This year I missed the sales. I was ill. But my Daughter went, for clothes
of course. She came back with armfuls of glamorous bargains which even impressed
her Grandma. It is not easy to impress Grandma by spending money. If you were
born in 1906 when a frock cost 3/6d, it is difficult to adjust to your grand-daughter
spending one-hundred-and-fifty pounds in a flash on clothes, or even 26p on a stamp.
"That’s five shillings," shouts Grandma (my Mother). "Five shillings to post a letter."
So since she’s moved in with us she has tried hard to act as a curb on spending.
No food must be wasted, clothes must be darned and mended, egg-boxes, jars, rags and paper
bags saved and lights switched off when you leave a room.
"It’s from living through the war," says my neighbour Jennifer. So my mother is the
strictest non-spender. And what’s the point of her buying anything new? At ninety-two
there’s a risk that she won’t have time to wear it out, and then it’ll have been a
complete waste of money.
Now I am copying my Mother. I can’t keep pace with the zooming prices either.
The supermarket bills grow bigger by the week, and the sums required to live even a
moderately respectable life seem to add up to squillions. My Daughter, on the other hand,
has known nothing else. Ask her for hundred pounds for a pair of trainers and she hardly blinks. It is over trainers
that we have fought our fiercest battles. I have even fainted in Top Shop.
But somehow the Daughter is still not a spendthrift. She can spend hundreds in
a flash, but after hours of researching, shopping around, memorising scores of comparative
prices and coming home again with those bargains. She is a sort of free spirit of the
shops, unburdened by thoughts of inequality, redistribution of wealth or worries about self-worth.
Inspired by the Daughter’s example I occasionally bust through the spending barrier
and we go out for meals together. The swizzier the restaurant the better, as far
as the Daughter is concerned. But it’s still dangerous to take Grandma. "Twelve
pounds fifty for this!" she may shout. "I could have made it for two!" Or back
at home, "How much d’you think this would cost you in a restaurant?" And naturally
she was enraged to find that I had squandered money on a ready-made steamed syrup pudding.
"What did you do that for," she roared, then she stamped off to the kitchen and whipped
one up for tuppence.
As a result we tend to lie about the price to Grandma. We usually halve it, or two thirds it.
"Disgraceful," says Grandma, even then. But we are trying to free ourselves, to reveal the
true prices and encourage Grandma to spend, spend, spend, to buy new clothes, to pamper herself.
Because if she doesn’t it’ll be left to us, and she knows what we’ll do with it.
"Get me to the shops", shouts my mother. I need some new trousers, slippers, loose tops."
Things are looking up.
