Earlier this year the government announced that child poverty in the UK had fallen by 2% at the end of the last government. But at 20% it still stands out as a very weak aspect of our society.
I remember as a kid, knowing we didn’t have much.
Sweets were a once-a-week-maybe treat (mine get them every other day) – btw there’s always fruit available too!
We got a tiny TV for the lunar landing when I was 5 but it was only a rental.
Holidays were in a borrowed caravan in North Wales.
But there was no mould on the walls. Jobs were more plentiful. By the time we emigrated when I was 7 Dad had been a worker in a transparent paper mill, a weaver and a milkman. We always had meat and two veg and home made fish and chips on Friday.
When I got to High School I started to find out that other kids went abroad once a year and didn’t hand clothes down to younger sibs. I started to develop a sense of shame about it and oddly anger toward my parents about our situation. I grew out of this and became hugely respectful of what my Mum had achieved (2 of us went to Uni and got Honours Degrees and my younger brother is a sr psychiatric nurse).
By then my Dad was disabled from a car accident so we lived off benefits first from Australia and then over here.
It gave me a good sense of how far money stretches and how to cook and look after things to make them last.
The documentary advertised below seems to paint a gloomier picture of the state of people’s homes and lives.
I’ll watch it and post a link to the programme when it appears.
BBC News – What children think and feel about growing up poor.
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