What's the limit on overstretched wallets?

Credit where credit’s due

The Government has proposed relaxing the rules on credit unions so they can widen access to affordable credit and personal banking, but with the cost of living ever-rising will it be enough to help those on the lowest incomes cope?

By Mark Cantrell

From Housing magazine, July/August 2013

MONEY'S tight these days. Incomes are under increasing strain from the rising cost of living; for the poorest in society, the strain of stretching the pennies is particularly arduous.

Last month, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) revealed the stark face of “eroding” living standards, with the publication of its annual Minimum Income Standard (MIS) report. This revealed that since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, the minimum cost of living has soared by 25%. Naturally, incomes have anything but taken flight; rather, they’ve stagnated, or been actively cut in the ongoing process of austerity.

“[F]or the first time since the 1930s, benefits are being cut in real terms by not being linked to inflation. This combined with falling real wages means that the next election is likely to be the first since 1931 when living standards are lower than at the last one,” said Donald Hirsch, author of the report.

The report revealed some startling results, not least the 26% increase in rent for social housing; childcare has risen 37%, food costs have gone up 24%; energy by 39%; and public transport has risen by 30%.

Results are based on the goods and services members of the public think people need to have a minimum acceptable standard of living. By that measure, the MIS suggests a single person needs to earn £16,850; a working couple with two children need 19,400 each; and a lone parent needs £25,600.

“There is a growing gulf between public expectations of the living standard everyone should be able to afford and their ability to earn enough to achieve it,” Hirsch added. “About a quarter of households in the UK fall short of the income required to reach an adequate standard of living – for them a 25% increase in costs intensifies the everyday struggle to make ends meets.”

Katie Schmuecker, the JRF’s policy and research manager, said: “Our research shows that the spiralling cost of essentials is hurting low income families and damaging living standards. Inflation has impacts for us all, but is most keenly felt by the poorest. Balancing weekly budgets has become an unenviable task for those who are worse off.

“Help for families in paying for essentials at more affordable prices can be just as important as improving household income – a precarious combination of rising costs and falling incomes leaves families in a risky position. Cuts to benefits and tax credits – especially cuts to support for childcare – combined with stagnant wages and the rising cost of essentials is resulting in unprecedented erosion of living standards.”

Given the pressures people are facing, it’s hardly surprising that some turn to pay day lenders or illegal loan sharks, even though that road leads to a nightmare of spiralling debt: desperation can provoke some dire decisions – and there are always those looking to take advantage of people at their wits end.

That’s where credit unions come in, offering low-cost loans for their members, but there’s more to these local ‘community banks’ than affordable credit; budgeting – so-called ‘jam jar’ – accounts as well as saver services are part of the package too. For social landlords looking to tackle financial exclusion, they’re important allies in combating illegal loan sharks, and helping residents who otherwise lack any kind of banking service.

Welfare reform and the introduction of Universal Credit have added greater impetus to efforts by social landlords to promote financial inclusion. There’s an element of enlightened self interest, of course – the rent needs collecting – but providing financial services to people, the ability to manage their money better, can be empowering, even if that’s only in a roundabout kind of way.

“Financial worries are awful. You are worrying about your debts, you are worrying about not having enough money coming in, you are worrying about putting shoes on the kids, all those kinds of things,” said Stephanie Noyce, head of financial exclusion at Affinity Sutton.

“That’s the worry with Universal Credit: if your kids need shoes and you’ve only got your rent money left, what are you going to do? Or if your kids need food – I know what I would do – and that puts people in a really vulnerable position, an impossible choice position. You lose whichever way you turn. If we can do something more holistic and give tenants the life skills to manage their own finances, that’s an amazing thing to give them. We know if someone is financially stable and secure, their outlook on life is going to be more positive.”

However, the strengths of credit unions – embedded in local communities – are also something of a weakness in terms of expanding their reach, especially for large social landlords that operate across a wide geographic territory. As Noyce pointed out, it involves the social landlord working with a host of distinct organisations, and there may be gaps in coverage, as it were, where no credit union exists. But that may be about to change with recent legislative changes proposed by the Government.

In June, the Treasury announced plans to introduce legislation in the Autumn that will enable credit unions to expand their operations, and also increase the maximum monthly interest rate charges from 2% to 3% to help them sustain operations. The aim is to widen access to affordable, short-term credit and provide more people with banking services.

“Credit unions provide an invaluable service to people on lower incomes, offering sound financial advice and responsible lending,” said Sajid Javid, economic secretary to the Treasury. “Allowing the maximum rate of interest to increase will help credit unions become more stable and allow them to offer reliable, affordable credit to consumers who may have to resort to more expensive means... This is part of the Government’s efforts to ensure that the credit union sector is in a position to grow and serve a greater number of members without undermining its stability.”

Affinity Sutton has acted to make the most of these changes by entering into partnership with Leeds City Credit Union (LCCU) to launch a national service offering tenants across the country access to a credit union.

“Many of our residents are struggling to make ends meet because of welfare reform and high unemployment. With few other options they are inevitably tempted to use high cost lenders such as ‘pay day’ loans,” said Noyce. “Our partnership with LCCU will enable us to fill this gap and provide all our residents with a wide range of easily accessible and affordable financial products and services, in a supportive and welcoming environment. We hope that the partnership will grow and develop so that over time we can expand the range of products and services on offer.”

The ethical dimension of credit unions is another vital aspect for Noyce, given the vulnerabilities of some of the people she works with: “That to me is what’s really important,” she said. “We’re talking about vulnerable clients – financially vulnerable clients – and because of welfare reform, Universal Credit and all that, they’re going to become increasingly vulnerable. So working with an agency that’s going to be understanding and respectful of that is really important to us.

"We’ve got a group of residents who don’t have a bank account of any way, shape or form, so potentially a [credit union] will give them a product they can use. And it’s going to give them a product that we are confident is safe for them to use because of the responsibility and the supportive role that the credit union will take.”

For any one of us, looking to cope with the increasing costs of living, any means to save money and make the most of our incomes is welcome indeed, all the more so for those whose incomes are tightest of all, but whether we like it or not, there’s a shadow looming over the issue of financial inclusion: how far can a finite income be stretched by even the very best budgeting skills, before it becomes an exercise in futility – because there is simply not enough money to make ends meet?

There is no easy answer to that one, for the housing sector, or indeed for society as a whole. There is only so much that any one individual or organisation or sector can do to hold back the rising tide of poverty.

“It’s a dilemma,” conceded Noyce. “We have a telephone support service for residents that provides financial guidance, and they will explore every opportunity they can with individuals to maximise their income and minimise their expenditure, or access products and services that will help their money go that little bit further, give them practical hints and tips, but – and touch wood we haven’t seen any cases so far – there will come a point where there is not enough money to go around. I guess then we’re looking at signposting people to food banks and to charitable donations, and who knows what else? It’s a scary thought.”

This article was first published in the July/August 2013 print edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently re-published in the Housing Excellence website, 28 December 2013. Photo courtesy of Affinity Sutton

Essay: Creatively speaking, would you shut the hell up?

An overdose of criticality

There's a time and a place for everything, so learn to switch off that internal editor until your all-important first draft is complete, writes Mark Cantrell 

 First published on Indies Unlimited

ONE of these days I’ll figure out how to switch off.

No, I’m not talking about relaxing, well not exactly, but stepping out of this world and into the ‘zone’. That’s the place where the state of consciousness alters when the muse is in full flow – at least until the inability to power down the critical faculties crashes me back down to Earth.

When the words flood the screen there’s a kind of freedom, but all too often the internal critic comes smashing through the door to stick his damn finger in the dyke. The other finger he tends to wag my way; admonishing me for the terrible state of my composition. If I’m not quick enough, he takes a dive for the delete key, too, the bastard.

That’s the trouble with internal critics, at least with mine, they’re unsympathetic swine, with little or no regard for the literary process. Going off half-cocked instead of chilling out in the back brain until you’re ready for them, they can seriously cramp a wordsmith’s sanity.

