My Life in Receipts E-Book

Andrew Dutton

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 202

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Charting a life spent lost in numbers, is My Life in Receipts a memoir? Too fictionalised. A novella? Too close to the truth. All too recognisable? YES! From chanting times-tables and unlearning old money to discovering the sinking schoolroom 'Maths Feeling' that ends a child's ambitions to be a 'scientist'. From the promissory note of student days to the hard times of the dole giro. From the exuberance of the first wage packet to the pleasures and limits of being able to pay your way… My Life in Receipts plunges you into the world of bags full of threatening letters, intimidating bailiffs, bankruptcy, eviction—even imprisonment. Revealing the lives of people in a perpetual cost of living crisis, and the work of those who help them fight to reclaim their lives, this is a dark, original and tragi-comic exploration of the past, the future, money, debt: whether to flee, whether to fight. There are some victories, some routs—and, along the way, thoughts on electronic train tickets too. Andrew Dutton will make you laugh out loud, scream with righteous anger and, most of all, make you think.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Dedicaton

Half Title

LSD and the Lost Generation

I, Scienteest

Promissory

An Afternoon Out

Giro

Always Keep The Receipt

Purchasing Power

The Bottom of The Bag

Anatomy of a misleading letter

The Old King With A Foot In The Door

Someone Has To Pay

The Caring Bank

E

At the Folly with Life and Soul

Traitor’s Cash-Out

Where The Past Belongs

My Life in Receipts

Andrew Dutton

Published by Leaf by Leaf an imprint of Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of Andrew Dutton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2023, Andrew Dutton.

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-983-4

Ebook Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-977-3

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press.

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

Acknowledgements

Quotation from ‘England 1-2 Iceland: Euro 2016—as it happened’ by courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd.

To ‘McLennan’,

and all those who keep up the fight.

My Life in Receipts

LSD and the Lost Generation

Two and two

Is twenty-four

Shut your gob

And say no more!

We chanted in the playground, led by Julie Fagin, class badgirl. It was in protest to, release from, parroting times-tables, standing to attention at our desks—faces raised, as if offering fervent prayer, but for the odd fact we were told to keep our arms stiff at our sides like soldiers. 

Those numbers, hummed, almost plain-sung, were meant to worm themselves into our minds, irremovable, but to this chanson I was tone-deaf; it was 1968, my first year at school, and I was already encountering what someone would—much later—pin close as ‘your outright anathema for mathematics’. It didn’t help that two and two did, in their way, make twenty-four, as I found when we began to learn about money. It was all confusing, the LSD system. Pounds were the L (but why?), Shillings the S (fair enough) and Pennies the D.

D?

Why not P?

But what’s important is what teacher says; what teacher says is right. Julie Fagin may have queened it in the playground, but it was time to ignore her. Pay attention! Nobody wants a child who can be cheated and short-changed with impunity. Nobody wanted to confuse infants with explanations of our Latin-haunted language. Libra Pondo; Solidus; Denarius: evidencing the long, cold reach of an ancient occupier into remote posterity. Grownups had decided this was the system, who were we to argue? Just learn it. 

They said if you looked after the pennies, the pounds would look after themselves—but it wasn’t so. They needed chasing, corralling, counting up, and that was hard, not least because in spite of us having ten fingers to work with, money didn’t work so handily; it jumped about in threes, sixes, twelves… twenty-fours. 

Twelve pennies made a shilling.

The S. was also a Bob. 

[Twelve times One is Twelve]

With threepence and sixpence in between—the Joey or Thruppence, and the Tanner. 

[Three times one is… two times three is…]

Two shillings was a florin.

[Two times twelve is…]

Two shillings and sixpence—half a crown.

[Twelve times two-and-a half is…]  

But the full Crown was unused.

[Twenty-four times two-and-a-half is…]

Ten Bob came in the form of a small brown note.

[Twelve times Ten is…]

Twenty Bob made a pound, the L. 240d. A green note. A quid.

[Twelve times twenty is… twenty four…]

There was a difference between Pounds and Guineas. Nobody told us what it was because Guineas were ancient history, yet people still leaped from one to the other, carelessly causing further muddle.

Why was it so confusing?

Everyday language was full of this; it was woven in. Something cheap but trying to act above its station was ‘tuppeny-ha’penny’. Christmas puddings had sixpences buried in them. Some vast, square-shaped six-year-old at school threatened me, fat fist raised, with ‘a fourpenny one’. My pocket money was the Saturday Sixpence. Someone would make a silly bet of a ‘tanner to a toffee’. My great-grandmother told my skinny Dad he had ‘a bum like a ninepenny rabbit’. Half-pennies weren’t used anymore. Nor florins or farthings. But they were talked of as though alive. To torment a classmate, a shopkeeper’s daughter, Julie F coined the money-tinged ditty:

Karen Gaston sells fish

Three ha’pence a dish

Don’t buy em

Don’t buy em

They stink when you fry em

She had revived the ha’penny and invented the consumer boycott. 

Some coins were undoubtedly pretty, but many looked as if they had been dug from long years in the ground, dull brown discs bearing the profiles of long-dead kings. Coins went out of use from time to time and they seemed to get rid of the prettiest ones—the ha’penny and farthing, the sailing ship and the little wren. But the farthing was half of half a penny and that was too much of too little for me; I was glad it was gone. You could say these things were valuable because they were time-honoured, but... we pay far too much honour to time. 

There was no way to get a grip, it was all threes, nines, twelves, twenty-fours: none of it made sense. Other enemies lurked when we came to measure and weigh: fourteens, sixteens, sixteenths; hundredweights that weren’t a hundred of anything but twelve more. Pints, quarts, gallons—ones, twos and eights. Feet and inches—sixes and twelves again, this time reacting with threes: Twelve Times Three to make a yard. Times another 1760 to make a mile. There were leagues too—multiply your twelve times three times 1760 by another three. 

‘I think you’re a King!’ cried Julie Fagin, false-smiling.

‘Wh-why?’

‘Cos a King’s a ruler, a ruler’s a foot, a foot smells and so do you! Hahaha!’ 

My head spun: I was lost. There was more confusion: decisions, about which the grownups weren’t telling us. One was a big change, debated and argued for years, decades: our two-and-two struggles had been in vain, understand the system or no. I was eight years of age when the message reached me: ‘Stop everything! Forget what we told you over these last three years! It’s all changed, it now works in fives and tens: finger-money!’

No more LSD: and, triumph, the D was now a P! The penny, once bigger than more valuable coins, shrank to a commensurate tininess; the halfpenny was back—smaller still—though not for long. Three pence was no longer ‘thruppence’ or dignified with its own coin, it had no special place or name and ‘three’ became a placeholder between the penny, two pence and five pence pieces—and we said ‘five pence’ now, not fivepence; an important alteration. Six was demoted to a staging-post between five and ten, ‘sixpence’ was gone; the coins remained for a time but were valued at two and a half new pence; the mighty shilling was tamed, a humble 5p; the all-important Twelve just an insignificant stop-off between ten and twenty, dominant no longer. Ten shillings was 50p; no longer a note. And it was the same for weights and measures; clean multiples of one-five-ten, no more fourteens, sixteens, sixteenths or hundreds that weren’t a hundred.

Forget, unlearn, then learn anew. There were posters on street corners showing the new decimal currency; exciting in its novelty. People complained and said the old folk would never get used to it, the children would be confused by the stop-start, we were creating a lost generation. The thrupenny bit was taken away days after the new money arrived; another pretty coin with multiple sides and a funny gate-thing on one face; it lost its place to a 2p coin. The old penny was gone at the same time too. The rebadged sixpence pieces lingered. There was even a Save The Sixpence campaign, but another old d-coin was lost at last. Fives tens, hundreds, stacking cleanly, easy to understand. Just what I’d asked for. I didn’t know who to thank. But I was, I am, confused, the past clings, tenacious, woven into the everyday. My beer comes in pints but my wine in centilitres. I look at a digital display of kilos and reach for the internet to tell me what that means in stones; my expanding waistline is measured in inches. ‘Give em an inch and they take a mile’; ‘doing the hard yards’; ‘acres of space’; ‘missed by a mile’; try saying any of those using five-ten-hundred language, try Julie F’s ‘king’ insult; even ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’, which at least works with the new money, but you know it means the old money. 

Those old coins are collectors’ items now, and that’s not the only nostalgia they generate: some have chafed against the fives and tens for decades, they yearn; they want the old system back, three-six-twelve-twenty-four. Defeat Napoleon, they say, reverse his from-the-grave-conquest of a proud land, roll back time, restore the Romans, they’re our kind of conqueror. 

And it is to them I say:

Ten times ten

Is twenty-four

Shut your gob

And say no more!

I, Scienteest

It was clear what I was. I looked the part: a small boy with short dark hair, an overly serious expression and thick bubble-eye glasses, the NHS type that consigned their wearers to years of mockery and cries of ‘four-eyes!’, until they were finally lent a geeky trendiness by a pop star in the mid-80s. Additionally, I played the part; I was fascinated with stars and space, I had a big map of the sky on my bedroom wall, I pored over the reports of the Moon landings long after everyone else—including the inconstant Americans—had got bored with the whole business. I could be found, even on the coldest evenings, peering intently into the eyepiece of my beloved telescope while other kids were cosy indoors, apparently engaged in learning every note and word of the night’s adverts on TV. It was plain—I was a boffin, a brainbox; my role in life defined.

It wasn’t just the other children who cast me so; I sat in a classroom at my junior school one day, reading The Story of Astronomy (£2.50). I had a lot of books like that, I debuted with Ladybird books (2/6d), progressing to bigger-boy books—passing the time doing ‘topics’ as a PE lesson in the schoolyard had been rained off. 

The PE teacher supervising the room of gameless, largely aimless children, was a bawling bully named Yawton, whose idea of encouraging his young athletes was to employ his coarse voice to yell ‘You clown!’ and other endearments at any youngster who couldn’t perform somersaults on his impatient, bellowed command. He too wore glasses, but they sat on a rectangular nose set in a cuboid head sided with sanded-down brown hair; the spectacles did not make him one of my tribe—they were simply there, the better for him to focus upon what he shouted at. As a man of action, Yawton was clearly ill at ease behind a desk, watching over us until we could be sent back to our own classrooms. His restless gaze roamed, efficiently and effectively dousing incipient outbursts of trouble, keeping kiddie-chatter to a minimum. 

Having arrived at the room last, I was in the front row, directly before the teacher with my book propped in front of me—I was proud of it, remember—its title easy for Yawton to spy with his little eye. I was aware of him leaning forward to peer at the book, and then me. 

‘Are you a scienteest?’ he boomed. The windows shook. Everyone looked up. His tone of mild contempt was, I hazarded, an attempt to be friendly—as close as he passed to the alien concept of friendliness—and, feeling superior in every possible way to this muscle-bound voice-box, I smiled smugly and assented. That was me; it was my destiny.

So, I was ten years old and a scienteest. Had I not been reading about Ptolemy, Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, Hooke, Newton and their ilk, albeit in pop-science books with lots of pictures rather than enormous tomes inscribed in ancient Latin? Had I not sniggered at the foolish fumbling of the ancients as they explored and thoroughly misunderstood nature? Had I not been shocked at the dogmatic refusal of their successors to test their silly, scatter-brained beliefs? Had I not cheered the heroes of invention and discovery as they broke the fetters of ignorance and shed light on the universe’s mysteries? Was I not a product of a modern society that honoured science and technology? Surely all I needed in addition to the glasses, books and an attitude of mind was a white coat, lab, set of steaming, bubbling retorts and a rack of test tubes. 

