My mother, a simple woman from the Netherlands, did a number of special things in her life. One was to spend the second half of her life as a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by no family and few friends, another was to raise her only son, me obviously, with no help, no guidance and hardly any money. The latter achievement was, I realised only much later, was to bring me up, with me not knowing, not really having the first clue, just how poor we were.
People say what you don’t have, you don’t miss and how true that is. I only learned much later how she scrimped and saved to enable us to eat and pay bills. I didn’t know, for example, that the meat we ate consisted of the cheapest of off cuts, purchased just as the butcher shop near where she worked was closing for the night. After a working day that started by getting up at 6.30am, getting me ready for school (including giving me my dinner money on a daily basis), getting a bus to work, selling clothes to people who had far more money than she did, she would wait by the butcher shop until they were just about to shut, essentially to barter with the butcher. I found this out years later, when my mum was greatly diminished by illness, via a throwaway comment she made, after which she confessed all. Shocked was not the word.
The same thing happened with all our groceries. There were no supermarkets as such. There was the dairy, the greengrocer. She would plan her shopping with military precision to pick up the leftovers. There were no “sell by” or “best by” dates, no BOGOFs. There was no meal planner because until the evening of any given day we didn’t have any food.
I say none of this out of self-pity because I have none. It never remotely occurred to me that most people we knew didn’t live like that, or that there was anything unusual that we only had one electric heater which we carried round the house if we were to use another room, or that we didn’t always have hot water. Or that we didn’t have a telephone. I didn’t know and I didn’t care.
All of which makes me feel very lucky to be where I am today. For a time, I confess that I was slightly jealous of those who had more money than me. I never earned a great deal in work, not remotely getting near the national average wage and working for a charity these days means I will never get rich, but honestly, I don’t care. Money, I long learned, does not greatly affect the psyche. Of course it enables you to better enjoy the material world and have better holidays, but I have seen precious little evidence that money can buy you love or a better life. Money certainly cannot buy you health – at least not yet, but that may change after a few more terms of Tory government – and it strikes me that that there are as many sad, embittered rich people as there are sad embittered poor people.
A lottery win wouldn’t go amiss, I must confess, but I am only buying a ticket these days because I stupidly chose a set of numbers for the first draw all those years ago and I haven’t dared stop, just in case one day the numbers come up. It’s not going to, is it? Nah.
We’re all the same really, aren’t we? I’m glad I know my past much better and in some ways I am glad I experienced poverty, even though I didn’t know it at the time. I suspect most poor people don’t realise there is a better way and that is why nothing changes. There are rich people, there are poor people; that’s just the way it is. Some things will never change.
