The obligatory and utterly depressing riots that occur these days after a criminal act by a foreign person are usually accompanied by all manner of posters and banners. ‘Protect Are Children’, that kind of thing. Of course, I understand people’s anger when innocent people are attacked, injured and even murdered – hell, I feel it myself – but the violent riots where police are attacked and innocent people’s homes are torched I cannot understand nor condone. One slogan I see more than any other is ‘I Want My Country Back’ and I always think to myself, do I? Really?
Perhaps my rose-tinted glasses are broken but the country I grew up in was not one that I’d like to come back to. I don’t apologise for repeating myself but my country was a dark, depressing place to be. My lone parent mother brought me up in poverty, going without food so I didn’t have to. We had a coal fire in the downstairs living room and no heating anywhere else. During the winter, we had ice on the inside of our windows, including our bedrooms. Holidays meant a summer in Rotterdam, paid for by my Dutch grandmother, where we made our lack of entertainment. We never ate out, we went on holiday in the UK once, to the best of my knowledge, and that was in a small unheated caravan in West Bay, Dorset with three grandparents, my mum and me and no cooking, washing and toilet facilities.
My grandparents lived an even more impoverished life, with an outside toilet and no bathroom at all, something I never thought of as odd until I was an adult. They had absolutely nothing, bar a tiny crackling black and white television. Luxury was a pikelet on the end of a fork, cooked over their coal fire. At least grandad had a car, a tiny little Triumph Herald which he kept in a garage several streets away, a garage that became his man cave. I mention all this not to ask for sympathy, or to wallow in a pool of self-pity – although I have done my fair share of that throughout my life – but to say that the country of my childhood and certainly before my childhood was not one I would want back under any circumstances.
There people who spend their lives yearning for a past that never happened. As if there were never burglars and paedophiles and how everyone looked after everyone else and no one felt the need to lock their doors. In our case, that might have been the case since we didn’t own anything remotely of value but I have the feeling that if we had left the door unlocked all day the result would have been little different than it would be today.
Obviously, people are concerned about the rise of technology and the arrival of the internet and of course there are issues that they have created. We don’t want children watching sex and violence on their portable telephones and all the bad things that have come along with technology but I genuinely feel my life is far better with the coming of the internet and products from companies like Apple. I love the fact that so much of my life is immediately available at my command, whether that’s my bank, the weather forecast or contact with my family, not to mention access to pretty well all the information I should ever need.
Even today we are in the stone age of technology. The Apple iPhone, my device of choice, has only been in existence for 19 years, yet it feels as if it’s been around forever. My mum died in 1999, eight years before the iPhone came along. I’ll bet her later years, spend in a care home, would have been greatly enhanced by a mobile phone enabling her to have contact with the outside world. It would have been easier for me to have contacted her, too, rather than having to rely on care home staff to pass on messages or for me to have to wait until I got home before being able to here recorded messages on an answerphone. I’d have found out she died a long time before I actually did. Life is so much easier now.
These days, I can get from A to B much easier because I can drive, something no one in my family except my grandfather could do. We can even go abroad on holiday. We can afford decent quality, healthy food, rather than the cheap cast-offs my mum was able to cadge from butcher and grocery shops. Beyond tinned peas, I don’t remember eating any other vegetables until I left school and started to bring money into the house. Again, this is not self-pity: it’s facts.
Contrary to appearances, I am not totally stupid. I know really that ‘Protect Are Children’ and ‘I Want My Country Back’ have everything to do with Johnny Foreigner than sepia-stained nostalgia for a brighter day that never happened, Johnny Foreigners like my family of migrants coming over, infecting English purity, no doubt, and indeed me, myself, I, with my circa 17% English DNA. But I use a broad brush to paint the image of Englishness and/or Britishness and I include my own ancestors, whose roots were Norwegian and Dutch, as being as English/British as anyone else. And the truth is that they struggled, too, fighting their way through and eventually out of poverty by dint of their hard work, of playing by the rules of their adopted homeland and claiming not a penny of state benefits (not that benefits existed for people like them in those days, when poverty was far more socially acceptable).
We can do much better than do dwell upon this fake and entirely bogus nostalgia and recognise, if we open our eyes, that in many ways this is a far better world than our forefathers and mothers were brought up in. I wouldn’t want to go back to those days for all the tea in China and everywhere else for that matter.
The picture of the top is the tribute to Mustad Nails in Portishead, the factory where a bunch of migrants came over here from Norway to start up a factory. The migrants were my family.
