Young blood

One evening in February I was on my way home from work when I saw a group of people heading towards me.

Faced with potential danger I behave as though I am 6' tall rather than the 5'3" I actually reach and my fantasy Dobermans are panting at my side, giving an outward show of respect to those involved unless the mood changes. I do not speed up and sometimes even slow down but without hesitating or giving ground. In this way I moved through a group of young males, ranging in age from late teens to a couple who could not have been older than eight years old. That shocked me and I risked looking at them as I passed. It was cold, dark and past 8pm on a week day. I wondered if their parents knew where they were or even cared. They certainly weren't dressed for the weather.

"Am I goin' to hear a smash, Ash?!" one of them called out, as they swarmed around a bus shelter. But it was left unscathed as they moved up the street like a shoal of fish, suburban piranhas. It occurred to me that, in their own way, the older members of that group were caring for the youngest and however much I disapproved of their method, they were filling the gap left by parents, often mothers, unwilling or unable to handle the children they have bred.

Six months later I can remember the sudden urge I had to take them all home, to scrape enough money together for a pizza - to share if not to nourish - and be mother. That pang was a strange and unfamiliar feeling, I am not the maternal type, but for a few moments I felt their need so deeply that it made a dent in the cynical shell that protects me from daft notions like that. I suspect that I am on my own with this sense of concern, especially after recent events.

The rioting, looting mobs that filled our screens for two days have led to all the usual calls for greater parental discipline, harsher police tactics and support for deprived areas. I find that I am tired of hearing them, probably because I've heard it all before so many times. Perhaps I am old enough now to recognise that there is no single solution, that any effective repair to the confidence of business owners and residents will be haphazard and largely accidental. There seems to be a growing acceptance that it will take a change in mindset rather than funding to fix things and it is tragic that it has taken so long for this to sink in.

Many are shocked, as I was, that children whose ages must be in single figures were not safe in their homes, watching the chaos on television. Instead they were wandering through the debris of ruined shops, following the example of their older friends and taking the leftovers. Some were even treated as porters, their innocent arms filled with loot by adults too stupid to realise that every move was being recorded on CCTV.

Loving parents who hang on each childish word, lavish time on home cooked meals and lose sleep over unsatisfactory school reports might as well be from another planet to those who raised these tiny looters. My lip used to curl at the mere thought of the selfish lazy creatures who have helped shape our future citizens but scorn has been replaced by a sense of fear that there are so many of them.

A former colleague became pregnant at sixteen by a man whose lack of interest in his son was a regular topic of our largely one sided conversations. I became a near expert on her son’s failings, including his own poor record as a father. Having set the example for his spending habits through her own need for instant gratification she spent hours on her phone berating him about it. Last year I was trapped in a waiting room with several others listening to another woman’s very similar, loud conversations, full of "I" and "me", on her mobile as she described at some length the hard time she was having.

The call that left the greatest impression on me was the one she made to her son. She complained that he wasn't with her, that he had spent the weekend "smoking", that he had failed in every way imaginable, yet when she ended the call and looked around at us she smiled, satisfied that she had such an audience for her woes, oblivious to our vinegary contempt. What a martyr. I could imagine the teenager on the other end, for whom humiliation by stranger was probably a common event, switching off for its duration, almost but never quite numb to the sarcasm pouring from her lips.

I was an adult before mobiles became common but my mother bitched about me to other people, in front of me, in the same selfish cathartic way and I admit that a degree of fellow feeling helps me overlook his use of cannabis. My mother's constant sarcasm cut deep and had a long term, negative impact so I wonder how anyone who does not have enough self confidence to know that they are good at some things could cope under such a negative barrage. Teachers report that very young children now begin school unable to recognise and respond to their own names because their carers rarely speak directly to them except to shout, too busy putting the world to rights on their phones.

To me it is no coincidence that terms such as “bruv” and “bro” are used by young men. When the people that society expects us to respect first and most, our parents, do nothing to deserve it, it is hardly surprising that a peer group or gang becomes the most readily available substitute family. If the dominant woman in your life treats you with contempt whilst behaving in a contemptible manner it is unlikely that you will regard others of her gender as people you want to commit to for life. It becomes inevitable that those who these children choose to prove themselves to are friends who really will follow through, with a beating or even a knife, if they fail to deliver, will teach them shame and pride in a way that their parents never could. It is the closest that many will get to the even handed discipline we all have a right to.

Do not mistake my words for a rant about single mothers because parents become “single“ for all sorts of reasons. An elderly neighbour never tired of telling me of the beloved gentle woman, a war widow, who raised her by herself with very little financial assistance from the government in a way that set a positive pattern for three more generations. The women who typify the modern negative stereotype of the "single mother" are now grandmothers to children who may well turn out just like their parents, raised in the 1980's when conspicuous consumption was a near religion, a measure of self worth.