If the creature doesn’t hit mid-flow and crash me out of the ‘zone’, then it undermines my regard for the latest draft I’ve sweated to finish. Snarling that my work is rubbish, it harasses me into a screaming fit, to send me wailing back to the keyboard and start afresh. Stretched thin, and wound-up, brittle me becomes lost in an endless round of sweat, tears and turmoil, while my critic cracks the whip.

Times like that, writing loses its joy, but bloody-minded obsession, maybe that slave-driving critic, won’t let me walk away. I have to keep going until, somehow, I come through the other side with words the critic can’t dismiss. I must admit, there’s a certain smug satisfaction to be had in leaving this mental gremlin speechless, but I know it’ll be back for another headbanging session sooner or later.

We all have our crosses to bear, this is mine; the problem is, as a journalist, I am expected to get my copy right first time. In a busy newsroom there’s no luxury of reworking and polishing an articled until it’s ‘just right’. The deadline doesn’t give a damn about precious sentiments of literary art; that’s not what a news or feature article is all about in any case, so get a grip and get that copy filed.

That’s journalism, but what works in the newsroom can play havoc with the author, at least in my case, because it doesn’t necessarily remain there: that damned internal critic demands the same right first time standards for my creative writing too. One of these days, I’m gonna kill the sod – that’s if he doesn’t get me first.

Now, it is possible to get that passage, that scene of a novel right first time. I know because I’ve done it, but right first time doesn’t mean to say finished first time. A draft is a draft – and it remains so until the novel is completed ready for publication. Until then, it’s subject to change (and these days with the delights of digital publishing, it can be subject to change long after it’s ‘gone to press’ too).

Novels grow organically, I find. For all the planning and thought that goes into their conception and development, they still begin to exert themselves as the characters find their feet – and their voice – and the plot begins to blossom. Sooner or later, the novel starts kicking back and asserting itself. You become less the writer, more the secretary, as the story comes alive.

That’s no bad thing. A novel that remains limp to the author’s touch throughout is nothing but a stillbirth in the making, but when it begins to come alive the newborn beastie needs a little tender discipline to ensure it reaches a healthy maturity. Cue that internal critic; he ought to be a crucial ally but that journalistic ‘right first time’ malady transforms a stern ally into a monster smashing up the lab.

To some extent, I probably owe the critic a begrudged vote of thanks, but let’s not go overboard. Here’s the thing: while at times those over-worked passages have resulted in the goods, more often than not any benefit has been outweighed by the headache and the pain involved in the endless re-working. The better re-writes have come at their proper time – in those second or third draft phases.

All the internal critic has really achieved is to hold up the novel’s progress by forcing me to waste time and effort (not to mention sanity) on a part best left to lie fallow while I focus on subsequent sections.

A novel is rarely – if ever – a continuous stream of structured thought. The whole is assembled from – and hopefully greater than – the sum of its parts. The parts, of course, are the disparate scenes and passages that are slotted together to create the seamless whole. At first, it may be a little clunky there, threadbare here, wonky at some of the joins, but as the first draft is revised and re-written through the second, the third, the fourth, however many revisions it takes, then so the work becomes its sturdy, polished self.

The first draft wants flow and momentum. This is the raw material, the ectoplasm of thought manifesting on the screen as words and passages, but however much the one initial manifestation might find itself intact in the finished manuscript, there are plenty more that will require kneading into the ideal shape, others still to be discarded and moulded afresh.

It’s all too easy to be caught in the ‘right first time’ trap of endlessly trying to perfect each passage – each module – before moving on to the next. Sure, sometimes, there’s a case to be made for taking another attempt, but for the most part you want to be getting your raw ideas down and moving on. Otherwise you’re going to fall foul of creative exhaustion, burning mental energy that’s better expended on the next passage, and winding yourself into a tight ball of frustration.

Take it from me, it’s painful and the internal critic’s sergeant-major-style barking only makes it worse. When I find myself caught in this trap, all I can do is work through it – find the draft that pleases the critic or else – by luck or sheer will – force myself to unwind and relax back into the project. Then I can move on and take the novel forward. And that’s the essential thing; plenty of time to rework later and you’ll have a much clearer idea of the work it requires too.

When the time comes, you can let that internal critic go to town. Until then, if yours is as bellicose and exacting as mine, you might want to keep the thing bound and gagged until you’re ready to set it loose.

The above article was written for the Indies Unlimited wesbite and appeared there on 15 March 2012.

Copyright © February 2012. All Rights Reserved.

Book Review: Svera Jang By Seema Gill

Seema’s novel is Svera’s song of life

Reading a novel by an author you know personally is fraught with dangers; all the more so when the novel in question is the author’s first. So Mark Cantrell approached Seema Gill’s Svera Jang with a certain sense of trepidation. What he discovered is a beautifully crafted novel about one woman’s resilience – and the strength of the human spirit

 A version of this review appeared in Cheshire Today

Svera Jang

By Seema Gill

Paperback (386 pages)

Indigo Dreams Publishing

(No longer available)

ISBN: 978-1-907401-14-5

WHEN I got hold of a copy of Svera Jang by Seema Gill, I must confess that I wasn’t entirely convinced that the novel would suit my reading habits, but in truth I hadn’t really bought the book to read at all – I just wanted to own a copy.

Already familiar with Seema’s poetry from our mutual involvement, some years ago, in Bradford’s literary scene, I was curious about her prose, so I was motivated by something of a collector’s urge. Seema, naturally enough, was delighted to learn that I had partaken of her work: thus did she throw down the gauntlet and beg me to review her pride and joy.

Suddenly, I found myself caught in tangle of the ethical and the personal – what if I didn’t like the book? What if I thought it poorly written? A review is worthless for both potential reader and author alike unless honestly given; likewise the truth has the capacity to hurt the author (or indeed swell their heads).

There’s a safe distance between reviewer and author when the two aren’t acquainted personally, so I suddenly found myself running the risk of slapping Seema unbidden in the face. I can’t say that I relished the prospect. So, would I dare to confront the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Yes, I dared, with misgivings. And then I started to read… and read… and read. Fate, or rather Seema’s writing, had slipped me a saving grace. All my worries evaporated as I was pulled into the story of Svera Jang and became seduced by Seema’s evocative prose. In one respect, though, I was right. The novel exists beyond my usual reading habitat, so it was an added pleasure to find my literary horizons become expanded. And, in this case at least, the grass was indeed greener on the far side of the fence.

Quite simply, Svera Jang is a beautiful book. Filled with warmth and compassion, the writing has an eloquence that speaks from the heart to convey a life-affirming story that has a resonance for us all.

Svera Jang dared me to be honest, which in a curious kind of way is what her story is all about, but it is also about much more than that. As Seema wrote: “[I]t’s a story of life.” These few words, buried deep inside the narrative, stood out as I read them for the way they innocently encapsulated the entirety of the novel.

The life in question is that of the character Svera Jang, but it is more than that, since the narrator is the older Svera. Born of the same mother’s womb, they are nevertheless separated by time and space and experience, but the older woman has the clarity – or perhaps the cloudiness – of hindsight as she undertakes a journey to reconcile Svera past with Svera present.

As much as it is about Svera’s life and times, it is also concerned with the chains of motherhood that link us all, one generation to the next, in a great flourishing tree of humanity. Motherhood, yes, and convention too, the great waves of expectation that demand we conform to half-comprehended norms and values; we are all shrouded this way, but it is women who are bound the tightest and in many ways Svera Jang is an urgent plea to shed these webs – and be true to each other and ourselves.

In that respect, though the themes of the feminine course strong throughout the novel, it is above all a book of humanity: man or women, young or old, we are all born of a mother’s womb. If this sounds philosophical to the point of becoming esoteric, then yes it is, for the book is also resplendent with a spiritual aura (but don’t mistake that as necessarily religious), as the narration makes its impassioned plea for the human soul to shine through the veils of age-old stifling custom.

