When Underclass Pathology Reaches Into The Middle Class

THE thing about underclass pathologies is: Who Cares? It’s all so far away. The closest that ordinary middle-class people get to it is watching the local news on TV or reading about “bad choices” in a magazine article about troubled teens. But what about when it comes a little too close to home?

In Britain this fall the nation was transfixed by a series of five murders of young drug-addled prostitutes in the middle-class town of Ipswich. Worse was the news that some of the girls had come from what we like to call “good homes.”

How could it happen, we wonder?

It’s difficult to find out because the poor don’t write books or magazine articles. It takes an activist, a Jacob Riis and his How the Other Half Lives or a Michael Harrington and The Other America, to bring the lives of the poor to the respectable classes. And you always wonder about the activists: what’s their game?

But here’s a woman who actually became one of those Ipswich hookers and lived to tell the tale. Her name is Rhea Coombs and her book is My Name is Angel. The book is being excerpted in The Daily Telegraph.

All I know about my father is that he had a drink problem and that he and my mother split up when I was about one.

Her mother was a bohemian who had fled her dreadful middle-class Fifties parents for the European music scene.

From the moment I became conscious of my own thoughts, I was aware of a mismatch between my body and my soul. Later as I edged towards adolescence these feelings of “unbelonging” intensified and manifested themselves in prolonged outbreaks of sobbing whenever I was alone.

Of course, her mother

had never been a bad parent but she had dragged me across Europe with her love-and-peace addled friends. She was often absorbed with boyfriends and the combination of being in perpetual motion and getting accustomed to different men had unsettled me.

There’s a thought.

Rhea started out in a Rudolf Steiner school but felt out of place and moved to a “tough comprehensive in inner-city Bristol when I was 12.” She and her friend Carole smoked cannabis “with an evangelical commitment.”

Then she got a 24-year-old boy-friend and then he wanted her to earn money. Eventually he put her on the street.

She entered a downward cycle of drink and drugs and abusive relationships and then came the day when her ex-boy-friend took her kids away until she could deal with her crack habit.

Maybe the children of the hippie generation had it coming. Or maybe our generation lacks the Charles Dickens or the Sinclair Lewis to wake us up from our selfish slumber.

Whatever it is, something out there ain’t right.

UPDATE: Here’s Part Two of Rhea Coombs’s compelling story.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.