Cash

Note: 'Cash' was originally written in 2023 for inclusion in Unbound Publishing's One In Five poverty-themed anthology. Unbound went bust in 2025 at a time coincidental to the book's release. While e-book and contributor copies seem to have been sent out, my understanding is that the pre-ordered paperbacks were never posted, and that the book will never see the inside of a bookshop. With the rights to the piece reverting to me on Unbound's demise, I can't see any reason not to let anyone read the work if they're so minded. Ta.

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'Cash' by Eamonn Griffin

The plural of anecdote is data. That’s the original formulation of the aphorism. Academic Raymond Wolfinger first said this around 1970 in response to a student who'd sought to dismiss an observation based on experience made by one of their peers.
Over the years the phrase has been upended, but the notion that the anecdotal cannot accumulate into the evidential is not what was originally meant.

So, yep. What follows is anecdote.

At the time of writing − the early autumn of 2023 - I’m fifty-five. I was born in 1968, my childhood straddling the 1970s and 1980s. In April 2022 I was made homeless. In December of the same year I applied for universal credit, my first personal engagement with the UK benefits system since my early twenties.

My thesis is simply this: being in poverty is hard, but it’s so much harder now than it was in living memory. I’ll focus on three factors: time, credit and cash money.

My parents, if you believe family stories, met at a wedding in Lincoln. Dad was in the RAF. He’d stayed on after completing his National Service for want of anything better to do. Mum was a nurse. She’d come from Ireland at the beginning of the 1960s, following her older sister and brother. They married and settled down, finding themselves within a year or so in Louth, a market town twenty-five miles to the east of Lincoln. They rented a house, and Dad used what skills he’d picked up in the forces − he’d been a missile technician − in a succession of jobs. Electrical engineering for an RAF subcontractor. Taxi driver. TV repair man. Eventually, labouring for a stone masonry company.

Mum was busy at home, what with three kids in a little over two years, and being on her way to having six. That meant full-time and more working as carer, cop, child-wrangler.

Having one work-based income to cover up to eight mouths (plus Liza and Taxi the dogs, and a succession of cats who’d strayed in and stayed) meant that life for the Griffins in the seventies and into the eighties was often a struggle. This didn’t go unnoticed. Even at six or seven I knew that money wasn’t always there, and that sometimes corners had to be cut, or stuff that other families took for granted couldn’t be provided. Here’s the thing, though. It was doable. Difficult, but doable.

Here’s a typical week when I was in primary school.

Dad’s working week was fifty-five hours. Seven a.m. to six p.m. Monday to Friday with an hour’s lunch break and then seven till noon on Saturdays. This was the standard week at the masonry, no overtime here. He’d get paid in cash on Thursday evenings: a small square envelope of notes and coins, plus the purple ribbon of his carbon copy of the wages slip.

When Dad came home on Thursdays, he arrived with treats. A bar of chocolate each, that kind of thing. On good weeks something like a Mars or a Marathon. On weeks already looking tight, maybe a Milky Way or a Fudge. Smaller and cheaper; like any selfish child I’d appreciate the price difference and be momentarily resentful.

The week’s wages would last till Tuesday. They had to. That was because Tuesday was family allowance day. It’s been called child benefit for decades, but in my mind it’s always been family allowance. A small cash payment weekly per child. There was a voucher book you took to the post office. The token was torn, the stub stamped, you signed for your money.

It’s difficult to get ahead when you live week to week, and especially when what you’ve got to cover the seven days only stretches to five. But, like I said, things were a bit easier then, nevertheless. This was down to three factors: reliance on cash itself, on the availability of informal credit on trust, and on the relatively short timescales involved. All of these, I reckon, have largely gone.

Let’s take cash first. The house ran on coins. The telly was coin-operated. A fat box that took fifty pence pieces, calibrated to cover the week’s rental. Anything over the few quid a week that the rental cost was given back to you. On a good week, the money would be thumbed back into the timer, on a tight week coins and telly would be rationed. A friendly fella came most Fridays to empty the box and update the account on a card that sat in a plastic sleeve atop the telly.

Both the gas and the electricity were coin-fed too. Fifty pences again for the electricity meter, five pence pieces originally for the gas. That got switched to fifties eventually, but not until it was an absolute necessity. Corner-shop runs for change were a regular thing. A logistical thing, but the advantages of this were that you knew what you were using and how much it was costing, and that if need be − as was sometimes the case − you could ration to ensure that there wasn’t an over-spend. You paid for what you used, and there was none of the present-day impression that token or other kinds of pay-as-you-go utility meters are anything other than a usurious punishment tool.

