Having worked in the East End as a peripatetic tutor for kids who had fallen out of schools for whatever reasons and in a number of schools in Harlow, both in primary and secondary schools and as a learning mentor, I've been in and out of a lot of homes in both Harlow and the East End (Bow, Roman Road, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Dagenham, probably more if I think about it). I'm not sure I'd say that the clearances of the East End of London nor the results of clearing to Harlow, were positive. In neither case were the identities left undamaged, and that damage was a lot of the reason I was working with those families. One of the families I worked with in the East End was connected enough to the Krays to attend their funerals.
I came across mining engineers linked to South Africa and Zimbabwe through university (there's a mining school at Imperial College), and some of the attitudes were .. different. There was guy who we'd known and rubbed along with OK while he was at university in the bar one night after graduation, boasting of his new job in, I think, South Africa. We were being polite and interested, but all melted away as he started boasting of how much he'd earn and how many servants, and how cheap they were going to be. He ended up pretty much on his own with the rest of our backs to him. (I can't remember what happened, but anyone who was still chatting to him after that was pretty much a marked man - it was Imperial 11:1 men to women, only one woman studying mining engineering, almost certainly a man.)
Some cultures could do with a bit of obliteration. The rural Ireland of my childhood/youth doubtless had virtues of cohesion and neighbourliness, picturesque crafts and an oral culture. But it was also repressive, censorious and ignorant and with murder in its heart.
Bringing this back to the issues of identity and place, I wonder about many of those who grew up in societies or cultures that no longer exist as such. Obviously, post-colonial Africa and places like Kenya or Namibia, but also former working-class communities in London now gentrified beyond recognition (thinking of Iain Sinclair's Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire and his attempt to recuperate the psychogeography of a vanishing city. The shabby segregated Cape Town I came to in the 1980s as a student bears little resemblance to the metropolis or playground for wealth tourists now.
I think that's very relevant. I happen to know two white men from Zimbabwe / Rhodesia here, in their 50s and 60s. Neither is at all racist, but both are entirely undone (more or less homeless) and seem to have washed up here. I know Poles who rejoice at the end of their occupation but who are undone by the new Poland. I've mentioned a book which describes interviews with people faced with the evaporation of the USSR. In a much smaller way my home town in the SE is now very different - I couldn't live there - and up here, Bentleys parade in the premier shopping street which when I came, could barely support motorbike shops and a place selling car paint!
I am intrigued by @Firenze 's hint at the dark side of Mrs Doyle ...
although, and here we're back into my own family, I think you could make a pretty strong case with the East End that the problems you were dealing with were just a different set of problems to what you'd have been dealing with had it not been cleared. My grandmother was a casualty of the attitudes and conditions of the pre WW2 East End, and it haunted her up to her death in the 1980s, including periods in residential psychiatric care.
I think that's very relevant. I happen to know two white men from Zimbabwe / Rhodesia here, in their 50s and 60s. Neither is at all racist, but both are entirely undone (more or less homeless) and seem to have washed up here. I know Poles who rejoice at the end of their occupation but who are undone by the new Poland.
Where I previously lived there was a caravan park full* of Rhodies aged roughly 50-90. They work in all the shops, post offices, garages in the local area - quite interesting if you get them on the subject of their former lives as civil servants, teachers, etc.
The Poles are different again. I grew up in a town with one of the larger Polish communities - thanks to a large Free Polish Army camp in WW2, and it was interesting when the East opened up that all these relatives they'd never met piled over, and after the initial tears of joy, it was 'what have we got in common actually' - the UK Poles were in some ways more Polish than the Polish Poles, but their Polishness had been frozen in about 1940, then diluted with marrying English girls and having English children. There were a lot of Polish surnames in my class (grandchildren of the soldiers) but aside from the pickled cabbage, or the parties at the White Eagle Club, you wouldn't know they were Polish.
Here's a couple of short films from up here. What came before , and what happened a surprisingly short time after.
