In the grip of slot machine addiction: ‘I’d keep loading £20s in. I could be in a daze’

Wendy Hughes’s daughters, Maria and Jackie Olden, outside the Merkur branch in Stockport. Jackie says gambling would once never have entered her mother’s head. Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian

Jackie Olden can pinpoint the troubling origin of her mum’s gambling addiction. “She was the kind of person who’d go to one shop where milk was a penny cheaper and another where bread was cheaper,” Olden recalls.

“This [gambling] would never have entered her head.”