Bardsey Chapel

Not Westminster at all. Bardsey. An island off the coast of Wales. No cars, no electricity, about a mile long, a mountain one end, a lighthouse the other, sea views everywhere. We went with some friends for half term. We went for a week.

Writing this blog I think I am trying to describe, perhaps even understand my life in Westminster in the small social housing flat in the big, old, tenement block, overlooking other big, old tenement blocks. All around, glimpses of other squashed lives. Last summer when Michael Jackson died people from different nationalities and different religions told each other quietly from window to window, leaning across in the hot dark above the street lights.
On our school run we join the pack of civil servants marching to work in the morning, and pass the grey shadow faces of the drug addicts and alcoholics from the hostels. 'You be good now for your mum,' they sometimes say to the boys. I think they see the waste of themselves in the energy and vibrancy of my mischievous sons. I have seen civil servants shout angrily as a child on a bike careers close by on the pavement and I have seen a ghost faced man with broken bad teeth and tatoos on his fingers grab a small, tubby, slightly out of control muslim boy, the brother of a boy at our school, as his scooter spun into the busy road, his mum, in full burka and me running down the street trying to reach him. Though probably both incidents are interchangeable.

I am this poor by surprise. By a spiral of circumstance. I love my life but I don't always feel I quite fit. I look quite posh, sound quite posh, work for a national newspaper and yet, I can't quite understand it, here I am. At a friend's book launch once a woman I didn't know shouted at me when I said I lived in a peabody flat. She said they weren't for an educated, presentable middle class person like me. I agreed with her in many ways and yet, I haven't found the way out.

In the end I have had to accept this is how it is. How it is for us now. I will keep working to change our circumstance. But I truly believe not living with a bullying alcoholic man is the battle I won for myself and if I keep going the rest will be ok.

The privilege of my poverty is that it is not the life I expect, not the life of my friends and family, that I see many other lives, many other things. Perhaps this is the difference between our family being here and the others around us. When the mums at school had to pick the children up over the bridge at Vauxhall station after they had been to a play, many parents looked around in wonder and one mum, young, white, glam, who shouts and shouts at her three small children, said she hadn't been there for years. I am not mocking, I know I am lucky.

So here, this beautiful island. It is a place of pilgrimage. A place where thousands of saints are meant to be buried. A legend that it is Merlins/Arthurs final resting place. A place of peace. The children run through fields of buttercups, picking up caterpillars and noticing birds. Seals like periscopes, watching us. The eldest two boys make a friend with a boy that lives on the island. The same age, he tells them his best friend is a cockerel. The house we are staying in is next to the chapel. I tell the friends we are with that I need to go in. I tell them about this project. But I bake cakes and beachcomb and paint my toe nails and wash up, wash up, wash up with a view of the sea and the sheep and the ruins of a thirteenth century abbey and celtic crosses. And funnily enough I become almost accustomed to the wonder of the view. I walk up the hill with the children, then walk it on my own. Sitting to think in the sunshine, in the beauty. Then reluctantly, before I am ready, I have to go into the small simple chapel to shout and stop the children playing, my son having stolen matches from the church.