Who Am I?

I am the divi number.

Two, oh, three, one.

You told it at the counter, and the Co-op gave you back a small percentage of yourself. We were toast-and-dripping-waiting-on-payday-poor. When I first read bell hooks on class as a material condition, not an attitude or cultural preference, but something inscribed in what you eat, what you fear, I felt the relief of being recognised. hooks wasn't describing someone else's life; she was describing my texture of not having enough. (hooks, 2000)

I am what the grammar school tried to make.

On the first day, he named me 'What the butler saw'. The school's tools were sarcasm, humiliation, and red ink. When I encountered Bourdieu's argument that education reproduces class, rewarding those who already possess the cultural capital it pretends to teach, I recognised the classrooms I had sat in (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). But what struck me most was Bourdieu on accent and symbolic power: the legitimate accent marks authority; the wrong one marks you as you speak. (Bourdieu, 1991)

I had been told my dialect was wrong—the words, the rhythms, the language of where I came from. It was working-class, which the grammar school decided was the same thing. At 80, I still adjust my accent to suit the company I keep. Jackson and Marsden recognised this condition in the grammar schoolboys they studied—caught between the working-class world they came from and the middle-class world the school pointed them toward, at home in neither (Jackson and Marsden, 1962). I have never fully belonged to either world.

I am a man who fell in love with a Welsh librarian at a TUC educational weekend.

They had read my essay aloud as a bad example, a sentence without a verb.

'May I sit with you? Writers should push boundaries.'

She thought I was a writer. She was my Polly Garter—Dylan Thomas's woman who loved without condition, who saw what others dismissed (Thomas, 1954). What I learned on that TUC weekend was that a working-class man who used a sentence without a verb could be called a writer by a woman with ice-blue eyes, and that this could change a life. Bourdieu argues that the legitimate voice—the one the academy recognises as authoritative—is conferred, not innate (Bourdieu, 1991). A Welsh librarian conferred it on me over a weekend about labour rights. That was the only credential I needed. I was her no-good-boyo and she loved loving. I have never fully recovered.

I am the Sunday night ironing.

She ran off with a postman. I was left with debts, three small children, on a council estate called The Circle. I ironed on Sunday nights and started crying for no reason. Judith Butler argues gender is a performance enforced by social expectation—step outside its script and you pay in precarity (Butler, J., 2009). Reading Butler, I understood why there was no language for a man ironing, managing, weeping, alone. The script didn't include me. I had been performing a role that had no audience, no validation, no name. Butler gave it one, thirty years too late to use at the time, but not too late to understand what the silence had cost.

I am the rich slave.

I had no certificate for what I knew; there is none for aptitude. A man who understood this promoted me beyond my market value. Gratitude held me. Insecure, indispensable, going nowhere. Guy Standing calls this the precariat—skilled but unprotected, valued but unrecognised, held in place by the gap between what you know and what the institution formally acknowledges (Standing, 2011). I lived that gap for thirty years. The grammar school taught me that knowledge without credentials is invisible. The workplace confirmed it.

I teetered.

Boxing Day night, 1998. Grey and thin, through the automatic doors of a deserted A&E. Next morning a premature, solitary snowdrop nodded encouragement. I sang 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place.' The nurses stood and applauded (Mann and Weil, 1965).

The marriage did not fail because of the illness; it failed because I could not afford to be known. Butler argues masculinity is a performance enforced by social expectation. I had to perform solitude, self-sufficiency, silence (Butler, J., 2009).

I write.

• because a Welsh librarian with ice-blue eyes told me I pushed boundaries before I knew I had any to push,
• because the Sunday night ironing needed a witness and there wasn't one, and now there is,
• because the English taught me grammar, and I learned a language instead,
• because words are the one thing the grammar school, the ward, the tribunals, and the not-grieving could not finally take,
• because working-class lives are literature, whether the academy is ready to say so or not (hooks, 2000).