East End Review

Category: BOOKS

  • Hard times in Hackney as economic slump takes toll

    Author and Guardian journalist Tom Clark
    Author and Guardian journalist Tom Clark

    “I have to get this in… I like Hackney. It’s got a lot going for it.”

    It’s an interjection begging for a caveat, as Tom Clark, a leader writer for the Guardian, finishes up a detailed analysis of precisely how the Great Recession of 2008 has manifested itself in his home borough.

    While the relatively peaceful coexistence of cultures here may be praiseworthy, this is no egalitarian utopia.

    “Hackney really does make the point about a divided society very powerfully, doesn’t it?” says Clark.

    “You’ve got huge stocks of social housing, you’ve got a lot of recent immigration of people who are on very low pay, people on benefits and people who’ve been living in the same house for years and years and then they find out their house is worth £1 million plus – there are very different types of citizens in Hackney.”

    And this had never been more clear than in observing the varied experiences of the recession here, and our attempts to eke our way out of it, as illustrated by Clark’s book Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump.

    It’s not a book about Hackney, and even London only gets a handful of mentions.

    But the borough, Clark’s home for the past decade, provided endless case studies for his far-reaching analysis of the symptoms of recession in Britain and the United States during their darkest economic moments: the Great Recession of 2008 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

    In attempting to recover from this most recent slump, the two superpowers took very different approaches: Britain with austerity, the United States with a stimulus package.

    And in the latter, Clark points out that for all its irresistible comparisons, likening our Great Recession to the Great Depression is only somewhat useful.

    True, in both cases the bankers were to blame, with the concealment of debt via “financial wizardry” wielding disastrous global consequences.

    But when it comes to sharing the doom, and sharing the recovery in these two “rich but unequal societies”, it’s not like back then.

    That sweeping, universal fall of the Great Depression immortalised by Orwell here at home in The Road to Wigan Pier and by Steinbeck across the pond, sets it widely apart from from the varied experiences of The Great Recession – the one that displays itself, Clark says, in Hackney as well as anywhere, compounded further by two exceptional events: the 2011 riots whose “flaming heart” lay at the “grimy asphalt intersection of Mare Street and Amhurst Road”. And after that, the 2012 Summer Olympics.

    The year the riots came to Hackney, Hackney’s dole queue as a share of the working age population had risen from 6.5 per cent in spring 2008, to 10.8 per cent. “Unemployment was peaking – at that point if you were young and you were black you were more likely to be unemployed than to be working and living on very inadequate benefits,” says Clark.

    But far more visible on the streets of Hackney are the signals of ever-growing prosperity: the endless opportunities to spend money, and house prices rising faster than anywhere except in Kensington and Westminster.

    Clark’s research shows that the slump hit Hackney’s black population harder than its white population, with a higher proportion of Hackney’s black and ethnic minority populations claiming job seekers’ allowance, and for longer (32 per cent of JSA claims lasted longer than a year towards the end of the slump, in 2013, compared to 27 per cent across London).

    While the Olympic legacy is a target for debate about who’s making use of the pool and the velopark two years on, Clark credits it with creating jobs that “helped Hackney turn a corner ahead of the rest of the country.”

    Even for those worst hit by the recession things are improving. The economy has grown 3 per cent in the past year. But where unemployment figures have improved, zero hours contracts and low pay continue to be hidden, unmeasurable culprits. “Where unemployment didn’t fall, quality work did,” says Clark.

    “But if you go around the more prosperous streets” Clark adds, it’s ‘recession? What recession?’”

    Look around, it’s all there.

    Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath is published by Yale University Press, RRP: £18.99. ISBN: 9780300203776.

  • Masters of the Airwaves: The Rise and Rise of Underground Radio – review

    Patrick Vernon and Trevor Nelson
    Patrick Vernon and Trevor Nelson

    The ‘VJ’ in Dave VJ stands for ‘vinyl junkie’, and the book he has compiled with Lindsay Wesker collects the stories of people addicted to music and records in the 1980s – soul, RnB, early hip hop and rap. At its heart are the pirate radio stations which were for almost everyone the principal way they could listen to the music they loved – most prominent is Kiss FM, where Wesker and VJ met and which started as a pirate station in 1985.

    Masters of the Airwaves is a collection of interviews with almost everyone who was active in some way in the 1980s black music scene in the UK, including artists, DJs, journalists, promoters and record company people. VJ and Wesker, concerned that “a big part of the UK’s radio music history could be completely passed over if someone didn’t document it”, contacted everyone they could think of from the scene who was still alive with a basic questionnaire: who are you, what did you do, what’s happening now – tell us your story. The book prints their responses word for word.