To be a true 70s scienteest I should also have possessed a computer, a huge electronic beast occupying the whole wall of a clean white room as it buzzed and chattered, its vast magnetic tapes spinning, the immortal machine performing its science-fiction broodings. 

We were taught no science whatsoever at primary school, but that could wait; science was big stuff, clearly not for kiddies. In the meantime, I realised I would probably never be a moon-walking astronaut, but consoled myself that it would be just as exciting to be part of the glow and beep of Mission Control: yes, that was how I would spend my future days. Impatient to attend to my real work, I would imagine my school desk, a dull brown thing that had lost its varnish in a long and apparently catastrophic lifetime, humming with power, its lid turning slowly to reveal an instrument panel crammed with lights and switches, the blackboard becoming a screen on which a rocket’s trajectory made an illuminated curve, the room filling with excited voices that called out flight status, checked, rechecked, counted down: I daydreamed the voices of the future. 

The Moonshots had come to an end but there were a dozen other exciting projects that would need my skills and enthusiasm—I particularly fancied the ‘Grand Tour’, which I had read about on a small picture-card given out with packets of tea, a plan to send a robot probe on a series of slingshot orbits planet-by-planet around the solar system, revealing the secrets of the sky. Yes, I would be at Mission Control, receiving high-resolution, highly coloured pictures of our neighbours in space, discussing them with NASA colleagues, then explaining it all on the TV and writing books to entertain and inform a star-struck public and inspire the next generation of eager, bespectacled scienteests. 

I never even got my job at Mission Control: but why not, when it had seemed so obvious that this was what life had decided for me? Anathema struck; the scientist and author Lancelot Hogben held that if we don’t possess the language of maths, we cannot contribute to the vital conversation about the future of humanity. Cheers, Lance mate, no, really. But alas: that was the problem. From LSD onwards, I suffered from ‘The Maths Feeling’, a desperate panic-attack that swept over me as soon any attempt was made to take me beyond the safe haven of two-plus-two. It was a true sinking sensation as I realised numbers were not going to open up to me and indeed that the vicious brutes were intent on fighting back—and winning. The Maths Feeling was a horrid variation on the cliché of wading through glue: I was wading through glue with lead in my legs, a ton weight crushing my head, a mouthful of sharp pins and broken glass, and cruel, mocking laughter in my ears. I sank out of sight in the morass—and drowned, every time.

A portent of my doom came in the form of Mr Johns, the sarcastic teacher of Maths Set A, my misbegotten placement in which I had blandly accepted as appropriate homage to my high intelligence. Mr Johns didn’t like children who couldn’t do maths, especially when they were supposed to be in the top stream. I sat there, a model of mute disbelief: in all my time at school I had never been shouted at by a teacher—dammit I was clever—and yet here I was in the front row of Mr Johns’ class, oppressed by the Maths Feeling and gazing numbly at him, bovine as he towered over me, projecting his voice to make sure no one in the room missed my humiliation. 

‘Every time I ask you a question it’s the same! It’s no use you sitting there looking up to heaven and offering a silent prayer to be sent the right answer! I may as well send you down the corridor to join the remedial class if that’s the way you go about things!’ I nearly asked him to make good on that threat-promise. Perhaps I should have, but I had lost all courage. I shut up shop, closed down my brain and waited for him, and the underlying problem, to clear off and leave me alone.

The 11-Plus came along and I passed it. There were no maths questions, that I can recall. What mattered to me was that I was headed for the best school in the area, one that taught science in venerable chemistry and biology labs that appeared to have been constructed by the noble founders of those disciplines. Even more excitingly, there was a modern-looking physics block, square, flat-roofed, glassy; science was calling me. I worked out quickly that I was hopeless at certain subjects—woodwork, metalwork, any task for which I had to use my hands—but I was at peace with that, certain subjects were compulsory for the first three years or so and I would shed these burdens when I could. And anyway, I was going to be a Mission Controller: problem solved. I had a good start in chemistry: we were taught a little of the history of the science, and I absorbed with alacrity the stories of Lavoisier and Priestley, I sniggered at those who vaunted the discredited Phlogiston theory; silly, silly people, how could they have believed such tosh! Science had a narrative, it had goodies and baddies too—yay to the heroes who found the truth, boo to the sillies who got it wrong. 

