Michelle

Just like Frank and many others in Bridgetown and beyond, Michelle's family have not been spared the effects of the crash and the austerity of recent years. In response to a question about her family history on the estate Michelle tells me unprompted of her father's redundancy during the recession. She describes the intergenerational effects of the crisis on her father after he lost his job with little or no prospect of other work. While Frank tells his own narrative directly, Michelle speaks of her father's redundancy in the second person, as a daughter looking in on her father from the outside as his sense of self and identity received a traumatic shock. She expresses a strong and innate sense of injustice at the fact that someone like her father, who wants to work, will have great difficulty finding any real function in society, given that, like Frank, he is leaning toward the wrong end of the age spectrum in work terms. He too worked in construction, but the only thing on offer to him at this stage is a ‘Back to Work Scheme’ that the government developed and promoted as a response to the crisis. As she describes it, with implicit reference to the class structure: