Losing Coins of the Realm...

We competed fiercely in the collection of Farthings, Molly and me.  Even in those days when every penny counted and people had very little, a farthing was something often easily discarded by the adults around us because there wasn’t a great deal to be bought with them.  You might think therefore that we would find ourselves knee deep in them on occasions but that simply wasn’t the case.  Farthings were of supreme importance to children not accustomed to having regular money at their disposal because the few things they would actually buy were things we desired.   The choice for a long time was Liquorice Wood or Locust Beans, later to be joined by Bubble Gum and each one of these delights was almost but not quite, forbidden by my mother.   Molly’s mother was decidedly more pragmatic and did not become overly involved in such matters.  Queuing up at the high counter of the news-agency and tobacconist next to Penny, Son & Parker’s on The Hill at Northfleet after school to choose between the available delights could be contemplated pleasantly for most of the school day. 

The child-sized coins we clutched firmly in our hands were small and round, each one displaying a Jenny Wren and had been in circulation since the early 17^th century, production of them only ceasing completely in the mid 1950s.   There were four to a penny and when we had more than four we felt prosperous and Molly would observe that we were Rolling In It.    Old Nan used to describe someone poorer than we were as not having a brass farthing to their name or not having two farthings to rub together.  Conversely we sang the rhyme Oranges and Lemons loudly and lustily, blessing our good fortune and hoping we would find no wriggling white maggots in our locust beans.   Though should we do so, their presence did not unduly affect the consumption.  Billy Elliot, who knew a great deal said they were simply protein anyway and protein was good for you.

We were less likely to have Halfpennies in our pockets with them being two to a penny and not discarded so carelessly.      Molly said she didn’t care for them and in fact they were boring and I agreed with her because I would be most unlikely to find myself in possession of more than one at any particular time.   We had heard that ships could be spoiled for want of a ha’porth of tar and near Christmas joined in the chant wherein if you didn’t have a penny, a ha’penny would do nicely. We understood the contraction because we heard it all around us, no-one ever using the full enunciation.   Molly’s grandmother who lived next door to us at 29 York Road said when she was a girl you could buy an enormous warm bun for a ha’penny, directly from the Baker’s oven.  What’s more she told us about a game she played when she was our age, called Shove Ha’penny, played on a special board and said if they ran out of ha’pennies they simply used pennies and then called the game Push-Penny. I thought she was lucky to have the wherewithal to do so but didn’t say that of course.

The penny was the coin we were best acquainted with because that’s precisely what so many everyday things cost.   You could as a child travel quite a long way on a bus or purchase a sizeable amount of sherbet for instance. It was inconveniently clunky unlike the sleek coins that many years later were to replace it and there were an astonishing 240 of them to each one pound note. Old Maudie Obee at Number 32 was said to collect pennies and store them in jam jars under her bed and was reputed to have at least five pounds worth.  That probably wasn’t true because Hilda Sims who operated the corner shop just opposite Old Maudie’s complained that she had a habit of paying for everything with pennies which was at times inconvenient.    It stood to reason, Molly thought, that the pennies were regularly being used up.   She certainly donated several to us every year leading up to Bonfire Night when we harangued passers by for A Penny for the Guy actually hoping for sixpence.

The unusual and comfortingly shaped 12-sided threepenny bit is easily remembered but most of us will be less familiar with the small silver coin it replaced in 1947.   This was the coin often put into Christmas Puddings and fought over on Christmas Day by siblings.  Colin Bardoe maintained that in his house three coins went into the pudding each year because his mother couldn’t abide the fighting that went on between the boys.   Old Nan stated that in their house they must have more money than good sense then.   The silver threepence was nicknamed the Joey and often called that by our grandparents and sometimes our parents.   At school we learned that originally a Joey was the name given to the Groat which was four pence and went out of circulation in 1855.   The silver threepence simply inherited the name.

A sixpenny piece was generally referred to as a Tanner and as far as we were concerned was quite a sum.   I was given one for my seventh birthday by my Uncle Edgar in a genial mood following an afternoon win at Crayford Dogs and Barbara Scutts told me that was nothing compared with her cousin Daisy who found a tanner under her pillow every time she lost a tooth.  Knowing nothing of this extraordinary and fairly recent tooth tradition Molly and I simply didn’t believe her.   My Grandmother called a Tanner a Bender and said back in her day you could bend them with your fingers and leave tooth marks in them too if you felt so inclined.  You could also easily buy enough gin back then to finance a Bender.  

