ARCHIVE - Confessions of a Class Traitor

In November 2009 I joined a collective column on the Eastern Daily Press called the One World Column, alongside a crew of progressive thinkers and writers from Norwich. Our main topics were centered on social justice, globalisation, peacemaking, human rights and the environment. I was asked to cover the Transition movement and sustainable food systems. The column was axed when a new editor took charge, but continued as a blog. This was a post written as the nation took to the streets to protest against the cuts to public services in 2011.

Where you are going is overwhelmingly dependant on where you are from. Just before the last election OWC columnist Lee Marsden wrote a perspicacious analysis of public school education and the class system. If the Labour government had hidden their Etonian and Oxbridge advantages, it was clear the next millionaire cabinet were going to flaunt them. We were entering a very different political period. A moment of turbulence in which we were all about to be thrown out of our comfortable seats.

During the last 30 years as the global finanical credit bubble swelled, many people in Britain improved their material lives. Everyone it appeared was able to buy houses and go on holiday. Shopping became a national pastime. In 1998, in a shocking report on poverty and prostitution, Dark Heart, the Guardian journalist Nick Davies looked at the hidden cost of that improvement, the demolition of the working class and the creation of an invisible underclass, a quarter of the population who served as scapegoats for the rest, and most particularly the governing elite.

We imagine that class has disappeared from modern consumer society, but of course it hasn’t. It operates insidiously as a signalling sysem, through language and behaviours, to establish who we are and where we figure in the pecking order: the people who take charge or who obey, those who bask in the limelight, or act out the collective shadow. In spite of what we do in our adult lives we are strictly labelled according to our childhood circumstances and education.

“Daddy, what class are we?” “We’re professional class,” replied my father, once a lawyer. “If anyone asks you tell them you are a professional.” I’m standing outside his old chambers on the Victoria Embankment and a group of socialist lawyers are gathering under a banner in wigs and gowns to protest against the cutting of the court services. It’s March 26 and thousands of workers, students, unemployed and sympathetic protesters are massing beside the Thames. I’m talking with Gurkas, London fireman, librarians from Manchester, engineers from Birmingham, student nurses, actors and coastguards. There’s a strong feeling of solidarity in the crowd I haven’t experienced for a very long time.

My father was born (illegally) in the Inns of Court and spent his whole life behind these gates, defending the innocent and the guilty, pornographers, murderers and fraudsters. During the day he battled against censorship, at night he told me stories about the woods and birds from his rural childhood on the Sussex Downs and about the protagonists of the French revolution. The liberation of Paris obsessed him. Allons citroyens!

We are made of the stories we are told. Sometimes we are told them in order to live them out. And sometimes we are born to end them - not just our personal narratives but the ones we tell ourselves as a culture, as a people. The most enduring story we are taught is that some people are better than others. Better fit to rule, better fit to live in splendour, more intelligent, more evolved. I was raised to believe that “lower” class people were poor because they were stupid and when workers went on strike they were holding the country to ransom. But this wasn’t the story my life followed.

At the age of 19 I found myself living in the slumlands of Birmingham with working class students from the North, who unlike me, had struggled hard to get here. It was the mid-1970s and all our world-views were being challenged. In the red-light district of Balsall Heath amongst the immigrant sweat-shops, I learned about Diggers and Levellers, studied Chomsky and socio-linguistics, stood by ASLEF workers and against the National Front, and when I faced a police charge realised I was in a country that bore no relation to the one I had been brought up in.

Those years changed everything. At the age of 35 I sold everything I owned and went on the road, compelled, like many of my contempories in the 90s, to reconnect with the earth and with people in a way that broke with our conventional upbringings. Today I’m about to march past the offices where I once had a successful career as magazine journalist. Fortnum and Masons, where I used to meet my grandfather for tea, is about to be filled with the tax-dodger protesters from UKUncut. It’s another England. I’m no longer inside those gates.

Like many people I'm struggling to co-create a new narrative, one of equality and fairness - not just for myself among the crowd in Hyde Park and the millions dependant on the welfare state, but also for the invisible people of the global South, on whose natural resources and slave labour the global North depend. In order to write a new story I need to deconstruct a very old one.