This is not just about the benefits culture. I point a steady and unforgiving finger at parents who were so keen to achieve their career goals that they replaced love, affection and a guiding hand with all the material goods their earnings could buy. Is it any surprise then, that their children fill the gap left by a lack of nurturing with stuff they don't need when they need stuff they don't want, like education and jobs? To them, greed is still good. As their offspring hurt themselves kicking in shop windows, bleeding on pavements across the UK, the cry went up: “Where are their parents?!” They were watching them in HD, on televisions they may have actually paid for.

Am I the only one to see the irony in the appeal made by David Lammy MP to network providers to shut down the SMS system through which many of these riots seem to have been organised? Thefts were being carried out by those who can afford a Blackberry, using communications that earlier this year were seen as essential to the success of the Arab Spring. To some these looters are revolutionary heroes. The rioters have been characterised as disaffected youths from underprivileged backgrounds but it was predictable that those already convicted include a number who do not lack for money. The emotional famine that their entire peer group, rich and poor, has suffered for a generation or more is only now becoming apparent. Unfortunately the remedy for this sickness is something that money can’t buy.

Slobs, snobs and hypocrites

“The feckless unemployed will be forced to take part in a punishing U.S.-style ‘workfare’ scheme involving gardening, clearing litter and other menial tasks for just £1 an hour in a new crackdown on scroungers."
"£1 an hour to clear rubbish…new IDS blitz on the workshy” Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday, 7/11/2010

I make a point of checking for little grey yellow blobs and smears in a particular men’s toilet that I have cleaned for the last three years.

Some will know what I’m talking about. For the less switched, on, I am referring to phlegm. The sort you find up your nose. Cleaning the urinals, I can imagine the snot artist digging away at the contents of his nostrils as he empties his bladder, flicking his finds at the porcelain where they cling and harden until I turn up to clean it off. It is unlikely that, having parked his best friend, he washes his hands. So the same finger that has been busy up his nose travels back to the office with its nasty little payload of germs, onto the door handle, the light switch (which he has sometimes embellished with his trophies), the office fruit bowl, that open bag of crisps left unguarded on a desk and eventually to a keyboard shared by any number of his colleagues. All unaware of what they are being exposed to.

This may be the same person who complained because he found some leaves under his car. Obliged to pay the maintenance company even more that year he was really annoyed to see any litter there at all. He called the company and the company called me - it is usually me - to find out what had gone wrong. Nothing, it turned out. Fallen leaves in an outdoor car park are a consequence of having trees around you in autumn. But because this man is hard to please and contracts are hard to come by I was asked politely but firmly to get to work half an hour earlier than usual to sweep away the leaves. I left our dying cat on his own for the twenty minutes until my partner got home from work, and spent money on a fare that I had been saving by walking the three miles to work. And thought about what I would do to the person in question if our beloved moggy died on his own in the meantime.

Personally I don’t have a problem being seen sweeping up litter outside a building but I have found that it has a “Princess and the Pea” effect on colleagues. You’d be surprised at the number of royalty employed in the cleaning industry. I can always tell because when it dawns on them that I wasn’t kidding about clearing litter from the entrance they start to make excuses or just don’t do it. I am now sharing the job with the fifth person in three years. I thought things were going to be better this time until I realised that my new colleague did not want to be seen wearing an overall unless she is cleaning the toilets. Someone might mistake her for a cleaner.

Every time this happens I find myself planning unspeakable fates for the magistrates and judges who use work like this to punish celebrities. There have been a number of Naomi Campbell moments over the last three years as adult women morphed into sulky teenagers for the time it took them to push a brush around a five metre wide space. It doesn’t help that the smokers in the building ignore the “No Smoking” sign at the entrance and drop their cigarette ends there. At least we no longer have to empty out the wall mounted ashtray. I could never hold my breath for long enough to avoid a lungful of the ash that it held and I would stink of it afterwards.

The horrors of the job now lurk indoors, in the toilets. Torn between working quickly to get out of there as soon as possible and trying not to cause splashes, I can’t always avoid being hit on the face by the contents of the bowl. It isn’t the excrement, blood, urine, vomit or mucus that worry me. The boss refers to toilet cleaner as “toilet acid” for a reason.

I sometimes wonder if the people who work in that building realise just how much I know about their guts. The day will come when, having been told yet again that the toilets are not flushing properly, I will stand in the doorway of an office and explain to the occupants that the consumption of junk food/fizzy drinks/eating too quickly/failing to chew results in floaters. I may throw in the fact that by failing to wash their hands after using the toilet they could be treating their colleagues to diarrhoea or flu, that an outbreak of E. coli could, at best, close down their business for weeks. At worst it could kill them. It amazes me that, on a planet where so many people die for the lack of clean drinking water, well educated people fail to use what is freely available to them to wash their hands.

