I rang my boy. He was in the supermarket with Oscar, my 15-month-old grandson, spending his last 50p on four ‘basics’ toilet rolls, he said. The toilet rolls cost 48p. It was a good job, he said, that he had nine cigarettes left in his packet to last him until his partner’s pay cheque from the government arrived.
Ten minutes later, I received a text from him. The usual one — ‘can u ring me pls’. He’s never got any credit on his phone so he texts me and I call him right back. I called him. He and Oscar were in the back of a police car, he said. He was being cautioned and fined for having no car insurance. Could I come and give them a lift home? He was outside the school, he said.
When I got there, it was as though a major incident had occurred. In front of the school entrance two police cars were parked askew, their blue lights still revolving, as though they’d arrived in a hurry, and three cops in flak jackets were standing around looking important. My boy was standing beside the kerb holding the baby, and two of his partner’s three kids, solemn with excitement, were standing beside him.
The pushchair and the economy toilet rolls went in the boot of my car, the kids piled on to the back seat. My boy’s cheeks were red with embarrassment. He’d been cautioned right in front of the headmaster — he was supervising the bus queue — and all the waiting mums, he said.
An officer had handed him a fixed-penalty ticket for £200 and said he was going to take the car away. It would be stored at a cost of £50 per day, until my boy could present them with a valid insurance document and the £200 fine. If he failed to turn up within a month, said the officer, they’d scrap the car. My boy said that he couldn’t afford to pay £150 a month to insure the car as it was. Six more points on his licence would push that up to around £200 a month, he reckoned. So my boy told them they might as well go ahead and scrap the car.
I’d given him that car, so I was a bit miffed at his largesse. Although I’d guessed he might have been riding around without insurance, I hadn’t inquired too closely. Maybe as his father I should have. Maybe I should have been generous and paid for it.
Back at his partner’s council house, over a cup of strong tea (they’d run out of milk), we reviewed his situation, financial and otherwise. My boy’s job prospects, slight as they already were in this rural location, were now worse than ever. Until Christmas he was performing ‘care in the community’ type agency work with the elderly. And it was a job he liked doing. Without the necessary car, however, he was now looking, at best, at a supermarket till.
We talked about his debt. Last week, he said, he’d received a text from the clerk of the magistrates’ court saying that, unless he paid an outstanding fine of £500, a warrant would be issued for his arrest. The fine was originally £70 for not signing a V5 vehicle-transfer form, my boy explained. The marked increase was due to his failing to attend the court hearing to explain why he hadn’t paid it.
He’d also missed payments to a loan sharking organisation that charges a basic 100 per cent interest, and whose public face, a cheerful fat lady, presses my boy’s partner’s doorbell every Friday morning. On top of everything else he has tonsillitis again but can’t afford the token £7.30 fee for the antibiotic. Fortunately, his partner has a chest infection and he can borrow some of hers.
Her eldest child has conjunctivitis and cries all night. And Oscar, my grandson, has been poorly for weeks with one thing and another. And he needs shoes, Oscar does. New to the pleasures of walking, he’s been tripping about in just his socks. Oh, yes, and his partner’s baby is due in 12 weeks. If things went on like this, my boy said, he’d have to sign on. We both laughed at the very thought of it. ‘More tea?’ he said.
But the kettle wouldn’t boil because the pre-paid electric meter had just run out.
I heard on the BBC news that a million young people aged between 16 and 24 are now out of work. How hard it must be, after all those fat years, and all that socialist rhetoric, to become an adult and find you don’t have a place at the table. How galling to be young and strong and have nothing, be nothing, hope for nothing. It happened to me, too. It shapes you.
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