At the end of his first term at Cambridge, he and a friend bought an ancient car. ‘I drove it back to Nottingham. My mother said, “You mustn’t leave it in the road with all the stuff. You can’t trust people round here.” So I give my mother a lecture about society, community and all the rest of it, go to bed and have the deepest of sleeps. I wake up in the morning and it’s gone! Everything,’ he said calmly, ‘I own in the world is in that car.’
A few days later, the police found the car, but the only things in it were Ken’s textbooks, some underwear and one shoe. He needed a suit for an interview, but had no idea how he was going to get one. I had a feeling this story was about to turn around and, sure enough, it did. ‘I was looking at suits,’ he said, ‘and the shop assistant asked me what I was looking for. I told her my sad story. She told the owner of the shop, who gives me an enormous discount on the suit – and a job.’
But the story, it turned out, wasn’t over. When Ken got back to Cambridge, his tutor asked him how his Christmas had gone. ‘I said, “Fine,”’ said Ken, ‘and he said, “I’m glad your Christmas was uneventful, because it’s quite traumatic after the first term,” or something like that. And I said, “Well, actually, I forgot to say, I did have everything I owned stolen.” He said, “Have you got it all back?” and I said, “No, but it doesn’t matter.”’ Ken is such a natural raconteur that he was practically acting out the part of the tutor. ‘He said, “How are you going to cope with the next term?” This was hugely embarrassing in 1971, talking about money. I said, “No, no, no, I’m fine.”’
The tutor asked him how he was going to buy textbooks. Ken told him he had got his textbooks back. ‘Then,’ he said, looking at me in the way that perhaps the tutor looked at him, ‘my tutor said, “I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to think very carefully before you answer it. If you were going to buy any textbooks this term, how much would you have spent, rounded up to the nearest ten pounds?” A classic Cambridge exam question. The number was zero, but, rounded up, the answer was ten pounds. He rang up the senior tutor and said, “I’ll get you a cheque tomorrow.”’
In 2011, Ken and his wife, Julia, made a huge donation to the library at his old college, which is now named after him. ‘When I endowed the library,’ he told me, ‘I pointed out that the ten-pound act of kindness had turned into two million pounds!’
Ken has been canny. There is no question that Ken has been canny. Most people from poor backgrounds do not make enough money to endow libraries at their old college. Nor, in fact, do most people from comfortable, middle-class backgrounds. Ken went to work in a field where it’s possible to make money, and he has made a lot of it. He has been very focused on making a success of his business career and is now just as focused on making a success of the charities he chairs. ‘There are two things about me,’ he told me. ‘One is that I have clearly had a charmed life. I recognize this, which is why I feel obligated to help others. The second thing I tell people is that for most of us, luck is relatively evenly distributed. The great skill is to spot it.’
‘We didn’t,’ said my friend Dreda, ‘have no money.’ We were clutching our stomachs after one of her delicious and gigantic Thai meals. She had made the fishcakes. She had made the pad thai. She had even made the prawn crackers and the spring rolls. I sometimes think she can do anything. She was a teenage athletics star and East London shot-put champion. Then she read African history at SOAS, the first in her family to go to university. Then she trained as a teacher, became a deputy head and then an educational consultant and now she’s a successful crime writer, broadcaster and journalist who also does work in prisons and schools.
‘I grew up on a council estate one street up from Cable Street,’ she told me. ‘My dad worked in a chicken factory in East London, and my mum worked as a cleaner in the local hospital. She also used to give the patients tea and she loved, loved, loved her job. It was a really great community. All the mums took it in turns to wash the stairs. We used to just run around. Kids lived on the street. You went home when you were told to go home. Your mum just used to go on the balcony and shout for you.’
Dreda learnt to read at Whitechapel library. While she was there, she would go to the art gallery next door. ‘We were never bored,’ she said, ‘and it was an outdoor lifestyle, so it seemed like we didn’t really need to have more money. But I think what my parents taught me was: you have to work hard. There was never a pressure, but there was always a feeling that we want more for you.’
