Or, the use of hygiene as a proxy for moral worth.
Last week, a man died when — so it appears — two paramadics failed to render appropriate assistance. The legal phrase is ‘wilfully neglecting to perform duty in a public office’. The circumstances aren’t clear, but reading between the lines (among other things) one suspects they were holding their noses. Why? Apparently the old chap lived in squalor, but not the kind brought about by poverty (he was employed as a civil servant, and apparently well paid). His house was filthy:
After Barry Baker, 58, died at his home in Braybon Avenue on 29 November, the paramedics were suspended on suspicion of neglecting a public duty.
Two South East Coast Ambulance Service staff allegedly made derogatory comments about Mr Baker’s home.
The small rubbish-removal company charged with cleaning up the wreckage has posted photographs on its website detailing the scale of the mess. They’ve also now been linked to by the BBC, which could be interesting for their server if nothing else. Two of the photographs are included below, as I doubt the company will keep the same front page for any great length of time.
This story, of course, is feeding into the Karen Matthews saga — she also had a filthy house, coupled with filthy children. It is also broaching wider public concerns, not only about ‘the underclass’, but about what David Cameron is calling ‘Broken Britain’. This account — from the wildly popular ‘coppersblog‘ — catches the angst from a police perspective:
Not long ago, I attended a house where the woman was complaining that her neighbours were throwing eggs at her windows. She was a mother of five, aged 24. Each of her children was the progeny of a different man (or boy) and none of them was supported by his or her father, in any way. The woman had left school with no qualifications whatsoever and had never worked. None of the fathers had ever worked; all were criminals of one stripe or another. It’s hard bringing up five children on your own, true, though she was an adult and she’d made her own bed (metaphorically, I doubt literally). The house was inexcusably filthy: piles of dog faeces of several different ages lay on the carpets, some of it trodden in by young feet. The woman sat in her armchair, in her house paid for by taxpayers, smoking Lambert and Butler and shouting at me about the neighbours.
This is not about material poverty: she had a big telly (admittedly, not a plasma), and a VCR, and a big computer game console, and a CD player, and a diet of relatively expensive fast food. It’s about human nature, and a lost generation (or two). Some people are, by nature, of the underclass. They are lazy, venal and greedy and they see an inch and try to take a mile. Fifty years ago, they had a hard time doing this: now it’s very easy.
Our job, in the new civil war, is to stop them.
Although not written by PC David Copperfield (the blog’s founder), this account ties into the issues that Copperfield has raised himself, first on his blog, and then in his very popular book, Wasting Police Time. For a long while, no-one knew who the anonymous ‘copper’ who wrote the blog actually was, only that he was (very obviously) a copper and (very obviously) alert to the bureaucracy and mismanagement that were destroying British policing. Wisely, he outed himself only after he’d (a) published his book and (b) migrated to Canada and taken a job with the Mounties Edmonton City Police, which involved a very different style of policing.
Inevitably, seeing things like this hardens you. I’ve only looked down the legal end of the telescope, but dealing with the same people — day in, day out — and watching them waste court time is very dispiriting. After a while, you start thinking that some folks are clearly incapable of finding any compass, let alone a moral one. And then you start to realise: I had to be taught to be clean and well-organised as a child. It didn’t come naturally, and I have to admit I was lazy. And my mother’s solution to my laziness was repeated floggings and standover tactics.
She’d been ‘in service’ as a girl and young woman. This polite euphemism means ‘working for the landed gentry’. Even after she emigrated to Australia, her primary income was earned cleaning middle-class peoples’ houses. She taught me all the skills a servant needs — cooking, cleaning, sewing. The only one I never mastered was knitting, but I can do all the others. I’ve also absorbed by osmosis her values. Like the ambulance men, I too instinctively recoil at a filthy house. Interestingly, as a child I saw the ‘filth=moral reprobate’ applied pretty equally to men and women, too.
Perhaps the most telling incident cropped up during the research for my novel. An elderly chap who lived a couple of streets away broke his leg and hip very seriously, necessitating a lengthy hospital stay. The wife of one of my interview subjects offered to ‘wash his dishes’ for him, whereupon she discovered a house considerably filthier than Mr Baker’s. It took six of us a week to clean it. Unusually, the man in question hadn’t had any time in the military (either Red Army or Waffen-SS). None of the ex-army men were dirty. One told me how a young man from Polish West Ukraine had left his bed unmade in the barracks because making it was ‘women’s work’. The Germans flogged him. The rest learnt, but — once again — they’d had to be taught. And not just frightened by flogging: the German or Russian Lance-Corporals and Quartermasters had to teach them the relevant skills, from peeling a potato to mopping the floor to knitting a sock.
I’ve noticed, since I’ve been at Oxford, that lots of people are almost as bad as Mr Baker at keeping themselves ‘tidy’. But Oxford has its ‘scouts‘, you see, people who do for Oxford students what my mother did for the Duke of Connaught. Often Polish immigrants overseen by the sort of cheery Englishwoman who could have stepped straight from the cutting-room floor of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, they clean our rooms and report exceptionally messy members of the future ruling-classes to the Dean (a very scary individual, even for 30 year old graduate students). I’ve also noticed that I’m often the only one who knows how to do the same things the scouts do. I’ve encountered people who don’t know how to clean a toilet.
But the middle-classes have a fall-back: their education and income. For the most part, there will always be a scout for them, even though the label will change with geography and circumstances. The poor (and unpartnered men of a certain vintage, as I suspect was the case with Mr Baker, and know to be the case with the man I described above) don’t have that fall-back. And they’re often unfit to do anything else. I get notes from my scout where every word is mispelled. Another scout — who leaves the common room and kitchens spotless — cannot read or write at all. I went to show him how to write his name, once, just so that he could sign his timesheet. ‘Oh no, Miss, don’t bovver, they tried for ten year at school. Didnat do no good’.
When she visited Oxford, my socialist sister (and she is, the real deal - Labor Left and all) noted the College staff eating provided lunches, and the grave care the Collegiate system took for them. ‘It’s very civilised, the way they’re cared for, eating in their own defined space’. But she also noticed the fawning and scraping, the ’sir’ and ‘ma’am’ directed at people often half their age.
‘I think that’s the trade-off’, I said. The poor and the dull get cared for, while the rich and talented get their rooms cleaned. And people of both sorts point and giggle at the single mother or older single man who can’t keep his house ‘tidy‘ (this phraseology has particular resonance in Wales).
I’m reluctant to equate moral worth with hygiene, even though I know hygiene is essential for many other things (successful care of an infant, for example). That said, schooling that fills people with false hope as to what they can achieve in years to come is genuinely blameworthy. Believing you can be a rock star while simultaneously failing to learn how to read (and while failing to be taught anything that could make you even remotely employable) suggests that whoever runs the schools in this country is telling more lies than your local Amway man (’anyone can get rich in this business’).
