I have siblings – another ‘we’ – they are not just my parents, but I do understand they are not yours. If I used the singular of ‘we’, in a love poem, you (dear fellow work shopper) would probably not find that problematic even when it clearly wasn’t addressed to you.

Our parents were both outsiders and took from poetry those comforts that those take who probably will never belong. As misfits they had a dual need to both be-long and not belong. Their need for belonging took them towards aspects of youth culture that both united outsiders and celebrated that status.

They met in Bury Jazz Club, a ‘club night’ in the upstairs room of a pub, where young people from this small industrial town (now part of Manchester) could rein-vent themselves – at least once a week – as something other, maybe a bit exotic even. But they were a ‘we’, especially when in the bar. And, it’s one that as a 1977 punk, I understand. That in dressing a certain way you can belong – especially to those you have yet to meet, who will know you when they see you. Perhaps our im-agined audience, as writers who are other, is part of that and it is them we are addressing when we say ‘we’.

Our Dad had a fondness for polo neck jumpers and trench style raincoats – an orig-inal fifties hipster his whole life, as if he was stuck in the ‘we’-ness of when he did belong. He would reminisce about this community on the edges of Northern work-ing-class life – his friends, how collectively they didn’t really ‘belong’ and the sense of belonging that brought. When he went back, they disappointed. His best friend Vernon (a hospital porter) became a Mail-reading Tory, so Dad stayed away, mak-ing it easier to hold on to that earlier ‘we’.

Both my parents came to London to escape becoming part of a more conventional ‘we’. For our mum, the ‘we’ she wanted was her marriage and a friendship group of music fans. For Dad, it was Mum (for a while) and a circle of friends around an anarchist group they joined (another ‘we’ he never stopped reminiscing about). Af-ter our parents split, our mum’s ‘we(s)’ were friends and me and my sister. Many of her friendship groups were built around alternative lifestyles. She was attracted to a hippy lifestyle, but in Ladbroke Grove in the late sixties and seventies, hippies were not that accepting of lonely working-class women and she never really ‘felt’ part of that scene. Mostly she moved in circles around anti-racist campaigns and housing rights where she felt more at home. And in the end, much as for her daughters, ‘we’ was family, politics, music, and the union.

I left home in 1981. Ladbroke Grove was changing. Through my childhood, W10 was mostly working class and considered rough and W11 was the swanky Notting Hill bit where the rich lived. From a project I did with the wonderful Miss M. at my primary school, I knew that W10 had historically been Notting Dale, ‘Pigs and Pot-teries’ and boggy farmland. Lots of Catholics; Irish, Spanish, and Travellers lived there throughout the 20th century and earlier. But, as ever, the rich expand like ivy and choke everything in their wake. Their little grippy hands take possession and, if not slapped down ultra-quick, grow into something only a revolution could scythe away.

People who left when I left came South, (well, at least eight of us) came to Waterloo – another ‘we’ – an odd one, a very specific group of outsiders. Those who left a bit later – mid 1980s – mainly went to Deptford. This has probably more to do with the relationships between housing associations in W10 and other areas at those times than any other factor and it might be just that it’s how it seems to us – those who were there. Is that what ‘we’ means – those who were there? People you can stand silently with and know what the others are thinking – or believe you do! Is that what you question when you raise the ‘difficult we’, because you weren’t there. And I un-derstand, but we do need to show you how things were when we did what we did – or when that thing happened. And that I suppose is the trick, how we invite you in and show you.

I understand myself, or believe that I do, by a process of all the ‘we’ I am. We family, we working-class, we Londoners, we in the union, we from round here, we not from round here, we bad people, we people pleasers. I imagine that a Venn diagram of all my wes might have me at its centre – but that might not be me. And, since our mum, dad and favourite uncle have died, seeing myself is harder.

I am a mammal, that much is clear.

When I was small, I wanted to be a zookeeper or a Beefeater. Either way, I was going to be standing beside something someone else wanted to see – standing tall – hands directing their eyes – not as if it was mine, more that I belonged to it. Like a man who is holding a woman’s handbag while she goes to the loo. The woman is wealthy and fabulous and the bag drips with gold. She is the Queen perhaps. He is not the person that bought the bag and he can’t quite remember how he comes to be holding it as the cameras flash at him. I serve, like all my servant ancestors. I am not Alpha. Although I have my moments, mostly when I am with others – a ‘we’ who can rise – like lions!

My dad bought me a history book – I don’t know how old I was – one or two. It was a large flat thing and bright yellow. It was about the kings and queens of England. It told their stories in a very linear way, with timelines in bright colours and eventually I did read it, or bits of it. At first though, it was a good book to sit on, like cats do. I believe that I remember the warmth of its boards beneath my curled-up legs.

I am trying to return to who I was before other people told me.

The child in a story, who loves the redness of tomatoes. Lays, cot bound, wishing she could talk. Understands Rapunzel but would probably choose to stay in the tower.

I fight if I have to. Caught myself screaming with pure rage from time to time, ‘hand-bags at dawn’ or ‘mini-skirts at dawn’ as no one ever said to me but you have heard that phrase, no? Trolled out as a way of diminishing women’s anger. Last time I did this in the street – it was as part of a very difficult ‘we’. This event involved a
shouting match with a neighbour who was threatening to call the police – to ‘shop’ or ‘grass on’ someone I wanted to protect. We had never liked each other. But since this event we have been almost friends. That might be my strangest and most diffi-cult ‘we’ – a collective of people that would like to thump each other – and ‘I’ am the person in my family least likely to, the one who never does that!

Working class poetry needs a ‘we’. Collaborative behaviours are woven into every way we have of understanding ourselves. We navigate them daily, whether we like it or not. The idea of the poet as posh, young and yet world-weary and very, very self-absorbed is at odds with this ‘we’-ness. But that poet-voice ‘I’ is, by and large, not an I that speaks for me and so I have to write my own – often a ‘we’. And, yes, it probably is always a ‘difficult we’ due to all the complications that life throws, but it is a challenge working-class poets are generally forced to grapple with in one way or another, otherwise we disappear. And is it not the difficulties: the contradictions, muddinesses, messiness of life that are the real business of poetry?

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Anna Robinson is a mostly a poet. She lectures in Media at the University of East London and runs a creative writing class at The Crypt underneath St John’s Waterloo Bridge. Her particular interests are working class history and poetics.

 

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From Magma 89, Grassroots 

 

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