The coalition government are made up of the kind of people I was brought up amongst: proud, ritualistic, acquisitive, obsessed by form, terrified of losing face, with a horror of the masses, all fellow feeling having been ruthlessly bullied out of them. In order to hold its superior position, the ancien regime needs to continually push others down. The more equality and fairness exerts its pressure within the collective, the harder they push. They are, as George Orwell points out in his peerless study of class, Road to Wigan Pier, terrified of losing control and falling. In this they are as much at the mercy of this heartless system as anyone else.

In order to deconstruct a story you have to know what it’s made of. The institution of class is ancient, stemming from the Aryan caste system, established in India thousands of years ago and upheld by the powerful few within all Empires from Assyrian overlords to corporate CEOs. It works its restrictions through all our lives, born high or low. The barriers between us are kept in place by hatreds, by humiliation, by blame, by revenge, terror, hostility and mostly by ignorance. In 1975 in Birmingham Mel Foster railed at me. An ex-miner, he had gone through Trades Union college to study for a degree and was cracking under the strain. Like many of his working class peers he was loathe to betray his origins by becoming educated and thus middle class. "You have destroyed the Hull fishing fleet and all our livlihoods!" he yelled.

He knew nothing about London. I knew nothing about Hull, but I did know I had a legacy, A crooked inheritance I had to put straight. We all have that legacy. And in this the working class is no more exempt than any other section of society, for it too has its whipping boys - the unemployed, the migrant, the homeless Orwell once walked amongst. Everything in our consumer society is a product of the exploitation of our fellow human beings, from the child slaves of the African cocoa plantations to the Chinese IT factory worker. None of us has impunity.

To break out of our historical mould we can’t identify with the class we were brought up in, hold on to our positions as victims or conquerors, as righteous Conservatives, as ideologially pure Socialists, we have to let go of them and come together in a new and fluid way. We have to see the world from a common perspective. Because, if we don’t, the corporate elite will push us all down as far as we can go. We will lose everything our ancestors fought for so hard - all our freedoms, all our public services. If we separate and attack each other, we play into their hands. United, we can exert a force that could change how we live on this planet as a people forever.

Part of that unifying future story, that radical shift, is that we have to listen to each other’s stories. We have to know what it’s like to be in other people shoes whoever they are, and when we understand begin to act from within a deep frame of change. And this is why I am telling you mine. I fell and failed. I quit my position, my house, my job. Contrary to the cautionary tales was told I did not die in destitution as my great-grandmother did in a workhouse on the Isle of Wight. I found that people are kind and fair and intelligent everywhere you go, so long as you don’t give way to your hatred or rage or self-pity, or close down from fear. What matters is that you give that natural empathy and desire for liberation a chance. History does not need to repeat itself. The French revolution, like all revolutions that followed in its wake, ended in the Terror and the brutal reinstatement of another kind of hierarchy. We don’t need another revolution. We don’t need class war. We need to evolve.

Complete list of OneWorldColumn posts (18) from Avatar to bio-tech

Photos: March for the Alternative, Victoria Embankment, March 2011; looking outside the door, Kent, 1958; Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth behind Hidden Britain by Nick Davies; coming together to discuss civil liberties and economic system, Transition Norwich, Aladdin's Cafe, Magdalen Street, Norwich, April, 2011.

ARCHIVE: Darkling Thrush

Some things you can't capture in a photograph in a time of fall: the scent of woodsmoke, the perfume of a quince, the sound of the sea roaring in the darkness, a sky with bright constellations, the knowledge that once this was the time of the reed, now sere in the marshes, which was gathered to thatch the rooves of houses. A time of shelter from the storm and of waiting.

It was a windy week: our tent blew down, our garden haven, and so I knew late autumn had arrived. I put my hand on the glass roof at 2am and felt the coming of ice. We ran into the darkness and fetched all the tender plants into the house. It's the bletting time: a time you wait for the hips and sloes and medlars to begin their sweet collapse. It's a time you wait inside as dusk comes and are sometimes surprised by the sound of a bird singing.

