Authors: Cathy Wilson
I have to admire Mum’s logic. Saturday was the big drinking night and, back then, you could still down a skinful and be allowed to drive. It’s incredible to think how lax the law was, but it helped us out at the time. When she discovered that first pound, Mum could just picture some old drunk staggering out of the boozer and bumbling around, all fingers and thumbs, for his car keys. He’d probably turned every pocket inside out looking for them and, in the process, not noticed he’d lost the odd note. And if one bloke could drop the odd note in his drunken state, so could a few others.
I don’t know who found the most money that morning – which makes me think it was Mum, otherwise I would have remembered! – but I do recall taking a handful home and lovingly laying them out on the table. Then Mum strung a line in front of the fire, pegged them all up and we sat back and watched a week’s spending money dry out before our eyes.
We did that every week for ages. Sometimes we were lucky, sometimes not. But rain, as Mum suspected, usually meant it was a good morning because the paper tended to stick where it was in the wet. On summer nights the notes would have blown everywhere.
Speaking of summer, I was a bit older when Mum had another money-spinning brainwave. It was a really hot day, which can totally transform a seaside town. But on this particular morning we weren’t heading to the beach. The Bay City Rollers, the hottest young band of the time, were coming to do an open-air gig up in one of the hillside parks and Mum had decided that we would earn some money from the event. Her plan was quite simple: it was scorching weather and fans had to hike half a mile up a hill to reach the concert, so obviously they’d be desperate to buy some lovely, fresh melon from her! So there we were that morning, out buying as many melons as we could carry, then chopping them up, wrapping the slices in cling film and lugging them up the hill to sell to dehydrated music fans at 20p a go. It was a brilliant idea. We were a godsend to those people – and I got to hear the concert as well! The only downside was having to carrying the stuff up there in the first place – by the time I reached the park, I was ready for the melon myself. We made shedloads of money, but I think we could have made more if we hadn’t needed to eat some of our profits ourselves.
Those two episodes are really happy memories for me. They might seem a bit weird now, but as a kid I loved doing crazy things like that. Life was never dull with Mum. Every day was a bit of an adventure, which I absolutely adored. She was obviously inventive and a hard worker. If only she could have channelled her ideas. She had so much to offer.
As soon as Mum had a bit of cash in her pocket she was desperate to spend it. Not on things for herself – usually it was treats for both of us. My favourite thing we did regularly was eat out together. With money being scarce, we’re not talking about the Ritz. But whenever Mum had a pound or two in her pocket we’d walk to a café on the corner of Preston Park and I would be allowed to have toast with margarine on it. That’s how I know how poor we were – because two bits of lovely, thick, white, toasted bread coated in marge was a real treat for me. I can’t remember having much in the way of cooked food at home at all. I certainly don’t recall Mum ever standing at a stove. Food just didn’t seem to be a priority for her. We had occasional tinned food – cold – but mainly packets of biscuits, cakes, bread, anything convenient. Mushka had dry biscuits, but otherwise was left to forage. I remember Granny offering me a choice of cereals one day at her house. I was staggered. I’d never had cereal at home. Having these little sugar-coated parcels to start the day was like a naughty treat.
Mum’s finances usually stretched to a round of toast once or twice a week. Very, very occasionally, I was allowed to look even further down the menu and have a sausage sandwich. That was an amazing meal for me. Two sausages cut in half and wrapped between slices of that same thick, white loaf was my idea of heaven. Being there with Mum, tucking into my 15p sarnie, I really couldn’t have been happier.
It’s only later, of course, that I associated it with the time we were at our poorest. As a child, I never made the link. I just thought it was a lovely way to spend time with my mother.
It was the same with the money-making scams. I never saw them as essential, so we could eat for the next few days. They just felt like an adventure to me, a bit of fun, with the added bonus of hopefully finding some cash. It was no wonder, then, that I hit upon my own wheeze to pick up a few pence here and there.
