when you join your very own - what do you get?

its a frightening thing indeed to move back into your own social strata after decades in the one below!

this is because society has 'classed' people and each class reacts or acts in a certain fashion.

I was placed in the sub-class decades ago but now i wonder was it in fact ever that, and who decides anyway?

when i was quite young really and struggling i was more or less booted out by my own er, class.
Yes, pretty much so.
penniless and jobless in the 70's i applied for social housing.
I was to be the first on this side of the pond to ever do this.
so this in itself was something to be rejected for and shamed for.
I lived amongst murderers, indeed my very first next door neighbour was a murderer, done his sentence and then lived peaceably beside me and i sat on the road with him many a sunny day.
Literally on the road, the leafy valleys and gardens of Killiney now all gone but the concrete of the tenement path now mine, with the druggies and the alkies and the murderers, wife beaters and chancers.

For the first time in my life i was happy.
I guess when booted out and left you do begin to take charge.  i took charge.
from not even one wooden chair i had to take charge.
not even a bathroom or a kitchen and wallpaper never holding on the walls i had to take charge.
add then to the butter mountains and beef mountains of europe i queued with my plastic bag.
A far cry from the Holy Child Jesus Killiney School for young ladies.
it was battlegrounds.

but these people became my own.
they actually had a moral code of conduct.
they stuck by you and supported you and watched out and over you.
they also saw sometimes your naievity and warned you of the people needed warning against, even the murderer warned me about people to watch for and make sure i didnt let them inside.

but doors could remain unlocked and open.
there was one across the road and there i went every day to sit with my dumpy adopted mom.
yes she was i adored her.
we sat and chatted and had a cup of tea and gorgeous bikkies always ready in that tin there.

we talked about the black and tans and how she had a boiled egg on easter sunday and the leg of mutton hanging over an open fire with a skewer for christmas dinner if they were so lucky.

I was very happy, i flourished and settled down.
i concentrated on improving my home and working to improve my art.
writing and illustrating books and designing greeting cards.
all added up to a bit in the bank or post office and nice furniture.
no, the middle class never clapped eyes on me again, hardly ever visited and least cared about me.

time moved on.  Decades.
everytime i was in mental pain and trouble and that was often i was considered just that, trouble, again by the middle class.
i was a bloody nuisance with my troubles, to them that is.
i was troubled to myself and that was that, troubled.
i had a shocking start and i had brain damage.
but no middle class person ever gave any of that an inch of thought.
i was 'ah Ann, she is 'trouble.'

but when i got into serious trouble with social housing it was decades fast forward.
the shift in times had come but not so badly as i had envisaged.
i dont blame the enclave the social housing authorities had placed me, it was far from where i had come both in one working class group and from my middle class background.
all men they were and very rough, unemployed used to drugging up and hanging themselves, leaving the mother with the babies.
but they also had troubled lives so they are not at fault, life is as it is.  the people to take responsibility are the people who are entrusted with this role when many couldnt take it.
they abused their power and treated people badly.
all people badly.
people in social housing in Ireland were the rejected and still are.
they are worth nothing in anyone's eyes, ever.

so when i was placed with a crowd of men who couldnt or wouldnt, or who didnt have a culture of working they knew they had placed a middle class woman with disabilities in a very vulnerable place and also a volitile place.
it did come to pass that my middle class status got to the drinking men.
my door was rapped at night in drunken stupers, i was accused of things i couldnt possibly have done, one being someones plant in the middle of his back garden!
children too were off the rails and hanging from them.  wild and brazen i got it there too.
i went into a mini madness of utter terror.
until the day i was shot at and so fleeing county was the stratedgy.
the ones that placed me where they did admitted it was a dreadful place for me, as too had the HSE but then no one takes responsibility for these sorts of things in Ireland.
what happens here if mistakes are made the phrase is 'you must move on' meaning forget it mate.
i had to literally move on and away from all i adored.
this time i was plumbing for middle class country.
i felt it best i got back to my roots in another county.
but what a failure as i fully now in the realm of all i had hated.
the brutality which is middle class utter snobbery and blame another and then tell the other to 'move on'
but middle class people do things a very different way and now i realise i am not altogether pleased with it.
they seem to feel they have a god given right to trod all over people's emotions and personalities and characters.
this is even without even getting to know a person or inviting them into their homes.
they make their assumptions from afar or on one meeting certainly not on a few.
you can be tarred and feathered within a day in this place.
you can be called anything here and have no comeback.
so far in my lovely middle class neighbourhood i have been called 'dangerous' and 'a tramp'
yep, thats what i have been called.
nice isnt it for a holy child jesus child to be called this.
and also for a very sick person with a disability but who is vulnerable now.
anything goes here.
but then i think i knew that coming from a family of 'lord of the flies ilke.'
the most unforgiving of all classes in society are the middle classes.
because they have grandiose ideas without the backup.
they think they have this right.
to slash and burn and then tell you 'to forget it and move on!'
well in my book you dont do that.
you treat people with respect.
I did, and i was taught to and i certainly learnt to, both from school, from doing charity work every living decade of my life and of course from the sub class of society.
we did respect and we tried to help without lumbering in there and demolishing.
but here they dont help, but certainly lumber in and demolish and seem to think it ok to call you a tramp on your own property, for asking a relatively simple question as 'when do you think you will be finishing up here?' as in 'this is taking a very long time, when can i have my home back?
and i am called 'you tramp you!'
he got stroppy and i told him to leave, and on leaving i am labelled a tramp.
i am not liking the style of the middle classes at all right now.
will it improve.
i dont know.
if the middle classes want it to improve maybe it will.
but i am not happy about it.
i want to return to the decent people.
when you have nothing absolutely nothing, you are all on level ground.
not here, there are the ones who trash and the ones who get trashed, and very viciously too.
it isnt nice, i hate it.