Svera’s journey of self-reconciliation starts in the Punjab, India, where the young Sikh woman’s artistic spirit is already straining against the everyday expectations of culture and country. From there, she strikes out on her own, running from an arranged marriage, but her idealistic pursuit of a life lived true and of a love unbound by conventional expectations lands her in a union with a “philandering Marxist”. Worse still, he proves a wife-beating coward; the very antithesis of everything that young Svera hoped and lived and loved for.

When Svera finds herself living in Copenhagen, she perceives in Europe a land free of the stifling conformity of her homeland, and in young Peter, her blond Viking as she calls him, the very essence of the unconventional man. A Marxist, a revolutionary, he appears to stand against expectation in his desire to change the world, but poor Svera learns – too late – that Europe and her Viking are every bit as bound in expectations of conformity as her homeland.

Peter’s Marxism is little more than a confirmation of his conventionality; a twisted parody of his role as the patriarchal authority figure he would no doubt claim it dismisses. The whole revolutionary show, no matter his personal and sincerest conviction, is but a vehicle for his self-centred narcissism; the demonstration of his stoic devotion to duty and self-sacrifice but a mask to hide his selfish interests and a justification for the neglect of his young wife. The man abandons his young bride on their wedding night to attend a party meeting, surly a sign of things to come as he warps the relationship to suit his own shallow needs.

We are all the sum total of our personal and societal contradictions, Peter the Marxist might say; true enough. Equally do we all carry within us the seeds of a tangled hypocrisy, but as the young Dane matures – in flesh if not in character – alongside his put-upon wife, those Marxian contradictions slough away to leave merely the hypocrite.

The story follows the increasingly mismatched pair from Denmark, to Bradford, England, where they settle for a time. That is, until Peter's wanderlust takes him to partake of charity works in Africa. There his more base lusts see him wander in pursuit of the local women. Svera's suspicions are eventually confirmed; sex with Indian women is so predictable he sneers, compounding his wife's humiliation. To my mind, this middle-aged man, so flushed with a sense of prowess at bedding African girls half his age, thereby further compounds his wrongs with a rather racist undertone.

Indeed, though he himself may not perceive it, he reveals himself as something of a caricature of the old colonialist, albeit it in a 'progressive' guise, striding forth under the weight of the 'white man's burden' to uplift the poor 'natives'.

Ironically, Svera demonstrates a far greater patience and compassion towards Peter than does this review; but then this reviewer found in Peter's curious amalgam of political and personal flaws an echo of his dealings with many a minor figure of the Left: the same familiar arrogance, the same distortions of ideology to justify selfish preferences, the same tendency to disparage others for their own personal failings.

The recognition, for me, made him a deeply unsympathetic character, but also a strangely compelling one. Perhaps Svera felt the same compulsion; certainly, in her story she demonstrates a tremendous energy in trying to reach out and pull the lost essence of her idealistic blond Viking out of his pompous shell. Ultimately, however, Peter proves to be a lost cause.

Reading the story, it is easy to find contempt for Peter as the years pass and he reveals his inadequacies. In truth, however, he is a pitiful and pitiable creature, completely unworthy of the mother of his children, or indeed of the politics he claims to uphold. It is clear that he cannot handle the free-spirited, artistic soul he has wed. The man is crippled by his own conventionality, stunted by his conformity, and the surface radicalism of his politics is but an expression of his stagnant spirit.

Deep down, one suspects he knows this; a tiny sliver of self-awareness that provokes him to take it out on his wife, but even this pathetic man’s fists ultimately prove unable to dowse the light of Svera’s spirit. Though she is forced to endure much pain, grief and shadow in the course of the relationship, she finally manages to liberate herself and rise above Peter to “soar like a firefly” as Seema writes on the book jacket.

The subject matter might sound grim and gritty, a journey in to some kind of misery-lit, but far from it. Svera Jang is a life-affirming story, a demonstration of one woman’s indomitable spirit and determination to remain true to herself. One might also describe it as a kind of ‘coming of age’ tale, the way that the older Svera confronts herself in the mirror of introspection and memory to come to terms with her younger self, yet remain true to her youthful ideals. This is a woman not content to let herself become staid and bitter as she rediscovers the threads that bind Svera through each of her living incarnations. In that, Seema demonstrates a lesson for us all.

Seema’s writing slips seamlessly through a number of narrative approaches. The story doesn’t simply interweave the contemporary with flashbacks of her earlier life, but slides back and forth along her timeline with graceful ease. At times, the prose slips into a delightful magical realism and Seema’s writing is lyrical whether Svera narrates herself, or whether the story slips into the observations of ghosts or even the house in which she dwells. They all take a turn in revealing Svera’s story.

An unusual approach this might be, but it conjures up a beautiful and at times dream-like quality that never loses its roots in the real. This is very much a reflection of Seema’s incarnation as a visual artist and poet, almost painting her story with the palette of her colourful language. Indeed, her prose is imbued with the living spirit of poetry, with its ebb and flow of its cadence, the rhythm lively with the eloquence of human speech in full flow.

“Admirers of Seema Gill’s poetry will not be disappointed by her first novel,” said Bill Broady, quoted on the cover. “Most poets damp down the fires when they venture into prose but she has gone for a full-on conflagration. Language is stretched to its breaking point – and often beyond – in its swoopings between the rhapsodic and the aggrieved.”

When it comes to stretching language to its breaking point, however, I must disagree with Broady: oh no, Seema shows herself too subtly aware of the malleability of her metal as she shapes the story into the fine filigree of its narrative strands, weaving them into the delicate sculpture of her living language, until with a gentle breath she stirs it to vibrate in a mellifluous melody.

For all of its poetic verve, don’t be fooled by an assumption of indulgence, of purpled flowers blossoming to tangle and choke the pace of Seema’s prose; she stays in control of this emotive and emotional journey to create both a compelling drama and a celebration of the human spirit.

This is a brave book, not least for the poetic expression the author uses, but also because Svera is none other than Seema herself. Fictionalised though it is, she reveals much of herself to the critical eye of her audience – and herself – as she airs her own struggle – her jang – to rise above an abusive relationship and reconnect with her self. The novel is as much Seema’s voyage of self-re-discovery – a mirror to her life – as it is Svera's and she invites us to keep her company along the way.

“So my mirror came to name itself Svera, meaning the dawn – an awakening – and Jang, meaning the battle. Svera Jang. I am not her now, but she was once me,” writes Seema as she embarks upon the novel.

“The more I wrote, the more I realised Svera was constantly fighting and searching for something. Hope? Longing? Desire? Or was it the freedom from those illusions? Hang on, hope is not an illusion. Or is it? I know I was searching for a place, a land where freedom prevails in its real sense. One thing was sure, it was a universal search. It started. It ended. It started and ended. It started over and over again. And again. A never-ending story of life, mapped out on the face of every breathing soul. The search for that total freedom of mind was her dream and the dream was her search.”

That’s something we can all share, if – like Svera, like Seema – we dare to look back at the path we trod and to face ourselves in the mirror. It’s called being human. It’s called life. And in this literary incarnation, it’s called Svera Jang.

This review was written for one of the author's earlier blogs, The Word On The Wall, and posted there. A version of this review has also appeared on Cheshire Today.

Note: Seema Gill has since informed the reviewer that the book is no longer available from the publisher listed here, but that she is looking to venture into Indie publishing for a future edition.

Book Review: When Graveyards Yawn (2002)

The grave case of the detective clown

Mark Cantrell takes a walk through the curiously undead streets of Gravetown, in this review originally written for one of his earlier blogsites

Title: When Graveyards Yawn (2002)

Author: G Wells Taylor

Price: FREE

Format: Kindle (plus other device formats)

Source: Many Books (www.manybooks.net)

Author's Website: www.gwellstaylor.com

THE graveyard in the title of this book by Canadian author G Wells Taylor might well be yawning, but this eclectic amalgamation of genre fictions certainly won’t have that effect on the reader.