My favourite trick was to stand outside one of the big red phone boxes we used to have then and try to look distressed. Then I’d say to passers-by, ‘Can you help? I really need to phone my mother and I haven’t got any money.’
A local call in those days was 2p. A few people would ignore me and some would tell me to clear off, but often they dipped their hands into their pockets and handed over a nice brown coin. Of course, there was no way I was going to use the money on a phone call. For a start, Mum didn’t even have a phone. I couldn’t have called her if I’d wanted to.
No, as soon as I had a coin in my possession, I would dart into a shop and buy sweets. You could get an awful lot of sugar for 2p, so I’d be straight out to find my friends to share my good fortune. It wasn’t just this entrepreneurial spirit that I inherited from Mum: I also realized that there’s no point in having money, however much or little, if you don’t share it with your loved ones. Two wonderful lessons.
Being a kid, though, I didn’t always care how I achieved those targets. I remember buying all the kids on our street an ice cream once. That’s typical Mum generosity coming out there. The only problem was, I hadn’t tricked passers-by into parting with their pennies or sold anything to baking music fans. I’d pinched the money out of Mum’s purse.
I only did it the once, but I’d never felt so ashamed. The second the ice cream touched my tongue, I felt like gagging. There was no way I could enjoy that treat knowing where the money had come from. Luckily for them, my friends had no such principles.
Not appreciating our dire financial straits was one thing, but, looking back at the photos, I realized something else had passed me by: just how beautiful Mum was. Of course, I’d always thought she was, but she was my mother and we all think that about our mums when we’re small, don’t we? But she was so pretty, so slim and, I keep forgetting, so damned young; a total head-turner for sure. I can’t find a bad picture of her from that time. Real knockout stuff.
Unfortunately, looking after me full-time didn’t give her much time to go out with friends her own age. Even when Granny looked after me, our lack of income meant Mum couldn’t afford to do much anyway. That was why her parents were so delighted for her when she came to pick me up from theirs one day and announced, ‘I’ve got a job!’
I was the only one not so thrilled. Money didn’t mean anything to me, but I wasn’t the one struggling to make ends meet each week. No, the only result I could see from Mum’s news was that she would be away from me for the entire day. I’d been with her virtually every day since I was born. Apart from the odd day or weekend with Granny and Grandpa, we’d been cooped up like battery hens in a succession of tiny flats.
In short then, while Granny was cheering loudly enough to be heard in Eastbourne, I couldn’t see any good at all coming from this news. As far as I was concerned, I had a wonderful life. Mum getting a job was going to ruin everything.
Within a year, I would be proved right. But not in the way I expected.
THREE
With more than 3,000 employees, American Express is Brighton’s largest employer. It was just as dominant in the 1970s as well, which I suppose explains how Mum was able to get a job there with no qualifications. Every day she’d pull on a suit, walk or catch a bus down to Edward Street and disappear inside the modernistic, white, angled building that had been built for the company a decade earlier. She was a clerk, basically shuffling paper all day, but it was work. It was something that paid a wage. And it got her out of the house.
As a four-year-old you don’t want to consider that perhaps Mum would rather spend some of her time with other grownups. You think,
I’ve got you, you’ve got me – brilliant!
I didn’t really know what a job was. She may as well have said, ‘I’m going to the moon.’ I had no idea what it would entail. But I soon found out: in a nutshell, it meant we would be separated.
In order to make the job work, Mum had to sort out child-care for me. That’s how I came to be enrolled in the Rainbow Nursery, where I was when Fisher-Price came to town. Looking back, I don’t know if she needed the salary before she could afford to get me in or whether it was a state-run thing. At the time, all I knew was that I was dumped there because Mum wanted to be somewhere else.
