I’m Maya Jordan and I believed it for most of my life when people said that women like me don’t write.
I once said to Michael Sheen, I know, national treasure Michael ‘bloody’ Sheen, get me! I said to Michael that where I came from, saying you wanted to be a writer was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut.
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I was told my place was ‘to work in the Co-op until I had a baby.’ There’s nothing wrong with working in the Co-op, but the world decided that was all I could have. A working-class girl, a young single mum, carer, mum of six, disabled, on benefits, the stories told about me were set in stone. ‘Girls like you should… women like you can’t….’
I don’t like being told no. Instead of their stories, I wrote my own. Now, aged 55, and still living in my council house in Powys, Mid Wales, in 2021, I won a chance to take part in A Writing Chance. It was launched by New Writing North with partners Michael Sheen and The Mirror to find aspiring writers from working class and wider under-represented backgrounds, give us a platform and help us break into creative industries.
Making a show of yourself is something else working-class women aren’t meant to do, but writing my book is more than that, it’s a reminder to myself that I’m a writer. Despite all the stories they told to limit my horizons.
If you have a dream but think people from your background don’t become writers, don’t let them make you feel small. Take up all the space. Shout and laugh too loud. Keep writing. Keep singing. Even when they tell you no.
We need to tell our own stories, because when they tell them about us, they always get it wrong.
Below, Maya gives Mirror readers an exclusive extract from Chopsy…
I was in my forties when I realised not everyone keeps an emergency chicken. I don’t mean a chicken in the garden – it’s hard to imagine what kind of emergency might require a fluffy one pecking round the yard. No, an emergency chicken, the height of luxury, is a chicken kept in the freezer for emergencies. If I was lying, I’d say it was for unexpected guests arriving for dinner, but you know how long a bloody chicken takes to defrost.
The emergency chicken was kept in case we became seriously poor. You can do a lot with a chicken: soup, stock, a pie, pasta sauce.
We’ve always been skint (loads of kids and not the best-paid work, then illness and redundancy) but only a few times have we succumbed to eating the emergency chicken. That’s not the point of the chicken. Its point is to be there.
Shame swallows my words. I wonder, in the writing of it, why this shame should be mine. I was a hungry kid. Tall and lanky with hollow legs, I loved my food. I remember my mum cooking – cheese pie and pastry, sausages and mash piled high like a volcano with beans poured over the top, cakes always wonky in the tin.
This was the 1970s, so there was nothing exotic like pasta or an aubergine. We didn’t know what a courgette was, though Mum made this revolting stuffed marrow thing – mince and onions encased in the slimy body of what appeared to be a big slug.
It was a white bread, margarine, mixed veg from the freezer kind of world. Findus Crispy Pancakes, soup was always in a can, Angel Delight a treat; jam tarts were made with left-over pastry from the pie.
But then the 1980s came. Industries crashing, free-market economies laying everything bare, my dad lost his job and didn’t get more work. While some made loads of money, some of us quietly starved.
There’s a shame to being hungry, to not having enough to eat. Even as a child who had no control over such things, I knew it was a secret you were not meant to tell, a story sat behind tightly shut teeth. But even if you tell no one, hunger still eats you up.
Free school dinners saved me. Each morning at registration, the teacher would give me a silver token I could exchange for a dinner of my choice. Some days, there was little for breakfast at home. Toast and a scrape if we were lucky, a finger in the empty jam jar sucked on the way to the bus.
School dinners were chips and burgers, creamy doughnuts and gypsy tart. I knew to be polite to the dinner ladies and, with my council-estate pallor, amongst kids back from holiday homes in France, I looked like I needed feeding up, so extra portions were always available.
Often, there was little for tea when I got home. Tinned soup, maybe more toast. By then, everything came from Iceland, easier to budget and portion out. Frozen chips, fish fingers, mini pizza, cubes of mixed veg.
You could tell when there was no food in the house. Dinner would be a half a burger, half a fish finger and the ice-burnt remnants of that mixed veg. Mine would be gone in seconds. My younger sister, a picky eater, would cry that she didn’t like it while I’d hover, eagle-eyed, waiting to see what might be going spare.
Being a hungry child did not make me generous. I didn’t nobly offer up my portion so someone else could have more. I didn’t wait, gracefully nibbling at my half slice of bread. I gobbled mine down in a flash and waited for scraps. I snuck into the kitchen late at night to steal a piece of bread sprinkled with sugar. I stood at the fridge in the darkness, drinking milk and then topping it back up with water so no one could tell.
Of course, they could tell. The screams and shouts as Mum demanded, ‘Who the bloody hell has been stealing food again?’ were met with my shamefaced silence.
Actually, free school meals could have saved me, but a bully, noticing that stooped-shoulder walk of shame to the front of the class to collect my token, quietly relieved me of it by the back stairs of the French block.
Someone was bound to notice after a while. I was tired all the time, tall and thin, black circles under my eyes. A teacher asked if everything was OK at home. I didn’t know what to say. I had to collect my tokens from a dinner lady after that. Free school meal kids were no longer allowed a choice, no free-market economy for the likes of us. We could only have the set dinner, meat and two veg, whether you liked it or not.
I was 50 when I read Lynne Voyce’s description in Common People of eating flour-and-water pancakes when there was no food in the house during the miners’ strike. I burst into tears. I’d never seen my secret written down before. I didn’t know we were allowed to tell.
