You live your life outside, with a ball at your feet. This is the way in South America. You don’t know anything different. What’s inside, anyway? Nothing fun. Nothing interesting. No Playstation. No big television. You don’t even have a hot shower. There’s no heat…. When you want to have a bath, you get a water jug and heat it up over the kerosene stove.25
Cavani insists that wherever he’s playing in the future—a vast stadium, a big cup final—his younger self should always find a way to “feel the dirt under [his] bare feet.”26
There’s no dirt under the feet for me, even though, in my childhood, I did have my baths in a metal tub in front of the coal fire. But there was and is the millstone grit on the peat-bog moors, high above the chimney tops of my upbringing. The grit is what I walked across, mile after mile, with my big brother after my dad had died. It’s what our stone terraced houses and the cobblestones of our streets were fashioned from. It’s what my playmates and I knelt on in our short pants when we rolled coloured glass marbles and steel ball bearings down stone slabs in the schoolyard. And, if you’re lucky, it’s what remains in your character that becomes part of the landscape of your soul wherever you find yourself in the future. This is not just Angela Duckworth’s grit—the grit of sheer perseverance or tenacity in response to daily adversity.27 It’s also the grit of defiance in the face of obstructive and oppressive authority.
As you move up, on, and out, you hope you hang on to some of these things. You hope you’ll continue to stand up to and stand with others against injustice and exclusion. Despite all your travels across different countries and cultures, you hope that when you open your mouth, people will still be able to tell where you come from. You hope you’ll retain some of your interests and TV-viewing habits, however unsophisticated and unfashionable they may be amongst the intellectual elite. You hope you’ll remember to treat all people with respect and dignity and acknowledge their humanity by thanking and conversing with them—the driver who lets you off the bus, the waiting staff at a conference dinner who never get noticed or receive any tips, and the people cleaning the toilets in the train station or the airport—because you remember how your mum used to clean people’s houses and how, when your own children were small and you were struggling financially, your wife was a waitress in the local pub and sold Avon cosmetics door-to-door in the evening. You also hope you do all this simply because it’s the decent thing to do.
But you also know you are moving in different circles now. Your accent will change a bit as you go from place to place. The subjects of the conversation will shift and widen—and why shouldn’t they, for don’t these worlds of literature or opera or international travel open your mind to other people’s perspectives? Isn’t this what your education was for? After all, one Latin root of education is from educere, meaning “to lead out.” But you’ll also feel uneasy when comfortable elites are smug or patronizing, when they search for a weak spot in your knowledge, your manners, or your bearing so they can put you back in your place.
Will you rebel? Will you stand up for yourself and others who are being slighted? Will you hold your tongue to keep the peace? Or will you respond with rapier-like flashes of cutting wit? Perhaps, like Drake, you’ll accomplish even more success just to show them a thing or two at thousands of dollars a show. Sometimes, like former U.S. ice skater Tonya Harding, when the judging is stacked against you because you like to do the equivalent of skating to rock and roll, not to orchestral classics, you also know you’ll just have to pull off your own unanswerable equivalent of a triple axel so they can’t, for shame, hold you back any more.28 Whatever the question, you’ll ultimately have to answer with your work.
But what will you say when you go back home and the family you love makes racist remarks or sexist jokes? What will you do then? Who will you be? How will you take advantage of every opportunity that has come to you, including that of an open mind, yet also keep the ball at your feet and the grit between your teeth?
There’ll be no balanced life for you—not for many years, at least—for this aspiration belongs only to the privileged. They already have something to balance. You’ll work relentlessly hard, knowing that on the ladder of upward mobility the rungs beneath you never stop falling away.
Social mobility is neither unambiguously heroic nor inescapably tragic. The path of social mobility, the process of moving on up, has complications—for everybody. This book is about my own path and the paths of others. If you are mobile, have been mobile, aspire to be mobile, or can influence others in their own efforts to be mobile, it’s a book that might have something to say to you.
CHAPTER 2
No One Likes Us; We Don’t Care
And this is the place where our folks came to work
Where they struggled in puddles, they hurt in the dirt
—Tony Walsh
“It’s coming! It’s coming!”
May Kenyon was sitting on the commode at the back of a sweet-shop, or candy store, in the small mill town of Accrington in Lancashire, England.
“Don’t be daft, May. It can’t be,” said her mum.
But May’s mum was wrong, and out popped my own mum, Doris. Doris came from the womb of May in the month of May. It was 1920, just two years after the end of the Great War. Beginnings do not get much humbler than this. For what would become the Hargreaves family, the only way now was up.
The first child in her family, and the only girl, Doris was named after a nurse who’d saved the life of Doris’s father, William Kenyon, during the flu pandemic that had swept across Europe when the gassed and wounded returned from the trenches.29
Bill was my grandma’s second cousin. On her side of the family tree, there are one or two trunks where branches should be! The marriage choices for women in Accrington at the end of World War I were sparse. Seven years younger than my grandma, half-deaf as a result of bombshell damage, and congested in his lungs all his life because of mustard gas poisoning (and a habit of chain-smoking Woodbine cigarettes), Bill was one of the town’s lucky soldiers who had returned from the war alive and relatively intact.
Doris and Albert
When Doris wasn’t at school, in the back of her family’s two-up, two-down terraced house, she would care for her younger brothers, Raymond and Stanley, and wash the tins and trays her mother would need for the tiny bakery she ran out of their front room. The Depression forced the family to close the bakery. These were hard times for many. Doris even recalled having to take a pram to the local pit to scavenge slack, or bits of coal, for the downstairs fire.30
Doris left school when she was fourteen and, for a few shillings a week, went to work in weaving, munitions, and carpet-sweeper factories. In one of her jobs, she had to twist wire coils by hand, which caused her palms to bleed. She protested and was subsequently given her cards. She arrived at the employment exchange to find that her former supervisor had called ahead, recommending they not give her work because she’d been fired for insubordination. Later in life, Doris often recalled having “prayed each day for that factory to burn down.” Uncannily, a few months after she’d been let go, it did!31
Doris was not averse to a good time. In her old age, she sometimes spoke wistfully about a dashing airman she would go to dances with at the seaside in Blackpool, where her mum’s relatives still lived. As a teenager, she carried a torch for her cousin Lesley, who died when he crashed his motorcycle. Doris kept Lesley’s memory alive by choosing his name as the middle name for her firstborn son, Peter. In an uncompromising working-class culture, my brother did not thank her for burdening him with what was widely regarded as a girl’s name at the time.