The concept of money is a mystery to most children. I remember teaching my middle daughter how to buy something in a shop: ‘Unless you have exactly the right money, you give more than is needed, and they give you some change.’ I send her into a shop on her own with a £20 note and she comes back with a copy of The Beano and no change – she’s simply handed over the note, turned on her heel and walked out, happily reading about Dennis and Gnasher. Her elder sister is better at maths, but has a skewed notion of the supply chain. She hits upon a bright idea to make a quick fortune – she’ll put a table up outside the front door and sell the contents of our house.
‘And what happens when the house is empty?’ I ask.
‘You’ll get some more things, won’t you?’
We’re not all little Jacob Rees-Moggs – very few of us learn spreadsheets, investments and the ins and outs of offshore banking in the nursery – as kids we mostly subscribe to the Boom and Bust economic model, we spend whatever we’re given on ‘pocket money day’ on the day, and live on nothing for the rest of the week.
Being sent to boarding school throws this model into sharper relief because there’s no food cupboard to steal a square of jelly from in the lean period. In the early years money is deposited with the housemaster and withdrawals are carefully managed to stop us squandering the entire term’s allowance on frozen Mars Bars in the first week.
As we get older we’re encouraged to open a Post Office Savings account – very useful for depositing Grandma Sturgeon’s 2/6d birthday postal order – though something tells me Grandma Sturgeon doesn’t know much about money either, because I’ve checked and 2/6d in 1970 is worth £1.98 in today’s money. Happy bloody birthday, don’t spend it all at once!
And finally . . . we progress to a bank account. This is the early seventies and the bank account comes with a cheque book and a free biro. Presumably they give you the biro to encourage you to write cheques, and this is exactly what I do: I write a cheque to cash for twenty pounds. This is the amount I need for the bass guitar I’ve seen in a musical instrument shop in York.
There is some consternation in the bank when I present this cheque. The clerk checks a couple of ledgers and takes my cheque to some higher authority who looks at it in alarm. From the dark recesses of the bank he looks at the cheque, at the ledger, and at me, then scrapes his chair back and strides forward. This is the moment when I begin to twig that you can’t write a cheque for more than you have in your account. My mind is whirring, trying to think of possible excuses as the assistant manager reaches the counter.
‘Mr Edmondson . . .’ he begins. How sweet of him, I’m only fifteen. ‘There’s a discrepancy between the amount being withdrawn and funds in the account,’ he continues, as if it’s his fault! He’s so generous of spirit, it seems impossible to him that I would try to defraud the bank on purpose. ‘There has obviously been some mistake.’
This plays straight into my hands and prompts an immediate and outright lie: ‘Yes, my mother says she deposited twenty-five pounds in my account last week.’
This throws the assistant manager into a paroxysm of shame and regret. He instantly cashes my cheque, hands over the readies, and promises to write to ‘Mother’ and apologize, and to find the missing deposit.
I leave the bank with a fistful of illicit dosh and an enormous problem – what’s going to happen when my mum gets that letter? Of course, in normal times, when Mum is in Uganda, the vagaries of the postal service would make this less of a foregone conclusion, but unfortunately this happens on one of the few occasions when my parents are ‘on leave’ in Bradford.
The easiest and best approach would be to confess straight away, apologize profusely, and hope they might not blackball me from the banking system for the rest of my life. But I don’t take the easiest and best approach. It’s late Thursday, the next postal collection in our tiny town is Friday, which means the letter will be delivered on Saturday.
So on Saturday morning I skip school and get the bus to York. I stand in the toilet on the train from York to Leeds to avoid paying the fare, but I have to pay for the train between Leeds and Bradford because there’s no toilet. It would have been better for me if this plan hadn’t worked, but it does – I turn into our street just as the postie walks away from our house. I let myself in, see the bank letter on the mat, pocket it, and then greet my parents, who are surprised to see me but stupidly swallow my next lie that we have all been granted the day off because of . . . disease? Plague? Death-watch beetle? I can’t remember the excuse, but whatever it is they accept it, and I spend the day with the letter burning a hole in my pocket before returning to school in the evening.
