Escaping poverty

Children who grow up in poverty and manage to escape its clutches wear their survival in very distinct ways. There are those who try to put as much distance between them and their past as they can, frequently in something German built with four wheels. You can lie about your past, but you cannot change your past and you'll never outrun it no matter how much horsepower you have beneath the accelerator pedal with your foot flat to the floor. It's always in the rear view mirror, even if it's a tiny spec and it will always catch up to you when you least expect it to, never to be fully outrun. All our pasts echo through eternity and these particular stories of victims of circumstance, often beyond their control and certainly of no one's choosing, have been repeating since the beginning of time itself. Ghosts who want to be seen always have a habit of enabling it to become reality. 

No amount of fancy watches will change the fact you were brought up on £1 dinners which had somehow provided enough substance to fuel a hunger to be one of those fortunate few to break free from their bleak situations. Their hunger was both literal and metaphorical. All too frequently children through no fault of their own found themselves being brought up by one parent families and in the main with women having to play the role of both mother and father. Women who had to work more than one low paid job just to keep a roof over all their heads, having to lie that they'd eat later when the kids had gone to bed so they'd never learn the harsh truth that they were going without so their kids didn't have to.

Others remain steadfast to the value of money, they respect the value of a pound note. Not having a pot to piss in engrained in their psyches like those who survived the war and rationing. Mend and make do. Waste not, want not. They never truly escape the trappings of poverty even when their bank balance reaches a point where only sheer stupidity would return it to its origin. Harry was one such example. Any perceived demonstration of extravagance on his part was only done for purposes of the purchase of quality goods built to last. To look at him you'd be forgiven for thinking he lived surviving from pay cheque to pay cheque. The boots on his feet caked in mud. What you wouldn't have known is that underneath the mud were hand stitched Chelsea boots of the finest quality leather, built to last and take on all the English weather could throw at them. If the mud was a good disguise then the boots themselves provided insulation from the truth that underneath those his socks were Swiss. Not in the sense of the country of manufacture, Swiss in the sense they were full of holes. He wore no watch or jewellery. His body was unmarked and naked as the day he was born. No ink to claim reference to his struggles to anyone that sought out their meaning. His phone was Android and had already served him the best part of 3 years and he had only replaced the last faithful servant after an accident with the pavement and the cost of repair to the cracked screen outweighed the cost of a new phone. His contract was just £5 a month, it did all the things he needed it to do. He wasn't a budding movie maker or whatever gimmick Apple tried to entice you to pay a fortune to them for every month only for the phone to be all but obsolete by the time you'd finished paying it off after 24 months. He just needed something that he could use to call someone in an emergency, text messages of Happy birthday on as and when when the need arose and to check the football scores whilst out and about on a Saturday afternoon. His favoured rain coat no longer held out the rain if it was heavier than a passing shower or for a period of more than half an hour even when it was just as a passing shower, but it kept the wind out and still served a purpose even if it was the best part of 20 years old if not more. Buy cheap, buy twice. He suspected during the life of his coat that others had probably brought maybe as many as ten times or more and not just the twice from the old saying. Like most things he owned in life they rarely owed him a penny. He saw no reason to own 40 t-shirts, 20 shirts, 15 jumpers, 10 pairs of jeans… you get the point, no reason to go through every type of garment. Neither did he buy fashion labels, he never understood why so many people fell for paying a fortune for becoming a walking advertisement that they weren't being remunerated for. 

Harry knew the power of knowledge and for him even as clichéd as it sounds, every day is a school day. When he took walks in the countryside to take advantage of the free fresh air he'd have his head in a book during the parts before the scenery was worth swapping his attention to. He knew people gave him funny looks as he walked along reading but how strange that should be an oddity when so many others are head down glued to their phones with no value being derived from what they were looking at. In his younger days he'd frequently leave for work in the morning drinking his tea from a mug which again he knew drew gazes from passers by clearly missing the logic of the saving on time. Most of the time it was because he was late and half asleep and needed the wake up juice but still, why not? After all it's a drinking vessel like a bottle or a can and what else do you drink tea from other than a God awful polystyrene cup? Harry was helping save the planet long before it became trendy although he wasn't aware of it naturally. Of course it isn't just fresh air that is free. Occasionally you might get the odd hit of Vitamin D when the sun paid a rare visit to the shores of Britain. Go out at the right time of day and you could be treated to the unrivalled beauty of a sunset. That could be true of course for a sunrise but Harry was very much a night owl and no matter how beautiful a sunrise was he would always rather still be in bed. 