The long-gone shilling piece, often known as a Bob, was a coin with a long history, first appearing in England around 1550.   The actual word Shilling is believed to come from the Anglo-Saxon Scilling meaning division and that word itself can be traced to Old Norse.  None of this was particularly interesting to us as children as we rarely found ourselves with a shilling to spend.  In school we learned that there were 20 shillings to a pound and that pounds, shillings and pence were written as Lsd standing for Libra, Solidus and Denarius.   The reason was never explained to us but we easily absorbed the intricacies of pre-decimal currency and became familiar with Florins, Half Crowns and ten bob notes unlike the future trickles of American tourists visiting the area primarily on the trail of Pocahontas but eager to investigate brass rubbing at St Botolph’s.   Betty Haddon, politely showing one of these visitors around the church was actually given a ten shilling note which proved they didn’t entirely understand the value – or so it seemed when she showed it to us.

A large, shiny Half a Crown or Half a Dollar was what red-faced uncles fresh from celebratory sessions at The Queen’s Head pressed into the palms of recently born babies. On these occasions my Grandmother would extricate the coin as soon as was possible to ensure it was indeed Half a Dollar and that he wasn’t being Tight Arsed by substituting Two Bob.  The infants whose palms had been crossed had each and every one of them to give up their wealth to their parents who made the important decision as to how to spend it.  Aunt Maud said that didn’t matter because it was to bring the babe good luck and the luck stayed with them for life. 

  There were eight Half Crowns in a Pound and the Pound Sterling itself was usually called a Quid which is a word that has been in use for several hundred years and over time variously described the Guinea or Sovereign.   Where Quid comes from is hard to determine but most likely it is from the Latin phrase Quid Pro Quo which means Something for Something or This for That.    The origin of the term Sterling also has uncertain origins and one theory is that it comes from a silver Saxon coin which was called a Sterling and there were 240 Sterlings in one pound weight of silver.  No one knows for sure even now and we certainly didn’t in the 1940s.

All this once familiar coinage and currency has long since disappeared and been replaced by a system infinitely more convenient.   Very few of us carry actual money around with us these days and having a purse full of pence is hard to get your head around.    Nevertheless how we would have loved that that very tiresome situation back in those post war days.      Cold hard cash was extremely hard to come by and we were certainly not in the habit of receiving pocket money so we had to devise other ways of accessing an income.    

 Returning glass bottles for money was wide spread, very popular and fiercely competitive with Tizer, lemonade and beer bottles much sought after.   Boys were generally more successful than girls in this endeavour and would sometimes scale fences to get to little enclaves of dumped bottles in the properties of those with More Money Than Sense.   Girls like us were more likely to knock on doors and politely ask the householder if there were bottles to return.  This was at times only variably successful and sometimes we were told to bugger off because they were quite capable of returning their own bottles thank you very much!  

Some boys had a good business going in shoveled horse manure which could be sold on to keen gardeners at a penny a shovel’s worth and until 1952 or 53 there were still a reasonable number of horse-drawn carts around.  Molly’s brother Georgie wondered why dog droppings couldn’t be sold on in much the same way because it had to be admitted that the pavements and alleyways of Northfleet were beleaguered with the waste of local pets.   Owners only rarely seemed to take their dogs for formal walks and even when they did so paid scant attention to their toilet arrangements but most animals roamed freely, making whichever corner suited them their place of choice.  Wisely we did not give serious attention to Georgie's idea.

 Another scheme and one that seemed much more exciting and somehow daring was checking Button Bs.   Very few homes had telephones so red telephone kiosks were a familiar feature near bus stops and outside shops.  To make a call you inserted two pennies and pressed Button A.  If no-one was home you pressed Button B to get your money back but often people forgot to do so.   Regularly checking local kiosks was definitely a worthwhile undertaking and on one occasion resulted in us securing six pence.   However, this was definitely not a regular occurrence and in the long run discarded farthings were much more reliable.

Being The Best Parents Possible

 

          My previous blog post on Jean Hendy-Harris Writes - Something to Cry For, elicited a surprising amount of comment overall and it’s very clear that the way we bring up our children has significantly changed since the dark days that followed World War Two.   As a society we are not nearly as punitive as we once were and we’ve largely given up physical punishment altogether in favour of appealing to children’s own sense of what is acceptable and what is not.  Of course a considerable proportion of reasonably intelligent youngsters react well to the change but some do not and perpetually test the boundaries making the lives of many parents harder than they need be.   Schools have long since dispensed with straps and canes in favour of deprivations and detentions which many students applaud but again, some do not.