Like Ken, Dreda always talks about what she has, not what she doesn’t have. So what, I asked, did she lack? What about clothes, for example? ‘We couldn’t afford many clothes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I went to school in trousers. I was growing and the trousers were getting shorter. I remember getting teased about that a couple of times at school and it did hurt me. My mum,’ she added, ‘didn’t like me wearing trousers. She said it made the angels weep. I was like: what?!’
We both paused for the weeping angels. And presumably she didn’t have holidays or go out for meals? Dreda laughed. ‘Never! I had my first holiday when I was twenty-one.’ Did she ever have days out? ‘No. What my mum used to do was pack us off to Sheffield, because we had a lot of family there. She used to send us off, with a sandwich and an apple, put us on the coach and off we’d go. My dad,’ she added, ‘belonged to a dominoes club and every year they used to organize a trip to the seaside, so you’d have these seven coaches of black people descending and these people standing in the street,’ and she opened her mouth as you would at a dentist, ‘like this. We’d go to Great Yarmouth, Blackpool, Skegness and Barry Island. Everyone brought their packed lunches. There was food, there was lots of sharing.’
When her father first came to England from Grenada, he had an accident at work and lost his leg. ‘I asked him years on why he didn’t take any holiday,’ she said, ‘and he said his job made him feel strong. He didn’t let what had happened to him hold him back. He said, “I’ve got four kids to bring up, I need to find some work.”’
Dreda has always been ‘a big saver’. She has always worked extremely hard. She is generous to her friends, and extremely hospitable, but she has always been careful. She bought her council flat on a discount and worked all out to pay the mortgage off. ‘I think as a working-class person,’ she said, ‘you’re really frightened something dramatic is going to happen, like you’re going to lose your job. Who’s that fabulous actor? Leslie Phillips. He grew up in Tottenham. He’s of an age. People say, “Why do you still work?” and he says, “Because I’m really worried as a working-class person that my money’s going to go kaput and I’ve got nothing.”’
Paul Brandford doesn’t worry about money. He has also never had very much, or at least not since he was a child. ‘My parents had very regular nine-to-five jobs,’ he told me, in the café at the Royal Academy after we had finished going round the Summer Exhibition. ‘They were lower-middle-class aspirational people. We moved to a brand-new house. I saw them getting ready for work every morning and I thought “are you crazy, why are you doing this?” I just knew that it wasn’t for me.’
It’s possible, I told Paul firmly, that the reason his parents did this ‘crazy’ thing was to feed him and his brother and sister. So when he decided to pursue art, how did he think he was going to earn a living? Paul laughed. ‘I didn’t think of it, and still don’t! It’s not that kind of involvement. I have been fortunate enough to do a whole string of art-related jobs, but my own art has never primarily been a means of making money.’
Although his art is wonderful, this is clearly true. His art jobs – largely freelance teaching – also haven’t made him rich. Did he never, for example, dream of owning his own home? Paul made a face. ‘I thought if it turns out I do, great, if it doesn’t I’m not going to cry about it. To be honest, I don’t own a lot of stuff. I own a lot of art books, but that’s about it. I don’t have a car any more. I’ve had a few third-hand cars. They got me around and that’s what they wer
e there for. I don’t feel I’m defined by the things I have or the clothes I wear.’
He had, he told me, ‘just enough of an income’ from his freelance work. Was it, I asked delicately, less than the national average? ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is the national average?’ About £26,000, I told him. Paul looked surprised. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘if I pull in twenty, that’s a solid year.’
Gosh. So what gets cut out? ‘We don’t go on holidays much. I know someone across the table,’ he said, looking at his wife, Jeanette, ‘who goes on quite a few, but I don’t. How old is this jumper?’ Jeanette grimaced. ‘Twenty years?’ she said. Paul grinned. ‘I don’t do holidays,’ he said. ‘I don’t do fancy cars.’ Did they have their own furniture? ‘At this point we haven’t,’ he said, ‘but we have had furniture in the past. But furniture? Really?’ And he giggled.