The shame of those doughy tasteless pancakes sprinkled with nothing silenced me. And that’s what I think about now. Waking, worrying about kids with no tea. Worrying about families not being able to turn on the lights. What will it do to them?
I tell you this because, even though I now have enough, I still fear hunger. One million children in 21st century Britain are destitute – such a Victorian word. Children living without access to the basic means of food, clothing or housing, and 4.3 million children living in low-income families.
Will they feel the same, these children? Will they lie, when asked at school? Will they be too tired to play, too tired to concentrate, only longing for lunch?
I was born in Liverpool but grew up in Kent. I had parents – a mum and dad, both just 17 when I came along. Then a sister a few years later.
A weird, gangly, working-class kid growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I was always wrong – too loud, too brash, talking too much, having too much fun. I was told to be quiet, know my place, not to be so tall, not to be so much. Who is it that said all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? Mine was unhappy. Not all the time, not every day, but often without warning.
Always ready for the strike, I learned to live with a hyper-awareness of other people’s moods and emotions. I watched, trying to seek order. There were rows and shouting, always about money, always ending in tears and slammed doors, the tension hissing in the house for days. Somehow it was always my fault.
The Provi man would arrive in his car and all the kids would scatter like he was the Child Catcher as he began knocking on all the doors on our rural council estate. For many, like my mum, it was the only way to get by – the only way to buy anything.
In the beginning, the Provi man was all smiles as he sat in your living room, Mum yelling for you to ‘go out and play’. We’d linger, as everyone knew he brought biscuits, not something we’d seen in a while.
Some years, my mum ordered a Christmas hamper – a magical box of goodies bursting with exotic treats that arrived the week before Christmas: tinned peaches and fancy peanuts, cans of chunky chicken in a creamy sauce that no one ever ate and a pear-shaped tinned ham coated in a snot of jelly. Of course, that was in the early days when she could still get credit.
I got a duvet and duvet cover for Christmas that year, but after the festive season was done, it was time to pay. We regularly hid from the Provi man. No smiling or offering biscuits now.
A pencil-thin man in a cheap Burton’s suit, like wildfire, the message would pass from neighbour to neighbour that his car had been seen on the estate and it was time to come in.
My sister and I would hide. Terrified, on the floor behind the sofa, my mum shushed us, snapping at us to sit still, making sure no arms or legs peeked out while the scary man hammered on the front door. ‘I know you are in there,’ he’d yell, hammering some more. ‘There’s no point hiding. I’ll only be back.’
He’d stand there forever, banging away, coming round the back, peering through the windows. Still not moved from your hiding place, you’d eventually hear him go to next door and start the banging and the shouting all over again.
The air in the house was thinner after his visits, everyone subdued, Mum snappier than ever, us trying to stay out of the way. There was a shame to it that was infectious, tainting us all, even if us kids didn’t know why as we curled up under our cheap scratchy duvets and tried to read.
My mum must have somehow had the money the next time he came. Another hungry week. Though she never got clear, of course. Each loan was renegotiated into a bigger one, spread over another year. Flour-and-water pancakes for tea again.
My shoes were a pair of little patent ballet pumps off the market in town – thin and plastic, with a little lace bow that fell off after five minutes. They were my school shoes but the problem was that they didn’t last. The soles, as sturdy as buttered toast, quickly wore through, a hole appearing in the bottom about the size of a 50-pence piece. My feet were permanently cold and wet.
I could have asked my mum for new shoes, but the Provi man was banging the door again and I knew we were skint. I cut up the side of a Weetabix box and fitted it inside the shoe.
I tried using a cut-up carrier bag to make it waterproof, but it slipped and slid beneath my foot and the noise was a dead giveaway. I lived in terror of kids noticing in school.
It was already established that I was the povo kid of the class. Nearing the end of year eight, I’d have been 13; my dad had been on the dole for near-on three years. I was sat in registration, trying my best to be invisible, when a teacher popped her head around the door.
‘Sorry, Miss,’ she said to my form tutor, ‘but I’d like a word with…’ She scanned the room and spotting me, beckoned me to follow her.
With that tight anxiety of wondering what it was that I’d done wrong, I shuffled up to the front of the class. The teacher smiled. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble. It’s just that I’ve been sorting through some clothes at home and I thought they’d be nice for you.’ She held out a huge black bin bag full of clothes.
This should have been a kind gesture. I know it was meant that way. But stood there in front of the whispering hordes in the classroom, I’d rather have burst into flames than taken that bag of clothes.
For the rest of the day, I had to drag that bag to every class. ‘Brought your laundry in?’ the French teacher laughed as I tried to find a seat and wait for the ground to swallow me whole.
The most humiliating part was how lovely the clothes were. There were jeans and tops and school uniform and socks, a couple of ra-ra skirts. They smelled of fabric softener and ironing.
I was aware that I smelled. I’d been made painfully aware by girls making comments. I washed myself all the time. I washed my own underwear each night, but my school uniform was often not clean and there wasn’t enough of it; I had the one set for the week.
Of course, when I got back to school the next day, the whole year knew about the bag of clothes. Girls sniggered as I walked past, variations of taunts tried and failed: Black Bag, Bin Liner, the always-inspired Povo, Gypo (factually incorrect, I wanted to point out). In the end it was abbreviated to ‘Bag’, my name for the coming years.
Maya’s book, Chopsy, is in bookshops now
