By Isle of Wight Observer
I come from a broken home, and by the time the dust settled, my Mum and Dad lived 80 miles apart. Seeing Dad meant catching a National Express coach or a train. Six of us kids and a stepbrother lived in Twickenham, my Dad and his new wife had another four in Banbury, so we didn’t all visit at once!
Both homes had plenty of bunkbeds, four boys to a room. That’s not a problem when you’re ten, but it’s tougher on teens. Privacy is a luxury denied to less well-off kids in big families. Asking friends over after school was another non-starter. There wasn’t the room in our crowded house. My Mum, Dad and both step-parents worked really hard to keep things going – but money was tight.
As kids themselves, I think they’d all had tougher lives than ours were. Shift working meant that someone was always around for childcare. Six days a week, my Dad went off to deliver bread at 4am, and if we were there, we’d go with him. He was quite the cook too, although his dinners were fairly simple, lots of potatoes, which were filling and cheap.
We loved our grub, and naturally ate whatever we were given without complaint. I do remember being hungry, but not going hungry. Food was a big deal, none of us helped ourselves to anything, although there were no cupboards full of snacks in those days anyway. I only remember fish and chip takeaways and on the odd occasion we ate out, the grownups chose for us, usually sausage and chips – the cheapest thing on the menu. A Wimpy and a knickerbocker glory were rare treats, usually birthdays.
I clearly remember my first steak; it was bought by the parents of my pal, Trevor Harding. He was an only child and spoilt rotten, with his own bedroom, an electric guitar and a Raleigh Chopper bike! On his 14th birthday, I joined them at a Berni Inn, and generously, they bought the steak. Naturally, I picked the cheapest on the menu, and still recall every delicious mouthful.
Us lot qualified for free school meals, which meant queuing to pay the school secretary. When you reached the front of the line, without looking up, she stuck her hand out for the cash. Every single day, we had the embarrassment of asking her to find our names on the non-payers list in front of her. It’s hard to be cool when your mates queuing around you think you’re poor.
Shockingly, around 30 per cent of kids still live in food poverty, and 40 per cent of those are from lone parent families. Research shows the principal cause to be long term worklessness and low wages. Parental instability ranks high too, as does the lack of parental qualifications. If you’re less well qualified, you get paid less money. Over nine million people in the UK aged between 16-64 are deemed not to be looking for work, and I wonder how many have young children.
Kids growing up in poverty struggle to get out of it, and the longer you’re poor, the less likely you’ll be to escape.
Unhelpfully, politicians, like ‘30p Lee Anderson’ – Britain’s first Reform MP, believe food poverty is largely avoidable – if only parents shopped and cooked properly. Jamie Oliver campaigned along similar lines, but advocates of healthy eating are up against a multibillion-pound food industry, replete with vast advertising budgets. Education could help those on low incomes, but as Jesus said, “the poor shall always be with you”, It’s been a tough nut to crack for quite some time! Personally, I found hunger a powerful motivator, that and the local library were largely responsible for my own jailbreak from what might have been a tough adult life.
Mal Butler