He and Jeanette rent a flat on the outskirts of London. They live there with their twenty-four-year-old son, Jake. The rent is £15,000 a year. Paul pays it out of his £20,000 income and Jeanette, who’s also an artist, and also does freelance teaching, pays the council tax, electricity and other main bills. So basically, I said to Paul, you don’t have any spending money? ‘Look,’ said Jeanette, ‘at the lavish clothes he’s got!’ Paul half winked at his wife. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘it’s not something I think “oh, I’m unhappy about”, or “isn’t life unfair?” It is what it is and you get on with it. The whole art game is the game of a professional gambler. You take the highs with the lows. It gives you things. It doesn’t give you certain other things. In a way, that’s a contrast you accept.’
So did he, I asked, ever think he would make money? Paul’s laugh was more like a snort. ‘Of course! Everybody has dreams about their own success. Over time, those dreams are tempered by reality. Actually, weirdly, and this may surprise you, underneath it all, I’m quite happy with how things have turned out. I was fifty last year. I’ve spent thirty years, more or less, doing the things I want to do.’
Which all sounds lovely, but what about his wife? What, I asked, was her attitude to money? Jeanette took a sip of her tea. ‘I wasn’t,’ she said, ‘really bothered by it. Nobody thought you could earn masses being an artist.’ And did her parents own their own home? Jeanette nodded. ‘Yes, but we were working class. The only reason my parents got a deposit for a house was that my mum was injured and got some money from that. Owning a house is good. I’m panicking now that we don’t own anything. Now we’re getting older, it does matter, because one of us is going to get ill. It used to be cheaper to rent than not, and we thought it would always be like that. I thought something would come along and it didn’t.’
They had, I said, pointing out the obvious, both chosen to put their work as artists above financial comfort. Paul, it was clear, had no regrets. Did she? Jeanette looked at her husband and then back at me. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t change it. Absolutely not.’
When I first met Lisa, we were both working in the arts, on salaries that might make even Paul laugh. She had been renting a flat with her boyfriend, but the relationship had split up and she was now lodging with friends who were a couple. It was a small flat and it was awkward. I helped her find a room just up the road from me, and it was while she was there, and eight months after she had started a relationship with Ian, that she found out she was pregnant.
A month before the baby was born, she and Ian moved into a rented flat. They have had to move several times since then, and the rent on their little flats has usually been twice as much as my mortgage. They now live in a cheaper flat in Hackney. It’s a lovely flat. They have made it really homely. But it’s a one-bedroom flat for a family of three.
‘I don’t think I’ve been feckless,’ Lisa told me, as she served up scrambled eggs in her charming kitchen, ‘but I’ve never been a high earner. I’ve always been in a situation where I’ve never been able to buy anywhere or put any real savings behind me. It just so happens that the person I’m with has had a divorce behind him, so he’s in a similar situation. I think the driving force for me has never been money. It has always been happiness, whether through job satisfaction, having a good relationship, or having a family.’
Lisa grew up in a family without much money. ‘We were comfortable,’ she said, ‘but there were moments. I do remember being told to be quiet because the milkman had come and we didn’t have money to pay him. I remember moments of looking for money, made like a game, to get enough to go to the chippy.’ Unlike Dreda and unlike Ken, her family did sometimes have a few days in a caravan or a B & B, but they would also spend a few nights sleeping in the car. ‘Everything,’ she said, ‘was always made an adventure. It was a very happy childhood and my mum was very playful.’
It’s just as well Lisa had that model, because there have been times for her as an adult when things have been very tight. They got even worse when Ian lost his job. ‘I suppose one of the worst situations,’ she said, ‘was when we hadn’t paid the council tax and there’s that horrible feeling of not knowing how you’re going to do it. We had threats that things were going to be cut off and we were going to be taken to court. That feels quite shameful. There have been times when we’ve had to live really frugally, and that does feel horrible.’
