a pound a day HNT

My mother was an early feminist. She hated housework and parenting, and when I was about 12, she found herself a job, which involved working shifts. From then on, she was rarely home, so she made each family member responsible for feeding themselves all day.

Every morning, she gave me, my brother and my father a pound each to spend on food. That was enough money to pay for lunch at school, and to buy ingredients for a home-cooked meal at night.

In the evening, while my mother worked late in the city, our kitchen would get pretty crowded as the three males in the family cooked three different meals.

Some nights, my father would forget to go to the shops to buy his steak and potatoes or whatever, and I would sell him half of what I had cooked, at a profit of course. The money I made went towards my next packet of cigarettes. Thanks to my mother, I learned cooking and capitalism.

Other nights, my father would stop at the pub on the way home, drink his entire pound away, then come home and confiscate half of my meal for himself. Without paying! The drunken basturn.

Occasionally, after school I would blow all my food money - like father, like son - on coke and cigarettes at the cafe near the school. On those nights, dinner at home consisted of several bowls of cornflakes and a cigarette. I never stooped as low as confiscating the dog's meaty chunks in gravy, but I thought about it.

A few years later, my mother was the only one with a job, and the rest of the family had progressed to a mostly liquid diet, playing Scrabble on the dole.

After a few beers, these Scrabble games would usually break up in acrimony, because my old man invented his own rules. For example, if he had used a word, nobody else was allowed to play the same word. I suppose he thought: the family that eats together, cheats together.