This is a curious and entertaining novel that works breathlessly (apt, given some of its major characters’ state of being) across the expectations of genre, but it is perhaps easy to see why the author chose to release this title free in an effort to plug the remaining two books in the trilogy it represents.

Simply put, it’s a novel that defies the ever-tightening strictures imposed on authors and readers alike by the demands of the marketing industry. Or, to put it another way, it demands some work from the marketing department that doesn’t involve simply cutting and pasting some of the publicity material for the last ten releases.

A cynical view, perhaps, but When Graveyards Yawn does not sit easily in the accepted slots of fiction categorisation, or in terms of easy definitions about the book itself. Frankly, it pushes the boundaries; these days, by definition, that makes it no easy sell, but for all that it is an engaging and entertaining novel.

So, what is the book about?

In essence, it’s a detective novel. And much as one might expect, it features a down-at-heel private dick, the stoic and much put upon sidekick, a dangerous femme fatale, a client and a murder to solve. But as the clues mount up, the detective work opens up a suitable labyrinth of twists and turns, intrigues and deceptions, that build up into a multi-layered mystery. And our gumshoe is slap bang in the middle of the action.

Hold on, though. This is no straightforward detective mystery thriller.

Even from the beginning, we quickly discern that this is not the expected noirish universe: for one thing, our gumshoe is called Tommy Wildclown. As the name says, he is a clown – a priapic, alcoholic one, with a disjointed and somewhat psychotic personality at that – complete with outlandish clothes and face paint.

The man Wildclown isn’t much of a detective, it must be said, but he shares some mysterious connection with the driving personality – the actual detective – who is trapped into serially possessing his body. Yes, it gets a little strange.

We encounter this unusual relationship right from the start, told through the ‘eyes’ of the narrator, as his spirit drifts in close proximity to his messed up host. To be honest, this scene-setting and character introduction is a little confusing and off-putting at first, but it locks down with the second chapter, opening up a book that is worth the effort – provided one sticks through that initially disjointing first chapter.

Quite why the spirit ‘tec is condemned to haunt this freaked out clown is all part of the mystery, and no doubt fully explored and revealed across the trilogy, but he himself is as baffled by this haunting as the reader. Whether he is the genuine spirit of a dead man condemned to haunt – and possess – this clown, or whether he is some eerily fragmented, but functioning, aspect of the clown’s shattered personality is deliberately left open to question.

Regardless, whether spirit or not, he has to keep his flesh and blood clown in relatively good shape, if he is to get to the bottom of things – and that means plenty of bread and butter gumshoe work. The case that duly arrives presents itself as a relatively straightforward murder, but it is about to propel both clown and ghostly detective into the heart of the mystery that has clutched the world in a state of baffling undeath.

Oh, and the client is also the murder victim; he was shot in the back of the head and he’s none too happy about it. From there things get, well, stranger and stranger, if not curiouser and curiouser (but to be fair, that is another novel entirely, and there are certainly no white rabbits here, late or otherwise).

When Graveyards Yawn presents a world that has definitely seen better days. Set 50 years after an incident known only as The Change, death as we understand it has become a thing of the past. Bacteria are extinct, the dead don't exactly shuffle off the mortal coil, but they don't become the shambling brain-dead zombies of Romero movies either. In the aftermath of this macabre transition, conventional governments have collapsed as the dead settle in, and everything is controlled by the ubiquitous 'Authority'.

There are a few niggles, mostly of the editing and formatting kind, which can detract somewhat from the reading experience on occasions, but overall this is an engaging story that will keep you reading late into the night and beyond.

The above article was originally written for one of the author's earlier blogsites, The Word On The Wall, and was posted on 26 March 2011.

The pub sign is just so iconically English

Sign of the times calling

Before the days of carefully manipulated corporate branding, there was feudal heraldry, and out of this era emerged a more down-to-earth visual aesthetic fit to slake a good thirst – they were the signs that said ‘here be ale'

By Mark Cantrell

THE  traditional English pub sign has emerged as the top “icon of England” in a poll conducted for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).

Yet at a time when such individualised signage is recognised as quintessentially English, the CPRE fears that they are on the verge of extinction as independent pubs close down, or old fashioned pubs receive a ‘modern’ makeover by new corporate chain bar owners.

Pictorial pub signs go all the way back to the 14^th Century, when a Royal Act in 1393 made it compulsory for inns to have signs. This was so that official ale tasters and the mainly illiterate population could identify them. In a sense, then, they represent some of the earliest forms of marketing.

Ever since, these dedicated forms of custom-art have been enticing drinkers to pop in for a quick pint – or three. Nor are they just a rural phenomenon, many an urban pub clings to the traditional calling card, even if in the towns and cities the pressure to go corporate is even more intense.

“[Pub signs] are as characteristic of rural England as church spires and ancient hedgerows. The diversity of English life has been reflected in these intriguing and deceptively informative artefacts for centuries,” said Bill Bryson, author and president of the CPRE.

“Only around 30 independent pub chains and breweries in Britain are still ordering individually painted signs. Amazingly, a few of these fine artists are still working and there are some notable examples such as the St Austell Brewery in Cornwall that still employ sign writers. But it is a shrinking market and the dominance of a few chains has contributed to the disappearance of traditional British pub names, and led to a profusion of bland corporate makeovers.”

It is estimated that around 36 pubs are closing their doors every week. John Howard, speaking for CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) said: “With the latest research suggesting one in eight pubs will be calling last orders by 2012, people in the business will welcome this public support for their trade.”

The support in question is the results of the vote in the public poll that shot good old-fashioned pub signs to the top slot as visual symbols of the country. The second slot went to red post boxes ,while coming in third position was canal boating. Though the angle of the poll was themed very much towards the countryside, some of the nominations for the poll apply to an urban setting too.

Actor Kevin Spacey nominated canal boating, an activity which is growing in popularity as a holiday activity. Partly this is a result of a resurgence in boating brought about by an interest in heritage, but also the resurrection of the canals as water features as part of the regeneration of Britain’s towns and cities. Pub signs were nominated by author Sebastian Faulks.

Other nominations for iconic aspects of England included corner shops, nominated by poet Daljit Nagra; stiles by author David Lodge; post boxes by writer and photographer Peter Ashley; crags by actor and television presenter Michael Palin; the Malvern Hills by poet and musician Benjamin Zephaniah; and bonfires by journalist and presenter Tom Heap.

In all, there were 25 nominations by journalists, actors, authors, photographers and filmmakers. They were selected from the hardback book ‘Icons of England’ (ISBN: 978-1845250546. RRP: £20), a photographic homage to England’s countryside and its historic monuments, published in September by the CPRE in association with Think Books and Pan Macmillan. The nominations were then subject to a vote in the poll of just over 1,000 people, with the pub signs coming top of the poll.

“People who think of England as a practical country with little flair for the visual would never have imagined that its lanes and roads would be regularly punctuated by what look like cards from a wooden tarot pack – optical extravagances, creakily offering delight, escape and risk,” said Sebastian Faulks. “But it is so; and sometimes we hardly see the strangest things by which we are surrounded.”

Bryson added: “I’m delighted pub signs won the icons vote, and of course there is no better place to celebrate this result than inside an equally iconic British pub.”

Indeed. So, stuff the fancy wine bar – mine’s a pint of real ale.

 This article was written for and published on one of the author's earlier blogs back in December 2008.

Heart of Bradford's historic wool trade brought to book

Nothing sheepish about this architectural revival

One of Bradford's historic buildings gained a face-lift and a new lease of life to create a startling regeneration success, writes Mark Cantrell

This article that first appeared in the The Yorkshire Journal (2000)

MOST of our heritage, the relics of past lives, is preserved like an Egyptian mummy. Dusty and hollow, its vitality has been gouged out along with its innards.

