Everything that I wrote about Batley can easily be used to describe
Dewsbury. Except this former mill town has a wonderful market twice a week and
is the home of the bargain.
With this in mind, I found myself in the unfortunate position of a
shopping trip there this week with my wife, Carol and my son’s partner, Kim. We
are all going away on holiday together in a month or so, and my wife and Kim
wanted to buy some last minute holiday clothes, toiletries, suitcases, make up,
perfumes, shoes, books, hand bags… My family is in fact keeping the whole
economy of Dewsbury alive and well.
My son was away working, and their beautiful little daughter, Harleigh
was, of course, also along with us. So rather than standing guard outside
various shops that sell things we neither need nor want, I decided to take
little Harleigh off to see what mischief we could get up to.
We ended up in a pet shop looking at lizards and snakes and all the
other pets that were desperately looking for an escape route. We eventually
ambled out and wandered down to a small square, where I bought an ice cream for
us both to share.
While we sat watching the world go by, licking our frozen treat, a
couple wandered over and sat on the bench across from us. They, too, had a
small child in a push chair. The child was screaming like a banshee. The couple
fitted the description I gave of the people of Batley in my previous blog. The
woman was fat, and her hair had been dyed so many times it had the colour and
texture of mattress stuffing. Her pallid skin was masked by various do it
yourself tattoos. Her partner was small and skinny, and he also had a body full
of the obligatory tattoos.
It is often said that if you want to know just how poor a family is look
at what size television they own; the bigger the set, the poorer the family! It
seems the same can be said of tattoos; the more people have, the poorer they
are.
They each sported a lit cigarette in their mouth and had an overwhelming
smell of beer about them. It was hard to tell how old they were, as lifestyles
have ways of altering your age, but they looked quite old.
The child screamed on, as they argued between themselves, and people
looked on: some in amusement, others in self-righteous disgust.
Finally the woman snapped, shouting at the poor unfortunate child, “Yer
Granddad will get yer one, now shut the fuck up!”
With that, the man jumped to his feet and moved, somewhat like a
‘Thunderbird’ puppet, in my direction. When he reached the bench that I was sitting
on he stopped, looked down into the pushchair where Harleigh sat with a face
full of sticky ice cream, and peered at her. He then turned to me and smiled a
toothless smile, and, in a voice that had endured forty cigarettes a day for
forty years, said, “What a beautiful little girl; you must be so proud!”
I smiled and agreed with him that I was indeed very proud of my family,
and thanked him for his kind words as he tottered off. He returned a while
later with a huge bag of crisps for his grandchild, which duly shut up
screaming once it had a mouth full of fat and e numbers .
I looked over at this family outing and thought to myself that they are
really no different to me. I must say that I feel a bit of snobbery coming on
here, because I do feel the need to explain that I neither have tattoos, or a
fat wife with tattoos.
But this family, like mine, are trying to get by the best they can. They
are, like most of us, just victims of life’s lottery. We can’t help where we
are born, who are parents are or our social and economic circumstances.
As with all lotteries, there will always be winners and losers, and as
with the lottery, there will always
be more losers than winners.
Around the world, children are born into poverty and famine. Politics,
economics and religion need to keep them that way. Without the developing
countries’ suffering, we in the west cannot afford the lives that we have
become so used to. We rely on their cheap goods.
I myself am acutely aware that I’m part of the problem, as I buy cheap
imported clothes and goods. You cannot make a shirt and export it half way
around the world and have a shop sell it for a profit for only £5. Someone somewhere
is working long hours in appalling conditions for little pay for this to
happen.
It is very difficult to break away from the chains that shackle us to
our ideologies and beliefs. Just because the political system has always been the
same, it doesn’t make it right, or the only system. Just because you have, and
your ancestors have, been fed an ideology as a truth, it doesn’t make it true.
People in the west shout about democracy but whose democracy do they
want to defend? The ordinary man in the street has a vote but he is manipulated
by the press and the media who are in turn owned by moguls who in turn curry
favour with political parties, so whose truth are you buying into?
It’s easy to mock and criticize people like my new Dewsbury friend (I
often do) but they are also a product of life’s lottery. They lack the
education and support and chances that I have been lucky enough to receive.
I have a working-class background and it would have been very easy for me
to turn into a hillbilly baby-making machine, but I wanted something different.
I‘m still looking.
I, like these people, have tried to give my family the best start in
life, just like my parents did with me. We use what methods we have at our
disposal; having lots of money doesn’t make you a better person or parent, it
just means that you have a lot of money. Good parents give time and love to
their children, and the greatest gift you can give them is the freedom to think
and the help to discover who and what they want to be.
I cleaned Harleigh’s face up. Her Mother would kill me if she knew that
I was feeding her ice cream in-between meals. I walked over to the couple with
the child. They were by now on their third cigarette since sitting down.
I had decided to pay back the lovely comment the man had paid to me
about Harleigh.
The child was quite a bruiser it has to be said. He was big and
well-built with an unfeasibly large head.
I said to Harliegh, “Say hello to the little boy.” then I turned to the
Grandparents and said, “He’s going to be a big lad when he grows up; it looks like you have a future rugby player
there!” to which the Grandma, with a voice like a chainsaw, replied, “It’s a
fucking girl!”
I smiled and walked away. The lottery of life can be quite cruel, sometimes!
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