But it wasn’t long until I quailed before the unwelcome advent of the evil, bastard twin of the Maths Feeling—the Science-Lesson Feeling: the same bemused, head-scratching lost-boy emptiness. I just didn’t know what the teachers were talking about. Having glasses, short hair and an earnest expression wasn’t enough. I despaired of getting my white coat; and by greater gradations, went off the idea of being a scienteest altogether. 

A true scientist would never have ignored the accumulation of negative evidence as I had over the years. I had received a chemistry set for one birthday, and my (ab)use of it should have given clear warnings about my clumsiness, my lack of precision and focus, and my disinclination to pay attention to instructions. I burnt a few things, turned others from one colour to another, failed to see the point, got bored, gave up. 

Then I had a biology set; I was fascinated by the microscope that was its centrepiece, but I could never see a bloody thing through it, I baulked at dissecting the poor little dead creatures thoughtfully supplied in grim little bottles, broke some of the glass slides and retreated, confused and sheepish. 

I also had an electricity kit: the less said the better, but it’s relevant to admit I couldn’t even light a tiny bulb from a battery, never mind construct the simple circuits suggested in the manual. Although I kept coming back to this thing with apparent indefatigability, my returns were ever more quietly despairing and ended when too many wires, screws and other bits and bobs finally vanished from the flattened, broken-sided box and fell into whatever void lies out there waiting to swallow discarded toys. 

I hung on for a time to the sickly hope that I could still be a scienteest –working at Mission Control required no messing with chemistry or biology sets, after all—but then the final, fatal crash came when the figures took over completely and the learning of science became nothing much more than an adjunct of mathematics. There were no more lessons on the history of chemistry, classes became just the taking of notes as dictated by the teacher; I attempted to translate the alien tongue in which he droned, but could only write any old thing to fill the book up, keeping five-bar gates that recorded how often he used his pet sayings, falling behind ever faster, understanding nothing. The work involved fewer and fewer physical experiments and more and more calculations, formulae, dense terminology, figures, figures, maths, maths, maths. Physics had lost its promise too; I missed the point, lost my way, and again all I heard were demands for calculations, figures, graphs, maths, maths, maths. 

So I was innumerate and inept. With some relief, I dropped biology and physics at the end of my third year, and at the age of sixteen my final abject retreat was my withdrawal from chemistry lessons after a dire mock ’O’ Level exam (Ungraded) to cram in an attempt to rescue my Maths ‘O’ level. 

These days it’s truer than ever that someone not scientifically literate is at a disadvantage, not just in understanding the world (or the universe, come to that) but in fighting against the darkness that always looms. For one thing, I would like to be able to tell the difference between true science and the TV adverts that blabber about wonder products, beta lampoonins, procozymones or whatever miracle ingredient they are hyping to blind their audience with—gulp—science. 

We are beset with pseudoscience, anti-science and storms of dubious statistics; owing to my failure to release my inner scienteest, I possess insufficient coherent arguments to combat their dubious, half-baked claims. I am forever arguing on the backfoot, nervous and at a disadvantage, looking for someone cleverer to rise up to the fight.

What, apart from me working harder and perhaps asking for help (I never thought of that) could have remedied the problem? It strikes me now that apart from those short lessons on Lavoisier et al., we were never taught the context, the point of science—indeed, we were never taught the point of anything. Our lessons were tasks we were obliged to undertake, why waste time on explanations? An exposition on the scientific method, on how to think critically, how to test a theory—now wouldn’t that have helped? I could at least have learned to think, rather than just look, like a bit of a boffin. 

That, then, was my short, doomed career as a scienteest. From Aristotle to Einstein, I had the chance to stand on the shoulders of giants: 

I fell off.

Promissory