I found this young thrush in the road. He was still warm, without a mark on him. Newminted from a spring nest in a summer hedgerow. I held him for a moment and laid him under a blackthorn full of sloes. Two long-tailed tits came and danced around us.

That's something else you can't photograph. The pain in your heart when something is gone. A beautiful singer who won't sing his mistle song, his great joyful sound in a time of elegy and loss in the woods when Winter's dregs made desolate/The weakening eye of day. In a land where thrushes are fast disappearing. In a world that is fast losing its songbirds and its poets. On a day when you struggle to pick up the camera and go into the lane and photograph the colours and shapes of those things you write . . . . and yet you go. Because something inside you won't stop loving the world, no matter what weather comes. It's a covenant we made with the earth a long time ago.

Bird in the hand; rosehips in the lane; Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy. Post originally written on This Low Carbon Life Nov 2011

EARTHLINES: Rewilding the Future

As the autumn issue of Earthlines (no 7) is about to appear, I am republishing my summer Life in Transition column, written in late Spring. Strange how my focus is entirely on gathering and storing fruit whereas this copy was written as the blossom was in full sway. The pictures are taken from a year of wellbeing walks I helped organise and lead around Bungay (to be mapped this November).

I’m reading George Monbiot’s Feral, flicking the pages and following his description of kayak trips over  seas full of jellyfish and rough waves. I’m reading it in one sitting under the apple trees in a day of rare sunshine, occasionally pausing, eyes closed to listen to the sounds all around me. It’s late May and the bittern is booming in the marsh, goldfinches chattering on the wire down the lane. Young jackdaws  squabbling in the chimney, almost ready for flight. Just above my head a crew of bees are working the apple blossom.  

Five years ago this apple tree fell over in a big wind and, inspired by Richard Mabey’s talk on Beechcombings, instead of cutting it for firewood, I left it to do its own thing. Now it has regenerated itself and become a small apple collective. Five years ago I would not be aware of the presence of these bees, or made the connection between their presence and the fruit that will appear this autumn.  I would not have treasured its apples, or gone around the neighbourhood, foraging  for other varieties,  or learned how to make cider from my neighbour. I would not have been grateful the sound of the now-rare cuckoo flying overhead, or the sunlight on this day, the land held in a haze of golden light, the sea a vibrant blue strip in the distance.

It’s a different time and requires a different sensibility - a mix of old knowledge, new awareness, and some  bold and unprecedented moves in uneasy waters. Not least in our own minds. 

I am reading Feral intensely today, because it questions a lot of assumptions about nature and has engaged my attention in the way scientific and literary books have been unable to for a long time now. It is making me rethink the land within a depth of time and see its received aesthetic  in terms of governmental policy, but most of all because it brings a totally new dimension into focus – a rewilded country for the future.  

We live in a time of loss and control. Over half of the wild things on these islands are now in decline, corporations have made the world’s seeds, lands and water their private property and no one seems to know how to respond to the increasingly alarming messages about the biosphere  .At times  it is easy to lose heart, or to feel as hemmed in as those fledgling birds in the chimney. The book talks big spaces, deep time, and makes room for something else to happen. It makes suggestions that spark an imagination dulled by too many facts and figures:  bringing the extinct creatures back into the hinterland,  making  the rivers  plentiful again, describes how it once was when the North Sea was pristine and clear and could be again.  

To be alive you have to make moves that go against the flow. You have to fight for wildness and freedom in a civilised world. But most of all you have awaken  the imagination, let your mind take flight into blue air: breaking out of what is perceived as normal, and widen our knowledge, seeing in deep time, archaic time, Palaeolithic time, and start building a culture around renewal  and getting back on track. All those Re words. Remember, regeneration, rewild. 

Return. 

Working with the fabric 

If you live a life governed by heart, you live in a different world than the one if you live governed by the rational mind. They are different universes. Something that the heart can feel and intuit has a currency and an agency that the rational doesn’t even recognise. It doesn’t even know what you are talking about. 

