How did people leave home at 15…

[Holdinguphalfthesky]

… move to London and start working as a music PR? Just reading an interview with Mariella Frostrup and it says that’s what she did. Even back in the 70s, how would someone have done that? I seem to remember in Caitlin Moran’s book How to be a Woman, she also walked into a job in music journalism at a very young age.

Is it unreasonable of me to ask how they did it? What’s being glossed over in the retelling?

I’m 69, I could legally have chosen to leave school at 15, and a lot of friends did. I never wanted to go to London but living in “digs” - renting a spare room cheaply in return for odd bits of help - was very easy, the local papers and shop window notice boards had lots of ads. I suppose the music industry had a surfeit of teenagers wanting to get into it and if you had the face and the personality they’d give you a chance, paying peanuts, but for someone who’d fit I guess it beat working as an office junior anywhere else.

Bermondsey was an absolute shithole then. It was very unsafe and the “landlord” was very dodgy.

it wasn’t a nice place. It was a room with a bed, a sofa, a hot plate and a mini fridge, and mould down the walls. 4th floor of an old, falling down house, with a very dodgy kebab shop on the ground floor. My window was nailed shut. My electric came from an extention lead through a hole in the floor.

It got demolished when the area was getting gentrified.

How did you know how to find this job? Someone asked me what surprised me more, the moving out or the job, and I think it's the thought of being so young, without contacts, and working in music PR or music journalism. I can totally picture 15y.o. working in shops, pubs etc because I did those jobs too at 15. But how do you find a job in the music or adjacent creative industry like that?

My dd is 15 and has a café job, would love to move away to study. I think she's really capable, but l wouldn't trust anyone else in her world if she did live away! Plus I would miss her.

I can believe this I paid £50 pcm for a 2 bed flat on coldhabour lane in 1995.

Very true.

Im 52 and left school in 1990 even then loads of 16 year olds started work or did YTS
I went to college but loads didnt.

Yep, I had friends paying less than the £30
a week I did.

But I had all bills included (I mean, really, I had a 4 gang extention chord through a hole in the floor and that was for the lamps too - no ceiling light!), and I was able to take a plate down to the kebab shop and they would fill it with what ever I wanted for dinner for free. The owner used to give me a salad and hummus filled pitta bread to take to work everyday, so I spent no money on food 🤣

Those were the days.

No one I knew from school did that though.
i went to a top Grammar school and they all stayed
For A levels, or went to another school for A levels and went to uni. It was just me eating kebabs in the dark at 16.

I know a lot of posters are very misty-eyed, but I'm one of those who did too much too young and crashed and burned. I had to move back in with my family at 19 for a few years, and was lucky I was able to do so.

Yes! Me too!

I did far too much too young. I moved back in with my father at 21. I was completely burnt out after already being an adult and working and paying bills for 5 years already, while all my old school mates were having the time of thier lives at uni.

(I got married and bought a house, and fell pregnant a year later, so I didn’t have much of a break!)

I think 'a music PR' is probably a very grand title for the work she'd have been doing at 15 - and there just aren't really those kinds of jobs anymore. No one employs someone just to do the filing and answer the phones anymore. Which does remove the possibility of doing that kind of job and just being bright, personable and helpful enough to gradually start being given more exciting tasks. And the arts, and particularly music, has always had a bit of a youth fetish - they want bright young things about the place.

My dad left school in 1976 after failing his A-levels, got a job as a clerk, literally writing out transactions all day, in a bank branch - a job which paid poorly but came with accommodation above the bank - and 15 years later, after back-to-back promotions (one of which he was told he was being given above the other candidates because he'd just had his first baby - me - and so needed it more!) he had a job in head office. He retired, wealthy, at 55 and then did some very lucrative consultancy work. He earned/deserved all of it - he was bright and hardworking and took every opportunity he got - but that just isn't a plausible trajectory anymore, no matter how capable you are.

Well I'm 54 and not burnt out yet lol. Running back home wasn't an option though and none of my friends would've entertained the idea even if it was possible

A 15 year-old could leave school at Easter or May, depending on when they turned 16. So it would have been perfectly feasible for someone of that age to have a job and somewherer outside the home to live.

I recall a 'Back in Time' series where a family travelled back in time. In the 60s it was not unusual for a teenager to live in a bedsit. Although the leaving age was 15 then, it shows that what we would consider to be children were moving out of the family home.