    The stories are good: the constant danger of on-air electric shocks from the wires running all round the leaky office Kiss FM used as its broadcast HQ in the early days; producers who slept in their studios, with breakfast show presenters stepping over their bosses’ ‘guests’ from the night before; vanished jobs like being a ‘dinker’ (the person who punches holes in records for juke-boxes); DJs who spent the night on rooftops armed with baseball bats in case rivals attacked their station’s aerial to steal its slice of frequency; malfunctioning sound desks and advice from Dave VJ as to what to do if this happens: “PRESS EVERY BUTTON in the vicinity of the turntables AND PRAY!”.

    Bound in a cover the size and shape of a vinyl record and filled with many beautiful photos of album sleeves and eighties fashion, Masters of the Airwaves is something of a collector’s item. Its format of disjointed detail, passionately set-down, isn’t for beginners, though there are a few primers, such as the list of “the big tunes of 1986” or “essential British black music purchases” – to bring the story into the modern era, those are two great Spotify playlists right there.

    Masters of the Airwaves: The Rise & Rise of Underground Radio is compiled and written by Dave VJ and Lindsay Wesker, edited by Patrice Lawrence and published by Every Generation Media. RRP: £30. ISBN 9780955106880

     

  • Interview: ‘It’s much easier to build resentment on the care system than on your parents’

    Jenny Molloy (left) with her daughter (right) and granddaughter (centre). Photograph courtesy of Jenny Molloy
    Jenny Molloy (left) with her daughter (right) and granddaughter (centre). Photograph courtesy of Jenny Molloy

    “Most kids in care do want to write their story,” says Jenny Molloy, author of Hackney Child. “I think it’s because when you’re in care everything is written about you, you’re not really allowed to read any of it and you’ve got no control.”

    It’s Saturday afternoon. Over the crackling phone line Jenny sounds bright, cheerful and very much in control. Since the publication of the first part of her memoir, which recounts in stark detail a childhood wracked by poverty and neglect, life has changed dramatically for the former project manager.

    As well as enjoying a spell in the Sunday Times Bestseller List, the book is on sale in Tesco, Smiths and Waterstones, and has proved a popular choice with Amazon shoppers. With such success Jenny has found herself somewhat in demand.

    “I was so inundated with requests from social workers and ministers and all sorts of people to come and help them improve the care system that I gave up my job,” she says. “Now I’m a consultant in the care world.”

    Over the past few months, she has been working with both the children’s minister’s office and Ofsted, sharing her considerable expertise to help support vulnerable children.

    It would be nigh on impossible to question her suitability for the role. At just nine years old she arrived at Stoke Newington Police Station with her two younger brothers, demanding to see their social worker. She had decided it was no longer safe to live at home. Jenny spent much of the remainder of her childhood in care.

    This bold and courageous move took place the morning after a mob of angry neighbours attacked their family home with missiles and graffiti, in response to the news that Jenny’s mother had been working as a prostitute. What the group did not seem to know was that the children were home alone at the time.

    “It’s funny, we were never asked about that night the whole time that we were in care. It was never resolved in any of us really,” she explains.

    While it seems absurd that such a severe trauma should be left untouched, Jenny is reluctant to criticise the care she received. In fact she is remarkably positive about a system in which she found warmth, comfort and solace.

    “I’ve had such serious backlash from so many people about me saying the care system was a positive thing for me,” she says.

    “The people that put round the bad stories are generally people who’ve either lost their kids or had a real terrible time, but a lot of the terrible times are to do with your childhood rather than being in care, if that makes sense. You know, you confuse the two and it’s much easier to build resentment on the care system than it is on your parents.”

    Jenny’s relationship with her own parents is complex. Contrary to what we might expect from this kind of story, there was always love, particularly from her alcoholic father, who died a few years ago.

    “With my dad, he constantly tried,” she explains. “There was never a point that my dad gave up trying to see us kids and trying to show us in his own way that he loved us. But his addiction was so serious.”

    As an adult Jenny has had the chance to browse her social services files, keen to learn about her history and get to grips with the story over which she had no control. It was in these documents that she learnt both her parents had been brought up in care, themselves the victims of terrible neglect. This commonality has helped her on the road to forgiveness.

    “They had hidden their own childhoods and all that shame and guilt and abandonment that was going on within them,” she says. “They never had any joy in their lives that I saw.”

    Despite the empathy she now feels, Jenny has decided not to see her mother anymore and does not know if she has read or is even aware of the book.

    Keeping care a secret is something to which the author can strongly relate. She originally wrote Hackney Child under the pseudonym Hope Daniels – on the suggestion of a social worker with whom she is still in touch.

    “The reason why I had a pen name was because I was never actually going to be doing any of this, no one was ever going to know I was behind Hackney Child,” she says. “I’d kept it a secret for all of my adult life from the majority of people I knew, including my kids.”