I am talking with fellow Dark Mountaineer, Jeppe Graugaard about working with the ‘fabric of the world’. It’s like an invisible matrix that informs everything that happens in this visible world. Writers and artists understand this fabric, even though they might not describe it in this way. When people make a strategic act with a good intent it has a power and an agency that we cannot see, but affects the whole picture. It echoes in all places, like a hologram, or a homeopathic dose in the body. It’s tiny move - a small trip in a kayak, a conversation by a fire -.but it speaks to the whole world. Everything is contained in that event when it is communicated. The rational tick-boxing ’left-hemisphere’ mind doesn’t understand these kinds of acts – instinctively distrusts them, fearing its own loss of control. Their meaning and value come directly from a creative’ right hemisphere’ intelligence that is almost impossible to articulate or commodify. Somewhere however we understand it. We get a feeling for it in the core of ourselves, in our bones. Somewhere we trust this feeling with our lives.  

That’s why when I sit down with Jeppe and we talk about time and dreaming and the old myths, I know it matters; why introducing the wolf and the lynx into the mountains, and letting trees regenerate themselves is key. Because these counter-intuitive acts can speak directly to the heart, and a people who have heart are capable of extraordinary things. The heart can turn everything around. Everyone knows that inside themselves. People light up when love and belonging is around. Imagine what that can do with a whole planet. The reason we have to imagine large wild things and do small strategic acts, is because we have got as far as facts and information can take us.  

And now something else, sometimes creative, has to kick in. 

Rewild the body, rewild the mind 

I am leading a walk around the castle in Bungay. It is the second Wellbeing walk in a series we’re running this summer, mapping the town and all its green spaces.  We are threading our way through the Garden Market, past the Punch and Judy show, past the historical ruins,  exploring  alleyways, backstreets and river paths  with fresh eyes. I say I am leading but in fact in front of me there are two small boys running ahead and I am following their track. Suddenly they disappear.” Come back now!” calls their father. “That’s someone’s garden.”  They jump out of a lilac hedge, laughing: 

“It’s not someone’s garden,” corrects the elder brother. “It’s a hedge.”  

We have become  a cautious people and  this does us no favours, nor the planet. I like to follow the feisty writer as he go fishing miles out to sea, I like to kick stones with Reuben and Tristram and climb trees, to talk about the deep North with Jeppe at the tail of winter, because these stories are not on the agenda, and yet are embedded in the fabric of life. I know we need to live the opposite of micro-managed life. We need to burst open like flowers,  leave home at dawn,  walk through the dark, trespass and reclaim our fields, connect with people on the wrong side of the tracks. Encounter the wild creature, stand up in front of strangers and share our story. Listen. Eat nettles and blackberries. build fires, sleep in rain, swim in wild places. Let ourselves go feral.   

So having followed the Transition ethos of relocalisation and community resilience in these five years,  I realise what I have really been doing within its well-managed civic remit is fostering a culture that cherishes all these  wayward,  earth-loving  actions.  Paying attention to things that civilisation has scant time for, or has forgotten in its pursuit of power. I have come to see that return and regeneration - of soil, neighbourhoods, people, places - is the wild card in the pack, the card all of us have up our sleeves.  

Because a mindset that only understand the value of life – including our own  - insofar as it makes money for the economy, that only understands water and plants as commodities, comes from a civilisation that has already outplayed itself. One that has run out of storylines.  And that a culture governed  by  good intention, that springs from  the vast savannah of our imagination, from the deep ocean of our memory,  from our ancestral  beings,  held intact by a long lineage of dreamers, poets and activists, indigenous wherever we live, will never run out, can constantly renew itself, because it holds the  future of the earth in its heart. 

Gazing into the long water reeds of the River Waveney on a bridge with ten people on a Spring day is a good place to start - bringing our feral imagination into play and loving where we really are. Bird by bird, flower by flower,  stream by stream, human being by human being. Truly, wildly, deeply.

Cover of new EarthLines; fruits of foraging along the Waveney (October); on the bridge to Falcon Meadow (April); en route to the Queen Head, Earsham (October); evening primrose behind Castle Meadow (July); collecting cherries on Bath Hills (August); on the bridge to Earsham (May).