The street where I lived

Woodthorpe Road. The street I lived on from roughly 5 years of age until I got my own place just after I turned 18. After some googling I found out it’s now the 52nd most expensive property in the postcode and its residents have an average age of 44. It was built just after the turn of the century and if sold now it’s likely to go for around £127,000.

Let me tell you some facts about when I lived there. The windows & front door were a horrid single glazed metal that were always either steamed up or iced up, and the windowsills always had tiny puddles on them. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a tiny sage green bathroom with a fabric shower curtain that stuck to your legs and occasionally fell on your head if you tugged on it too hard. Every wall surface was covered in either anaglypta, a textured paper with raised patterns on it, or chipboard which was an awful kind of wallcovering with wood chips in it which could be painted over. There was always a patch of wallpaper missing at the bottom of the stairs were I picked at individual wood chips while sat on the stairs chatting on the phone, the telephone cord stretched under the door from another room and my Dad shouting about the phone bill. Sat on these same stairs I revealed to my mum age 15 that I’d gotten a tattoo of a boyfriends nickname on my knee (Bear if you’re wondering), which I’d done myself with a needle, cotton and Indian ink, and had been concealing under long nighties for over a year. Also at the bottom of the stairs, next to the coat rack which had so much hung on it you could never open the front door fully, was a huge control box connected to a burglar alarm that never actually worked. This existed due to a door to door salesman who had scared the bejesus out of me and my mum one afternoon with horror stories of families traumatised by masked intruders. I remember clearly that it cost £2000 which was spread over a life sentence of months and no doubt doubled in size with interest, an amount I can still recall because of the mega row that ensued when my dad got home that evening and found out.

Downstairs was the kitchen and ‘the room’. ‘The room’ didn’t need further description like say a ‘living room’ or a ‘dining room’ as it was the only room other than the kitchen, therefore just ‘the room’. In ‘the room’ was a sofa, a gas fire and hung on the walls were pub mirrors with brands like Schweppes, Beefeater Gin or Martini scored across them in coloured fonts, and at Christmas every year we hung the same Blue Peter paper doves from them, made from tissue paper, card and with one googly eye a piece.

In ‘the room’ I watched Captain Caveman while eating my tea (dinner) on a tray. I spent all of one Boxing Day there watching back to back Only Fools & Horses on VHS tapes after falling out with my boyfriend, and another time I invited friends (a loose term) round to get drunk on a Sunday while my parents were out, drinking all the home brew my Dad had made before it had actually finishing fermenting and ended up violently sick.

Outside this semi detached house, was a coal bunker and a patch of rose bushes which I fell head first into when rollerbooting age 10. I can still remember the smell of germoline which was applied to each and every one of the tens of cuts I had. At the bottom of the path, past the gate (well the gap were a gate should have been), ran white metal railings from one end of the road to the other. I don’t know if they were ever freshly painted as all I remember is the chips of metal rust I repeatedly got embedded down my nails or in my legs from performing roll overs on them.

All of the houses on our side of the street were semi’s and privately owned. On the opposite side were more semi’s but all council housing. The private houses were set higher up, with a strange kind of ramp made out of cement and large pebbles running down from the pavement and the white railings to the edge of the road which seemed to suggest the private houses to be superior, sitting higher up, looking down on the council houses, and the rest of the street that seemed to sag down in the middle.

This feeling of one side of the street being better in some way than the other carried into my primary school years. For some reason the kids thought I was posh, simply because both my parents were still together and both working. The truth was my dad was a bus driver and my mum a part-time seamstress who also worked as a dinner lady at my school. We were definitely not rich, or posh, and if anyone had suggested my dad to be anything other than working class he’d have been appalled. What my parents did drill into me was that there was no shame in being working class, or for that fact in wanting to make the best of things. I would be pulled up for missing my t’s out of words like butter or water, encouraged to eat slowly and be polite, all of which somehow translated into the other kids thinking I thought I was better than them. I was tormented for eating slowly, scuffed new shoes on the way to school so as to avoid the attention of new footwear and made up lies about my parents divorcing so as to feel like I belonged.

The irony is that I brought this same feeling of not quite belonging into my adult life. I still feel embarrassed to have achieved a little more than many of those I was at school with, and still cling to my working class moniker regardless of my now middle class situation. The fact is although some of those kids considered me to be different, I really wasn’t. My parents still struggled to make ends meet, bought pretty much everything they had on credit, including the VHS recorder & TV which were rented from Rumbelows and their marriage was just as rocky, shouty and destructive as most of the other kids mums & dads. About the only difference I could see was that we weren’t claiming benefits, though we probably qualified for them, and we lived on the other side of the street.

My relationship with class is one I find myself exploring more and more. It wasn’t miserable, but it wasn’t quite as sunshiney as I’d once believed it to be either. What’s more I’m in no rush to escape my background, or to create a picture that I’m happy now because I am no longer living in any kind of poverty. The street I grew up on, the people I met, the family I came from, they were all incredibly fascinating, and I learnt lots from them, and not just resilience which is the badge I think people want to pin onto working class people who no longer quite fit the description. As far as I am concerned I am still, and will always be, working class. I am proud of that, even though there’s still clearly a bit of a (wood)chip on my shoulder I need to pick at.

Whilst my spell on Woodthorpe Road had its fair share of darker times, it was also the home my Dad and I would have play karate fights in, a la Inspector Clouseau & Kato. It was home to some wonderful Christmas Day dinners cooked by my mum and attended by both sets of grandparents. The cucumber omitted from my grandads prawn cocktail because it repeated on him and my other Grandad’s starter replaced with oxtail soup because prawns were too fancy. Most of all it made me who I am today, a sometimes rough around the edges working class girl from Yorkshire, who pronounces Cake with an ache in the middle.