Let’s start with a multiple choice question. It is a cold, wet February evening. You come home with your two kids after school. You stand in the hallway and contemplate your options. Do you put on the heating? It is freezing and your kids are reluctant to take off their coats. Perhaps you should make a cheap but nutritious dinner for them. They have been saying all the way home that they are “starving”. You could give them their night-time bath, because it is two days since they had their last one, or save the cost of the heating for some new winter boots – theirs are too tight and letting in water.
You can pick only one option.
When energy bills increase for millions in April, these decisions will become a stark reality for many. According to the thinktank the Resolution Foundation, the number of households living in “fuel stress” will rise by 2.5 million to 5 million. This is a staggering number to comprehend, so please think of your neighbours, your auntie, your best friend, your favourite teacher from school who might be in that position.
As for the measures announced by the government on Thursday to ameliorate the effects of the rise in the energy price cap, the words “too little, too late” and “poorly thought‑out” spring to mind.
Perhaps I should be writing this from a clear-eyed, journalistic point of view, but in fact I am writing this from a place of fury. You see, I grew up in extreme poverty. I know only too well the absolute degradation and hardship of poverty – particularly fuel poverty – when home isn’t a home, but a place that you avoid as long as possible, lingering in shopping centres or libraries, where you can stay warm for a little longer.
“It was just so warm and cosy. Our bed was right by the radiator.” This is what my mum always said when she recalled the women’s shelter we ended up in not long after I was born. For many, it wouldn’t be something worth mentioning, but if you have grown up poor – and in the cold, hard granite of Aberdeen, no less – warmth is memorable. Indeed, my grandmother and her sisters used to go down to the docks in their childhood to scavenge lumps of coal, earning the name “Torry seagulls”, after the working-class area where they grew up. I sometimes imagine that cold passing down through slow-moving blood, generation to generation, woman to woman. That is three generations for whom sleeping next to a radiator that you don’t worry about paying for is an anecdote worth repeating over and over, throughout your life, like meeting a celebrity.
After the women’s shelter, there was an unfurnished, uncarpeted council flat that no one wanted on a street no one would choose to live on. My single mum and I had only a coal fire. As a mum to a 15-month-old boy, I cannot imagine the stress of building a fire, keeping it going and ensuring it was safe. Or of lugging the coal up the front steps with a baby and a buggy. When I was a toddler, I came running through to tell my mum I had run a bath. I had filled our tub with coal. I understood that was where warmth came from, but not how.
After that council house, we moved around a lot, up and down the country, taking in Kent, Durham, Lancashire and East Anglia. We lived in homeless B&Bs, bedsits, council houses and slum private rentals. I think there were about 16 places – possibly more, but I lost count. One thing they all had in common was brutal, biting cold. We measured and rationed water for bathing, wore clothes as long as we possibly could before washing them. Often, there were no facilities to do so anyway.
As a child, I came to know what it was to be constantly cold, even as you slept. Even a duvet could feel wet, heavy and hopeless. In one childhood council flat, we had ice inside the windows; I used to say: “Jack Frost has been.” At night, I would lie in bed and draw shapes with my fingertip in the black mould on the wall – council-estate kid Etch A Sketch. In a B&B my sister, my mum and I shared, the metal bunk beds would get icy to the touch. There was a meter in the communal showers. If we didn’t have a 20p piece, we couldn’t have a shower. Often, that money was days away.
At school, I was often told I was smelly. For years, I believed it was because kids were cruel and I was always the strange new girl with the falling-apart shoes and the free school dinners. But I now realise that, since we got to shower only twice a week and we never had the money to wash our clothes regularly, I did probably stink, especially as I reached puberty. When I got my period at 13 – such an acutely self-conscious age – I begged my mum for a bath each night, but I had to settle for a cold sink wash and, when the night came, the thirdhand bath water.
In one bedsit, when I was in my teens and adept at gallows humour, I joked to my mum that maybe we could eat the mushrooms growing out of our damp bathroom carpet. She said: “Don’t be daft,” as though I had been serious and that was an entirely normal thing to suggest.
I cannot remember a warm home in the winter from my youth. Instead, I recall my mum, my sister and I crowded around small fires, like characters in a Dickens novel, after showers, to change our clothes, to eat, to read. It didn’t matter whether we had a whole council flat, a bedsit or a single room: all our lives and activity took place within the two square metres’ warmth of that heater. Except, of course, we weren’t Dickensian characters. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Even more reprehensibly, these scenes are still being repeated three decades later.
Growing up in this way told me I didn’t matter, that society didn’t think I was worth even the most basic provisions. I truly believed – well into adulthood – that I had done something wrong to deserve it. That somehow I was lesser or bad. That was why, when I went to better-off friends’ houses, I could take off my shoes and feel warm carpet under my feet. It was why we sat on top of their Groovy Chick duvets and didn’t huddle under them, wearing two jumpers.
Now that I have a child of my own, I often think about that first flat, with its bare floorboards and coal fire. Unthinkable even in the 80s. My boy was born in Prague at the height of the pandemic during a winter of heavy snow. When people came into our small apartment, they would declare it almost tropical, shedding layers as they walked from the front door to the living room. They would look at me questioningly: “Aren’t you boiling? Can I crack a window?” I would shrug, hold my baby close to me and say: “I just really can’t take the cold.”
Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns by Kerry Hudson is out now (Chatto, £8.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
