I work the front gardens; I watch the comings and goings. There are personal trainers, dog-walkers, delivery drivers, battalions of cleaners. One of the most popular cleaners in my catchment is an irrepressible lady from Warsaw. In Poland, she is a professional midwife with two degrees. Here, on the perfect street, she is someone who does ironing and steam-cleans the terrazzo tiles. We share an unspoken kinship, the cleaners and the gardeners, because we are the competent ones, maintaining the households, stewarding the land.
It is one of the more curious idiosyncrasies of contemporary British life that, when people speak of the country’s elite, they no longer mean the haute bourgeoisie. They mean the people I work for: this new financial caste. The people who were like them once, and who now, through some alchemy we barely understand, reap the new economy’s elusive harvest.
This isn’t something we discuss that much, historically acculturated as we Brits are to deference and class stratification. However, they have come to occupy a unique place in the national tectonics in that they are unpopular with both the Left (for their privilege) and the Right (for their faux-liberalism). You hear it most explicitly on those rare occasions when the journalists deign to leave the city. When they head north, to vox-pop pallid, scowling people against a backdrop of some bleak, dilapidated shopping street. “Those people down in London…”; “All those politicians in London…”; “They might think that in London, but up here…”
Behind the acrimony is an allegation that goes something like this: the keepers of the liberal flame promised us all a piece of their covenant. But its perks have all coalesced in their own streets, where it is least needed. Perhaps, in an earlier, less cynical era, they would have been viewed as those with the education and talent to make good in the City. Now, they are the metropolitan elite, sole beneficiaries of the stable jobs, flexible working, generous leave and gold-plated pensions that we were all promised a piece of yet never received.
Hypocrisy clings to this constituency like their floral athleisure pants. Their politics tend to lean progressive, and ostensibly egalitarian, but it prescribes a society that they seem reluctant to live in. During the summer’s BLM marches, the parents sat down with their kids to do homework projects about slavery, Windrush, and the fight for race equality. But few dark-skinned people actually live on these streets; “strangers” are viewed with suspicion. The families trumpet diversity, yet send their children to private school. They lament the dismemberment of the NHS, but the corporations they work for offer private family health insurance. They sigh about climate change but take three long-haul holidays a year and drive gas-guzzling SUVs. The Guardian lies neatly folded on the kitchen worktop, undisturbed.
They have so much stuff. Plastic stuff and metal stuff, antique stuff and state-of-the-art stuff. Also: organic stuff. Each November, we enter one house to find boxes ordered from on-line horticulturists filled with two to three thousand bulbs. Yet every plunge of the spade excavates the hundreds we planted one, two, three years before, and we stand there muddy and bewildered, figuring out which to discard.
It’s raining today on the perfect street, and my boots are heavy with mud. On one hand, it is possible to feel ennobled by the hardship and exposure of this hands-and-knees work: the communion with the earth, the soil beneath my nails. This job, which permits me to escape the city’s artifice, to notice the spiders setting webs in the hedgerows, the robins toiling for worms. But it can also breed resentment. And so being a gardener comes to mould a conflicted identity. The skin peeling from my hands is at once a testament to honest graft and an indictment of an economy that demands I strain my muscles while others stay indoors, obsessing over trivialities, or in the shiny totems at the horizon, conjuring wealth out of thin air.
Sometimes, between the yoga and the online painting class, a client will come outside to extemporise on the latest news. Mostly, it’s incomprehension. “Why are they doing this?” they say, when talk turns to Brexit, because there is no escaping Brexit if you live on these islands. “What could they possibly be getting out of it?”
I just shrug, feign ambivalence. They wouldn’t like the answer. For whatever deceits and nostalgias underpin Britain’s culture war, this is what really animates the national rage: the theory that the people holding the reins inflated huge bubbles in the financial and property markets, colluded in sustaining them for as long as possible to the detriment of everyone else. The obstinacy with which many cleave to the Brexit cause is rooted in the suspicion that Europe was somehow an apparatus of this hegemony, and, by association, of their dispossession. That behind the liberal establishment’s horror of Brexit is the fear that it might immiserate these gleaming streets. That it might drag us all, poor and rich alike, back into the primordial clay.
Perhaps one day I will tell them: “Because it will hurt you, too.”
I wouldn’t claim to be a voice of Britain’s disaffected working classes. The product of a middle-class upbringing myself, and conscious that the ability to scrape by in London betrays a certain privilege, I am culturally closer to my clientele than I might care to admit. But in cynical moments, when I’m kneeling on the wet ground, using a trowel to spoon cat shit into a bag for someone who has never offered us tea, I think: “No wonder.” As unfair as it is to taxonomise people this way, I get it, I feel it, the proletarian wrath.
“You’re so lucky, working outside,” they often say, when the sun is shining, and the work is genteel, an hour spent dead-heading the climbing roses. Who is having the better day?
For the second year running, the clematis has grown leggy. It doesn’t thrive in that spot near the French doors, so perhaps I will cut it back hard, transplant it to a sunnier position, and hope for its resurrection next spring. I will chop down the anemones, as their flowers, the last of the summer colour, have already surrendered to the changing season.
I will till the London soil, as my city sinks deeper into a mire of its own furies. And all the while I’m snipping and raking and digging, I will be thinking, “I hope they never see this essay. I need the money.”
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