However when I recall the gifts they have left for me in those cubicles I suspect that some of them were raised in a barn before they hit university. Special mention goes to the woman who must have leaned forward during a bowel movement, depositing a broad pile of excrement on the ledge of the toilet bowl, under the seat. By the time I arrived this had hardened and it took me over half an hour to soak it off. Thanks for that, princess. People are particularly thoughtless when it comes to rubbish. A dagger-like piece of broken glass, coated in who knows what, pierced a bag and scored a deep scratch through denim and into my calf when I worked as a caretaker.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t wear couture for the job in fact, even when they have been washed, the worn jeans, tops and fleeces are stored away from the smarter clothes. Count yourself lucky if you wear nice clothes to work. I look like a rough sleeper which may be why I am sometimes spoken to as though I have serious learning difficulties. The worst snobs are not the bosses. It tends to be the underlings who’ve had a hard day that pass on the misery. They look up to their boss because he/she pays them. They look down on me because I clean the office. I know my place.

It’s almost funny that those who have been on benefit for a long time are being threatened with a similar experience at £1 an hour. At £6 an hour (the Mayor of London regards £7.85 per hour as the living wage for my area) it is already a punishment. I don’t know if the proprietors of cleaning companies are rubbing their hands at the prospect of having so many contracts and employees available to them at a discount but I do know that the value of my work has risen over the last three years, even if my pay has not. They are charging even more for the same services and it shows in the way that every failing is now noted and reported. I don’t blame them for asking that they get what they pay for. I just wish they’d realise that I haven’t gained from the increase.

Few seem to understand what life would be like if there was no one to sweep and clean. The kinder ones say things like “I don’t know how you stand it. I couldn’t do it.” But they don’t seem inclined to pay me more for doing it. On the occasions when a colleague failed to turn up for work in an office that my company dealt with there was a degree of panic as they tried to replace a rubbish bag without breaking a fingernail. The sort of fingernail that would pierce the latex gloves I use when fishing out a floater that refuses to be flushed away. Some of them treat you as if you aren’t there which usually brings out the worst in me. Doing my own work as well as that of an unreliable colleague one evening I heard one executive ask another if “they” had shown up yet. “They will get there when they are ready because they only have one pair of hands!” I snapped. I think his mother must have been the last person to have spoken to him in that way because a) I got away with it and b) he left looking rather sheepish. “They” is actually an improvement on “the girl”. Especially as “the girl” is forty-five years old.

The problem I’ve got is that I am lucky to have this part-time work. I need the sort of job where I am left largely to my own devices, away from crowds, because I have panic attacks and suffer from agoraphobia. That makes it hard to find anything better paid that makes use of my skills. I find it irritating that some people think I’ve ended up as a cleaner because I spent my time at school looking out of the window. For this I wrote essays.

I am concerned that those obliged to take part in a “workfare” scheme may find that once involved in unskilled work it is hard to get clear of it. Cleaners in particular find it difficult to find anything other than part-time work, which means they probably won’t notch up National Insurance payments or get sick pay. To make any significant money they have to get several jobs which means spending money on fares and working unsociable hours. There are few opportunities for promotion. Some employers are very cynical about the standard of work and I get angry about the poor reputation that goes ahead of me because some cleaners are so lazy and unreliable. But when you think about how little we are paid for what we are expected to do it isn’t surprising.

The consequence of the low pay and stigma associated with menial work is that it will nearly always be done by the desperate, usually immigrants. Virtually everyone I have come across lately sweeping up litter has belonged in this category. They have travelled halfway around the world only to have others look down on them yet they are grateful for the money. I grew up in tied accommodation in a very affluent part of London, a few doors from a Middle Eastern family who did not let the fact that they lived in a small mews house stop them from having a live-in maid. This qualified teacher had left her child in the Philippines to sleep on a kitchen floor in Knightsbridge and sent all her earnings home. At the time her government took a cut of the money earned by its émigrés.

For a while I cleaned a flat for a Sudanese family whose relative brought her maid with her when she visited. This woman, who was of African rather than Arab descent, never spoke, raised her eyes or looked at anyone directly. Both her employer and mine reminded me of spoilt cats. I once pushed the beds apart in the children’s bedroom and found an upturned plate of food on the floor. She couldn’t be bothered to check if her sons had eaten or to clean up after them, leaving them in front of the television with their meal.

I had hoped to find something better within months of getting my present job but I’m still there. At the moment it is just about worth it but the proposed increase in fares will mean that I am earning money simply to pay the fares. As it is I only use public transport to travel to work and walk for an hour to get home. This costs me a round a tenth of what I earn. I did walk both ways for a while but it almost finished me off. A six mile round trip with a stop to clean fourteen sinks, eleven toilets, six urinals, wash eight floors and/or vacuum and dust a six storey building. I‘m not that good. The really desperate may have to be.

“Our changes will make work pay and create the biggest package of back-to-work support ever seen. Asking someone who has been out of work for a long time to get involved in a programme of work to boost their self esteem is not a recipe for despair, but a way to repair their shattered lives.”
Iain Duncan Smith