Community spirit can be in short supply these days, but I learned when Michelle and I did all those things on the estate that while you might not be able to change the adults who want to sit in their flats drinking and watching TV, you can encourage their kids out a bit more. In the years that followed, Michelle and I carried on doing things, and although she used to tell me that half the people thought we were stupid and the other half were sure we wanted something from them, I didn’t care. That’s just how I am and I think my mum and dad made me like that.
You have to break down the barriers if you can – just as we did after causing uproar when we decided to take down the washing lines outside the flats for a few hours one day to put up badminton nets for the kids instead.
‘What are you up to now?’ people cried when they saw what Michelle and I were doing. ‘Our whites need airing.’
‘Won’t be long,’ we shouted.
Their smalls could wait a few hours. I’d played badminton as a kid and Dad had held my hand to help me. Now Michelle and I did the same as we got the kids to bat the shuttlecocks. As we played, I saw a little girl standing on one of the balconies. She was only about six and I could tell from looking at her that she’d been told not to come down, because she kept looking away when I tried to catch her eye. So the next time we played badminton, I knocked on the door of the flat where she lived and told her mum that I didn’t have any certificates and I couldn’t take her child all day but I hoped she’d let her girl come down. The mum didn’t say a thing and I was a bit worried she might think I was a busybody. But she obviously didn’t, because after that the little girl was sent down to play with us.
The best thing of all that Michelle and I did was starting up a bats and balls night – although it got off to a rocky start. We’d got a bit cocky by then, what with the gardening and the badminton, so we decided that we wanted everyone to join in our bat and balls evening – even mums and dads. To spread the word, we used our secret weapon: the local gossips. You know the ones? Mouths like the Dartford Tunnel and the time to stand around chatting for hours. I casually told them about what we were planning and knew they’d spread the word. But on the first night of our new club, Michelle and I took George, Ricky and Ashley down to the green and found just our friend Sharon waiting for us with her kids and a couple of old ladies. The gossips hadn’t done quite as good a job as we’d hoped, but we had to carry on because people were watching from their balconies, staring at us and wondering what the nutters were up to now.
After that, we had to think of something else if our games night was going to work. We had to have a big plan. So Michelle and I decided that the best way to advertise the bats and balls was to have a family fun day on the green to let people know what we were about. After talking to my family, who agreed to help us out with money, we bought a cheap paddling pool and hired a bouncy castle for the day. We were so excited by it all that it was only as we stared at the paddling pool on the morning of the fun day that we realised it was going to take more than just a few buckets to fill it. The pool could have been used for Olympic laps.
‘We’ll have to use our kitchen taps,’ Michelle said.
So we hooked up hoses down to the pool, and that day turned out to be one of the best of my life. Loads of people arrived, and the kids jumped in and out of the paddling pool or on and off the bouncy castle, with Michelle keeping an eye on them all, while I started up a game of rounders to get people playing. George had come out and kicked his football as he watched lots of people play rounders. Even the man from the end of my block, who was so drunk he could hardly see straight to hit a ball, joined in.
‘Now I know you like a drink, and I do too,’ I said, even though the most I ever had was a brandy and Coke and he must have had at least eight cans of beer inside him. ‘But I’m not sure you should have lager in your hand as we play games with the kids. It sets a bad example, doesn’t it?’
The man looked at me, cross-eyed, before throwing his can up in the air with a smile. Later we talked and I found out his parents had died, and he’d become homeless and gone on the drink. Just shows that you can’t judge what’s on the outside, doesn’t it? There’s all sorts in this life, and I think the man had fun, even if he couldn’t focus on the ball. We all had a good time that day, and the only bit of trouble came when the water tank on the roof burst because we’d left the taps running. As all the old biddies started moaning because they couldn’t get a drop out of their taps, we had to phone the council to send someone out.
‘What’s been going on here?’ the man asked as he stared at the massive paddling pool, loads of wet kids and sopping grass.
I had to tell him, but thankfully the man just laughed and went up on to the roof to fix things.
I always look back on that day with a smile. There were loads of us from all different flats, all different ages, who’d never really spoken to each other before, and the fun day broke the ice. After that more people started coming down to play bats and balls. It got so popular in the end that old people would come to sit on a bench and chat, and kids would be waiting for Michelle and me when we went to unlock the shed where we kept everything. I loved doing all that stuff and learned from it that behind every door there’s a different story: the old woman I thought had lots of family was in fact lonely; an Asian family who’d always felt a bit unsafe on the estate were now comfortable enough to come out with their kids because they’d realised that most of us were friendly. Most of all I learned that when you do something for other people, you do something for yourself too, because as George and I got to know our community it felt as though we were beginning to have a place of our own. Maybe the world was opening up for both of us.
George’s school was a real mix of kids. As well as all the ones who learned at an average pace, there were children who found it harder because they had special learning needs. By that I mean things like attention deficit disorder or physical disabilities that meant they needed more help than average kids. Some were taught in the special needs unit, while others had the help of a teaching assistant who sat with them for anything from a few hours a week to all day every day, giving them one-on-one attention during regular lessons.
Ever since seeing the counsellors and doing the parenting course, I’d felt as if George was being forgotten by school, as I’d gone in and out almost as much as he had – either because he’d got into trouble again or to ask for something to be done – and it had felt as if I was bashing my head against a brick wall. Poor Mum had almost had her ear chewed off about it all as I talked to her about it over and over.
But something finally happened when George moved from the infants part of the school, where children spent their first three years, to the juniors, where he would be for another four until starting secondary school at 11. The school decided that from now on he was going to get some help from the special needs unit because he wasn’t learning properly. Now that was more than a bit of an understatement: George was seven, couldn’t read a word or write one, say the letter ‘A’ if you held an apple up in front of him or recognise his own name when it was written down. I was glad something was happening because I can’t tell you how it had all made me feel: some nights I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry into a towel because I didn’t want George to hear me upset. I felt lonely one day, sad the next, and then I’d try to be hopeful on the third.
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