Activist

One thing I can be certain of, the word, salubrious, don’t cut it for the place I grew up. North Nottinghamshire in the ‘80s.  In a town caught between the miner’s strike and its evolution into the epicentre of packed sandwiches and pet food it is today.

Big shaat gooin’ aaht (say it loud and proud with the necessary flat vowels and near-Yorkshire grit) to Worksop! 

Our family was Labour through and through.  By history, bloodline and without question.  My dad was a local councillor and had that old Tony Benn, Labour intellectual vibe going on.  As a young kid, after I said I was going to vote conservative when I grew up (I had no idea what I meant –I just wanted to wind up my dad), he told me it wasn’t even something to joke about.  Like I’d uttered ancient, forbidden words, or cursed him.

Me and my brother were dragged to Labour Party Christmas dos to play awkwardly with kids we didn’t see from one Christmas to the next. My dad held Saturday morning surgeries for his constituents and I had visions of him listening to people’s chests with a stethoscope.

When he went out midweek, he’d mystifyingly tell us that he was going to ‘see a man about a dog’ – and we thought it was Important Council Business. This was a regular occurrence and I remember wondering, was it always the same man with the same dog?  Same man, different dog?  Different man, same dog?  You get the picture.  In retrospect, where the hell did he go every Wednesday night?!  It goes to show you never really know your parents.

When the miners’ strike was at its worst, so many kids in my school were affected and Saturday mornings became the time when a bunch of us would go into the shopping precinct and shake buckets at people to put money in.  We were Young Socialists – idealistic, naïve, feeling we were doing something.

Around this time, I became a knocker-upper on election nights, which entailed banging loudly on the doors of ancient people to check they were still alive enough to vote, and to arrange a lift to the polling station if they couldn’t get there themselves.

By the time me and my brother were in our mid-teens, our idealism was running low, replaced by teen torpor.  One of the worst things we were ever tasked with doing was leafleting through doors in the run up to local elections.  I bloody hated it – my hate only being matched by my brother’s.  My dad would give us about a million leaflets (always with the picture of some grim-looking man, trying to look sincere on the front) and we had to put them through the doors of houses on the council estate. 

We lived on the adjacent private estate, as it was called, and jumped up little snob that I was, I couldn’t bear going on to the council estate.  No matter that my gran still lived there, as well as a couple of my friends (to my utter shame;, I would pretend I couldn’t find my way to their houses when they’d invited me).  If kids from the council estate came on to our road, we were even known to shout, “get off our estate”, like we were lords and ladies of the manor.  Jesus Christ.

But whatever we thought, delivering leaflets was what we had to do.  It was good for your principles, for your country, for your very soul, my dad assured us.  So me and my brother would be loaded up with carrier bags full of leaflets for putting through letter boxes. And off we’d go. Down scaggy roads, with rough kids and hellish dogs.  Arsey posties, truculent deliverers of political messages.

We used to entertain ourselves by making each other as uncomfortable as possible in order to make a bleak experience into a bastard one.  Tearing an unused teabag and pouring it on my brother’s hair was a particular, favourite addition of mine.

In the face of adversity, we rarely worked together.  More, the pain of the work was private and it made us taciturn. The elections were always in May and so the leafleting would be in April; yet in my memory, there’s no sun or spring. Just pebbledash grey and cold winds.

One day, my brother brought up the unmentionable.  Could we just pretend we’d delivered the leaflets?  Could we just chuck them somewhere and lie about the delivery part?  We thought about it for all of (maybe) three seconds and answered, yes.  Hell, yes we could.   So we walked down the road we were on, round the back of the chip shop, through the cut into the woods and cobbed the whole lot into the stream where the tadpoles were forming.

After hanging around a bit for authenticity’s sake, we went home light of leaflets and I’d like to say heavy of conscience, but it wouldn’t be true.  We were light of heart, conscience – you name it, we were damned light of it.

The Labour candidate lost their seat that year and there was many a time I very nearly told my dad about our misdeed; but my brother could always dead leg me quicker than I could confess.

We weren’t activists, but slacktivists. Not the modern, feel good, press a button and join a campaign slacktivists; but the hard core, can’t be arsed type.  Hanging around on our sofa, doomng to our Bauhaus records. Ungrateful, little bastards that we were.

And ultimately, is the personal political, or is the political personal?  Whatevs.  I can’t be bothered to think about it.