His jeans and trousers have had to have their pockets sewn numerous times but unlike his boots they're still very much presentable. A clean white T-shirt never goes out of fashion. No one thinks to mug him because quite frankly there's nothing to mug. Well apart from the mug but who's going to snatch a mug especially one full of hot tea? The same goes for holding a book in your hand. Books when held, well the right title anyways, can impress. They can also make a great improvised weapon. Try hitting someone across the throat with the spine of a book and see what happens. A hardback smashed flat across the face is equally as effective. Only try that when you're in danger though otherwise simply take my word for it. Books are a conversation starter. Find yourself sitting on a train and leave a book in front of you and invariably a fellow traveller will ask you if it's any good. Harry always brought his books from charity shops and then gave them back like he'd paid a loan fee. Either that or he gave them to people he knew that shared the same interests telling them to keep it, give it to someone else or gift it to charity but never to give it back to him. 

Some people find it hard to let go of anything. Everything has a meaning attached to it and if they don't remember it when asked they simply event a new one. 

Afraid to let it go in case they remembered the truth before the lie to maintain the justification for taking up valuable space whilst merely sat collecting dust. Harry didn't need to fill space just because there had always been space throughout his childhood. He kept his journals which contained his thoughts and the parts from books he'd given away that were useful to him, had made him think, or be inspired by or simply made him laugh. Hoarding tends to originate from loss rather than from poverty. Those born rich frequently have a penchant for displaying their wealth with questionable design tastes throughout their less than humble abodes. Harry meanwhile could pack up his entire life in under an hour and be on the move should a need ever arise in an emergency. If disaster struck the insurer might well add a few lines to the claim just to get value from the premium on his behalf. It wouldn't have been a long list. 

Maybe you were one of the fortunate ones and were born into the right postcode. If you're at home take a look around whatever room you're in right now and ask yourself if you could, how much of what surrounds you now would you buy again? How many things can you see that probably haven't been used in an eternity or moved other than to be dusted? Frightening thought isn't it when you think about it? 

It's hard as a kid when you don't have a pot to piss in, your own misery only made better if your peers wear the same misfortune as yourselves and you have someone to share it with. The Victorians had the workhouses. Now we have free education where you freely advertise your lack of financial circumstances. Ask Harry, he'll tell you what a gut punch hunger is followed by another blow of ritual humiliation in the playground for not wearing the right clothes or trainers. Kids don't set out to make bad choices in life. Wolves prey upon the weak and the impressionable. One day you're slipping a Mars bar into your pocket and the next you're in over your head into something you can't handle. People scream ‘the countries broken,’ they point the finger of blame, unaware it's being pointed in the wrong direction by those who have all the money and power to make the difference in the first place so they can keep hold of what they have and worse, add to their lot. 

Kids from bad circumstances taking whatever they can to forget. They steal to feed their habits, get caught, get let out, get caught again and remain in the rinse cycle forever spat out waiting to be dirtied and thrown back in again. Load the money in at the front end in investment and you'll find you're not paying out the damages like a never ending insurance claim with ever rising premiums. The burden on the NHS, on the prisons and so forth. Kids don't get an education, they get years of being tested on who has the best memory. Let the rich pay to study the arts if that's their choice but if you really want to build houses then carry on their education for free in a multitude of trades. Shortage or doctors and nurses, again there's no shortage of the willing, just those who can't afford the tab. Make it free to learn. The investment will pay dividends in the end from taxes, well staffed hospitals and so forth. 

There was a time when to Google something meant a way of finding an answer. Now it's a means to sell you shit you don't want or need. Why do we need to grow the economy year on year? Who's benefitting from the money spent? Why isn't the message one of care, of nurture, of investment in the next generation? To stop pretending to be someone that you're not and trying to fool the world your life's all rainbows and sparkly glitter. Change mentalities for young women especially so that they're valued for their brains over their looks. You can only drive one car at any given time, sleep in one house, wear one watch. OK maybe two but you know where I'm going with this. 

Poverty begins like a postcode lottery to which some are cruelly excluded from the draw whilst others are handed winning tickets and everyone in between is busy looking at what others have that they want but don't really need. Rarely if ever are the middle rung of the ladder grateful for what they have. If you climb up that ladder and do it in the right way, the legal way like Harry did, don't be afraid to look back down. If you're in a position to hold out a hand then make sure you do. Of course if you're one of the really fortunate few, ask yourself what could truly bring you a feeling of happiness? Is it that next purchase which brings with it a high for a fleeting moment before it sails off into the wind like it was never really there at all? Or could you choose to help someone less fortunate than yourself and bask in the warm glow that kindness brings. It needn't be financial, time is after all the most precious of commodities that we all possess yet few ever realise until it's too late. Whatever you're spending, be it time, money or energy do it wisely. 99 times out of 100, whatever it is will still be there tomorrow so maybe sleep on it for now and see how you feel in the morning.