Malone considers middle class wrath
I kid myself I’ve come a long way from growing up in Shepherd’s Bush. I think I’m all middle class, because I shop in Waitrose. You can take the girl out of London, but you can’t take the London out of the girl. True, I will always be a Shepherd’s Bush girl. Most famous for having the BBC there, Shepherd’s Bush is a big Green (an ex plague burial ground) that however much money they throw at to regenerate, will always be lined with men drinking cans of Tenants-Extra and children who think they are gangsters leading pit bulls around in their tracksuits. The Green is like the garden of the tower block council flats that peer down it. They may have built Westfields shopping centre there with it’s designer stores but ‘you can’t polish a turd’ as my dad used to say.
As an inner city girl who’s also half Irish with a fiery side I’m now proudly middle class (though I don’t own any Le Creuset saucepans, hopefully this doesn’t affect my membership.) Occasionally something will remind me of my roots. I come over all indignant and proud – I would call it Irish-Shepherd’s Bush, you might call it feisty…
Whilst shopping in Waitrose with a friend, (a lone parent to two girls) she was exclaiming that their value pizzas didn’t seem that value… Staring into the freezer cabinet choosing pizza we took our eyes off the children for possibly 30 seconds. In some countries this pizza pontification is probably illegal. A furious man asked the kids who they were with? Turning round, he barked angrily at us: “Your kids are dropping croissants! Then putting them back!” He described it as if they were stealing zimmer frames off grannies and then spinning them round. Feeling so judged, I felt an animalistic urge to narrow my eyes – had I been a snake, I would have hissed at him.
He retorted: “That’s not very good, is it?!” If this had happened in Shepherd’s Bush, the man would have kissed his teeth, told the kids why not to do that, sauntering off muttering “kids!”
My friend sweetly explained they weren’t doing it on purpose, that they just couldn’t reach them well. I admired her calm response to his over-the-top judgmental fury, but my inbuilt conditioning was to start staring this man out, (I may as well have put my hoodie up!) I guess I thought how dare he judge us like we are unfit mothers because our children picked up what they dropped, and put it back. Yes it was a food item, and yes that’s bad, but they were just being kids. I wished I’d said: “I’m sorry, I’ve raised her on my own for six years, taught her to read and write and always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. But I forgot about correct croissant etiquette. Please direct me at once to the nearest Iceland store where we belong.”