Cash gives you immediacy and control. You know what you’ve got to work with. That tangible sense of paying that can get lost in eras of app-based payment systems, contactless cards, and of automated direct debits. But what do you do when the money isn’t enough to see the family through the week? Well, we borrowed.

I’m not talking credit cards, payday-style short terms loans, Klarna-type instalment plans and the like. Credit in the seventies and into the eighties was, for us, informal, local and accessible. There were three main sources of credit. First, for larger purchases − and to some extent for saving up for Christmases and birthdays − there were catalogues. Some of these companies still exist, these days offering an online alternative to the kinds of bricks-and-mortar department stores that have struggled this last decade. Freemans, Littlewoods, Great Universal, Marshall Ward. Yes, you paid over the top for everything from clothing to household appliances to pricey festive hampers of canned and packet stuff, but breaking down the global cost into weekly instalments (thirty-eight such payments was a typical repayment plan) made things affordable. Plus, you could pay into these same schemes, accumulating a little credit against future purchases. Shops offered pay-weekly options too as a regular and no-credit-check required alternative to making larger purchases upfront. A lot of families worked backwards on the basis of what could be afforded to be paid back per week: if you could run to a fiver, you paid off a perpetual five pounds, with new purchases taking the place of the old forever.

That was for big stuff. For getting by to Thursday, though, we had two options. The milkman, and the corner shop.

Our milkman came daily. The usual dairy products plus a selection of basic groceries. Bread, bacon, eggs, potatoes, orange juice, cheddar. If tea on Tuesday and/or Wednesday was egg and chips that was as clear a sign as any that we were living off the milkman till payday.

Empty glass bottles on the doorstep the night before, with a note about changes to the standing order, and the milkman (a friendly fixture for what felt like forever) would leave what we’d asked for the following morning. Remember, part of the point of daily deliveries was that a refrigerator was not a given in the British household. You bought what you needed as you went.

The milkman collected what was owed weekly. If things were tight, payment could be rolled over, or an amount paid off against the full balance. Mutual trust, a sense of relationships, and of community all helped here. He needed you as a customer, and you needed him both as a support mechanism and as a source of credit. In an era before supermarket deliveries, having heavy basics brought to your door was invaluable, the credit facility notwithstanding.

And then, the shop. My childhood coincided with the decline of at least one form of the traditional corner shop. A front room converted into a store offering basics and humble treats. Most town centre-ish residential streets of any length had a corner shop; look at terraced Victorian housing, and for larger out-of-period front windows for shop display purposes from when the front room got its conversion. Our shop − run by the stentorian Mr Moncaster − was a newsagent, too, so there was papers and tobacco, magazines and children’s comics. You could pay in cash or purchases could go into ‘the book’.

Mr Moncaster kept a ledger, a record of what was currently owing based on unpaid itemised purchases to date. That way there could be no disagreement about what was bought or when. Sometimes, Mum’s account was clear. Often it wasn’t, and I’d be sent over with some money to pay off a bit, or else with a shopping list so that there’d be evidence that I wasn't taking advantage of the arrangement. Yes, Mr Moncaster let kids take home cigarettes; he knew who smoked what, after all.

And again that element of community and mutual obligation. Once − about 1980 − there was a fire at Mr Moncaster’s. It was put down to rough kids sticking a burning newspaper through the letterbox late at night. That hit the Moncasters hard, and they ended up giving up the shop within a couple of years, but in the immediate aftermath of the fire Mr Moncaster kept the shop running. A chair out on the pavement, a counter fashioned out of crates. He felt an obligation to the street to make sure that folk could get by.
Like I said, while poverty is a perennial issue for all too many people, my recollection is that previous generations could access a spectrum of support. All this revolved around the fundamental of being paid in cash every week. An obvious downside of this arrangement was that it made planning for the future difficult because the financial time horizon was always closer. That said, on a week-to-week basis it was possible to get by, and if the money fell short there were facilities − family allowance, milkman credit, the local shop, not building up large bills for gas and electricity that would be impossible to pay off − that could be drawn upon.
Part of this was out of necessity, and may also have served the purpose of perpetuating poverty as well as alleviating its symptoms in the short term.

But you could get by. We did. Sometimes in a skin-of-the-teeth sense, but we did.

That doesn’t mean that I didn't carry around the weight of guilt and otherness that poverty can impose. It didn't mean that I didn’t try my own repairs on cheap school shoes that were meant to last the year but which were falling apart within weeks. It didn’t mean that I never avoided conversations with mates about holidays and Christmas presents. But I got by.

