Broken Homes

couple of collapses, sat down.
    ‘All the balconies were originally built with a foot of clearance, especially to lay down topsoil,’ said Jake. ‘They’re waterproofed and designed to drain slowly – look,’ he pointed at the underneath of the balcony directly above us. ‘You can see the drainage channels.’ These were three raised ridges in the concrete that fanned out from where the main waste water drop pipe ran down the length of the tower, adjacent to the two-metre thick support column.
    ‘The lawn I believe,’ I said. ‘But what about the trees?’ I pointed my beer at the three metre palm and, in the other corner, what looked like some kind of ornamental fruit tree.
    ‘There’s an additional foot of depth of soil at the end so you can plant trees,’ said Jake. ‘Stromberg knew you’d need the trees as cover to protect the rest of the garden from the wind.’
    ‘But our balcony’s just concrete,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, well, they lost their nerve,’ he said. ‘They’ being the Greater London Council, London’s city government as it was before getting abolished in the 1980s. ‘Some of the early tenants complained and they concreted over the lot.’
    ‘Except for yours?’
    ‘No,’ he said ‘I had to dig mine up, bit by bit. Took me the best part of six years. Then I had to make sure the drainage system still worked, not to mention having to shift all the soil in.’
    ‘God,’ I said. ‘No wonder you don’t want them to knock this place down.’
    ‘That and it’s a waste,’ he said. ‘You see those blocks? The Council said they were going to provide Housing Association build for those tenants, but have they fuck. They all got told six months to find alternative flats in the system or they was out – so they took what they could get.’
    ‘Those blocks were rubbish, though,’ I said.
    ‘They were as good as any system-built block in London,’ he said. ‘And it’s not like they’re going to replace them with country cottages, is it? The trouble with people is they’ve got a romantic view of the past.’
    I doubted that I did, but I was enjoying the garden and the beer and it’s rude to stop people talking.
    ‘I’ve lived here for over forty years but I can still remember what it was like before,’ said Jake and then proceeded to tell me in great detail, including with statistics, about the outside toilets, the damp, the overcrowding, the bomb sites and just how vile a sublet terraced can be when there’s a lot of you sharing the same bathroom. Assuming there is a separate bathroom and not a bath in the kitchen that serves as a table when not in use.
    Bath in the kitchen? I could hear my mother saying. Luxury! In Sierra Leone we used to dream of a bath in the kitchen . Only obviously not in a Yorkshire accent.
    For Jake, the problem was not in the design but in the people.
    ‘People were proud to get a flat,’ he said. ‘They appreciated having all the mod cons.’ This being the proper working class who did a day’s work with their hands and scrubbed their front step. Who understood the importance of education.
    ‘If you went into the library in them days it was full of men who’d just come off the morning shift,’ he said. ‘You could have heard a pin drop in there.’ And they were all diligently improving their minds and occasionally buying the Daily Worker on their way out.
    ‘I used to sell half my copies outside the library,’ said Jake. ‘That’s the kind of working man who used to be allocated a council flat. Back then it was a privilege, not a right.’ He finished his beer. ‘Not that decent housing shouldn’t be a human right, you understand? But in those days people appreciated what they had.’
    And what they had were streets in the sky with indoor plumbing. High above the noise and smell of the traffic, where the elongated artist’s impression of young white mothers with strollers waved to their friends from improbably clean concrete walkways under a sky of Battle of Britain blue.
    ‘If we’d had the right political structures in place,’ said Jake, ‘proper local democracy, we could have kept the communities intact. Now everything’s handled at arm’s length through contractors and agencies .’ He practically spat the last word. ‘There used to be people you could hold to account. But now it’s all call centres explaining that your job doesn’t seem to be on the system. Nobody is accountable any more.’
    ‘Contractors like