My girlfriend at the time assumed my parents hated her, which was far from the truth. My birthday meal on my 16th birthday was a plate of boiled potatoes. We knew exactly when to get to supermarkets on a Saturday in order to buy marked down goods. There was a lot of sitting round in what I (but not my father) perceived to be the cold and the dark.
My family were inveterate coupon clippers, unpluggers and cadgers givers of careworn, recycled Christmas and birthday gifts (not to mention reused cards and wrapping paper), and one particularly grim year the givers of no gifts at all. Shoes resoled until the leather uppers shredded and tacks pierced young feet jumble sale cardigans recycled for knitted school jumpers socks darned so many times, they ended up close to ship of Theseus-like, few threads from the original garment remaining. My childhood, spent growing up in the suburbs of Liverpool in the 1970s as part of a household financed solely by the paltry wages of a factory floor worker who had overextended simply by buying a house instead of renting, was punctuated by periods of not particularly discreet poverty by the 1980s. I can identify with much that the author says.
I went through a mix of emotions recently when I read The Melancholia Of Class: A Manifesto For The Working Class, Cynthia Cruz’s highly personal polemic published this month by Repeater.
