Difference and Trust (Brad)

“You need different ears for different people”

Small - and large - differences in the ways South Yorkshire people speak get noticed by Brad, one of the conversation facilitators at Who is Your Neighbour? Brad enjoys talking and listening with teenagers, and in places where there might be tensions between younger and older people.

Noticing difference

Brad was raised on Sheffield’s Manor estate, with his white British Mum and Jamaican Dad. Mum was a hairdresser and Dad - who spoke Patois - a welder. He remembers visiting grandparents in nearby Derbyshire,

“the only mixed-race person their friends had ever seen.”

As a young child, growing up in the ‘80s, Brad was interested in details of conversations:

“With Mum and Dad, children were seen and not heard. You didn’t ask questions, you didn’t answer back. Dad spoke bluntly; not ‘Bradley, would you mind?’ just, ‘Go on, bring it!’“

Grandad was different, seeking out conversation with the children:

“He would question us. If I stayed in bed all day, he would raise it with me as an issue.”

Listening carefully

Brad didn’t always listen to his Grandad’s attention and advice and the older man’s life-experience - including managing a Sheffield steelworks - wasn’t always paired with a listening ear, either: “Telling people what to do your entire life, that changes you.”

These days, listening carefully is important to Brad. He has learned, in particular, of the need to listen out for local differences:

“The way people in Barnsley talk is different to people in Sheffield. I remember being called a dee-dar and thinking it was racist. Mum just laughed - because ‘dee-dar’ means someone from Sheffield.

“That kind of banter is a good sign. If people don’t like you, if you aren’t accepted, they just don’t talk to you.”

Local differences can also challenge conversation, though. Brad remembers a man telling him his wife and ‘burn’ had been moved out of his house:
“Burn is tobacco. I said, ‘Can’t you do without it? Just have a few weeks without it?”

The man, who had said ‘bairn’ - child - was upset and taken aback. “Even though we were both from South Yorkshire, we were speaking different languages!”

Self-awareness

Awareness of others’ responses to the way you speak - and picking up on their way of speaking to you - is a subtle art:

“On some estates, you can hear anybody talking slightly posh coming a mile away. The class divide is huge. They might live just down the road, but still they get, ‘Where are you from?’”

Who is Your Neighbour? invests time building relationships in the places where it holds conversations. Brad recently spent 12 weeks doing this in one location where, now, he is trusted:

“I get shouted in the street. You go from not being recognised, to being recognised and people not being interested, to people knowing you but not approaching - and then, people know you and stop you.”

Any reticence may be partly a result of experience with organisations, professionals or new people who come and go. Brad understands it because, “you can’t just glue people together, you have to have an active working relationship, you have to understand each other.”

Difficult conversations

Brad is used to listening to things that might be hard to hear. Because he prioritises building trust, and understanding the ways people communicate, he is able to respond with questions like, ‘Who told you that?’ or ‘Why do you say that?’

If he is criticised for talking or listening to certain people who say difficult things, his response is to say that when individuals invested in a community are willing to discuss issues, it’s evidence of a job well done:

“We try to listen to other people’s language. Everyone’s willing to have a non-judgmental conversation, where there is genuine curiosity about their lives.”

Building trust

His work with young people has taught him that kids, particularly, are interested in people who are interested in them. Being willing to enter their territory is important: