In between writing for other people on their projects - ie getting employed to adapt a book into a screenplay, or write an article for a newspaper - I'm working on a bunch of my own stuff right now. One of them is very close to my heart, as it's all about class, politics and unusual friendships.
I'm a 'genuine' product of a meritocracy. My grandfather on my Dad's side was a lorry driver in Liverpool, and my maternal granddad was some engineering factory worker type thing. My mum was a nurse after going to Secondary Modern. My dad, who lived in a two-up, two-down with three sisters and his mum (his father died when he was young - dodgy heart after being gassed aged 14 in the trenches in WW1) - won a scholarship to grammar school, and from there went to Liverpool University to study medicine.
Dad became a doctor and moved to North Wales for a job with his three kids, and when my twin sister and I were born, the family moved from a
house which was too small to accommodate seven, to a beautiful, rambling old vicarage in a tiny little village called
Cilcain. I grew up straddling two worlds though - because while my Dad's occupation and his decent salary meant we had risen to Middle Class, we were not the same as the other doctors' and dentists' kids, whose parents were born into the class my parents had
worked their way into. We had a firm foot in that 'other' space: we were English in Wales, we were northern, we were not rich, we were not privately educated, we were not - and could never be - 'posh'.
As the fourth child, I was the first kid in the family to go to 'proper' university. Actually, my older sister and I went at the same time, when she returned to Liverpool, aged 31, as a mature student to study dentistry. We all had our degrees paid for by the government, and receive maintenance grants for living costs from the county council because we were a large family, and because Dad had retired early due to ill health, as a consequence of which we lost our home. I went from a comp school called
Mold Alun to an
all girls college in
Cambridge.
And I suppose it's then that difference really kicked in.
I loved Cambridge and still do, but what happened to me there and afterwards is complex. People from my background rarely go to Cambridge. If they're comp-school educated, they're probably
born southern middle class and went to a good comp in a good area - which is radically different to northern middle class risen from working class. What happened to me in Cambridge was that I became hugely aware that money and family and class were just as important as intelligence, and talent, and skill. I got a chip on my shoulder because I didn't have money and class, but the chip meant I had to swallow a little ball of unfairness all day long. Inequality. Life's fucking unfair. I never played the class card, despite the fact I had a bunch of jobs all through university and during the holidays, which made life quite difficult at times. You're hanging with a bunch of people who
do not know what it is to be poor, and yet you don't eat at
formal halls because you can't afford it on your college bill, you don't even eat in the college canteen because it's too expensive. You don't buy new clothes and you support your smoking habit by cadging off richer friends. You never go to a
May Ball because it's a hundred quid plus a ticket, and even if you got a ticket you couldn't afford a dress and the shoes, you work in
a pub three nights a week, and you work in the college kitchens serving your peers as it gives you discounted rent.
But in the eyes of those you left in Mold Alun, you already moved up a class. In the eyes of the people you're hanging out with, you're a clever kid with a funny accent who never has any money and is different. Not bad, not wrong, just different.
I never played the class card because it's not really something I think I should play. I have everything they have, apart from money, a family home in London, and connections. I didn't have the posh private school, but I still went to a good university and got a first. I can get all the rest myself. But trying to get that has sometimes nearly killed me. Being completely self-sufficient has nearly killed me. And I've wept and wept and wept over someone saying something as simple to me as: "Why don't you just eat?" when I've been too poor to even afford a 2 dollar bagel. I've cried over people saying, "Well I don't understand why you had to move to New York. Why did you feel you were entitled to work there just because you had a Cambridge degree?"
Why am I entitled to be a writer, to live in New York and California, to have a dream and to get that dream, when thousands of people aren't? Because I'd turned into a toff?
I never really figured it out in my head, until I started working on my screenplay about class. I hung out with very rich Conservatives and I schmoozed with staunch Socialists, miners, Labour party insiders, and questioned them. I'm not a Socialist and I don't believe in it. But after I spent a day in Parliament with
Dennis Skinner last week - a mad, lovely, wonderful man who I admire and have so much affection for - it hit me. Me, trying to clamber and hold on for dear life to my poncey life as a writer, jetting all over the world, losing my car, losing my apartment, never having security, biting hard on pride to borrow money and humiliate myself on a regular basis, suffering from mini-breakdowns every two years as a result - my idea of being left wing, my idea of liberalism, my idea, I suppose, of socialism, is that what 'they' have through birth, I can, should, and will, have - by hard work. We already start off the same: with a mind and a body. Yes, some are disabled, some are stupid, some are clever, some rich. But we come into this world the same way: with nothing. We go out the same way. It never occurred to me how far I'd come until I sat and spoke to Dennis by the Thames in the sun that afternoon, and he said to me, "You went to Cambridge? With your background? You must be clever."
I spoke to my old A-level Politics teacher a little about it, and he talked about the difficulties of working in a comp school like mine - teachers are part social workers, part guidance counsellors. We spoke about the problems of battling to get bright kids into Oxbridge - kids who'd never had the luxuries of Eton, and the infallible, bright, burning confidence instilled in them by money, birth, connections and private school.
Despite the fact I despise both Conservative and Labour policies, when dealing with people like Jonathan Aitken and Dennis Skinner, I don't bring that to the table. They're just people to me. People from radically different sides of the political spectrum that I can talk to as equals because I know, after my time at Cambridge, to pass the port to the left, and ask for a top-up with my distinctly northern vowels.
All the miners I spoke to, including Dennis, said we shared something. We knew what it was to lack a safety net, and to stare into the abyss and know that for us, there's no bottom. That's what New York and California taught me, and I will never forget it. I don't think many people living in Britain can comprehend it these days - certainly none of my peers. It's a strange thing to be able to brag about, but I consider those hard times as a blessing, because I can write about it. I can write about it not just as some well-off Oxbridge Liberal tutting over the Welfare Reform Act and worrying about the 'poor people'. I
was that poor person, with nowhere to live, no money for rent, no health insurance, no one to turn to - least of all a government who would put me back on my feet. For five long painful, terrifying years. Punitive and ill-thought out cuts now are being made by people who do not, and cannot comprehend the abyss. But welfare and benefits and education policies before it were designed by people who had no comprehension of this fact either, and didn't know how to make the system one that would let no one go hungry, cold or sick, but help them find a way to be proud, self sufficient and mobile.
I don't share much with the Tories, aside from an Oxbridge education, but I get on well with them, the same as I do my radical Union Miners. I understand when they talk about reducing the deficit, but I don't agree with the way they're doing it. I blame both Labour and Conservative for pricing out university and taking it away from people like me. That process started in 1997 when Labour moved universities to the Department of Business, Trade and Innovation and charged people to go, so they could expand higher education in other areas. It's now been made horrendously worse, but I hold both parties at fault for this.
And ironically, though Jonathan and Dennis would be horrified to hear me say it, I see many similarities between them both.
At the end of the day we're all deeply, beautifully, wonderfully flawed humans. I'm so lucky that I'm part poor, part posh in an age where few will have the opportunities I had. I'm so lucky that a poor kid from a comp school in Wales gets to have dinner in Earl's Court with a Tory one night, and tea with a Socialist in Parliament the next day.
