Last year I was chatting with another writer and talk turned to council estates. The writer asked if I had ever lived on an estate myself. On and off, I told her, during my earliest life and then back again for the final eight or so years of my childhood. I had intuited that she and I were aligned in some vague sense, or rather that I didn’t have to be conscious of my performance as a polished, well-to-do author as I spoke to her.
“It’s funny actually,” I said, “my estate was once on this tabloid list that called them The Estates From Hell.” “Me, too,” she said, both of us delighted, “I’m from Ballymun.” And we smiled at each other.
I was born in a largely working-class area of Waterford called Ballybeg which is made up of four council estates and one private one. Priory Lawn was ours. When I say I was born there, I mean it literally – my mother gave birth to me in the bedroom. Some ventilating equipment was accidentally kicked under the bed in the fuss of my emergence and I did not breathe until after the midwife and my father had managed to find it. I had inhaled meconium, the baby’s first faecal movement, and occasionally in moments when I am struggling to feel gratitude for this life, I think to myself: well, at least you didn’t die choking on your own shit.
I remember little of my first years in Ballybeg, which we would leave before I turned four. What I recall are the purely sensory experiences of earliest childhood: the quality of light in the kitchen when my father was leaving for work and I was scooting frantically toward the door on my potty, wanting to accompany him; the clean, sweet smell of my mother’s sweat as we sat on the porch. It’s always summer in my memory of Priory Lawn; perhaps it felt like real life could take place only in the central square, not our private home. I remember ice-cream vans and disgustingly coloured gobstoppers, and the neighbour five or so years older who carted me around amiably as though I was her own baby. I wasn’t old enough to be aware of the reputation Ballybeg had as a “bad neighbourhood” nor to engage with any of the goings-on that made people believe it to be one.
In my adulthood, after I had left Ballybeg again, I became aware of certain circumstances surrounding our departure I was too young to be privy to at the time. A sexual crime had taken place involving two neighbours – neighbours I had until this discovery recalled as jovial, positive presences (both perpetrator and victim). I was deeply disturbed to find out what had happened, not just in the way one is always hurt and degraded to learn about pointless acts of violence, but in a more personal and selfish sense. It felt as though the knowledge had reached into my past and made the warm memories warped and ugly. I had been – unwittingly – physically very proximate to the crime and it dislodged my sense of my young self as a lucky child who was always safe.
I knew it was insane to centre myself in this story I had no material part of, but nevertheless I felt angry. It made me feel dark about the area, about my origins. I wrote in passing about this at an early point in my career and my mother gently took me to task for suggesting Ballybeg was a malign place characterised by violence. She reminded me of what I had once known but had forgotten in the ensuing disturbance of learning about this crime, which was that the real characteristic feeling of Ballybeg was its powerful, defiant community. She was right, but it was – is – difficult to keep straight in my mind how I feel about being from where I am from. Part of this is that I do not feel particularly from anywhere, and perhaps I resent the place I was born for not giving me the strong sense of identity I have seen it give others.
* * *
In Dublin there’s a colloquial rousing cheer: “Up the flats!” which celebrates pride and community in the inner city: the actor Barry Keoghan, from Summerhill, employed it while responding to his Bafta win for The Banshees of Inisherin. A talented young musician called Gemma Dunleavy released a song called Up De Flats in 2020 which includes lyrics such as “The soundtrack of the summer gettin’ played by the sirens/We found laughs in the middle of the violence/We coulda had nothing but we had it all/Shouting up the flats from the rooftops”. By contrast, there have been countless media depictions of areas like these as lawless shantytowns rotting outside polite society. In 2013, TV3 produced a three-part documentary about Ballybeg called The Estate, which follows, among others, a teenage mother arguing with her own mother (who also gave birth as a teenager) about her financial irresponsibility, and a 25-year-old called Denis who had spent eight of those in jail. Denis says, “I think there’s a curse on Ballybeg” but one gets the sense he would rather propagate the supernatural theory than focus on his own culpability.
I, naturally, find such depictions embarrassing. But then I must ask myself why I am so eager to disclose Ballybeg’s depictions to others. Why am I seemingly so keen to let others know I hail from Ireland’s Hell Estates? I do feel pride about coming from Ballybeg, but why? Is it valid, the sort of pride many people feel about their particular street or neighbourhood? Or is it instead a dishonest claim to a disadvantage I did not experience? I suffered no poverty, no exposure to addiction, no violence, none of the hardships that would mean I valiantly overcame my circumstances. My life was about as good as it gets. I had parents who not only loved and cared for me but were interesting, funny, talented individuals in their own right, siblings I more or less got along with, and dedicated encouragement to read, draw, sing, to become engaged with the world. No matter what street you are born on or how wealthy you are, these are advantages that not everyone receives.
No doubt I have at times strategically emphasised my minor differences in a creative industry that is pretty overwhelmingly homogeneous. When I dropped out of university, I felt both poisonous regret for my failure to get a higher education and a defensive bolshie pride about the fact that I didn’t. Part of me loathed the feeling of inadequacy and part of me enjoyed how it made people in certain sectors widen their eyes with surprise I wasn’t sure was admiring or scathing.
But if my trajectory is a little different from many successful writers’, it certainly has never felt that I’ve been disadvantaged by my background. If anything I feel I have not lived up to the endless possibilities open to me from within it, because of my parents and my excellent if somewhat overly Catholic secondary education. In fact the sole disadvantage I feel burdened by, the thing that makes me jealous of those peers who don’t have to negotiate it, is my experience of mental illness. Seasons of despair so acute I can’t get out of bed, when I wake and hear a voice that is both me and not-me telling myself not to bother waking up, that the world is malevolent and that I am too weak to withstand it. I have no moralistic adulation of a work ethic in an abstract sense, but when I reflect on how I have spent my life, it’s these fallow periods in which work is all but impossible that make me feel either bitter, or proud for having emerged from them. It doesn’t have anything to do with where I grew up, or that my parents didn’t have generational wealth.
