Poverty Safari, page 12
They spill into overcrowded casualty and high dependency hospital wards. They spill into six-month-long waiting lists to access clinical psychologists and psychiatric counselling facilities. They spill into overrun social work departments and inundated supported accommodation projects barely keeping their heads above water. They spill into stressful housing offices, packed-to-capacity crisis centres and outmoded addictions services. And for some they spill into police stations, sheriff courts, children’s homes, secure units, young offender institutions and prisons.
A vulnerable family living in constant economic uncertainty, job insecurity or subject to an inhumane sanctions regime often lacks the capacity to absorb, process and practically address life’s unpredictable adversities. So much of the system is presided over by people who only understand poverty in the simplest of terms, and therefore it also reflects everything they misunderstand too. Take the UK welfare system at present, where it appears that humiliation is being used to incentivise people into finding a job. Such an approach could only be dreamt up by people who have no idea of what being born poor is really like. What it does to your mind, body and spirit. Poverty is not only about a lack of employment, but about having no margin for error while living in constant stress and unpredictability. And for children growing up in this chaos, the experience can leave them emotionally disfigured, at odds with everything around them.
A stock image of a child sitting on a step, with their head in their hands, does not adequately express this complexity; it dangerously undermines it. The over-simplified way this issue, and many others, are framed and discussed creates a false impression in the public mind of what is really driving child abuse and neglect. And in turn, what is driving many of our current social problems where crime, violence, homelessness and addiction are concerned.
It all begins with a child living in social deprivation. When it comes to child abuse, poverty is the factory floor.
17
Children of the Dead End
MY MOTHER FANCIED herself a bit of an arsonist. On more than one occasion, I faintly recall people being preoccupied by something that mysteriously caught fire. Once I heard about a blaze through my granny, who received a phone call informing her about it; another time I was fleeing the scene myself. My mother either had a fascination with fire or fire had some sort of score to settle with her; the two crossed paths far too many times for it to be coincidental. This gave weekends at her flat in the high-rise yet another unsettling edge.
One Saturday afternoon I was down at the swing park, playing. The park was situated between the two high flats of Stirlingfauld Place and Court. Despite being very badly vandalised, the park was still of moderate quality, featuring a large and complex climbing frame, a swirling chute and a fox-slide. When visiting my mum, I spent most of my time entertaining myself and the park at the foot of the building was a reasonably safe place to do that.
I was attempting to climb up the chute with the intention of sliding back down it again. It was a manoeuvre I had performed many times without event. However, I made the mistake of climbing up as someone else was sliding down and we collided about half way up the chute. The heel of his boot tore the nail on my thumb back through my finger, creating an unsightly wound and an awful lot of blood.
Like any child that age, I started screaming for my mum. But in this kind of environment, when you call for help, it doesn’t always come.
I walked around the local vicinity in agony, tears streaming down my face, trying to find her, to no avail. I couldn’t access her flat either and had no idea whether she was in, and simply unconscious, or if she had gone out to get drunk at someone else’s house.
Eventually, I tracked her down to the building opposite, where she was drinking with an old man in a flat not dissimilar to her own – dirty and dark. I showed her my injury. She didn’t react. Perhaps it was because she was drunk or maybe she didn’t think it was that bad. After all, she’d lost half a finger after attempting to gain access to her home as a child, only for a window to be mysteriously slammed down on her hands as she climbed in.
When confronted by my injury she simply told me to phone my dad, and kept on drinking.
Regardless of how frightening or dangerous life around my mother could get, it all felt strangely normal at the time.
When I was huddled with my brothers and sisters in a dark room in the middle of the night, while a man screamed death threats through the letter-box, it was scary but not unusual. When I had to run out and phone an ambulance after walking into the house to find her on the toilet having a gastric haemorrhage, it was startling but not unusual. Whether it was a child being tied to a chair for being cheeky or a baby being booted across the floor for crying by the faceless male drunk she had in occasionally, it all felt bizarrely normal. Not even the sight of her having sex was enough to shock me.
In ‘deprived’ areas, where resources are scarce, gossip is a form of currency and if you’re unlucky enough to hail from a visibly troubled family, you are presented with a choice: you can let other people talk about it or you can become the author of your own story – which is exactly what I did.
With the dysfunction finding ever more obvious expression in my life and with no ability to keep it private, I underwent an adaptation that would change the course of my life: I began to embrace the dysfunction and used it as form of creative and social propulsion. Rather than being on the receiving end of cruel jokes about my mother, I began to hold court in school playgrounds and crack them myself. Instead of leaving it to the bullies to make light of the clouds that hung over my head, I beat them to it – and even started preparing jokes about the bullies’ mums too. This became a way to accept and process trauma. Being open about my difficulties helped me to take some ownership of my life.
