Inspiring Older Readers
Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew by Bernard Hare
This is not an easy read but it is a powerful one. A mix of ethnographic study and gut-wrenching memoir, this is one of the most effective studies of modern British poverty that I have read. This book has got nothing to do with sterile statistics or dispassionate social theory - it's a visceral, grimey and utterly truthful portrait of life at the bottom of the pile.
Hare, a trained social worker, loses his job over a past minor criminal conviction and decides to return to his 'home' community in Leeds. Here he encounters 'Urban' Grimshaw, a young boy who is a truant and glue-sniffer. Hare finds it easy to empathise and to share Urnban's jaundiced world view because he too has slipped into a life of extreme drug abuse. Hare enveigles his way into the life of Urban and his friends and, at the same time, into a sexual relationship with his mother.
Hare paints a compelling portrait of what the political Right went on to denounce as the 'underclass' - a morally deficient, benefit dependent sub-working class that has given up all pretence of community responsibility. In reality though, these aren't people who gave up on society but people who are the victims of an uncaring capitalism. This is a brutal life of bare existence that is only alleviated by alcohol, narcotics and casual, even degrading, sex.
Although Hare tries to act as something of a mentor to Urban and his gang, his own terrible choices and his shocking lifestyle are hardly the stuff of a role model. But at least Hare does not romanticise his own behaviour and he understands that he has no right to pass moral judgements or take the high ground - he deprecatingly refers to himself as a Fagin character or, at best, 'Mr Chips on smack.'
This isn't a book to look into for redemptive hope. Hare writes with real colour and has a tremendously engaging style but what he's describing is the way whole communities can be destroyed by the decisions of the rich and powerful when they decide jobs are 'uneconomic' or that benefits need to be cut. To his credit he can see the humanity in the children and he goes out of his way to make sure that we as readers see that too - they are just children and not feral monsters.
Although this book was published in 2005 and harks back to the early to mid 1990s, the issues he deals with remain terribly real today. This is a scathing indictment of all the Governments that have occupied the offices of power and have done nothing since Urban and his gang watched - as Jarvis Cocker memorably noted - their lives slide away as they 'dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to do'.
My copy of this book was published in 2005 by Sceptre.
Terry Potter
October 2015