Flashbacks

Tonight I experienced a flashback. For one moment I was a child again. I was sitting in the car in the dark when my daughter ran in to collect our dog from her nan. The warmth of the light flooded through the open doorway into the dark street. As I sat there a flood of childhood memories filled my senses.

My mum who died of cancer only last December used to collect weekly insurance payment from door to door. I frequently accompanied her as she did this job. I would meet her after school and keep her company as she went from house to house. I remember the cold winter nights when for hours we would walk from house to house. The emotion that flooded my memory was one of feeling locked out of something warm and beautiful. I would stand with my mum in the cold and feel the warmth as the door opened, a smell of something cooking would hit my brain and I would long to be asked in. To spend a moment in the warmth drinking a hot drink. Instead I was left with a feeling of being excluded, locked out somehow not part of this society that is going on before my eyes. I used to love asking to use the bathroom, to be able to take a break in the warmth. Some people had pink fluffy carpets and these dolls with a frilly dress that hid the toilet roll.

The thing is that as a child I was very poor. I remember the feeling of shame. I always had grey socks somehow I wasn’t like other children. I remember lying about my Christmas presents because it would be embarrassing to say what I really got. I was often mocked because I didn’t have clothes that fitted with fashion. Once a teacher in my primary school asked all us children who had free school dinners to stand up. She then said we should be ashamed for not eating the dinners that were given to us for free. All the rest of the class looked at us in disgust, like we were a lesser being.

Now I am not poor, I am comfortably off. Over the years I have looked at the provision of Working tax Credits for working families and been thankful that the state has supported these families and they don’t need to have the experience I had. But now I see that changing, in the future children in the UK will experience poverty and a feeling of not belonging. Like my memory of looking on at others who have warmth and comfort and I am outside alone in the cold. Is this what we want the future to look like?