Broke?

Broke?

I smile when I hear people say that they are broke and can’t afford to go to the pub or buy an extra bottle of wine to drink while watching the television. Broke? They don’t know the meaning of the word! I wonder how they would have survived years ago when I was young and, my mother could not even afford to replace our second-hand shoes with a new pair of second or third- hand shoes. I nearly always wore the ones my sister had grown out of We had to put newspaper inside them to keep them dry if we couldn’t find any dry cardboard in the entry where our terraced house stood. Mom rarely if ever managed to afford to buy us a pair of new shoes - even those off the market in town were beyond her means. We always wore second-hand clothes given to us by aunties or bought from a cheap market stall. At one time as we were growing up we only possessed one dress each and a skirt and jumper.

Mom married young, and unfortunately, our father deserted her for another woman, he never hung around to meet me. Gran looked after us after school until Mom finished work at a local factory and came to collect us. Mom was extremely poor back then, but she never moaned, she just got on with it. We always had a fire in the grate - albeit a small one. And we never went hungry. I don’t know how she did it, but she always managed to make us a stew for tea and a couple of dripping sandwiches to take to school for our dinner break. And if she could she would buy us a penny chew when we went shopping in town at the weekend. The stallholders were good as they would always give us an apple or even an orange when Mom bought the veg. I knew they always gave her a few extra vegetables. At Christmas she would manage to find a couple of tiny dolls and an apple and orange for us. In those days we did not have a Christmas dinner or cake. If we were lucky we did visit Grans for Christmas Day if she invited us. We felt truly blessed. There would be lots of our aunts, uncles, and cousins there, and a good time was enjoyed by all who attended.

The church of St Albans was across the street from where we lived, and the nuns would often visit to see if Mom was all right and invite Pauline and me to some event that was going to take place at the church.