This is another part of my ambivalence – money. Or should I say class? The lack of clarity on the exact relationship between those two things adds to my confusion here. Ballybeg is a working-class district, but I have no idea what class I am, nor what I was back then. Class wasn’t something I was especially aware of as a child, or at any time in my life in Ireland. Even when friends of mine lived in enormous houses and had doctor parents and multiple cars, I did not experience them as being meaningfully different from me. Once a girl in school called my coat “cheap” – which it was, probably – and this is the totality of discrimination I faced for being from Ballybeg. I knew Ballybeg had more fires and horses and drug dealers than some other places, but that just seemed an organic fact of nature; here were the places horses and fires and drug dealers happened to exist, alongside all the other parts of life.
I didn’t think about money or class. With hindsight I can see that it must have been very difficult for my mother to get by – single in her early 30s and with three children – but no level of financial difficulty was ever apparent to me. My father was and is a playwright and director, and this cultural status confuses matters further. His background is working class, and he grew up on another estate called John’s Park, but I do not have the economic sophistication to interpret at what point he stopped being working class, or whether he still is. I don’t know the amount of money you need to make, or the amount of time spent on creative work that needs to take place, for your class status to change.
* * *
When I moved to England, where all things class are more clearly stratified, these definitions came up and I kept getting them wrong. I grew up in Ballybeg, neither of my working-class parents came from money or went to university, so I was part of a working-class family, I assumed. No, said angry commenters responding to a column I had written: my father was an artist and therefore neither he nor I were working class. This was mildly galling because at other times my experience of being perceived in England was that Irishness achieved a flattening of demographic differences; your specificity, including your economic or social markers, were eroded and your general yokel-ness was conflated with being working class. At the time I was still into having pointless, spite-fuelled arguments with strangers about this kind of thing. Now, I don’t particularly care about being able to accurately describe my class, except that I wonder if its obscurity helps inform the frustrated longing I sometimes feel toward Ballybeg, the annoying sense that I’m not a part of the place I grew up in.
Maybe it was simply that I moved house regularly during my formative years, before ending up back in Ballybeg for the final seven or eight years of my childhood. Maybe it was having parents who were separated, the inevitable discordance of identity that follows splitting one’s time at that age, learning how to please one or other parent, the existential anxiety that can accompany it all. When I got back to Ballybeg aged about nine, I was wary of the kids who lived around us, not because they were bad or frightening, but because they seemed so of their place. They were comfortable, or so I thought, and I was not. I have never been that. Whatever it is, I find myself drawn back again and again to the idea of The Estate, which exists not only as a frightening tabloid fabrication, but also in reality as a place of unusually sturdy community.
I began work on my second book, Ordinary Human Failings, in 2021 but had thought about it for several years beforehand. The inspiration was less a character or plot and more a sensory feeling that bothered me enough that I felt compelled to pay it attention. In this case, it was the feeling of looking down on a central courtyard in a housing estate and the gradual build of dread and excitement that takes hold when something terrible is happening. The relevant details filled themselves in as I began to write, emerging from a long existing area of interest – the tabloid press and its rabid demonisation of working-class people and those defined as the bad, feckless sort, instead of the hardworking, decent kind. I had also been struck years ago by a detail in the Gordon Burn book Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son about Peter Sutcliffe, in which a tabloid had approached Sutcliffe’s family – some of whom were alcoholics, all of whom were working class – and offered to put them up in a hotel, essentially sequestering them to keep them as a source on tap, in exchange for money and booze.
I read many accounts of the trial of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, killers of James Bulger, aghast at the details of the murder itself, naturally, and also disbelieving at the chaotic circus that was allowed to unfold around the court case. It was striking how little the boys’ youth seemed to mitigate the conviction that they were monsters; if anything, their youth achieved the opposite job, enforcing the idea that certain kinds of people are born bad. I was interested in the furious determination to simplify, the need many people had not to consider the boys as human beings. It’s an understandable impulse, because of how easy it is to conflate the attempt to understand with the attempt to excuse. Still, I couldn’t help but think of the infinite quirks of family history, economics, living situations that accumulate through the decades and years to amount to a day of violent madness like this one, which not only robbed a family of their child but ruined many other lives and incited the passion of a tabloid culture obsessed with the feral poor.
I came, in my novel, to tell the story of a small child found dead on her estate, the daughter of well-liked, community-minded people, and another, older girl who is suspected of her murder. A tabloid journalist gets wind of the suspicions and sequesters her family. They are Irish immigrants who arrived in the area 10 years before and never assimilated, are considered by neighbours to be at least strange and possibly dangerous people, and now their historical miseries, kept private even from one another, begin to unfurl.
I conceived this shortly after a stint renting a room in a former council estate that has now, like so much else, been partially privatised. I read years ago about the attempt to erase the word “estate” from contemporary vocabulary in London when the Olympic developments were taking place. One professor said, “The word ‘estate’ has become synonymous with the term ‘ghetto,’” while a letting agent said, “You would jeopardise the deal if you said ‘estate’. You always said ‘ex-local’.” I lived there only nine months, in an unstable hinterland of my life, and it was an appropriate halfway house for that sort of living. I paid very low rent because the owner of the flat worked from home in the main living area, so I really just returned to sleep, creeping in and out, feeling a little like an intruder. I liked the place, though. I liked standing out on the balcony and looking down at the convivial shared life I could hear thrumming there, a life I was next to but not a part of, just as it felt back home in Ballybeg.
• Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is published by Vintage at £16.99. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