I don't doubt that 'before' was shit in its own kind of way, but when I arrived (not long before 'after') you didn't see old ladies out, or mothers with prams, or young kids playing. They were too scared to come outside. Unlike 'before', the shops were boarded, and cars on the street lacked wheels and windows. I wonder if it would have been different had the economy not collapsed through the 80s - certainly tower blocks are going up (again) here, but not for council tenants any more.
(Edit - x-post with Betjemaniac - I'll get back to your next, now!)
There were a lot of Polish surnames in my class (grandchildren of the soldiers) but aside from the pickled cabbage, or the parties at the White Eagle Club, you wouldn't know they were Polish.
Quite a lot at Polish school on Saturday mornings, perhaps!
Most of the guys I know are products of the next period who arrived after about 2000 - nationalists, very RC, very suspicious of the state, resourceful, and suspicious of the wealthy. Those a little younger (born after about '75?) are total yuppies! Perhaps it's always this way for those of us (well, I include myself) who find it harder to change, having adapted to a way of life which has moved on while we weren't looking.
There were a lot of Polish surnames in my class (grandchildren of the soldiers) but aside from the pickled cabbage, or the parties at the White Eagle Club, you wouldn't know they were Polish.
There were a lot of Polish surnames in my class (grandchildren of the soldiers) but aside from the pickled cabbage, or the parties at the White Eagle Club, you wouldn't know they were Polish.
What would have told you that they were Polish?
that's my point really - nothing outward or visible. So, in my quiet corner of 1980s England, very easy to look at the class/school (there was one non-white pupil in 250 kids) and assume superficially it was a monoculture. Which it wasn't. On the other hand, some of the grandparents were quite sad about that, including the ones that looked after me, because they felt that by being so integrated their grandchildren had lost something.
My fellow university students of about the same era, including a significant proportion of Polish surnames, also the product of grandparents who'd escaped the pogroms. One conversation sticks in my mind with a girl in the same hall of residence saying that no they didn't really know their family histories, because for most of their families it was better not to know. If their families were in the Warsaw Ghetto and not Jewish, there's no hope of knowing as there are no records. That includes a lot of Eastern European Romanies and other travellers.
My fellow university students of about the same era, including a significant proportion of Polish surnames, also the product of grandparents who'd escaped the pogroms. One conversation sticks in my mind with a girl in the same hall of residence saying that no they didn't really know their family histories, because for most of their families it was better not to know. If their families were in the Warsaw Ghetto and not Jewish, there's no hope of knowing as there are no records. That includes a lot of Eastern European Romanies and other travellers.
Without going into details (because it's not my story to tell) I think my wife's family would agree with that.
What's really interesting (to me) though is the extent to which through marriage I've viscerally adopted their history as my history, if that makes sense? I don't mean I claim to have relatives who died in the camps just because my wife does have such relatives, but I'm acutely aware that my daughter therefore does, and she's half of me.
It's all a bit mindblowing - as I said, aside from the Rhodesian detour, my family was totally rooted in the British Isles, and suddenly I have a compulsive need to know everything about long dead people from a country I've never visited, who suffered the most appalling fate.
Not totally convinced that's normal but I'm going with it.
I think it may be normal; after I became aware I was gay I started to be much more interested in what is now termed queer history and started to think of it as part of my history - in a way I didn't for much of my life.
You wouldn't say your in-laws are not your relatives because they are a relatives by marriage - surely your wife's relatives become in some sense your own.
You wouldn't say your in-laws are not your relatives because they are a relatives by marriage - surely your wife's relatives become in some sense your own.
I wouldn't, but I think some people might. I also think they'd be wrong but it seems like an easy way to start a fight with the wrong person so in general I'm pretty diffident!
