Quirks from a poorer childhood that have followed you through life.

[Motorwayview]

Inspired by the tight people thread.
No matter how much underwear I have I am always slightly panicked that I'll run out of clean underwear so have been known to handwash and leave overnight to dry. Ive got draws and draws of the stuff now - BUT growing up for a while I had just enough to get by on but only if DM washed them every night. ( 3 pairs knickers) Sometimes we didn't have the 50p for the meter to use the emersion heater or boil a kettle (this was the '70's).
The one that drives DH mad is that I have to use every last drop out of a bottle even if Ive got 3 more of the same in the cupboard ( shampoo ect) .
Anyone else ?

All those people above talking about the clothes they were forced to wear to school reminds me. I had the worst of both worlds too. My clothes didn't satisfy the teachers as regards school uniform and the other kids thought them gross and unfashionable too. So I got abuse all round!

When I was about 16 I discovered Goth fashions and I've never looked back. I'm still that way in my early 40s. Even all these years later I still wake up grateful that I don't have to go to school. And that I can get dressed in clothes I actually like and make me feel good.

I was a young teacher in the early 90’s. The girls had a very distinct style. I taught in a village but was from the nearest, big city and I was fashion mad so it was something they talked to me about.
I had one girl in Year 8. She was adopted, her parents seemed old at the time, and she dreaded non-uniform days.
We had one day out and her mum had knitted her a pink angora tracksuit. Thick elastic in the waist and legs. She had a very angular face, wavy hair and huge pink specs.
She was sat at the front of the bus with her friend and I could hear other girls sniggering.
So I turned around and went into a whole story about how my friend* Kate Moss only wore knitted tracksuits away from
the catwalk, and went into a whole spiel about their similarities. I asked if her mum would knit me one as well?
Apart from the fact that they all believed I knew Kate Moss, other girls started asking about knitted tracksuits and I kept saying well when I go home, everyone wants one, didn’t you know?
Thank God it didn’t rain.
*I have never met Kate Moss!
The student in question grew up, got asked to model in Japan and kept in touch and she told everyone that story. She was fabulous!

That's a very heartening story. Well done. It shows how there's a very fine line sometimes between being the butt of everyone's humour and being a fashion leader.

Now I've landed myself a half decent professional job and have money to spend, it's not unheard of for younger women to say they love my outfit/coat/shoes etc. and ask where I got them from. If you're a bit higher up the status gradient you can get away with a lot more! My goodness me how times have changed . . .

So was I! Wall Park Pontins

Do you think Channel 5 will pic this up - The Day That Elvis Died?
Multi-family drama all around those 24 hours?
I can remember my dad bringing in the newspaper the next day and thinking that’s not Elvis. I had no idea he wasn’t in his 20’s wearing a garland on my telly.

I couldn’t afford enough sanitary towels or tampons, and my mum was pretty neglectful about buying them for me.

My teenage daughter is now drowning under piles of clean period pants & boxes of tampons/towels as I’m so keen for her never to be in that horrible position of having to use wadded up toilet-paper 😔

I'm another ex-wad of toilet paper user. Either that or a couple of sheets of kitchen roll folded into a rectangle. When I finally was able to access the proper stuff it felt like such luxury - as if I'd become a glamorous woman in Cosmopolitan.

As soon as I hit 11/12 and was about to start secondary school (in 1989) my parents (who are minted but fucking tight) refused to spend money on me

The school has a uniform and I needed things like a bag/books/dinner money/shoes/pe kit etc

I did get a tiny amount of pocket money (£1 a week) and did babysitting for extra pennies (£5 a night-so i might have earned £5/15 a week)

My mother made it clear I was to buy my own uniform/books etc and I remember worrying myself silly on how I was going to afford a £12 jumper or a £9 shirt (and the thought of books/pe kit etc sent me into a spin)

I did manage to scrape the money together but I also had to buy the following years uniform and other bits I needed as i moved through the years

As soon as my dc started,they had more than enough uniform (one set for every day,bar their blazers-i bought two each) and I spent a fortune on things like books/pens/paper/folders etc

I'd saved for about 2 years each to afford it as I was a skint single mum-it cost me a fortune but I was damned if they where going to pay