    But in writing the book, she has found the confidence to identify herself as a care leaver.

    “The thing that I learnt was that actually I’m all right. I’m not that kind of horrible person – I’m an all right person. I’m caring, I’m quite generous, I’m empathetic – all the things that the social workers were to me I’ve carried into adulthood. I would never have been able to describe those sorts of assets to you before the book.”

    Jenny explains that she began the book having entered recovery for alcohol addiction five years ago. It was there that she started to process what had happened to her as a child and embarked on the therapeutic journey of writing about her life. What she has produced as a result is honest, unpretentious and shocking.

    The often-horrifying memories on which she draws are interspersed with rare but poignant moments of gentle joy. She reflects on the kindness she found in the Hackney community of the late seventies and early eighties.

    “I remember having different people that I could go to at all different times, whether it was a lovely, kind person in the library up Church Street or someone in the fire station club. It didn’t matter where we went, we always had adults that were kind to us, that knew us, that took the time to get to know us.”

    But returning to Hackney has proved difficult. Jenny moved away soon after leaving care to start afresh and has since struggled with the place where she grew up.

    “It’s almost like that life happened to someone else. Thankfully, my life now is so far removed from any connection to our childhood that it really does feel like a different world.

    “When I go back to Hackney, in particular Stoke Newington, anywhere I look there are memories of my parents, of things that happened,” she explains. “But it’s a really complex feeling because when I go back there I feel like I’m home, but then I don’t want to be there.”

    Writing Hackney Child seems to have marked a turning point in this already successful care leaver’s life.

    “I’ve found acceptance, I’ve found forgiveness,” she says. “I’ve found all of these things that I never even considered before. I just thought that was my life – I’ve got all these horrible things from it and I’ve just got to accept that my life is going to be a little bit crap, but actually it’s not.”

    Hackney Child is published by Simon & Schuster UK. RRP: £6.99. ISBN: 9781471129834. Jenny’s next book is due to be published in July.

  • Columbia Road: A Strange Kind of Paradise – review

    Harry Young, alias Diamond Lil, stands at the centre of photograph taken on VE Day 8 May 1945 on Columbia Road. From left kneeling; Gladys Herd, Mrs Stephens, Isabella Wilkinson, Clara Hoare, Nell Lloyd, Diamond Lil, Isabella Lloyd, Alice Wilkinson. Photograph:
    Harry Young, alias Diamond Lil, stands at the centre of photograph taken on VE Day 8 May 1945 on Columbia Road. From left kneeling; Gladys Herd, Mrs Stephens, Isabella Wilkinson, Clara Hoare, Nell Lloyd, Diamond Lil, Isabella Lloyd, Alice Wilkinson. Photograph: Marie Stephens

    Linda Wilkinson is an East Ender born and bred and a true Renaissance woman.

    A human rights activist, she spent 30 years working full-time as a research scientist before penning a play about Diamond Lil (based on the true story of an East End drag queen whose real name was Harry Young) as well as several books.

    ‘Lil’ crops up in Columbia Road: A Strange Kind of Paradise. She is pictured showing some leg amid of a crowd of women celebrating VE Day in 1945.

    “What did people make of it?” the author writes. “It seems nobody was much bothered. As a child I was eight before I learned Lil was a bloke and then only because one of the boys at school told me.”

    Salt-of-the-earth inhabitants of the East End were, and probably still are, much more tolerant than they are given credit for. In Columbia Road this easy-going mindset helped foster the bohemian trappings the street displays today.

    Part memoir, part quirky, unclichéd history, this self-published book is a cornucopia of historical anecdotes, containing photographs and reminiscences from the author’s fellow Columbia Road natives.

    The roots of the street’s famous flower market are shrouded in mystery, though records show it was already in existence in the 1800s.

    Precisely when and why it sprouted remains a matter of debate as poverty-stricken East Enders were not archetypal bloom-fanciers, though Wilkinson cites Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew’s observation that pretty plants are comforting to people who spend long hours labouring indoors.

    What is clear is there is more to Columbia Road than flowers. Over the decades it has played host to silk weavers, body-snatchers, child murderers and Huguenot and Jewish refugees.

    It was a focus of the efforts of social reformers and philanthropists like Angela Burdett-Coutts and was part of the route from Essex into London travelled by thousands of farm workers leading their livestock to the slaughter.

    For much of its history Columbia Road hardly smelt of roses; close-by there was in Dickens’s time a vast and stinking ‘dung heap’.

    But despite its flaws the area has always inspired great loyalty among its residents.

    It is indeed a strange kind of paradise.

    Columbia Road: A Strange Kind of Paradise is published by Linda Wilkinson. ISBN: 9780957329423. RRP: £12.99