Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [9]
The first inkling I got that all was not well came when I was four. A friend of Mum’s had come round – this was rare – and she’d commented on how cold the flat was.
‘It’s the power cuts,’ Mum said. ‘They’re playing havoc with the gas.’
The friend nodded sympathetically. This was 1973 and power cuts were the scourge of the western world, thanks to the oil crisis. Obviously I didn’t know any of that – but I did know that whatever these ‘power cuts’ were, they had nothing to do with our heating. We hadn’t had any for as long as I could remember.
Mum’s not telling her friend the truth, I realized. I wonder why?
To her credit, Mum was always looking for enterprising ways of making money and I loved helping – even if it did sometimes mean getting up at the crack of dawn. We were going out to a park one Sunday morning and happened to walk past the local pub. I was yapping away when suddenly Mum darted over to the kerb. There in the gutter was a screwed-up pound note. Mum whooped as she put it into her purse and I remember thinking how nice it was to see her so happy. I certainly didn’t think any more of it, but obviously Mum did. The following Sunday she had me up and dressed at six o’clock. I could hear rain on the windows.
‘We’ll get wet,’ I moaned.
Mum was excited. ‘Stop grumbling,’ she said. ‘It’s perfect weather.’
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about or why she was so cheerful when we were obviously in for a soaking. But I followed her out without another word. I don’t know where I expected to end up, but it certainly wasn’t outside the pub where we’d found the pound note the previous week.
‘Why are we here?’
‘To look for more of these,’ Mum replied, then, right on cue, bent down to rescue another note from the road. It was soggy, but still in one piece. Mum had such a smile on her face, it almost made the early, wet start worthwhile.
When she explained her plan, I got excited too. We were there to find as many pound notes as possible.
‘See if you can find more than me,’ she suggested.
‘I’m going to win!’ I declared and ran off to hunt.
I have to admire Mum’s logic. Saturday was the big drinking night and, back then, you could still down a skinful and be allowed to drive. It’s incredible to think how lax the law was, but it helped us out at the time. When she discovered that first pound, Mum could just picture some old drunk staggering out of the boozer and bumbling around, all fingers and thumbs, for his car keys. He’d probably turned every pocket inside out looking for them and, in the process, not noticed he’d lost the odd note. And if one bloke could drop the odd note in his drunken state, so could a few others.
I don’t know who found the most money that morning – which makes me think it was Mum, otherwise I would have remembered! – but I do recall taking a handful home and lovingly laying them out on the table. Then Mum strung a line in front of the fire, pegged them all up and we sat back and watched a week’s spending money dry out before our eyes.
We did that every week for ages. Sometimes we were lucky, sometimes not. But rain, as Mum suspected, usually meant it was a good morning because the paper tended to stick where it was in the wet. On summer nights the notes would have blown everywhere.
Speaking of summer, I was a bit older when Mum had another money-spinning brainwave. It was a really hot day, which can totally transform a seaside town. But on this particular morning we weren’t heading to the beach. The Bay City Rollers, the hottest young band of the time, were coming to do an open-air gig up in one of the hillside parks and Mum had decided that we would earn some money from the event. Her plan was quite simple: it was scorching weather and fans had to hike half a mile up a hill to reach the concert, so obviously they’d be desperate to buy some lovely, fresh melon from her! So there we were that morning, out buying as many melons