My parents told me I should have bought more as 'we dont think they have enough of x/y/z' (they didnt offer a penny,just told me I hadn't bought enough bits and bobs) and that they thought it was 'disgusting' that I couldn't afford to send them on a school trip abroad (I was told that if I wanted to go,I had to pay for it myself)

Makes me so angry-i missed out on spending my pocket money on teenage tat because they where too tight to pay for the bare basics that you pay for as a parent

Im nc with them-i hope their bank accounts are there for them because I certainly won't be

This was my mum's upbringing, not being allowed clean knickers or decent san pro. We didn't have much money growing up, but she made sure I had lots of underwear and the sanpro I chose.

I used to have a plastic money box in the shape of a globe where I put my Christmas and birthday money. As a twelve year old I'd worked out that life would be better if we were able to afford to buy a house so I was saving for one. However my efforts were often thwarted by periodic family financial crises where bills hadn't been paid and I made a contribution so we wouldn't get cut off. Nowadays I realise you wouldn't expect children of that age to contribute to household bills, and some people would even see this as borderline abusive. But I thought it was just what you did in families. Needless to say, my savings didn't grow very quickly and the dream of home ownership seemed to be slipping ever further from my pubescent fingers!

I get such a sense of relief now, nearly three decades later, when I remind myself of the fact that there's a roof over my head, that the utilities are paid for there's groceries on the shelves and every personal requisite I could desire is either in the house already or only a mouse click away. Luxury!

I can make a packet of hob nobs or chocolate digestives last an entire week. My husband will demolish a whole packet in one go but I was taught to take two then put them away because someone else might want some and once they are gone, they are gone.

I have a couple of memories.
Every weekend my gran on my dad’s side used to give me a £1 pocket money. A Mars bar was 9 p as was a can of Coke.
Every Monday my mum would say can I borrow that £1 and give it back to you for your lunches? She did give it back on the Friday but I hated it.
We never went without food or love.
But I can remember my first Christmas at secondary school, and hearing about what others were getting for Christmas and thinking how lovely would that be.
One girl who was the wealthiest by a mile didn’t get anything. Her mum used to make her wait for the sales.
My mum retrained then, got a really good job and the quality of our lives was different.
I started working at 14 as well as a heavy workload at school, I just wanted my own money for my own things.
I have a lovely memory from when my mum retired and I took her to tea at Claridge’s. She got to be a real lady and I will never forget her face.
I miss her.

Ah, you're all very kind! I'm not angling for sympathy though. It was all a long time ago and I'm at peace with it. Life's much better now!

As cost of living increases outstrip wage rises, there'll be a lot more people doing these sorts of things nowadays. I feel sorry for children caught up in it all.

That reminds me of my one. We weren't so much hard up, as my dad had been bought up in complete poverty and so wanted to make sure he had a reserve in case. So he saved for a rainy day through all the rainy days.

If there was something we were going to and they had, eg a branded t-shirt to wear. Dm would buy a cheap t-shirt and write/embroider the "logo" on. I remember cringing so hard for dbro when she did that for the Beaver's uniform, and used to feel so self-conscious when I wasn't wearing what everyone else was wearing.

It means that when mine were going to anything like that they always not just had the basic uniform as wanted, but they had all the extras too that I never even bothered asking for as I knew there was no chance.

I had the same moneybox !!
Im sorry your parents made you pay from your savings.
Our GP's all clubbed together to get me & DB a Specrtum computer ( ZX I think it was called). Ddad had an accident at work and couldn't work for 6 weeks , DB and I offered to sell it to help out, not undetstanding why mum got so upset. DSil ( 15 years older) gently explained.

DM made sure I had them but could only afford the basic ones from Kwik Save. As soon as I got some babysitting money I treated myself to a pack of Bodyform.
As my DP's financial position improved DM always made sure she had a basket of sanpro in the bathroom " just in case" , she was very amused to realise that Id done the same.

I buy luxury food items from the supermarket when they’re half price, but don’t use them because I want to make them last, so much so that they sometimes run out of date 😂

I have so many. I grew up poor and was a late baby, my mum and dad had very odd ideas of what was normal.

