My Life as a Socialist

 On the 17^th July 1975, Apollo CSM -111 docked with Soyuz 7K-TM somewhere up in space. This was also the day I flew for the first time. I know this date because I was glued to the TV watching the space docking and my parents had to drag me out of the house to get to the airport.

My brother, sister and I had been packed off to my aunt in Reading for a month in an attempt to give my mother a bit of peace and quiet. My aunt had moved to England in the fifties and “did well” in an unspecified way. She lived in a rambling four-storey Victorian house on the better side of town and while she had five kids of her own, she had plenty of room for the three of us and lots of love to spare too.

 I was ten and it was my first-time outside Ireland. I was a shy kid and a bit of a loner at the time. I said I was getting nose bleeds sleeping on the fourth floor (in reality, I just didn’t like climbing all those stairs) and my aunt fashioned a bed for me in the laundry on the ground level.

After that I became her favourite. She took me into town shopping and bought me my first watch. Her kids were all a little older and had passed into that teenage mentality of finding their mother to be the most embarrassing person on the planet.

I filled a maternal gap and my daily outings expanded beyond shopping to the other activities that caused my Aunt to leave the house each day. That introduced me to the source of her wealth. It turned out that in the previous twenty years she accumulated properties, mainly Victorian houses like her own but in the less salubrious parts of Reading. She turned them into individual flats with shared kitchens and bathrooms and specialised in providing accommodation to west of Ireland building labourers and people on council subsidised housing.

Tuesday was rent day and she brought me along for company. Forty years later, I can still remember climbing the steps into that first tenement hovel. The smell addressed me first, a sickening cocktail of cigarette smoke, stale beer and human sweat. Emaciated figures were slumped across stain sheeted beds and when I asked why they were still in bed at 11am, my aunt calmly explained that they were day sleepers, fresh from a night shift building Britain’s motorways and had come back to a warm bed that housed a different navvy who had a day contract.

My aunt walked from floor to floor collecting rent, her voice taking a sinister tone when she was met with a request for credit.

I walked out of that house a Socialist.

I probably had a social awakening before then but that day is etched in my memory. My aunt, who I loved dearly, had become wealthy through the misery of others. People need to live somewhere of course, and landlords are a necessary part of this process. But they can still provide decent accommodation, care for their tenant’s welfare and not squeeze every last penny from those miserable souls.

I came back to Ireland a changed boy. I’d seen the big world and it sucked. A couple of years later I was in secondary school and wrote my first essay in English class on the ill-treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli Government. It didn’t go down well with my teacher. In my last year of school, I had an English teacher who was a well-known member of one of Irelands right-wing parties. He commented on an article I had written for the school magazine with that well-worn cliché, “He has no heart who is not a Socialist at twenty. He has no head who is still one at thirty.”

I only wish I had the presence of mind to go back to him with the opposite. “He has no head who is a right-winger at twenty and no heart if he is still one at thirty.”

I didn’t change at thirty and I’m still a fiery renegade at fifty five.  I have done well on a personal level from Capitalism. Acquired a nice house with a low mortgage, travelled the world, living and working in exotic places and working for the rapacious American banking industry got me the opportunity to eventually end up here in paradise. But I’m proud to say that I haven’t sold my soul. I have never knowingly underpaid somebody, never abused another to further my career and never earned income through somebody else’s misfortune. I have also voted for the most left-wing candidate available in every election I’ve taken part in.

One of the manifestations of this is my approach to rental properties. During the Celtic Tiger years, it was common to buy ten apartments from the plans in Bulgaria. Every man and his dog had a holiday home that they rented out for eleven months of the year. But I resisted. The memory of that tenement visit in 1975 is still raw.

Property is a sensitive issue in New Zealand. The rich own too much of it and the poor can’t afford to get on the ladder. Most people see it as a pension plan, which is pretty depressing because it pushes up prices and leads to a huge wealth disparity. One person’s pension plan is another person’s need for a warm dry home they can call their own.

I’m happy that we only own the house we live in. I don’t want to be part of that other world. The world that robbed me of innocence on that bright July day in 1975. That first plane ride was memorable though.  I’ve flown regularly since but not for a while now because of the “thing”. If my aunt is up in heaven, perhaps she could make up for screwing all those poor navvies by fixing Covid and letting me fly again.