Page 73 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

66 Narrating the self
she pleases everyone – loves adults and loves children. Will look after a
little baby, except her own sisters, and loves adults. Or anyone younger
than her, she’ll mummy them, or smaller. Put her arm round them. And
very nosy! [directed to daughter, jokingly].
(Interview 14)

Rosemary also had recourse to other narratives – such as the way in which
her local area had changed (for the worse) over her lifetime.

How it’s getting lately I’d like to move out . . .. It’s just there’s a load
more crime and that going on round here. You just can’t walk out. It’s
frightening to walk down the streets at night. So many people hanging
about.
(Interview 14)

Rosemary was also interested in presenting a particular portrayal of herself,
that of the good mother who has her children at the centre of her life – she
stressed that she worked only to be able to buy her children more things, that
she never left them with anyone other than her mother, she kept them with
her at all times – and joked that she would probably carry on doing so until
they were forty. The following extract shows how part of this representation
of the good mother included the need ‘to be friendly to everybody’:

BB: So you basically said that things like class and race, they don’t
come up as issues, you don’t talk about them with the kids
much?
Rosemary: No we don’t, we just go from day to day really. And if they come
across anything, they might mention something, but not really.
No we don’t talk about that. I mean class, personally, we’re the
same as everyone, you know. You either like us or you don’t.
But we get on with everyone, there’s not any people that we
say ‘oh no, we don’t get on with them, no they’re too posh, no
they’re this colour, that colour’. I don’t say to them, ‘oh no,
you mustn’t . . .’. It’s them, they’re growing up, they need to be
friendly with everybody. That’s what I like to see from them. I
don’t like them bullying.
(Interview 14)

Despite this, one gets the sense that Rosemary had a relatively strong
attachment to differences of ‘race’ and class, but simply believed that her
children should not bully. Her account of the changes in the area she lived
in was certainly racialised. Rosemary told me (off tape) not only that she felt
the area had changed with the influx over her life of black people, but that
she did not like ‘Africans’, who she found to be rude. 9