The Wool Exchange in Bradford is different. It stands as a monument to the past, but it also represents a prosperous future. In a sense, the Wool Exchange is Bradford. Over the generations it has followed the fortunes of its Pennine home.

Once it attracted traders from across the globe to haggle prices on the floor of its cathedral-like hall. As the industry declined, this fine building fell into disuse to stand as a brooding shadow of the past. Unnoticed. A tale of what was.

Cities never stand still if they are to grow and thrive. And Bradford certainly hasn't. In recent years it has pondered a future beyond the wool industry. Legacies of this past have been brought to life as galleries and offices and retail developments.

Our past has been brought to life in a way that transcends the here and now, if only we have the guts to continue along the road.

The Wool Exchange has become a centrepiece for this revival of old monuments. A £2.5 million refurbishment transformed the Grade 1 listed building, that today houses shops, a restaurant, a pub, cafe and commercial offices.

Pride of place went to Waterstones, the booksellers, which took up residence within the old trading hall. The ghost-like statue of free-trade advocate, Richard Cobden, towers over bookbuyers and packed shelves, where once wool-men fiercely haggled prices.

Situated on the granite columns and stone walls, the visitor can find plaques and testimonials to the building's past. The walls speak to us, even as we browse.

The centrepiece of the renovation was the glass facade that now fronts Waterstone's. This replaced a blank, connecting wall. At the time, it caused controversy. But architecturally it works, allowing the once gloomy interior to be illuminated. The heart is on display in all its splendour, whether you stand on the inside or the outside.

The Exchange now stands for what it is, and will be. Much as it did when it was first opened in 1867. In those days it symbolised the importance of Bradford and the wealth that flocked into the hands of its wool Barons.

It was built at a cost of £40,000 in the Venetian Gothic style. The foundation stone was laid by the then Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston in 1864. It can still be seen today in the basement restaurant.

Unusually, the Exchange was built of different coloured stone, rather than the usual honey-hued Yorkshire gritstone that forms most of the city's Victorian architecture.

In 1877, the statue of Richard Cobden was erected on the main trading floor.

The ground level exterior is decorated with statues and carved heads of the luminaries of free trade and discovery: Cobden, Salt, Stephenson, Watt, Arkwright, Jaquard, Gladstone, Palmerston. On the other side are: Raleigh, Drake, Columbus, Cook and Anson.

These are the men who "discovered" the world, laid the foundations of an industrial society and otherwise opened up the world for global trade, thereby allowing the kind of wealth and international links once enjoyed by the city, in those days nicknamed "Worstedopolis".

And yet it is the building that is noticed and admired. The "Founding Fathers" of world trade, if they are noticed at all, are anonymous. Could that be some kind of poetic justice?

The new frontage may have been a cause of controversy. But the Exchange was born in controversy when the contract for its construction was awarded to the firm of Lockwood & Mawson.

Lockwood was a talented architect. He was also a close friend of the wool magnate Titus Salt. Through his friendship he gained plenty of work, including the contract for Salts Mill at Salt Aire.

Sour grapes were the order of the day once the firm gained the contract, and accusations of favouritism were rife, though none of this acrimony was allowed to interfere with the project, which is seen as one of  Lockwood's best designs.

Admirers of the building point to its high, narrow-hammer-beam roof as a particularly striking aspect of its design. This is best appreciated from the floor overlooking the trading hall, which now makes space for a cafe.

Light from the stained-glass roof windows illuminate the ornate pillars and arches. And looking down from this vantage point at the booksellers below, one can almost erase the shelves from the mind and picture those long-gone wool-men.

By the early '60s the Exchange's list of subscribers tallied over 3,000. That may not seem much but they were a powerful breed. The world's wool trade existed in their collective hands. These players came from all over the world, representing traders and suppliers, but most were Bradfordians born and bred - if such a phrase can truly be applied to people born of itinerant stock.

These men had many languages and were familiar with markets the world over. Between them, they possessed a global network of contacts and specialists who knew about local markets and tastes. This gave them the edge in terms of exploiting a diverse range of markets.

By the late '60s this was all gone. Bradford ceased to be the centre of the wool trade and the Exchange fell into disuse. The floor no longer babbled with voices of the world. Richard Cobden's ghost was left to the lonely gloom.

In 1968 Bradford Council bought the building to save it from demolition. A fate which befell many of "old Bradford's" architectural landmarks, such as the Swan Arcade, that now exists only in fond memory.
   
Some may have thought demolition preferable to its new fate, for the Wool Exchange became a flea-market. Shabby and gloomy, it was largely ignored by the city outside.

Fortunately for future generations, the building was not destroyed and refurbishment brought it back from the dead. Like many other monuments to the wool days, the Exchange was rightfully recognised as an asset to the city in its bid for regeneration. Some, like Little Germany (the old warehouse district), have been developed to house galleries and exhibitions and office space.

Yet none of these redeveloped icons quite stand out like the Wool Exchange. After it reopened the building became something of a focus for nostalgia as old "wool people" returned to admire their former workplace.

They assailed the staff at Waterstones with their fond memories. Eventually, the store decided to collect them and put them on the record when they published: The Wool Exchange - An Oral History. The proceeds of the book went to charity.

What emerged is that Bradfordians are passionate about the place. Somehow this building has become a symbol of the city's pride. Not just amongst the old, but also those who are too young to remember its former incarnation.

They visit the shops, they eat and drink there, they browse the bookshop, they walk beneath its walls. The Exchange exerts an almost subliminal presence. It's part of the landscape, it's been there always, most know little of its history, yet it is loved and admired for its character.

The Exchange is living heritage.



First published in The Yorkshire Journal, Winter 2000 issue.

When Bradford was at the forefront of education reform

"How can we educate dirty and ailing children?"

Mark Cantrell on a woman's struggle to give working class children a healthy and educated start in life, back in the days when they were seen as little more than 'fodder' for the mills

STRANGE to think that it was a period of bitter industrial turmoil that indirectly brought Margaret Macmillan to Bradford, where she did much of her pioneering work in child education.

The early 1890s was the period of New Unionism that saw fierce clashes between employers and workers. Riots, bitter strikes and outbursts of violence did not leave Bradford untouched. After a lengthy dispute at Lister's Mill, the Riot Act was read out from the steps of City Hall and troops were called in to pacify the city centre.

One such street that survives from that dramatic time is the narrow Ivegate - where troops with bayonets charged the retreating strikers. Anyone who has ever been down Ivegate can surely imagine the terror of such an event.

From this momentous period, the Independent Labour Party was formed and in 1892 they invited Margaret Macmillan to lecture their members in the city.

Coming from an affluent background, she was born in New York in 1860. After the death of her near-bankrupt father, her family returned to Aberdeen where they were treated as the poor relations. Margaret became the "mother" figure after her own mother descended into "a gloom of melancholy."

She trained as a teacher and toured Europe. On her return she became the companion of a wealthy socialite, Lady Mieux, described as a "fiercely pro-Tory Tart". This Lady promised Margaret a prosperous future and fine acting career.

Since Margaret was a committed Christian Socialist, it seems bizarre that she gained such employment. She recalled her own worries over declaring her politics, but such worries proved unfounded. By all accounts Lady Mieux was delighted; promising that after a while together, Margaret would be cured of her affliction. It is also likely that this fine benefactress gained a certain mischievous delight by consorting with a "Red".

If this was so, she certainly lived to regret it. In her spare time Margaret mixed with a wide range of exiles who flocked to London at the time, as well as other politically active individuals. Kier Hardie, Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, and the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin were frequent associates.

Eventually she introduced the "Vierge Rouge" of the Paris Commune to Lady Mieux, who subsequently invited both women to a dinner party, doubtless in order to delight in showing off her revolutionary chums. However, things did not go to plan. The guests were horrified by the "revolutionary fervour" of the conversation, and the good Lady was reduced to a screaming fit.

"Go!" she later declared. "You may blot me from your memory."

