There have been armies of journalists out on the streets of Britain in the lead up to the December, 2019, general election. They’ve been dropping in on deprived areas, places where the demographic is out of step, where the statistics ring alarm notes, where political and Brexit polarities clash. They have been in search of Broken Britain. The results of their findings are pasted into countless op-ed pieces in the newspapers and vox-pop soundbites on radio and screen, the froth of alarmism and contempt posing as evidence of an attempt to understand what exactly is happening.
There’s a more subtle, more complex story to be told, and Kevin Boniface tells it in Round About Town. This collection of vignettes, observations from the author’s day-job as a Huddersfield postman, covers the period of austerity from August 2010 to February 2018. Texts appear chronologically, in any length from a single sentence to half a page, with often more than one piece per day. Boniface, an artist working across print, film and performance media, contributes complementary black-and-white photographs that capture the underside, the stuff that reflex would have us look the other way.
Kevin Boniface has eye and ear attuned to giveaway behaviour, the telling remark. He takes advantage, we suspect, of his employment to permit loitering a little longer, to take in the full story, the end of the conversation. There are some great moments: “A grey-haired man in chinos places a four pack of Galahad Premium Lager and a bag of green potatoes on his neighbour’s doorstep next to the faded plastic meerkats on a seesaw”. Or this: “There’s a wet pair of suede loafers in the hyacinth bed”.
The immediate reference point is Ian Breakwell, whose Diaries from the 1970s and ’80s recorded his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time to witness moments of symbolic, or symptomatic, absurdity and pathos. Tony Ray-Jones achieved something similar in photography. But Breakwell’s eye is not of place, or of class, representing more a cosmopolitan sweep that makes Englishness look smaller and fussier by contrast. And my impression is that Ian Breakwell worked his writing up in the direction of the better story, rather than the more accurate reportage.
Kevin Boniface disguises himself in his writing, much as he hides in plain view in his postman’s uniform. The style is immediate, unfussy, sparing of metaphor. Anecdotes are if anything underplayed; there is no contrivance, no steering towards punchlines, more a sense of working through a poetic machinery that lifts the moment into something more intense, more permanent. The things he sees are things worth seeing and knowing about. We have – and this we don’t get with Ian Breakwell – the repetitions and changes and variations that come over years of time spent walking the same circuits, the same postman’s rounds.
The people are people we all know: the “teenage boy with lots of tattoos and no shirt in late October”; the “woman with yellow teeth who wears her anorak indoors”. And we know their moments. The Transit driver who yells “Which way is it back to where I just was?” The girl who asks three boys if she can join in playing football, and is told “Yes, you can pretend you’re watching us on TV”. The lack of affect, the compassion, puts me in mind of Thomas Hardy, forever surprising us by unearthing worth in unpromising people and places.
But it is the Town of Boniface’s Round About Town that is the protagonist. The wheelie bins and poorly maintained tracks, the fake lawns and broken garden ornaments, the sofa cushions in the street, the St George’s Crosses and the bargain shops. Nature has its edgelands; Huddersfield, this particular Huddersfield and all those other Huddersfields across the country, has this. Above all, the erosion of care, the deterioration of the environment. The cannibalistic cycle of people oblivious to their grotty surroundings, and investment withheld because people don’t care.
Verdict: Depressing or funny? Both, as it should be. The privation a long swell, a bass line that sets the mood, the key. Without this, we would be in sit-com territory. With it, the humour is richer, more poignant, working to some purpose. The complex mingling of ups and downs, of the profound and the superficial, of care and carelessness, are testament to honesty. England, for better or for worse.
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Kevin Boniface: Round about town. Uniformbooks, 2018 http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/roundabouttown.php