Left Behind in Grimsby

Moments after the removal van left, the street was just the way it always was, except we no longer lived there. After a decade and a half in a sprawling housing estate in Grimsby, a town on the east coast of England, we were gone. But what had we left behind?

On a bright morning in April I saw Dillon (not his real name) waiting by the pedestrian crossing at the bottom of our road. He was sitting on the low wall next to the garage, smoking a cigarette.

Beneath a baseball cap, pulled down low over his taught face, his hooked nose and high cheekbones were prominent, his pale skin stark against the dark blue of a thin tracksuit top zipped up to the neck, where the blue of an elaborate tattoo reached up to just below his ear. The area around it was still pink, bright against the white of his throat.

“New ink?” I said, after we had exchanged the usual greetings.

“Terrible, isn’t it.” He looked sheepish.

“What does it say?”

He inched the neck of his jacket downward to reveal a swirling script.

“Die rich …”

“And I suppose that this means you’re going to die a bit poorer now too,” I said. He smiled and then we both laughed.

“Quite a lot f—in’ poorer, yeah,” he admitted. We laughed again and he took another drag on his cigarette.

I got to know Dillon when I worked in the school he went to. I was a part-time chaplain there, and first remember encountering him in a small room. A local priest had come into the school complaining that some children had been climbing on, and damaging, the roof of his vestry. He had done some detective work and unearthed the incriminating CCTV footage. Among the culprits was Dillon, then a small, scrawny boy.

Photograph by Britpix / Alamy Stock Photo.

In the room, faced with the evidence of his misdeeds, Dillon had squirmed. His friends stared morosely at the floor. The priest was keen to make friends, rather than enemies – he wanted a “restorative conversation” that nonetheless would make clear that the boys must stop climbing on the roof.

Other than this semi-stern lecture, there were no further consequences for this particular misdeed; Dillon had dodged a bullet. The same was mostly true for the other minor crimes he committed during his school career, misdemeanors for which the word “petty” might have been invented. He was a frequent visitor to the detention room, and teachers admitted that they didn’t expect him to excel academically. Still, he managed to complete his years of compulsory education without major incident, avoiding the sanction of expulsion that is so strong an indicator of future criminality and imprisonment.

Now in his early twenties Dillon has begun to settle down; he has a child with his girlfriend, and he lives with his mum, let’s call her Jo, with whom he still has a somewhat stormy relationship.

“When you saw us together the other day,” she told me one late-summer evening outside the shops, “it was so nice. We was getting on so well.”

I’d met them in the graveyard on a lunchtime walk a week or two earlier. They had been going one way, my wife and I the other. Dillon was pushing a pram with his daughter in it, playing music on his mobile phone as they walked together past the aging headstones.

Squirrels skittered away through the trees.

“I’m introducing her to Blue Öyster Cult!” he said, grinning.

The band’s most famous song is the catchy seventies classic “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” a song which owes a lot to the Byrds’ version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Pete Seeger’s setting of the famous poem in Ecclesiastes 3. Both songs are meditations on mortality.

The baby seemed happy, placidly lying back in her pram, chubby face swathed in silky pink bows. As the rock music blared from the tinny speaker, Dillon sparked up a cigarette.

“Not too close to the baby,” Jo said.

“Oh yeah,” he said, blowing the smoke out through the corner of his mouth before giving me a toothy, wolfish grin.

In front of the shops, that day, Jo was in a mood to confide. “All most people see is us fighting,” she said, “but we do get on, we do …”

She went on to talk about her late husband, who had killed himself when Dillon was very young.

“We got married when we was twenty-one,” she said. So had my wife and I. But my best friend hadn’t drowned in a bath like Jo’s had.

“She was on drugs,” Jo explained.

Dillon and Jo live in a housing association property at the end of a small cul-de-sac known as The Grove, part of a much larger estate of houses and apartments built by the local authority – the place I have lived for fifteen years. My own terraced house sits – or, as I should now say, “sat” – just a couple of hundred meters from The Grove.

Between my street and The Grove lies an empty patch of land, fenced off and largely given over to thorny vines of blackberry bushes and long grass. Occasionally contractors arrive to cut back the vegetation and clear away the rubbish that has been dumped there. When they arrive with their saws and mowers the small, pointy-faced foxes who breed there are evicted, sloping off to find somewhere else to hide.

One morning I watched as a small team of police extracted a stolen motorbike from where it had been hidden behind a cluster of bushes at the edge of the field. “When did that get put there?” I asked my wife. She just shook her head.

