Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
worked). My dad, who was somewhat insular, played a subordinate role in all of these ventures, driving people about, doing the accounts, printing stuff on the Gestetner. In such a way we were connected, as a family, to everyone we lived among; through the cubs and the drama groups and the church. This is not a reworking of Family and Kinship in East London, where the doors were always left open on a terrifying extended family who’d welcome you into their ’omes, gawd bless em, ’ave a banana. It was a 1950s commuter suburb of Middlesbrough, with probably a more transient population than was then the norm. Although, saying that, it was a shock and an upheaval if someone we knew moved – and in the ten years we were there, they didn’t do so very often. The place had, despite itself, a sense of permanence and belonging; crime was low, there were no gangs. There was, mind you, a community wanker – the Nunthorpe Wanker – who gained a certain notoriety for a brief while, by wanking at people. I saw him once, in a bush, wanking in a rather leisurely manner. Probably I did not excite him. But the Nunthorpe Wanker aside, we all felt part of a community and looked out for each other. Actually, I suppose the wanker did too, in his own fashion.
In 1975 the Liddle family received 284 Christmas cards – I can remember counting them, slightly in awe and slightly sickened – of which all but forty or so were from the people we lived among, the rest having been despatched by the Liddle diaspora. By way of contrast, last year I got about thirty Christmas cards, and most of those were from fucking PR companies. I realise, incidentally, that this is neither an important nor a scientific gauge of anomie and alienation. I’m just, you know, sayin’.
The exhortation to move to where work exists, endlessly following the job market like a dog chasing its own tail, is only one reason why we have far less of a sense of community today – and probably not the most important, at that. We travel more generally, and do so a lot more lightly, than was the case fifty years back. It is genuinely hard to convey the upheaval, the sense of occasion, the excitement of long-distance travel for people outside the top echelon of society before the late 1960s. My family went by train from London to Darlington once a year, to visit my grandmother and those other assorted ageless northern relatives – and that trip would need to be saved up for, long and hard, for months before we departed. Train travel was, in real terms, ruinously expensive, and laborious. Later we got the car, primarily for the purpose of saving money on train fares – and before such a voyage my father would be out busy tinkering with his vital little instruments, his tyre-pressure gauge and his dipstick and so on, because driving 260 miles was a huge undertaking – anything might happen. We would leave home at 5 a.m., me dozing on the back seat next to the dog, for an unimaginably – it seemed to me at the time – lengthy journey up the A1, which was still, for a substantial part of its route, a simple two-lane road, slow and windy, snarled up with traffic as it made its way through the high streets of dimly remembered outposts of the east Midlands – Long Benington, Retford, Newark. Eight hours later we would arrive in Darlington, the Anglia with an exhausted look on its fly-spattered face, Skipper gasping for water and farting like a wizard. We usually stopped for something very nasty to eat somewhere in Nottinghamshire, and then for something even nastier at the Little Chef near Doncaster.
Travel then was not something which many of us were habituated to, and there was little joy to be gleaned from it. One tended to stay where one was; the psychological impulse to stay in one place was much greater, and by and large people were content to do so; hence they had longevity and tenure in their communities. In the late sixties and early seventies this changed a little; the roads improved rapidly, car ownership hit 75 per cent, and suddenly moving around a bit became a reasonable option, both practically and, more crucially, within the mind. The horizons were opened up; a change of scene gradually became a possibility – especially now that the family and friends you’d be leaving behind were more easily reachable, should you want to reach them, by that newish thing the telephone or via the car. And then – in the south-east particularly – there was immigration, and the resultant white flight. The indigenous working class of London saw their communities change around them and, with ever greater haste, got the hell out – south to Bromley and the Medway towns and Thanet, north to Broxbourne and the increasingly paved-over county of Hertfordshire, east to Hornchurch, Billericay and the new towns of Harlow and Woodham Ferrers, west to Woking and Reading and Basingstoke. They left some behind, of course – usually the older members of their former communities, who were reluctant to up sticks – and, ironically the incomers, Asians from Bangladesh and East Africa, India and Pakistan, began creating the very same tight-knit, mutually dependent communities that their arrival had helped to usurp or replace. I suspect that if the sociologists Young and Willmott returned to parts of the East End they would find people living in a very similar manner to the one they had documented in Family and Kinship in East London; only the colour of the skin has changed. And they probably wouldn’t be eating pork chops, as the pair lovingly described the white folks doing back in 1957.
But the effects of large-scale immigration were, in this regard at least, comparatively regionalised and minor, certainly compared to the next impulse which gripped hold of us all, first mildly in the mid-1970s, and then with an atavistic fervour in the awful decade that followed. I can think of nothing which has contributed more to the winnowing away of a sense of community than the deliberate implanting of the poisonous notion that a home is not primarily somewhere you live, but a means of collateral to be ever traded upwards.
House prices first began their maniacal upwards spiral in the 1970s, and not, as is popularly believed, in the 1980s. My family moved from South London to Middlesbrough in 1968. We received, by our standards at least, a large cash windfall for having traded a 1920s two-and-a-half-bed semi in Bexleyheath for a 1950s two-and-a-half-bed detached in Middlesbrough. I think the London house was sold for about £3,500 and the new one bought for £2,200, there or thereabouts. Eleven years later, that Middlesbrough house was sold for £19,000, a rise of roughly 750 per cent. But a good proportion of that was down to the Argentinean levels of inflation that pertained throughout Ted Heath’s guileless tenure as Prime Minister and the only marginally less inept Wilson/Callaghan regime which followed.
People were moving more than they had done before, for sure, at least in part for the reasons I mentioned above. But the endless, consuming avarice of flogging your property and buying a new one, and then flogging that property, having improved its value by adding a fucking study in the attic and an open-plan kitchen/diner and decking in the garden – that madhouse was all still to come, and largely at the hands of the next generation. Certainly it is true that when my mother and father bought their first property it was not out of a wish to make large amounts of money from it – the house in Woodlands Road, Bexleyheath, was a family home which they would have been happy to stay in forever, were it not for my dad being transferred with his job, and the pull of home, to the north-east.
When I bought my first property, it never occurred to me that this was the place in which I would spend the rest of my life, or even more than a very, very small part of it. I was on the ladder. Everyone was on the ladder. There were countless TV shows about the ladder, and how to get up it and how to screw the vendor out of a few thou, or add a few thou to your own selling price. Everyone was buying houses, and selling them, and then selling the next one, and the next one. Officially sanctioned, institutionalised venality which effectively began with the sale of council houses, the ‘right to buy’, which has left us with almost no council stock at all, save for the residuals – the piss-stained skagheaded shitholes nobody in their right mind would want. Of course you only bought your council property in order to sell it: that was the point, to cash in just like everyone else was cashing in. Flogging your house became an obsession which, regardless of the predictable property slumps, has still not yet abated.
I don’t think this madness ever really commended itself to my parents’ generation; they found this new way of viewing where you lived as an absurdity and the economics upon which it was founded a chimera, a bubble that was sure to burst one day soon. Which of course it did, several times. But it remains a singularly British obsession – no other country in the world has this rapacious and desperate housing market, and we are making ourselves extremely unpopular by exporting the greed to France and Germany and Spain, purchasing second homes, buy to lets, timeshares, apartments and hideous villas abroad, raising the prices of property on the Continent with every year that passes so local people can’t afford to buy. And back at home moving,