As I got a little older and new issues surfaced, I began to understand some of the constituent parts of the problem my family faced, whether alcoholism, violence, lifestyle or drug addiction. By the time my mother left and my sister returned from the Gorbals, a shell of her former self, the painful events that I had witnessed or experienced were becoming a form of fuel that fed a growing obsession to write. I would rush home from school to get to work on whatever project I was developing and immerse myself in these words; purging myself of trauma by vomiting everything up for anyone who would listen.
Over time, I started to see my personal experience in the wider context of a family and our home in the broader context of a community. Every few months, the scale of what I could comprehend seemed to expand and into that broadening horizon poured new possibilities to explore. Now in my teens and certain I knew everything, I started to find a small audience for my stories. The validation I got when I performed relieved many of my other anxieties. The rush and sense of self-worth gave me a deep feeling of connection to other people and the present moment where dread about the future and obsession about the past did not trouble me.
As I gained more experience, writing, speaking and performing, my stories took more sophisticated forms. Then I’d learn something new that recontextualised my journey. Working on material became an obsession; no matter what I was doing, I was always in a rush to get back to my work.
After a while I popped up on the radar of some of the local organisations that were set up to ‘engage’ young people like me. I seemed to tick all their boxes. More and more people were on hand, offering me a platform to tell my story. The bigger the platform I got, the more people in the community seemed to connect with it. Sharing my experiences was cathartic but was also becoming a form of currency I could trade locally. Out of nothing, I suddenly had something of value. It wasn’t long until I was invited back to the West End to offer my thoughts and opinions on the topic of poverty.
18
The Stranger
MY FIRST APPEARANCE on the BBC took place at my auntie’s flat in Govanhill, on Glasgow’s southside, where she lived with my two cousins and a mother and child she had taken in who were fighting deportation. Having got involved in the Pollok Free State, she later became a local environmental activist and was eventually elected to the Scottish Parliament as an MSP. By this point I was about to leave secondary school but had trouble getting work. I had been working as a temp in Next but was not offered a contract after the Christmas period. There was speculation that certain employers were screening potential employees based on their postcode – which was an indicator of social class. BBC Radio Scotland was covering it on the news and I was asked to come on and talk about it. It went well and I was asked back more over the course of the year.
Charities, arts organisations, youth workers and even politicians were becoming familiar with me. At events like gala days or fetes, I would be presented as an example of a young person who was doing something positive with his life. I’d be allotted time to perform or speak about my experiences and this was becoming a regular fixture of my life, even after I became homeless.
The BBC, after letting me host their flagship news programme as a guest presenter, asked me to present a four-part series called Neds. In Scotland, a ‘ned’ is like a ‘chav’; a poor person, usually young, who causes disruption in their community through anti-social behaviour – which was high on the news agenda at the time. Now working at the BBC, my life represented something of a schism: on one hand I was homeless and developing a dependency on alcohol and drugs and had no self-esteem, but on the other hand I was about to become a radio presenter who travelled the country like a proper journalist. When you have no real sense of self to anchor you to reality then you become whatever the world decides you are that day. Some days I was flying high, thinking I was on my way to some kind of job and would make my family proud. Other days I was unable to get to the BBC on time because I was so hungover and depressed.
When the series ended, another was commissioned, this time a three-part show about Shettleston, a housing scheme which had among the worst health statistics in the country. I had a growing public profile and was involved with several organisations as a volunteer while making a name for myself as a local rap artist. But whether it was low self-esteem, imposter syndrome or just a self-sabotage instinct, I began to question people’s motives for wanting to help me. Beneath everything, all I was looking for was connection; to feel understood, heard and supported. To feel respected, safe and loved. The praise and platforms I received certainly made me feel I was heading in the right direction, but once the novelty wore off and I began to consider what was going on more deeply, some things started bothering me. The big contradiction of my life at this point was that the people who apparently wanted to help me, with whom I craved a connection, were all being paid to be there. So it wasn’t that big a leap to assume that if they weren’t getting paid then they’d be away doing something else.
I also noticed that while people were always keen that I tell my story, in whichever form it took, they seemed to prefer that I stick to certain parts of it. The testimony about my childhood was fine but they were less keen on the observations I started to make as my understanding of poverty, its causes and impacts, deepened. I was growing and learning and evolving, as I had been all my life, and this created new lines of inquiry that I would immediately pursue, no matter the consequences. Queries such as ‘Who makes the decisions about your budget?’ and ‘How do we solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?’ were making people around me nervous.