Music often pumps out of The Grove late into the night, making it hard to sleep if you live nearby and your windows aren’t shut. Sometimes there are fights: people will yell and scream at each other and then the music will stop. Other times it just fades away when people finally get fed up, sometime in the early hours of the morning.

Around the corner from The Grove a Polish family I know well are constantly improving their house. New windows went in first, then bits of old kitchen appeared in the front yard before being disposed of. A new front door was installed, old electric wiring began to appear outside, and bits of bathroom. In the meantime, their two cats lounge in a fleece-padded bed in a south-facing front window. When not improving their house, he works as a paramedic, she as a care worker. Their sons, grown up now, were well behaved, polite, and reasonably studious at school, pretty good at sport, better looking than average, and generally popular – no real trace of an accent but both with distinctive Polish names.

The eldest boy from the Polish family, like Dillon, is the same age as one of my children; they were all in the same year at primary school.

“Your daughter got into a row with one of my mates on Facebook,” Dillon laughed as we stood chatting in the graveyard. “He was saying some stuff about immigrants, and she was like ‘fact, fact, fact, you’re being racist, boom!’”

He laughed again.

“That shut him up anyway, the stupid c—.”

“People always are trying to blame other people,” Jo chipped in, “because their lives are shit.” She gave an involuntary twitch.

Dillon finished his cigarette, pinching it between his fingers before dropping it to the ground, where he pressed it into the soil with his toe. He coughed into his fist and looked away.

“Yeah, but anyway it made me laugh the way she was just, like, banging out the facts,” he said.

In the United Kingdom, the highest levels of what the government euphemistically calls “economic inactivity,” people who are neither in work nor actively seeking it, are to be found in the coastal towns that ring the British Isles.

Even when employers actively seek to develop job opportunities in those places, they face difficulties – local people lack the necessary education and skills, and it’s hard to attract people from other parts of the country who fear the loss of property value and worry that struggling local schools will fail to provide their children with the opportunities they’d get elsewhere. Children in coastal communities typically achieve lower marks than those who live further inland.

“Anyway, I’m working now,” Dillon told me as we stood by the garage. “Can’t f— about any more, got to provide for the kid, haven’t I.”

“What are you doing then?” I asked.

He launched into a description of work which sounded both physically demanding and potentially dangerous – I didn’t ask about the legalities. The options open to him as an unskilled worker are limited, a result of poor personal choices but also unfavorable odds. Factory work is the most obvious legal route, though the prospect is not enticing.

A motorbike roared past. Neither the driver nor the pillion passenger wore a helmet as they swerved onto the main road. Police are wary of chasing motorbikes with helmetless riders; the force can’t afford to be blamed for causing deaths.

Once young men who were willing to risk their own physical health to earn a living were important members of society, worthy of respect. Today their social value has decreased markedly. Still, there is a need to earn money. According to the “strain theory” of the sociologist Robert Merton, when people want to achieve normative cultural goals such as financial wealth but find themselves unable to do so by culturally legitimate means, they will “innovate.”

Drugs are a key part of the innovation economy. Children and teenagers who find, or feel, themselves shut out of legitimate opportunities are recruited to carry “gear” to purchasers, traveling by motorbike, e-bike, or bicycle. The cash rewards are enough to scratch the immediate economic itch, if not to provide a stable future.

The arrival of a child sometimes heralds a change; as Dillon said, “I can’t f— about no more.” This might precipitate college enrollment, or a more thorough job search, something that looks beyond the immediate. The absence of positive role models, though, still leaves many adrift. “We’re parenting adults,” a veteran community worker once told me, “because they’ve not got parents of their own.”

“The thing is,” Jo carried on in her confiding mode, “he looks up to you.” I looked away.

“He’s a good kid,” I said weakly. “I’ve always liked him.”

Jo and I are almost exactly the same age, born the same year toward the end of the 1970s, with children the same age, but our lives are so different.

“You’re moving away, aren’t you? Going to be a minister?”

“I am, yeah.”

“Ah, that’s great. Make sure you come and see us before you go, won’t you?”

For the first time since I’d known her, she hugged me.

There’s a feeling of inadequacy that comes with knowing how little you can do to help people. Social pressures, lack of opportunities, chronic health conditions, and poor decisions made, or made for you, at formative stages of life represent huge, sometimes insurmountable, challenges.

As I move on, like so many others who have the power to be mobile, Dillon and Jo are left behind, again. Abandonment is keenly felt in “marginal” places like Grimsby, and often resentment builds, sometimes to a boiling point.

“Look after yourself, yeah,” I said to Dillon, when I saw him last. “And that kid of yours.”

He grinned his wolfish grin again.

My strong suspicion is that neither Dillon, Jo, nor the baby will die rich.