Thus Margaret and her Lady parted company, just in time for the invitation to lecture in Bradford - the "Socialist Rome" as it was then known in left-wing circles.

On their arrival at Forster Square Station, Margaret wrote: "We saw in a shower of rain the shining statue of Oastler standing in Market Square with two little black and bowed mill-workers at his knee. Lord Shaftesbury had unveiled it in 1869, and it stood there - a tragic avowal of things that still went on."

Much of what she saw in the city appalled her: many children were dirty, vermin infested, hungry and stunted. Arriving only to give a few lectures, these sights compelled her to stay.

In 1894 she was elected as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) member of the Bradford Board of Education. She was the youngest member ever to join, and the first woman. She remained with the Board until 1902, and through all that time she fought to improve the quality of education for the children of industrial workers.

"How can we educate dirty and ailing children?" she asked the Board. First and foremost, Margaret believed that if a child was to benefit from education, then that child must be healthy. Many of her battles were conducted not just to improve education, but to fight the neglect that withered young minds before they could even form.

Life for the children in the industrial slums was extremely poor. Low-quality food at home, unhealthy conditions, inadequate or non-existent facilities for keeping clean, and parents working long shifts at the mills. In fact, many of the children themselves were condemned to long shifts of work.

This was known as the "half-time" system, whereby children were required to work for six hours before attending school. Margaret opposed this practice.

In 1897 she gained one of her first victories for deprived children, when the Wapping Street School opened the first school baths in the country.

"I recall the jeers which greeted her first demand, as member of the School Board, for baths," a former colleague said. "First derision, then anger at her persistence, then examination and finally proud acceptance."

This was but one of many of the "mad" schemes she fought to bring into reality, gained through determination, conviction and love of children.

Medical inspections became another success, when the city appointed its first Inspector for schools. The rest of the country would follow 13 years later, and they portrayed a harrowing account of life for working class children. During one inspection of 300 children, the inspector discovered that a third had been sewn into their clothes and not removed them for six months. Many were infested with lice, they were under-grown and in poor health.

After establishing the link between health and performance at school with the food children received at home, Margaret succeeded in introducing kitchens to provide the first - free - school meals. These were carefully balanced to provide a minimum nutritional standard that would improve the children's health.

Other improvements followed: she replaced long benches with tables and chairs. Buildings were poorly contrived and badly lit with poor ventilation. Echoing modern concerns, they were also badly overcrowded. She fought to change all of this, liberating the children from "fort-like" schools, and allowing them outside for walks in the green surrounds of a park.

What she is best known for, however, is the Open Air Nursery Movement, which she founded with her sister Rachel. The first was opened in Bradford. London followed. These gained widespread recognition for the good they achieved, and soon nursery schools swept the country, after the 1905 Education Act empowered local authorities to establish them.

A far cry from the stereotyped Victorian teacher, Margaret advocated play, freedom and a lively, talkative atmosphere in the classroom. During visits to her nurseries, she would often spend hours sat on rugs playing with the children.

She is described as a dreamer, who found practical solutions to make her dreams real. Yet the things she dreamed are simple by today's standards, even though she was the champion of the very things we take for granted. In her day, however, they were Revolutionary (Yes - with a capital 'R').

It says a great deal about her tenacity that she won these gains for the children. After all, they were mill-workers' "brats". What need had they for an education, when they were destined for a life in the mills anyway? Yet to Margaret, education was a thing of value in itself. In that respect, she was typical of a whole generation of socialists and early trade unionists.

Margaret Macmillan died in March 1931, leaving a lasting legacy not just in Bradford, but in London and the rest of the country, where all children benefited from improved educational prospects.

In 1960 a commemorative plaque was placed on the house at 49 Hanover Square, Manningham, where she lived during her time in Bradford. It was inscribed, simply: "All children are mine."


First published in Old Yorkshire Magazine #7 Autumn 1998.

Meet the man who conquered "Bradford's Disease"

When Anthrax was an industrial hazard

First published by local history magazine, Old Yorkshire Magazine, Mark Cantrell looks back at the exploits of a man who conquered a disease that is today more commonly associated with bio-terrorism than it is the wool textile industry

ANTHRAX is an unpleasant disease, little heard of today, beyond perhaps the annals of biological warfare. In the early part of this century, however, it was a major industrial hazard for Bradford workers.

Dr William Eurich

The elimination of the disease baffled the wool textile industry. It was a complete mystery - its source, causes and transmission, yet it claimed many lives. Particularly among woolsorters, since they dealt with the very source of the contagion: wool and animal hair.

The disease became such a scourge that in France it was known as 'Bradford's Disease'.

One sorter who gave evidence at an inquest said he personally knew 22 men who had died after sorting mohair. Many such attacks were fatal. It was common for a worker to go home feeling 'out of sorts'. Twenty four hours later he would be dead.

There was increasing concern over the number of deaths of workers after handling alpaca and mohair, which had been coming into the city since 1847. Bradford & District Trade and Labour Council urged the need for a Bacteriological and Pathological Lab to assist doctors in their diagnoses.

In 1905 they finally got their wish. The Home Office, in co-operation with the Bradford Chamber of Commerce, established the Anthrax Investigation Board. Appointed as bacteriologist, Dr William Frederick Eurich promptly set up his lab in the old Technical College (now Bradford & Ilkley Community College).

Over the next 30 years, Dr Eurich devoted much of his energies towards defeating the anthrax threat. This "cause" was considered his life's work. But he had already gained his professional credibility via other aspects of his work.

Considered a brain and nerve specialist, Dr Eurich made a name for himself in the study and treatment of certain classes of criminal behaviour. For 24 years he was the Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Leeds. He also worked as pathologist to Bradford Corporation, and was an honorary physician at Bradford Royal Infirmary.

At the Infirmary he regularly devoted Saturday's to treating patients unable to afford doctors' fees.

He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and took his medical degree at Edinburgh University, where he became a gold medalist MD. He began practising in Bradford in 1896.

Born in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1869, he was brought to Bradford by his parents at the age of eight. They were typical of the wave of immigrants who influenced the city, bringing with them liberal politics and a humanitarian outlook that contributed towards Bradford's progressive social stance at the time.

Anthrax became recognised as Eurich's greatest achievement. In his make-shift lab at the Technical College he studied cultures of over 14,000 samples of the anthrax bacillus and studied thousands of hair and wool samples. Through this, he discovered it was the wool and hair that transmitted the deadly spores.

Over the years he was in constant contact with the very agents that could kill him in less than a day. As the Yorkshire Observer commented: "He was playing with Death - that others might live."

Though it took 30 years to thoroughly defeat the disease, Eurich made rapid progress. Within three years there was a dramatic decrease in incidents of the disease. The Medical Inspector of Factories reported a decrease in the number of fatal cases of anthrax.

Eurich had discovered that clean hair was just as dangerous as when dirty. Thanks to his research he was able to provide workers with the knowledge to spot likely contaminated material. This brought about a great deal of preventative measures against infection.

New methods of treatment also increased the numbers of those who survived the disease. It was through a colleague, however, that Eurich discovered the way to sterilise the wool. This led to
the establishment of a Government disinfection station at Liverpool, where contaminated material was brought into the country.

An associate, G E Duckering commented to Eurich that he often used a drop of formaldehyde on his pillow to help him sleep. The smell lingered after it had dried. This provided Eurich with the inspiration to use formaldehyde to disinfect wool - with no detriment to the wool or workers' health.

At Eurich's retirement from practice in October 1938, the Coroner, J G Hutchinson, made this comment: "In the old days I conducted scores of inquests on anthrax victims. But no case has come to my notice for many years now."

In recognition of his work, the Textile Institute presented Eurich with its medal in November 1937. He was the first non-member ever to receive the award.

After his death, Eurich was further honoured by Bradford Civic Society. An oak bench, inscribed with the words: "He conquered anthrax", was presented to the Technical College's Textile Department on the centenary of Eurich's birth.