How on earth did you live on £60/week ?even in a shit part of Londen that would still have been a pittance
I qualified as a nurse in 1996 and really struggled to live on my student bursary which I think was £360/ month when I was training and this was in Salford .

She said the kebab shop mainly fed her

Absolutely. My niece also refused a house share because she didn't have an en-suite. I didn't get an en-suite until I bought my third house!!! Expectations were indeed much, much lower. And yet we did OK.

My now husband and I rented a bedsit next door to the hairdressers I worked at in 1993 for £50 a month in Oxford! It was a hovel but we were desperate! I don't think you'd able to get that now but, at the time, we had no other option. We were sleeping in the 'living' area, our shower was in what passed as a kitchen and were sleeping on a single mattress between us! I was also pregnant and 19-years-old.
I still think it was a good thing to go through though as it makes you really appreciate what you have later on in life.
I left home at 14, albeit to live with my nan, but it was me looking after her, not the other way round. My son is in his early 30s and still living at home!
I do wonder how the Millennials and Gen Z (or whatever they're known as) are going to cope in the world once they finally leave home - I think the problem is that a lot Gen Xers have tried to make their kids lives a lot easier/more fun than their childhoods might have been and now we're reaping the cost of that in that they don't ever want to leave!!

I always wanted to do music production.

I did it for work experience at a studio in year 11, and started calling around just after that. I started work the day after my last gcse and moved to London (an hour from home) a month later when I’d found digs.

These days people go to uni to study music production. In the mid 90s , you could still get a job as a “tape op” (general studio dogsbody) and work your way up. I ended up meeting people at the job through the bands who came in, and got offered a job at a record company in A&R by someone who could see I was a hard worker.

It was a lot easier back then.

People have often asked how my dad was okay with it (my mum died when I was small), but he was born in 1930. It was his norm that you left school early, found a job and digs. He was from a different generation to my friends parents.

My parents came to London in the 1960s. My dad was a late teen, my mum early twenties. My dad had lots of jobs that don't really exist any more or have been mechanised to require fewer people: bus conductor, grave digger, switchboard operator... My mum was a newly qualified nurse.

When i was born, we were living in one room in a shared house with a landlord who scalped the electricity/gas meters and the pay phone. My parents sent me home to live with grandparents while they pulled double shifts and saved the money for a deposit on a house.

I don't think any of us thought it was a better life than my kids have now.

£30 a week (which is what I had after rent) in 1996 went quite far. Especially as I wasn’t buying food and I walked to work.

I used to go out drinking in Camden 3/4 nights a week. I would get into gigs for free as I knew all the bands and it was £1 for a bottle of hooch at most places.

I had a blast!

These are the boomers, so despised by today's pampered entitled youngsters 😊

Well she shouldn't have been. It sounds terribly glamourous obviously - but the school leaving age was 16 at that point, so she should have still been in school. School leaving age had been 16 since she (and I) were 10. I didn't know anyone who had moved to London before their 16th birthday.

Some sort of exaggeration going on, I suspect.

Yeah was 16 unless you aug 31st birthday like me and could leave at easter . You'd still be 15 for another few months

Because people rented rooms rather than flats! My first rental in West London was a tiny room with meters for electricity and gas ( for some reason the room had no fridge but a full sized cooker) I shared a bathroom and toilet with three other people. The bathroom was on the landing downstairs from my room.Hot water for the bath involved putting money into another meter, a skill I never mastered since the geyser looked as though it had been in the house since Noah was a boy so I went to my friends flat for baths. There was a pay phone on the ground floor, lighting on the stairs was by push buttons so you had to be a bit nippy before the lights went out. I think the rent was the equivalent to half my wages.

My next flat was shared with 2 other girls. My “room” was an alcove off the living room, theirs was the curtained off end of a corridor . We did at least have our own bathroom. This was in Nottinghill shortly after the Rachman scandal, rented housing was pretty unregulated. But jobs were plentiful, you could walk out of one and get another the same day and we didn’t care, we lived in London when London was the envy of every young person of the world, it was our oyster and the word ensuite hadn’t been invented.

Yes entirely possible I squatted at 16 and you could work quite easily. Not sure how MF left school at 15 though. Maybe she just dropped out but leaving age was 16 in 1979

Just remembering those old Calor Gas heaters we used 🙂