Poverty of Poverties or "Oi! Chavvie!"

For some reason I can't identify I've just realised that the defining problem of my life and my family wasn't anything I've mentioned here, it was poverty. And by poverty I don't mean not having much money, I mean growing up in a family where there was often none, nothing to buy food or pay the rent with, where my parents had to go cap in hand to relatives for loans and hand-outs, where I grew up on overspill estates in the middle of nowhere hearing people on TV and in the street disparaging "council estate types", where my dad struggled to find even low-paid work at anti-social hours, where my parents never had holidays or even socialised because they couldn't afford to. Where hard work and effort went unrewarded. I got to college but after I left college I returned to that poverty myself.

We didn't have a car - my parents know they couldn't afford to run one -  and I feel the same myself to this day.


I sometimes call myself "3rd Generation Underclass Shite", is more or less true, it's just that I don't come over as such because I'm bright, so can I probably pass for middle class on the surface.

But the exclusion and alienation and sense of worthlessness that goes with knowing that one is powerless and looked down on is grinding and dispiriting, and one is looked down on.

So much of what I feel, so much of my sense of inadequacy and inevitable failure comes back to this strong sense of powerlessness and worthlessness and enforced lack of opportunity and experience and expectation, a sense that I've lost before I even enter the race. I used to have a friend, Shirley, who was black, from Jamaican parentage (she got married, moved to the States, and we lost touch) and we once discussed how hard it is to attempt anything when you feel every hand is turned against you  I remember saying that poor whites get a similar bad deal to black people, it just isn't so obvious, and the similarity goes far deeper than most might realised, in that the rural poor in this country were effectively enslaved during and after the enclosures, when they were driven off the land and forced to sell themselves into indenture just to survive.

But that's a digression.

I'm just noting that a lot of my problems came from being born into and having grown up in actual poverty, like and amongst the people who now get called Chavs, and the diminished ways of thinking and looking at the world and myself remain with me.