This sort of sentiment didn’t seem as popular among the various youth workers, charities and journalists as the story about my dead mum. When I realised this, I soon learned to use that story as a Trojan horse, mainly because without it, people seemed much less interested in anything I had to say. It was as if the only thing that qualified my opinion was the fact I had been poor. The second I wandered off that topic people started shuffling their papers and things got awkward. It seemed my criticism was often deemed not to be constructive enough. Despite the constant talk of empowerment and giving voice to the voiceless, it was obvious many of these people were only interested in my thoughts if they were about my experience as a ‘poor’ person. It was assumed that people like me had very little insight on anything else. This was disheartening and confusing. I couldn’t figure out if people wanted to associate with me because I was smart or because they wanted to use me in some way. Having very little self-esteem, it led to wild fluctuations in my sense of who I was. Sometimes I felt my ideas were of value, other times I was crushed by the terrible thought that I had just been kidding myself. That I was worthless and stupid. But rather than buckle beneath that confusion it seemed to stoke the flames of my anger. The conflict seemed to concentrate my mind, just like fear, and the things that upset me, just like traumatic experiences, became a form of fuel.
Even mental illness and problems in my personal life didn’t stop me from pursuing my lines of inquiry and going after my targets. I followed my instincts, right or wrong, despite the fact I could sense resistance to the message I was transmitting. Eventually, like the books and poems teachers tried to make me read, I began to take an adversarial attitude towards the people and organisations I believed were trying to influence how I thought and spoke about these issues. I began to lash back against anybody I felt was manipulating me, either to pacify my criticism or to extract narrative or data for their own agendas.
My story, which I had been conditioned to retell like a party piece, got me so far and then people became wary of me, aggravating my sense of rejection and exclusion. I was learning that there were limits to what you could say when you wanted to talk about poverty. I was learning that even the harshest childhood experience wouldn’t get you a free pass to cast a critical eye on the structures around you. But I was also learning that the emotional damage that growing up in poverty had done to me, made it that much harder for me to engage with the very people deployed to help me. I often projected my pain, mistrust and sense of exclusion onto people who really did mean well. I was never quite sure if my instincts were right or if I was in the grip of an episode of mania.
What I soon learned was that, no matter your background, you are cast out the second you offend the people who’re in charge of your empowerment. Sometimes it’s a person, other times it’s an organisation. Sometimes it’s a movement and other times it’s a political party. But the minute you start telling your story in service of your own agenda and not theirs, you’re discarded. Your criticism is dismissed as not being constructive. Your anger is attributed to your mental health problems and everything about you that people once applauded becomes a stick they beat you with. Look out for these people. The people who pay wonderful lip service to giving the working class a voice, but who start to look very nervous whenever we open our mouths to speak.
I never regarded my childhood as hard until I saw the look on people’s faces when I talked about it. I never assumed that my life, or indeed I, was interesting or significant in any way until people started telling me so. I never assumed I had anything of value to say until people began prompting me to repeat this poverty narrative over and over. But if I happened to stray off script, then curtains would mysteriously close, lights would mysteriously fade, microphones would mysteriously cut out. The BBC didn’t offer me any more work. The anti-social behaviour news agenda had moved on. They didn’t even respond to my pitch about another programme. The week the Neds series came out, the Sunday Mail, who had interviewed me earlier in the week and sent a photographer out to take pictures to promote the show, ran a story called ‘Neddy Burns’. In it they used a picture of me in which my hat had been blown up by the wind, appearing to sit at the same angle as the stereotypical ‘chav’. The minute the social deprivation agenda dried up in the media, there was no longer any need for me. I thought I had been asked to take part because people valued my insight. Because I had something to say. Then one day it dawned on me why they had asked me to present Neds in the first place: it was because they thought I was a ned.
Today I know better. Today I understand that my poverty narrative is viewed by many as an opportunity, as opposed to something with inherent value that people who read books could learn from. Please understand that I think no less of those who inadvertently helped create that impression, nor do I think for one moment that people employed in the poverty industry have anything but good intentions. The issue here was my assumption. Perhaps due to my radical roots in far-left communities and maybe my naivety as a young person, I always just thought the aim was to dismantle poverty. However, once you see the mechanics of the poverty industry up close, you realise it’s in a state of permanent growth and that without individuals, families and communities in crisis there would no longer be a role for these massive institutions.
I’ve been wheeled out by organisations and political groups and had my ‘powerful’, ‘honest’, ‘heart-breaking’ testimony offered as proof of the changes we need to make as a society when it comes to poverty. But the moment my lines of enquiry change, relative to my growth, understanding or aspiration, and my critical eye turns to those who would repurpose my story for their own agendas, whether it be an activist, a charity or a politician, then I am cast out as an ‘arrogant’, ‘aggressive’, ‘dangerous’, ‘self-sorry’, ‘indulgent’, ‘ego-maniacal’ ‘pseudo-intellectual lightweight’ ‘sell-out’ ‘who always makes everything about him’. All fair criticisms. I am certainly not a flawless person. But all I’ve ever done is talk about poverty. And the only way anyone would listen to what I had to say was if I prefaced my opinion with personal testimony about my dead, alcoholic mother and what a difficult childhood I had. I don’t write about myself because I think I’m important, it’s because that’s what I’ve been conditioned to do in order to be heard. That’s the sort of window dressing that is required before the great and the good become willing to take lower class people seriously.
