writer's moll

Now that we’ve been made redundant from our night watchman’s job, we’re back in Villefranche preparing ourselves for re-entry into the real world. On the terrace watching the boats in the bay, we chew over all the issues that Rob’s dying and death have raised. Grief’s a bitch because there’s no recovery slope that takes you from the bottom to the top in a given timescale, just a constant see-saw– the heavy sack of anger, sadness and guilt weighing you down one day and the hot air balloon of fond memories and daily happenings swinging you up the next – it’s just a matter of waiting for that perfectly weighted balance of remembrance and grief that will rock you gently between the two. And there’s no knowing what will trigger the highs or lows, so out of the blue, a game of scrabble spells out the word sedation (and he even had the cheek to win 50 points extra for using up all his 7 letters), or eating my favourite food, immediately produces an image of a dying Rob – and tears.

I know it seems mad reading such a depressing book as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle at a time like this, but it’s the first chance I’ve had since I bought it a couple of months ago after hearing a radio programme on its importance. I’d never heard of it before then, although my loved one tells me he read it over 40 years ago. At the heart of the story is a Lithuanian family and it tells of the brutal conditions of exploitation, corruption and filth that eastern European immigrants worked in in the Chicago stockyards in 1905. Sinclair’s exposé of the meatpacking industry got results, although it’s a shame that it was the public’s fear of the chemicals, diseased meat and rodent excrement in their morning sausages that brought about the reforms, rather than sympathy for the working conditions of the immigrants. At the time Sinclair was writing, the genre was known as muck-raking and often given a pretty harsh reception, but the power of words can change our perception and now we call it whistle blowing and it earns praise for the brave person with a social conscience who’s maybe risked the loss of his job or his friends. Laws change too and thankfully there’ll never be such extreme conditions again in the civilised world. But what doesn’t change is the exploitation of those seeking a way out of poverty and a chance of a better life elsewhere. When we Brits emigrated in our thousands to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, we used terms like pioneers, adventurers, people with drive, but now that we’re on the receiving end, we use asylum seekers, economic migrants or other pejorative terms to describe the poor old eastern Europeans for doing the same thing. But is it their fault that there are people with vested interests in selling them the dream of golden opportunities and welcome that await them? And when they do arrive? You can hardly find a pub outside of London now that isn’t staffed by Eastern Europeans, who’re accused of taking our jobs and houses, but does anyone suppose they’re being employed for any other reason than that greedy business men and women can pay them less than they would have to pay the the rest of us?