There’s a lot that’s changed between then and now. I’ve got second-hand experience at best of much of this, so I’m not claiming any expertise or insight about much at all. What I have seen and felt, though, is the comparative difficulty of contemporary poverty to that of two generations ago, and the lack of informal support mechanisms that might be easily tapped into.

These experiences link to being made homeless. At the end of March 2022 a short-term ban on no-fault evictions in Wales was lifted, put originally in place to ensure that people wouldn’t be made homeless in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. In April I was evicted, the landlords wanting to turn the flat (and the one above) into Airbnb lets. Righto. This coincided with a sharp downturn in work, meaning that while sorting out somewhere to live, I was living off savings, and seeking alternative employment or other self-employment opportunities.

The experience of being forced into the rental housing market revealed the paucity of local options for renters, either in the private sector or in social housing options. While it’s not the only issue, the explosion of short-term letting options has taken away much of the once-available housing stock. This is especially for smaller homes, flats, and properties that might once have been affordable for young adults, the low-paid, and for those partially or wholly reliant at present on benefits. Social housing is in short supply through Thatcherite sell-off of stock and subsequent underinvestment in new builds. In the end I was fortunate because my homeless status meant that I was assessed as a priority case, and was allocated a temporary council home. I’m writing this up there now.

The work downturn and enforced moving costs soon ate into what savings I had; by late 2022 I had little enough left to be easily eligible for universal credit without any deductions from the benefit. If someone has over £6000 in savings, benefit is deducted on the assertion that you have a savings-related income. If you have £16000 or more, you’re wholly ineligible. So, for the first time in over thirty years, I signed on.

There are millions of other people − including those contributing or otherwise featured in this anthology − far better placed than me to both exemplify and discuss poverty in the UK in the present. A few short observations, though, to indicate the differences between my then and my now.

First, cash. It used to be ubiquitous. Now cash accounts for something like 15 per cent of all transactions. We’ve gone virtual, digital, contactless. Which is fine in itself up to a point. But cash gives options: control, immediacy, tangibility. Also, cash allows you to work with what you’ve got in a much more straightforward way than a changing set of numbers in the cloud might. If you’re on a budget, you need to have control. Some places don’t take cash. The expectation from companies is that payments will be digital. Access to money of your own is rationed through high street bank closures and cash machines that might charge you a couple of quid to get your last tenner out. There is the assumption that everyone both has online access and the technology to use digital banking facilities. It’s easy to understand how poverty means exclusion from civil society.

Second, time. The sketch I offered above is perhaps nostalgic and underplays the realities of poverty, but there was an element of time being on one’s side. The timescales we were living to were short and therefore more manageable than now.

The weekly pay packet is a folk memory. Wages are paid most often monthly in arrears. Universal credit is paid monthly, and there’s a brutal six weeks to wait before the first payment might appear. Child benefit is paid every four weeks unless special circumstances apply. Personal independence payment − a non-means-tested contribution towards the costs of long-term illness or disability − is paid every four weeks unless you’re terminally ill, when you can arrange for a weekly payment. Time isn’t on the side of the poor.

While this isn’t the place for a full discussion of the relationships between both low pay and benefits on one hand and a minimal level of dignified existence on the other − in short, there’s a gross unfair disparity − the time factor is a significant additional burden. Eking out a little to last two or three days is one thing. Two or three weeks is another. And, yes, while there are safety nets such as food banks − one of the UK’s few growth industries − they rely on charity and on the kindness of strangers. The responsibility of government to ensure and protect a minimal acceptable and safe standard of living for all has long since been abrogated.

The third element is credit. My childhood was supported by accessible short-term credit at little or no interest and without stigma. Catalogue shopping was expensive compared to high street shops, but the facility made extras accessible. The milkman and Mr Moncaster’s corner shop were simultaneously retail operations for profit and examples of community working more or less together. Credit can be dangerous, but it is a necessity also, not least for budgeting, forward planning, and for amortising larger costs over time. People at all income levels need access to credit arrangements, not least so that we can plan for our future as much as to work through our present.

As I said at the outset, this is anecdote. But that doesn’t make it unreal. We’ve had better working arrangements in the past, often at the levels of neighbourhood and community, with shared social existences informing the financial organisation of everyday life. There’s no reason why there can’t be a return to some of these practices, not least if they’re put into place at that same local level. Maybe that work’s begun near you.