Obviously, that’s not what was happening. Things were desperate. We needed money. We were chasing pound notes around rainy car parks, for God’s sake! But I liked those things. I never appreciated how much stress the financial situation placed on Mum’s young shoulders. So for a while I resented being at Rainbow. It was fun to play with other kids, but every day Mum dropped me off and every day I thought,
I wish I was staying with her.
It’s probably the only time in my life when I entertained ill thoughts about her. It really felt that she was choosing other people over me. I hated it. But then the door would close, the nursery teacher would wave a paintbrush at me and I’d be lost in the wonderful cacophony of thirty children enjoying themselves.
As a mum myself now, I know it can’t have been any easier for her to leave me than it was to be left. It’s a mother’s role to feel guilty about every single choice you make. And, let’s face it, Mum had had four years of suffering guilt about the life she had given me so far. As much as she hated seeing my tearful face at the nursery window in those early days, she knew it was for the best. She was the only parent in my life. She’d been mother and play pal for four years. Now she needed to be the breadwinner too.
‘It will be worth it,’ she kept promising, ‘you’ll see.’
‘I don’t know how. I hate it at nursery.’
Actually it wasn’t so bad. And then a funny thing happened. Things began to get better. In fact, I have to admit, it very nearly was ‘worth it’.
Once I settled into the routine of going to Rainbow, of course I loved it. I’d gone from having no toys to being surrounded by all manner of plastic, clockwork and metal treats. It was like being in Aladdin’s cave. There literally weren’t enough hours in the day for me to play with everything. I even loved story time, when our teachers read from some of their wonderful books. We didn’t have books at home. I suppose I thought that was natural – that all the other children hadn’t seen a book until they came to nursery as well. In truth, I didn’t think twice about it then. I just remember loving the exciting mysteries and adventures that these fantastic heroes were having.
And then there was the other advantage of Mum’s work – the very thing she’d taken the job for in the first place.
Money.
I didn’t see it at the time, and she never discussed it, but her starting to wear a suit coincided with little treats cropping up in my life. The village hall near our flat used to put on film shows every Saturday which a lot of my little friends went to. It was only 10p, but Mum had never been able to spare it before. Now things were different. She would buy two tickets and we would sit back while the film of the week was projected onto a big screen at the front. We didn’t have a television then – and even Granny and Grandpa only had a black-and-white set – so it was amazing to see these incredible colours dancing around in front of my very eyes.
Trips to the café for my sausage sandwich became more regular as well. The only problem was cramming it all into a weekend. There was only so much we could do during the week, with Mum working an eight-hour day, so Saturdays and Sundays became sacrosanct. They were ‘our times’. That was when we’d go down to the seafront or the Brighton Lanes to shop. I remember winning a giant stuffed panda at an amusement arcade. I couldn’t have been happier as Mum and I lugged it back home. After a month or so, I had to admit that life was great.
The longer Mum worked, the more she was able to straighten herself out financially – I imagine there were various debts to be repaid, probably to Granny. At some point, though, my treats got better. King of them all came on the day she said, ‘Would you like your own bike?’
My own bike? I couldn’t believe it. All the kids on our street had started to ride and I’d had a go on their bikes, first with stabilizers and then – don’t ask me how! – riding solo on two wheels. I’d never really questioned why I didn’t have my own. That was normal. I didn’t have anything. But Mum must have seen me riding someone else’s and had the idea. The next weekend she had a surprise for me.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said, barely able to contain her own excitement.
I did as I was told and Mum led me into the bedroom we shared. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but Mum’s voice told me I was going to like it!
‘Okay,’ she said as we stopped. ‘Open your eyes now!’
I did. There before me, leaning against the bed, was a spangly new red bicycle. I gasped. It was amazing. So shiny, so new – and so mine!
Then I noticed the wheels. Kids are funny about details; they get things into their heads. For some reason this bike had a black tyre at the back and a white tyre at the front. I hated it. Looking back, I suppose the bike was second-hand and that’s how it had come. At the time I just thought,
This is not right.
Mum saw me falter.