Comments
I came across mining engineers linked to South Africa and Zimbabwe through university (there's a mining school at Imperial College), and some of the attitudes were .. different. There was guy who we'd known and rubbed along with OK while he was at university in the bar one night after graduation, boasting of his new job in, I think, South Africa. We were being polite and interested, but all melted away as he started boasting of how much he'd earn and how many servants, and how cheap they were going to be. He ended up pretty much on his own with the rest of our backs to him. (I can't remember what happened, but anyone who was still chatting to him after that was pretty much a marked man - it was Imperial 11:1 men to women, only one woman studying mining engineering, almost certainly a man.)
I think that's very relevant. I happen to know two white men from Zimbabwe / Rhodesia here, in their 50s and 60s. Neither is at all racist, but both are entirely undone (more or less homeless) and seem to have washed up here. I know Poles who rejoice at the end of their occupation but who are undone by the new Poland. I've mentioned a book which describes interviews with people faced with the evaporation of the USSR. In a much smaller way my home town in the SE is now very different - I couldn't live there - and up here, Bentleys parade in the premier shopping street which when I came, could barely support motorbike shops and a place selling car paint!
I am intrigued by @Firenze 's hint at the dark side of Mrs Doyle ...
In fairness, I'm not sure I did either
Where I previously lived there was a caravan park full* of Rhodies aged roughly 50-90. They work in all the shops, post offices, garages in the local area - quite interesting if you get them on the subject of their former lives as civil servants, teachers, etc.
The Poles are different again. I grew up in a town with one of the larger Polish communities - thanks to a large Free Polish Army camp in WW2, and it was interesting when the East opened up that all these relatives they'd never met piled over, and after the initial tears of joy, it was 'what have we got in common actually' - the UK Poles were in some ways more Polish than the Polish Poles, but their Polishness had been frozen in about 1940, then diluted with marrying English girls and having English children. There were a lot of Polish surnames in my class (grandchildren of the soldiers) but aside from the pickled cabbage, or the parties at the White Eagle Club, you wouldn't know they were Polish.
*well, double figures anyway
I don't doubt that 'before' was shit in its own kind of way, but when I arrived (not long before 'after') you didn't see old ladies out, or mothers with prams, or young kids playing. They were too scared to come outside. Unlike 'before', the shops were boarded, and cars on the street lacked wheels and windows. I wonder if it would have been different had the economy not collapsed through the 80s - certainly tower blocks are going up (again) here, but not for council tenants any more.
(Edit - x-post with Betjemaniac - I'll get back to your next, now!)
Quite a lot at Polish school on Saturday mornings, perhaps!
Most of the guys I know are products of the next period who arrived after about 2000 - nationalists, very RC, very suspicious of the state, resourceful, and suspicious of the wealthy. Those a little younger (born after about '75?) are total yuppies! Perhaps it's always this way for those of us (well, I include myself) who find it harder to change, having adapted to a way of life which has moved on while we weren't looking.
What would have told you that they were Polish?
that's my point really - nothing outward or visible. So, in my quiet corner of 1980s England, very easy to look at the class/school (there was one non-white pupil in 250 kids) and assume superficially it was a monoculture. Which it wasn't. On the other hand, some of the grandparents were quite sad about that, including the ones that looked after me, because they felt that by being so integrated their grandchildren had lost something.
Without going into details (because it's not my story to tell) I think my wife's family would agree with that.
What's really interesting (to me) though is the extent to which through marriage I've viscerally adopted their history as my history, if that makes sense? I don't mean I claim to have relatives who died in the camps just because my wife does have such relatives, but I'm acutely aware that my daughter therefore does, and she's half of me.
It's all a bit mindblowing - as I said, aside from the Rhodesian detour, my family was totally rooted in the British Isles, and suddenly I have a compulsive need to know everything about long dead people from a country I've never visited, who suffered the most appalling fate.
Not totally convinced that's normal but I'm going with it.
You wouldn't say your in-laws are not your relatives because they are a relatives by marriage - surely your wife's relatives become in some sense your own.
I wouldn't, but I think some people might. I also think they'd be wrong but it seems like an easy way to start a fight with the wrong person so in general I'm pretty diffident!