I always have butter and jam on sandwiches because we were never allowed both and I always have both butter and jam in the house, cheese was reserved for my dad and him only, the same with cold meats of any kind, even leftovers I wasn’t allowed to touch. Our fridge always has a selection of snacks including various meats, cheeses, chutneys etc and I bake various types of bread as we were rarely allowed sandwiches or snacks. We never had sweet treats or biscuits/crisps, there’s always plenty but I still feel guilty having a snack between meals and leave these for others (although there’s only DH and I in the house these days).

I never had nice clothes and school uniform was passed down from friends and neighbours and never fitted properly - every year our children and I would go on a school uniform shopping trip at the end of the summer break and I’d kit them out from the underwear to shoes and jackets. Their old uniforms etc always got donated to the school. The same with clothes, they got new clothes for winter and summer every year and I never passed any of their clothing to siblings, again it was donated. I love good quality clothes and tend to over compensate and make sure I have plenty to choose from especially matching sets of underwear. It was my dream as a little girl to have matching pants and vests with embroidery on them, all of my underwear is embroidered in some way.

I have a stockpile of Andrex toilet roll and sanpro. We never had proper toilet roll most of the time, it was often torn up newspaper which still revolts me to think of. I never had sanpro until I got a little job and could buy my own, I used to steal the school toilet roll to use or the lovely school nurse would often give me some extra.

I didn't know that some people consider something to be "empty" long before we did as kids.
I remember one of my first jobs as a teenager, a girl took a tub of butter out of the fridge, opened the lid and went "oh, this is empty" and threw it in the bin. I was shocked because to me, there were a good few toast slices left of butter in that tub.
I was then told by the manger to please not put empty butter tubs back in the fridge, to watch I replied, I didn't think it was empty. Manager looked totally confused.

Even now, at nearly 40yo, I still do what many posters on here do, scrape out the last of everything.

I also have a pantry full of back up food because I'm terrified of running out.

Good god, only your dad was allowed cheese and meat? How could he sit there eating that, depriving his kids, and be OK with it?

With containers that have held butter or margarine, after I've scraped as much as i can out with the knife, I put a bit of hot water in and swill it about and the put it in a soup or curry, so that every calorie of that nutritious grease gets used. If I've boiled potatoes or other veg I keep the water and make it into a soup.

Pretty standard in poor households in the past -- the high-value proteins were reserved for the man of the house who was assumed to be doing the heavy manual work, the women and children made do with cheap starches.

My mother grew up dirt poor on potatoes, bread and cheap vegetables. Her father got any meat there was.

Cannot believe the cheek of your parents to pass comment after they had been so stingy with you as a youngster…..

OK, I'm going to tell you something disgusting, but hey ho, we're amongst friends.

When I was a child the fat from frying bacon, sausages and so on was left to accumulate in the frying pan and get used again and again. In the mornings you could see where the mice had been at it, with tiny footprints and teeth marks. My parents were not unduly troubled by this, on the understanding that the heat would kill any germs as we cooked the next lot of food. Sometimes on Saturday mornings, to use up all this accumulated grease, we'd have fried bread. It was one of my favourites, because we were allowed to get the tomato sauce out and I liked making patterns on my fried slice of Mothers Pride.

It was only about thirty years ago but it sounds like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. I'm surprised we weren't carted off by social services.

In terms of uniform my mother bought me that but everything came from the second hand market. So I never looked neat or tidy in school, Needless to say I was made fun of by my contemporaries. When I began work in local government I was on a good salary but my mother had no idea how much I was paid because it was bank transfer, I used to feel that every pound I gave my mother went straight onto my sister's back. No second hand market for her. All her school uniforms were new. In the meantime my mother used to browse through my wardrobe and take note of any new dresses I had. I used to tell her I got them in a dress agency for 50p or £1. In fact I was buying from the smartest shops in town. My locker in work had at least 4 dresses and 3 pairs of shows hanging in it. I would go out in one of my "old" dresses and change as soon as I got to work. Sometimes I changed half way through the day for the sheer hell of it. Then back into my mufti for travelling home.Being poor as a kid made me interested in fashion and accessories to the point of obsession. There was a time when I owned 80 pairs of earrings.