That bench still lies within the College textile department, gathering dust in a corridor.

After gaining renown for the service he did to the city, Eurich's modesty, and the removal of a serious threat from the lives of ordinary Bradfordians, has caused the dust to gather over Eurich's memory too.

At his retirement party a guest said: "The comparative immunity to anthrax and the lapse of time since Dr Eurich began his life's work creates a real danger that his splendid self-sacrifice may be overlooked and perhaps forgotten.

"It is the duty of everyone to see that it does not happen."

They failed. Though perhaps not entirely.


First Published by Old Yorkshire Magazine, #4, Winter 1997

Cover Story: Don't overblow it

There may be bubbles ahead

There’s a worry that Britain faces another house price bubble, but this time it’s not just sale prices that are over-heating – rents are blasting through the roof too. Can these bubbles be safely deflated before they blow up in our faces?

By Mark Cantrell

First published in the May 2013 edition of Housing magazine 

SO, here we go again, one might think. The smart money, or should that be the ‘smart mouths’ of the commentariat, are talking bubbles; the kind that are primed to blow with devastating economic and social consequences.

Actually, if the critics are anything to go by, it’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer who’s been blowing the bubbles, inviting Britain to join him in an “aspiration nation” with a Government stimulus package intended to revivify the market for first-time buyers.

Homeownership is supposedly back on the agenda, courtesy of George Osborne’s Help to Buy package, which promises some generous Government cash and State guarantees to underwrite mortgage-lending to the tune of a staggering £130bn. Taking out a mortgage and buying a home is a risky venture, of course, and the potential drawback to the Chancellor’s scheme is that he may well have – in effect – mortgaged the UK’s economy to the flagging fortunes of the housing market.

Help for first-time buyers is welcomed by a broad spectrum of industry figures but there are mixed feelings about the Government’s proposed method; too little too late, on the one hand, fears that it simply sets the scene for a nasty crash somewhere down the line. While it may help a few first-time buyers short term, over the longer term, we’ll all pay a price if these fears prove prescient.

The Chancellor might hope that his Budget measures boost the delivery of new homes but any such movement is expected to be small scale, even when combined with the more direct investment in newbuild, such as Build to Rent and the £225 million to deliver an additional 15,000 affordable homes. But these numbers are small fry when set against the 250,000 or so new homes needed per year to begin addressing need.

The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) noted “the measures could push up house prices if they fail to stimulate housebuilding on a big enough scale”. And the organisation has not been alone in warning of the potential for the Chancellor’s market interventions to inflate another housing bubble.

“[T]he danger is that if we don’t tackle the fact we’re still not building enough homes, we’ll just create another housing bubble that will continue to push prices up and out of reach of the majority,” said David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation (NHF). “Our housing market has long been weakened by the lack of new houses being built, which are forcing up rental and house prices – leaving millions of people struggling to get on the property ladder or pay their rent.”

To the campaigning organisation Priced Out, the Chancellor’s Help to Buy package is a “disaster waiting to happen”. It said: “Pumping more money into a housing market with chronic under-supply has one sure-fire outcome: pushing up house prices. At best it may help a small number of new buyers but it will mean housing becomes more expensive for those that follow.

“The major problem faced by first-time buyers is high prices and daunting levels of debt needed to enter homeownership.

"Of all the policies you could think of to tackle this, it is harder to think of a riskier or more short-termist policy than Help to Buy. House prices across much of the UK are already unaffordable for young adults and families with ordinary earnings, so this extra upward pressure on prices will create far bigger problems in future.”

Indeed, house prices have already been ‘recovering’ since well before the Chancellor’s latest intervention in the market. Figures vary across the country, and from month to month, with London as ever the prime hotspot, but they remain very much on an upward drift.

The average price paid for a home in England and Wales rose by £532 in March, according to the LSL Property Services Index, with house prices up by £1,117 over the last year (and £6,600 if London is included). It puts the average house price at £230,078 – a mere 0.8% below the pre-crash 2008 peak.

The knock-on effects of high house prices, not to mention the post-crash reservations about mortgage lending, have been felt in the private rental sector, where business has been booming over the last few years as it mops up the homeownership exiles.

Increased competition from those who have become known as Generation Rent has put upwards pressure on rents; not one bubble but two, a double whammy in the making.

Last year’s Home Truths report from the NHF summed it up neatly. “The shortfall of homes year-on-year has huge consequences. Rising house prices mean the dream of home ownership is beyond the reach of millions and the size of a mortgage deposit alone stops many would-be first-time buyers from getting on the housing ladder. More and more people are therefore being pushed into the private rented sector and as demand rises there, so too do the rents.

“With private rents becoming increasingly unaffordable, and with the lack of security and often quality, that private renting offers, many people are turning to the affordable housing sector for a home. One in 12 families in England is now on a social housing waiting list and homelessness has risen by 26% over the last two years.”

Traditional social housing remains critically understocked, however, and so offers little scope for a haven for such exiles. Furthermore, there is concern across the sector about its ability to deliver sufficient new homes.

The sector’s ventures in the Affordable Rent programme, low-cost home ownership, even private rental and sale offerings could be expected to mop up some of those cast out of the conventional marketplace, but in many respects it’s early days yet. In any case, it is far from clear whether it can deliver sufficient properties under the existing environment to defuse any ticking market timebombs.

Rents, like house prices, are in constant flux, varying from month to month and place to place but again demonstrate a strong ascent. Indeed, generally speaking, rents appear to be rising with far greater vigour than sale prices.

The March 2013 HomeLet Rental Index showed that the average cost of renting in the UK went up 3.3% during the first quarter of this year, reaching an average rent of £776 per month. The LSL Property Services Buy-to-Let Index reported an average March rent of £735 per month for England and Wales, a 0.5% rise on February. It reported a new high for London, with an average monthly rent of £1,106.

The Countrywide Quarterly Lettings Index, meanwhile, indicated that average monthly rents rose the most in Wales and the East of England in the first quarter of this year, both up 5.5% to £618 and £814 per month respectively. Outer London’s average monthly rents rose by 5.4% year-on-year to
£1,107 per month, though the index reported a decline of 1.1% in the South East, falling to £1,054 per month. The North and South West also experienced  a year-on-year rise in average monthly rents to £603 and £745 respectively (up 2.7% and 2.3%). In the Midlands, rents rose 1.8% to an average of £636.

Snapshots of snapshots the above figures may well be, but they serve to demonstrate the inflation taking its toll on household finances; the risk is that people priced out of homeownership are now becoming priced out of private rent. Indeed, rising rents are arguably another barrier to homeownership, depleting households’ disposable income that can be put towards a deposit for a home.

In its latest Savings and Investment Report, pension provider Scottish Windows indicated it would take renters 23 years to save enough for the average deposit on a home, put at £50,845.

For first-time buyers, it would take 13 years for them to save an average deposit of £27,984; as things stand now, doubtless prices and therefore deposits, along with rents, would continue to eat into their savings capability during that time.

This is taking its toll, according to the charity Shelter. In a survey, it found that two thirds of renters are struggling to pay the rent or even falling behind. The survey of 4,300 private renters found that one in three were cutting back on birthday and Christmas presents; one in four visit family and friends less often; one in seven use a credit card to pay the rent; one in 12 have borrowed money from children to pay the rent; also, it found that 6% (the equivalent of 515,000 people) had been forced to move home because of a rent increase. And pressure on the private rental sector continues to increase, even as wages stagnate, the charity said.

“This is proof that the growing cost of renting is hitting families where it hurts, forcing them to make impossible choices about what they can cut back on next,” said Campbell Robb, Shelter’s chief executive.

“When families are forced to resort to taking money from their children’s savings or paying their rent on a credit card, it’s a clear sign that sudden rent rises are pushing many ordinary families to the edge.”