After one particularly bad period, Lisa set up a home budget. ‘If I know what I’m dealing with,’ she said, ‘I’m less scared, because I know I can manage it.’ She didn’t want Ruby to feel deprived, so she would check websites to find things they could do for free. ‘Even in winter,’ she said, ‘I can remember walking through parks in the pouring rain and just making up songs and finding somewhere to eat a sandwich. Somehow, eating sandwiches in the rain, in a little shelter in the park, was exciting.’
Lisa literally learnt how to control every penny. If she had £1.60, she knew she could either get a bus somewhere, or perhaps buy Ruby a small bag of popcorn. Every day she would plan their evening meals: often baked potatoes or beans on toast. She and Ian would save up all year to take Ruby on a little holiday, a few days in Cornwall, or Paris or Amsterdam. Once, they lost their holiday because they had to move out of their flat suddenly and find a deposit. But I don’t know anyone who has talked about holidays with more joy.
When Ruby was eight, Lisa got a much better-paid job. Did it, I asked, make her happier? Lisa’s smile was rueful. ‘No! In recent years, when the income was better, I’d get to the end of holidays or weekends and think we’ve not done as much. I think in some ways we were enriched when we didn’t have money, because we’d be more organized about how we spent our time.’
‘I suppose I’d be a liar,’ she said, ‘if I said there weren’t times when I thought it would be easier if we had a property. In her twelve years, Ruby has already moved quite a few times, so I worry about the fact that we can’t offer her that kind of security. But I think of everything else she’s got. She’s got a very happy home. We’re always joking. We get on well. We always try to make time on Sunday morning to sit and talk about things that are happening in the world, just to make her look outwards as well as inwards.’
*
If I think of all the people I know, I’d say there’s absolutely no link between happiness and wealth. Some of the happiest people I know have the least, but I don’t think any of them would want to say it’s fun being poor. Nobody wants to worry about having their electricity cut off. Nobody wants to feel that they could be chucked out of their home on a whim. It may not be true that money makes you happy, but if you’re really struggling, it will certainly help. Once you reach a certain level, according to the happiness experts, more money doesn’t make much difference. When you reach that level, which depends on where you live, what makes you happier, says the economist Richard Layard, is to earn more than your neighbours, colleagues or friends. Layard quotes the story of the Russian peasant whose neighbour has a cow. When God asks him how he can help, the peasant says: ‘Kill the cow.’
In the long term, it looks as though standards of living for
most people in the West are likely to stagnate or even fall. The post-war dream of having a better standard of living than your parents now seems more like science fiction. My parents had job security, automatic pay rises and index-linked pensions. They might as well have had a penny farthing. I’m probably going to have to work until I drop and so will quite a few of my friends. We are nearly all going to have to adapt our expectations of what makes for a comfortable life.
I was asked by the Sunday Times to write a piece about Ebola. I spoke, via a charity worker, to an Ebola survivor in Sierra Leone. He had lost all seventeen members of his family. He has no relatives, no income and no job. He eats, he told me, when people bring him food.
Before I interviewed him, I had been googling Ikea kitchens. I would like to say that after talking to him I will never google Ikea kitchens again. That would be a lie. I can watch Syrian refugees on the news and still think it would be nice to get a new sofa. We all live with these double standards all the time. I’m not sure if we need, as that professor of philosophy said, to ‘reenvision’ the role of money in our lives, but I’m pretty damn sure that we could all learn a few lessons from Lisa.
Fortysomething millennial
‘A primary job of the citizen’, said the letter, ‘is to earn money to pay taxes to help to support citizens whose needs are greater than our own.’ The letter was from my father, and it was written on blue Basildon Bond notepaper. He wrote it when I was doing a dissertation on patterns in the novels of Iris Murdoch as part of an MA on ‘The Novel’, and not showing all that many signs of trying to get a job.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 23