          I was usually reasonably well behaved at school because I was quite wary of punishment.  Nobody liked being caned although for the most part it was the boys who were and I can only remember one occasion when I seemed to be firmly in the firing line.   Eventually, however, the frustrated Mr Clarke who definitely did not cane on a regular basis, slapped me instead.   I no longer remember what my indiscretion had been but doubt if I repeated it.   However, being a paragon of virtue did not ever extend to my home life and I can well recall a number of unpleasant confrontations with my parents where the problem was invariably what I said rather than what I did that so enraged them.   My long-suffering mother said I was for ever giving her Old Lip and my grandmother agreed that I definitely had a Mouth on Me.  My father did not go in for warnings and when he felt I had gone too far he was inclined to immobilise me with one hand and take to my bare upper legs with the other, saying it was the Thrashing I’d been asking for.    This was both painful and humiliating and once, following such an incident I furiously and foolishly asked what made him think he had the right to beat me.   Old Nan, standing by with a teacup in her hand observed with some satisfaction that if I was Hers, she’d give me another walloping for being a Cheeky Mare.   But he decided not to do so and I was glad.

These days despite our very best parenting efforts, and no matter what strata of society we come from it appears that we should all have worked a lot harder to meet the standards expected of us as from our now fully grown progeny.   No matter how many hours we worked to make sure the best schools were accessed, no matter how much money we spent on toys, books and interesting holidays, like it or not some of us will still come in for a lot of criticism.   It’s abundantly clear that doing the right thing does not always come easily and many of us have failed quite spectacularly.

 I have to be honest and say here and now that I lay a great deal of the blame for the rise of this condemnatory attitude squarely at the feet of Philip Larkin for his particularly divisive This Be The Verse from round about 1970.   Greatly loved by fourteen year old boys and many of their English teachers it has put a lot of their parents off Larkin altogether.   The very fact that permission was given use to obscene language within the walls of Gravesend and Northfleet classrooms, and many other places as well of course, and within the hearing of adults was clearly thrilling to the young of the 1970s.   Little wonder he became the poet of choice for a whole generation and that students who had previously shown no interest whatsoever in verse of any kind suddenly saw themselves as aficionados.  Unsurprising that he was offered the position of Poet Laureate following the death of John Betjeman.   In my mind there is little doubt that Larkin must shoulder some of the responsibility for the ever-growing group of middle aged victims of parental ineptitude.

But we parents of the seventies and eighties should have worked more assiduously at providing less flawed environments within which our children might have grown up without the traumas that have blighted their lives.   More generosity of spirit was perhaps required.    If we are now called insensitive we have only ourselves to blame though there is a school of thought that dictates that working excessive numbers of hours in order to pay for the things in life they seemed to need, was not as essential as giving them sufficient Quality Time.   On the other hand those who abandoned long shifts and did give Quality Time are also falling short of perfection.  Forty year old Sebastian’s non-working mother was recently described by him as Smothering whilst his father who worked extra hard was said to be Distant and frequently Absent.  It’s sad really that between them this highly motivated and intelligent couple could not get it right because had they done so they might have a better relationship with their son now.  

However,  there is a school of thought that says accepting too much accountability for the various failures proliferating the lives of our children is to head towards a slippery slope that Josie says at worst leads towards a form of Elder Abuse which she agrees is something else we didn’t have years ago.  Emily, her 38 year old daughter still blames her for refusing to pay for her to attend Drama School  but Josie argues that there was nobody to pay for her own teenage dreams after all and in the final analysis becoming a shorthand typist, a job she hated at the time, was not the end of the world.

She even adds that she finds herself greatly buoyed in this belief by the recent behaviour of Prince Harry who was briefly mentioned in a previous blog post.  Harry at the age of 36 clearly feels his lot in life is so bad that neither the millions inherited from his mother nor living in a Californian mansion with 16 bathrooms excludes him from complaining that his father was recently merciless enough to cut him off financially.    There is no doubt whatsoever that we are expected to feel compassion for him and little wonder that a host of other thirty-somethings now feel quite at liberty to emulate him.   Laura has also been enormously sustained by Harry’s story and looks more closely at her middle-aged son’s grievance regarding his father refusing to raise his pocket money all those years ago – and might even re-examine the trauma he claims to have suffered when she forgot to pick him up from school on more than one occasion.      

That said, all of us would still continue striving to ensure our children have better lives than we had ourselves.  More toys, more books, more time were all invariably on the agenda no matter what the state of our individual finances were.   Sadly the syndrome we are examining seems to only intensify with affluence so that the offspring of the successful brain surgeon and defence lawyer are likely to eventually air the most poignant stories of emotional mistreatment.   

Happily, neglectful mothers like Laura and Josie optimistically maintain that money can sometimes do a great deal to alleviate the pain experienced by what was lacking in the past.   They both agree that parents who courageously shoulder their guilt and do their best to atone for it with expensive meals out for the whole family and Ipads for the grandchildren, may well find the accusations of past misery and neglect diminish somewhat – for a while at least.   And should mortified parents be in a position to provide it, large sums towards smarter homes in more upmarket suburbs might also work wonders with some complainants.

 Katie had tales to tell that supported the spectre of Elder Abuse but was definitely of the opinion that those not in a position to finance the wants and whims of middle-aged malcontents were ultimately better off.  I was personally relieved to hear that because we were definitely a family that didn’t have money to burn all those years ago, as were most of the families around us.  Lack of excess finance was happily the case back in the Bad Old Days when parents beat their children without thought thus laying the foundations that ensured they would undoubtedly grow up destined to over-indulge the next generation. Where does the ultimate responsibility actually lie I now wonder?   And do we always need a poet to explain it to us?

Something to Cry For ......

 

It was never wise to make too much fuss about matters my mother considered trivial, certainly not a good idea to cry too readily because that might create a state of affairs where I’d find myself in danger of being given Something to Cry For.   I didn’t want that because she was not in the habit of making totally idle threats and a swift slap across the face was most unpleasant.   Other children, boys in particular, when misbehaving to the point of drawing undue attention to themselves were simply advised to Wait Til Your Father Gets Home and once again these threats were not made vainly if the yelps and roars emanating from Northfleet sculleries and backyards after five o’clock was anything to go by.   And from what I gather the same went on in Swanscombe, Greenhithe and Gravesend too.   

Back then beating your children was nothing to be ashamed of and in fact could be seen as commendable.   It was even felt that they ultimately benefitted from the effort their parents put into these punishments and perhaps they did.   Generally it was hard later on to find those who bore grudges.   Trauma associated with the child rearing norms of the time was largely unheard of and would remain so for years; it would be decades before any of us became familiar with the term Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and when we did it seemed to be something to do with World War One and Auschwitz.   That’s not to say we were impervious to anything unpleasant that went on around us as anyone who can recall the first half of the 1940s will readily verify.   In fact it would be hard to find someone who could honestly say they were totally unaffected by the menacing tones of the air raid warning and even now, eight decades later do not instantly recognise the underlying threat the sound promised.

I suppose we were fortunate to have been born on the outer borders of the modern age of human resilience.  Our parents and grandparents were more hardy generations benefitting from a greatly defined sturdiness of resolve.   Life wasn’t easy but they didn’t expect it to be.   By the time we were born some of us were destined to harbour slightly different expectations and were definitely lining up to be just a little more indulgent with our own sons and daughters.   Although the war had definitely delayed the rate of progress, the times they were a-changing!

By the middle of the 1950s some ultra-progressive families like The Blakes of Pelham Road where my mother cleaned on Tuesdays for a few months, no longer smacked their twins, who apparently were in need of the occasional wallop if ever children were, and even allowed themselves to be addressed by their first names.   Their mother, was clearly proud of the liberal views the family held and over morning Nescafe and Nice biscuits tried hard to induce her Tuesday employee to follow her lead.  There was little chance of this, though my mother, always unwilling to speak her mind, tried to look interested, privately thinking that Summerhill School where Geoffrey and Gillian had their names down for the following year, sounded far too much like a place where the Kiddies Ruled the Roost.  As for your children using your given name when they addressed you, in her opinion this was shocking to say the least and indicated a very fast route to Reform School rather than a few expensive years at Summerhill.   It was in fact one of the twins addressing her as Nellie rather than Mrs Hendy that convinced her to take the job offer as a dinner lady at Gravesend Girls’ Grammar School.   It has to be remembered that this was still a time when neighbours were known as Auntie or Uncle by we children and one of my mother’s long term friends was still addressed, even by her as Mrs Bennett after many years.  These norms meant that many of us who were children in the 1940s and 1950s have little idea still as to how strangers should be appropriately addressed and meant that last week’s bright and breezy young plumber easily called me Jean whilst I called him Mr Seymour.    

Nevertheless, overall things have changed now of course, mostly for the better. In most up to date and forward thinking countries nobody, whatever their age or station in life might be, seems to have anything other than a first name and physically taking to children by way of punishment for general misbehaviour is not simply frowned upon but illegal.   Here in New Zealand it is now quite unlikely you would ever witness public displays of even minor discipline although the occasional daring Pacific Island child might still be subject to what my mother called a Clip Around the Ear.  The last time I actually witnessed anything of a disciplinary nature concerned a three or four year old on a supermarket shopping trip who unwisely decided to crawl among the frozen food cabinets sampling Ice Block flavours.   His mother’s wrath was palpable and his ability to deftly dodge the blows had to be admired and indicated he was a boy of some physical ability and life experience.  

These days of course we worry a great deal as to how our children might view us in years to come and it’s important to us to preserve ourselves in memory as compassionate parents who did not inflict unnecessary pain and suffering.  We certainly don’t want our adult offspring emulating Prince Harry for instance and informing the world of our shortfalls.   Not that Harry has so far accused his father of Clips Around the Ear but it can never be entirely ruled out for the future.   As I have already pointed out, being given Something to Cry For was no joke and so a part of me would definitely feel the first inkling of sympathy for Harry should it ever emerge that something similar happened to him.