My absence from school has been noticed and two weeks later I receive six of the best for truancy, which leave my arse looking like the railway tracks at Clapham Junction.
All this for twenty quid – is it worth it?
Why am I even bothering with school? I should just leave and get a hod.
But I don’t. I write a letter from my mum to the bank forging her signature, explaining how she posted the cheque to the bank and is rather annoyed that they have lost it.
Things spiral out of control from this point: it’s noted that my mum’s letter has a postmark from Pocklington not Bradford; the bank write to her again, without my knowledge or any chance to intercept; all is uncovered. I have to give the money back, I have to apologize to the bank, to my mum and to the school. As punishment my parents cut my allowance. I am poorer, I have no bass guitar, I am not in the band, I am full of shame at my own stupidity, and I have a hurty bottom. I resolve never to get into debt ever again.
My first attempt to buy a bass having come to nothing, the following holiday I try to earn the money.
Although they’ve now returned to Uganda, Mum and Dad have bought a new home in England – a bungalow just outside Scarborough. And for a couple of school holidays, as I am now considered to be of the appropriate age to look after myself – sixteen – instead of being farmed out to the family tree, I’m allowed to stay in this bungalow on my own.
I work like a dog. I work a few days in a supermarket then find a job in a holiday camp in Cayton Bay – changing the gas bottles on the caravans during the day and changing people’s money in the penny arcade at night. It pays 20p an hour. But I find a better rate of pay down on Scarborough seafront: 25p an hour! Again I’m working in a penny arcade, but it’s much bigger and more crowded.
I work with an old guy called Alan whose job it is to fix the machines when they go wrong. I learn a bit of physics they never taught me at school: if you touch a live wire that is AC it will throw you off, if you touch a live wire that is DC you cannot let go. Most of the one-armed bandits are DC internally. I have to listen out for Alan’s shouts when he touches a DC wire, then find him and switch the machine off at the mains. He gets electrocuted about three times a day, generally for about a minute each time.
He is a somewhat frazzled individual, and perhaps the constant shocks have altered the wiring in his brain, because every day he tells me the same joke. I say joke. He thinks it’s a joke. It’s just a crude rhyme: ‘Blacker’s Knacker Lacquer – adds that lustre to your cluster.’ He says this apropos of nothing. You just need to catch his eye and he’ll say it. If you’re sucking down 240 volts I believe it gets funnier. There’s an idea for a comedy club.
After a few weeks my independent spirit gets noticed by the manager, who owns another arcade further along the seafront. I’m moved to this other establishment where he gets me to call the bingo. This is fun. It’s not the big bingo you get in a converted cinema, it’s the small bingo inside an arcade with about thirty fixed cards attached to a wrap-around console with plastic sliders to cover the numbers. It’s a much smaller card than in proper bingo too. The prizes are pretty worthless so the idea is to get people to play as many games as possible and swiftly move them along.
My job is to make it sound like fun and entice people to play, but the script is already written for each number: Kelly’s Eye, number 1; Ted Heath’s Den, number 10; Beans Means Heinz, 57.
I make up a few of my own: Days a Week, 8 according to The Beatles; Hours from Tulsa, 24; and my personal favourite, another Beatles reference – Revolution, number 9.
It’s only when I get really bored after a couple of weeks that I start messing with them properly: Legs Eleven, 69; Two Fat Ladies, 2; Unlucky for Some, 76 trombones.
There are groans, complaints and some laughs. The manager thinks I’m getting more people to play but that I’m slowing down the game. He can’t work out if he’s losing money or not. I get a warning, but the holiday’s nearly over and I manage to scrape together the money I need for a cheap copy of a Fender Precision Bass with a sunburst finish, so I don’t care.