I write a regular column for my local free newspaper, the Whitstable Whistler. It’s a quarterly. You can read online editions here. It’s a great model for publishing: hyper-local, financed entirely by advertising, it pays its contributors and serves as a focal point for the talent in the town. There’s a launch party with each new edition, in a pub or hostelry, where the contributors—illustrators, photographers, writers, editors—can get together and check each other out.
One of my co-contributors is Glyn Brown. I’m impressed by her writing, even more so when I discovered that she’s recently had a book published. It’s called Dancing Barefoot: How To Be Common and is published by Ignite Books. We agreed to a book swap so I could get hold of a copy.
The subtitle "How To Be Common" refers to her background. She’s working-class, daughter of a builder and a cleaner. The book is a semi-fictionalized memoir, based upon her attempts to make a living in the writing trade in London. She’s written for a number of prominent newspapers and magazines, including the Times, the Independent, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, i-D and Mojo. Also for the rock press, where she used the byline Carmen Keats—obviously a reflection of her romantic sensibility. She’s interviewed Morrissey, Robert Smith of the Cure, Nick Cave and Tony Bennett, among others. Cave told her she was “the one good cop.”
The book has a twist. Alongside her own story, she also tells the stories of other working-class heroines from history: people from poor backgrounds who’ve made their mark. These range from Sally Salisbury, an 18th-century courtesan, to Nell Gwyn, actress and mistress to King Charles II, and Annie Oakley. There are 17, all of them memorable for overcoming the burden of their background to achieve something noteworthy; for being witty, clever or brave or skilled in some activity (such as flying or shooting or big cat training) usually reserved for men.
There’s a Gonzo element. At certain points the heroines come to life and talk to the author, encouraging her, using their own lives as examples. She has them perched on her desk, or fingering the objects about her, adding commentary to the action as it unfolds. One of them joins her on a jog, hitching up her skirt to do so. There’s a lot of shifting about in time, from the lives of the heroines, to the author’s ongoing struggles with her career, to the present moment, as she’s writing the book, as the heroines make guest appearances in her imagination, urging her to continue, to overcome the obstacles that confront her.
It’s this that makes the book unique. It’s neither a straight memoir, nor the retelling of a set of stories from the past, but an interweaving of the two, using historical events to highlight the class issues that underlie the book. There’s a succession of posh boyfriends who use and abuse the author, and editors and associates whose privileged background makes them unable to understand her perspective. As the book progresses Brown finds it more and more difficult to make a living in her chosen profession and is forced to feed cats and take other odd jobs to supplement her income.
As a writer from a working-class background myself, I found I empathized. She went for a job as a postal worker once, but failed the interview. I passed, and spent 13 years as a delivery officer at the Royal Mail.
Freelancing is hard. It’s isolating and can lead to depression. You’re constantly fighting for recognition in a world that rarely gives you a second glance. Editors are busy. They don’t have time to check your history, to see what work you’ve done before. If they don’t know you already, they’re likely to pass you over in favor of someone they do know, someone they went to school with or who they’ve worked with in the past. This leads to a sort of closed shop of journalists from the “right” background: privileged people who are already in tune with the kind of values and attitudes that the media represents.
According to a recent report, 54 percent of the top 100 UK journalists attended private school, 46 percent went to Oxford or Cambridge, 69 percent have at least one clear personal tie to the British establishment, and 26 percent have three or more. Journalism in the 21st century is an establishment tool. It’s purpose is to maintain the status quo, to support establishment attitudes, to ensure that the interests of the ruling class are served.
This is part of a general trend. In the 1950s and 60s the working class were on the rise. Most art forms were dominated by people from less privileged backgrounds, as writers, musicians, artists, actors made names for themselves. Name a famous British actor or pop star from the 1960s and it’s odds on that that person will have working-class origins. In recent years all of that has shifted. New research shows that the proportion of working class people engaged in the creative arts has shrunk by half in the last 70 years, down from 16.4 percent of people born between 1953 and 1962, to just 7.9 percent of those born in the 1990s.
The 1960s was a time of rising wages and disposable income for the young and gave rise to an explosion of creativity, led foremost by the Beatles, a bunch of scallies from one of Britain’s major working-class cities, Liverpool. A band like the Beatles couldn’t exist now. They had the spare time to practice and were able to afford the equipment they needed to go on the road, to hone their skills as a live act in places like the Star-Club in Hamburg and the Cavern in Liverpool, and to develop their almost supernatural instinct of the possibilities that rock ‘n’ roll offered. They were raw, down-to-earth and energetic, with an entirely new approach to songwriting. Much like the working-class women of Brown’s book, they were cleverer and more authentic than the people around them. But the doors to new worlds that they opened up for young bands in the 1960s and 70s have been closed behind them. There are fewer working-class bands plying their wares on the music circuit these today, and fewer clubs for them to play in. The age of the Beatles has given way to the age of Coldplay, raw talent and innovation to playing it safe and treating music as a career option, as a substitute for taking a job in Daddy’s accountancy firm.
This is true of the other arts as well. Michael Caine has been replaced by Benedict Cumberbatch, Glenda Jackson by Helena Bonham Carter. Films about working class life, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, have given way to films about meeting friends at parties or famous actresses falling in love with booksellers in London. Alan Sillitoe has been replaced by Richard Curtis. There’s almost no access anymore for working-class people to the arts, no mainstream journalism that doesn’t serve as stenographer to the powerful. The opportunities for self-expression and advancement that working people once saw ahead of them have been summarily removed. We’re living in an age of division and helplessness, where the winners in the game of capitalism have taken it all, and the rest of us are left with nothing.
Brown’s book is personal, told from a woman’s perspective, but it has a universal heart. It’s a tale of hardship and loss told with wit and honesty, heart-rending in places, funny in others. At one point she goes to the doctor and is told she’s suffering with vaginal atrophy. “Vaginal Atrophy,” she muses: “a great name for a band.” You find yourself wanting to slap the entitled boyfriends who take advantage of her, but then her therapists from history add their own perspective. Things were clearly worse in the past. Sally Salisbury was a child-prostitute at 12, dead by 33. Nevertheless she lived her life on her own terms, loved and laughed and gave as good as she got. Our author has absorbed the lesson, has outlived Salisbury by a number of decades and, despite the hardship, has managed to make a life for herself, albeit one in which she’s got to know a lot of cats.
There’s one passage that struck me in particular. As she enters one “glitzy new tower block on the river” to feed Nelson, a cat with a damaged forepaw, she makes the following observation: “As I negotiate the keypad on the outer doors, clutching my plastic carrier of scourer, rubber gloves, scoop and poo bags, notice I’m invisible to the people who live here. But the lowly mechanicals—the guys still wiring bits of the lift, the various cleaners, gardener, postman—all nod.”
It seems to me that she’s gained more than she’s lost. The book she’s written is the result.
—Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone.