Getting by, by making ends meet

Growing up in a working-class family and on a council estate, I have heard and been part of many conversations among women regarding childcare, child development, running a home, handling relationships, budgeting, and in general, simply ‘making ends meet’. I know these conversations are not limited to working-class women who live on council estates; however, included in these conversations are other aspects of family life, which are particular to where you live, and where in society you are positioned. Passed-down knowledge has always been important among women, particularly when that knowledge is about ‘making ends meet’, or ‘getting by’.

‘Getting by’ comes in different forms, from where you can buy the cheapest chicken, to how you might handle the various government agencies you have to deal with, often on a daily basis. As a woman living on a council estate it is important to know ‘what to say’ and how to answer a question – answering a question ‘wrongly’ can have steep penalties.

There is one topic of conversation I have heard throughout my life, first hearing it as a child listening to my mother and aunties. I was about seven years old and I used to listen to them talking on a Saturday afternoon in our living room. They didn’t notice me listening in as long as I sat beyond the boundary of eight women chain smoking John Player Specials; I could, as we used to say, ‘tab hang’ into their conversations. After my grandparents’ death, my mother had been forced to go to what was then National Assistance; she had to give up her job making tights in a factory to look after her younger sister, brother and me. The conversation, as I remember, was that they had refused her claim for assistance, on the basis that she was a single mother, and young – they suggested that she, ‘as a young girl could sell her clothes, and records’. Since that time I have heard this conversation about ‘asking for help’ and how to deal with the benefits agency many times over several different generations of women. It is part of ‘the conversation’, in how you learn to ‘get by’.