mono_vox (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mono_vox) wrote,@ 2007-05-04 19:32:00 |
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Apples
By Richard Milward
If you live in a town, where the beer is cheap and the opportunities for working class kids are pretty low when compared to their middle class counterparts, then you'll have met characters like Adam and Eve before.
If you live in Middlesbrough like me, and have dared to buy sweets from Bell's in Easterside, have been started in the toilets at Millennium or went to school in Saltersgill or over at Brackenhoe, then you definately know them.
Eve is the kind of girl that used to scare me at school, all hard stares, high hair sprayed into place by a ton of hairspray, skirt like a belt, ready for a fight or a fuck should either come her way. Adam is the weirdo every year at school had, who lurked in corners, all pale face and too-short trousers.
Coming from a 'nice' estate where I always had a meal on the table and was told I was a girl who could go to uni, not stay here and have babies, I never imagined I could empathise and understand what went on in those girls lives, but with Eve I could completely see why you might want to neck some dodgy e's and go to the Royal Exchange, and that being a teenage mam might not be the worst thing in the world.
I also never imagined that people like Adam and Eve would ever notice each other when i used to see them every day, nor go on to have a happy life of chaining lamberts and gregg's pasties for fun, but Richard Milward managed to convincingly imagine what would happen if the hard nuts came face to face with the oddballs.
Although depressingly grim (and accurate) at times, there's a strange beauty to Milward's description of the home town I love and loathe with equal measure. And although I can guarantee some people will criticise him for wiritng about estates he's nowhere near from (he's from the much leafier Guisborough), surely the fact that he can portray this other world so accurately, with unflinching details on infaticide, rape and attempting to murder your dad with a telecaster, is blimmin impressive.