Hardly surprising, then, that the numbers of people falling off the edge are likewise increasing. Quarterly statistics from the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) indicated 13,570 households were accepted as homeless in October-December 2012, up 6% on the same period of 2011.

Homelessness was up 10% in 2012 compared to the previous calendar year.

“This is yet more proof of how families across the country are being pushed to breaking point,” Robb added.

“The crippling cost of housing, combined with rising prices, flatlining wages and cuts to housing support, is meaning many families are simply no longer able to hold on to the roof over their heads.”

As we already know to our cost, house price bubbles are catastrophic; all the more so when they burst – as burst they must – and send their destructive shockwaves crashing through the economy, and ordinary people’s lives. Unless the bubbles are safely deflated, then eventually this house of cards will come tumbling down – and then where will we be?


This article first appeared in the May 2013 edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 22 May 2013.

Book Review: Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death by Otto Dov Kulka

Haunting reminiscence of inhumanity

Dreamlike and poetic, yet no less lucid for that, Otto Dov Kulka’s personal reflections of his time in Auschwitz is a compelling testament that is both haunting – and haunted, writes Mark Cantrell 

First published on Cheshire Today

BEAUTY in the midst of Auschwitz must seem a strange concept, but that is one of the many apparent paradoxes one might perceive in Otto Dov Kulka’s personal testament to the Holocaust.

Certainly, as Kulka himself relays in ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’, the author is himself struck by the strangeness of the observation, yet as his own words testify “the blue of the sky in this land is many times stronger than any blue one can see anywhere else”. This was in Auschwitz; surrounded by so much senseless death, constrained by the bleak landscape of the camp, the colour blue takes on a whole new intensity.

The strangeness is compounded by the strangest phenomenon of all, the family camp, so-called, where the boy Kulka found himself living amidst a strange discontinuity of normal family and cultural life, yet immersed at the very same time in the continuation of cultural and social living. In stark contrast to the by-now-familiar images of Auschwitz, here there were no striped uniforms, no shaven heads; there were choirs, and schools maintained, intellectual activity, a semblance of life. Again, paradoxical, contradictory, the way the inmates of the camp continued to cling to the norms and practices, one might say the very fabric of civilised society – indeed that they were allowed to – amidst the wastelands of death that lay all around them.

But what was the family camp? A cruelty within a cruelty; a charade to mask the horrific truth of the existence of murder on an industrial scale, all established to deceive officials from the International Red Cross. Once it had served its purpose, the camp was “liquidated”; the euphemism for the gas chambers and crematoria that gulped down the inmates in ghoulish swallows to belch from grim chimneys the ash of their remains.

The image of those chimneys stands stark in the mind of a young boy who witnessed their voracious appetite for human flesh, even as he shied away from the maddening totality of their reality; just as they become essential sites of visitation for the adult Kulka, finally confronting these macabre obelisks as they lay in ruins, but no less potent for all that.

Kulka was born in Czechoslovakia in 1933. As a child he was first sent to Theresienstadt ghetto with his mother, and from there to Auschwitz – the Metropolis of Death – where he survived the lie of the family camp. He went on to become a respected historian, and dedicated much of his academic life to studying and researching Nazism and the Holocaust.

Today, Kulka is Rosenbloom Professor Emeritus in Jewish History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in publishing ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’ he has ‘broken ranks’ from the lifelong discipline he has maintained in the course of his historical research; the man has built his reputation on the strictest adherence to cold objectivity in his subject matter. Now, he breaks a silence to provide an insight into his own personal history.

The whys and wherefore of this are best explained by Kulka himself in his introduction to the book: “[F]ew are aware of the existence within me of a dimension of silence, of a choice I made to sever the biographical from the historical past. And fewer still will know that for a decade (between 1991 and 2001) I made tape-recordings which allowed me to describe the images that well up in my memory and explore the remembrance of what in my private mythology is called ‘The Metropolis of Death’ ... These recordings were neither historical testimony nor autobiographical memoir, but the reflections of a person then in his late fifties and sixties, turning over in his mind those fragments of memory and imagination that have remained from the world of the wondering child of ten to eleven that I had once been.”

Don’t be fooled, then, into taking the book as a straightforward autobiographical account. It isn’t. Yes, there is personal history, drawn from his diaries, the recordings he mentions, his own recollections; the essence of the book is a reflection on memory, on imagination, how the sights and sounds of Auschwitz impact the mindscape of a growing boy, and the man that boy in time became.

In many respects, it makes the book difficult to quantify; we are invited to roam through Kulka’s internal narrative space, to perceive his memories and recollections and dreams, the metaphors and euphemisms his mind constructed, as he himself reflects upon their meaning. This is both an exploration of the horrors of Auschwitz, as it is an exploration of the conundrums of the place; a reflection on the nature of people to cling to the trappings of life, in both a denial of mortal doom and yet, it seems on reading, a kind of defiance.

There is something almost dreamlike to ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death; seemingly surreal at times, as dreams can be, poetic in its cadence, in its allusion to metaphor and visual symbolism, yet for all that, the book is never less than a lucid account of Kulka’s memories and reflections. Equally there is a sense of timelessness here, a disconnection from the conventional passage of years; naturally, for here in these pages Kulka comes to his Auschwitz from two directions.

First, there is the conventional chronology of years lived; the actual time in which he dwelled within – and was fortunate enough to live beyond – Auschwitz. Then there is the mind slipping back to the memory of those times, interspersed with his backwards travel through his chronology, to the memories and recollections of visits to Auschwitz as an adult, to the memories of the child invoked in those visits, to the memories of the adult by a still older man. This is a tangled tapestry of time and space and life and death.

Here, we have an author haunted by boyhood experience, seemingly no more able to make sense of the horrors of the camps than distant observers separated from this Great Death by time and space; in his own words, he explored his life works as a rigorous scholar, suggestive of building a shell around the memories of the past.

As he writes, deeper into the book: “Here, in this safe and well-paved way of scientific discipline, I believed that I would be able to infuse a consciousness of the intensity of the experience of those historic events, a consciousness of their trans-dimensionality, a consciousness of their vast impersonality, which I experienced through the prism of that present – its memory and its imagining, from which I flinched and which I feared, perhaps subconsciously, to confront head-on.

“The fact is that in all my research I never had to deal with the stage, the dimension, of the violent end, the murder, the humiliation and the torture of those human beings. I left, or skirted that dimension – as perhaps I skirted the piles of skeletons of the corpses that were heaped up in front of the barracks in Auschwitz on my way to the youth hut – in order to study the broad background of the ideology and the policy underlying it all, the historical implications, the dynamics of society and government, and the society and leadership of those who were the objects of the ‘Final Solution’ – the Jews – in the period preceding that stage of a violent, ultimate end.”

Meaning, an ancient human urge, made all the more painfully poignant here, in its context of one of the 20^th Century’s worst of crimes against humanity.

Throughout, Kulka invokes the two great themes of his experiences and recollections of Auschwitz: the “Metropolis of Death”, and the “immutable Law of Death” by which the fate of the camp and its inmates seemed embroiled. In these, he wrestles with the obfuscations of memory, seeks the vaults of hidden meaning in the euphemisms of language in camp life, strives to draw meaning out of the incongruities of that existence’s mental memorial: the sounds of Ode to Joy sung by a children’s choir opposite the crematoria, the “black stains” he saw on the snow-clad roadside during a winter march – the frozen corpses of stragglers too weak to continue. And his mother, a notable vision in Kulka’s memory and dreams, as she walks towards her death with never a backward glance.

‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’ is intense without ever becoming overwhelming, personal without – apparent – bitterness; the book is intimate, yet still conveys an aura of detachment. Human and humane, Kulka’s book is a moving testimony that is both haunted – and haunting.

Details:

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Reflections on Memory and Imagination

By Otto Dov Kulka

Translated by Ralph Mandel

Allen Lane

ISBN: 978-0330519694

Hardback

Price: £14.99

This article first appeared on Cheshire Today, 19 February 2013.