Sadly, I identify all too well with the sentiments expressed by Kerry Hudson (Struggling to pay at the supermarket till, I felt that childhood shame flooding back, 29 May). As a child from a poor family, I remember furtively hiding my yellow “free school dinner” ticket, identifiable to any onlooker by the different colour. I would palm it over to the dinner lady, swamped in shame – as if the polyester school uniform (provided by the local authority via vouchers from a portable building in the car park) weren’t evidence enough that I was marked out as an “under-being”.
Later in my life, despite hard-won success in study and work, disabling illness brought the burden of shame again. Feeling like a repellent Gollum, grovelling at the feet of the DWP through ever more punitive processes while, ironically, being so exhausted and unwell that I lacked the energy to prove the very illness in question.
Privileged and prosperous politicians misrepresent and lie about the lives of those kept low while legislating against them. How can those who are oblivious of the pervasive, insidious tendrils of shame, invisibly suffocating and silencing the souls of the poor, be the ones with the loudest voices to speak of our needs?
Sally Booth
Marsden, West Yorkshire
• Kerry Hudson’s description of childhood shame arising from a lack of money triggered a reaction in me. Growing up in Hertfordshire wearing what would have been the height of fashion five years earlier in America meant that I certainly stood out.
The clothes arrived in boxes, lovingly packed and sent across the Atlantic by my aunt, once my cousins had grown out of them. Adults who commented on my “unusual” clothes always remarked on what good quality they were, which was true, but no amount of quality could compensate for ridicule from my contemporaries.
Some people view school uniform as an unnecessary restriction on personal expression, but for me it represented freedom from the one-upmanship of those who could afford the latest fashions. I loathed non-uniform days. The shame of admitting that I didn’t own the “right” clothes outweighed the embarrassment of “forgetting” and just turning up in school uniform.
I still experience anxiety about what to wear, even to go into the office. I know where this feeling comes from and can rationalise it, but it never goes away.
Jane Kinton
Englefield Green, Surrey
• Thank you to Kerry Hudson for sharing her experience and childhood memories of financial worries. Her article really resonated with me. I grew up in a poor northern town, but my parents made sure the house was warm and that we were well fed. We couldn’t afford things straight away – Mum had to save up. I remember us looking at a duvet cover for weeks before we bought it. I still have that duvet cover, to remind myself of those times.
Now I earn well – but still feel precarious, knowing that life can turn in a second. I’ve tried to teach my children the value of money and to care for those who need help. I feel ashamed living in this country, where the excesses of the rich are in stark contrast to the lives of many who are struggling financially.
Asra Saleem
Watford, Hertfordshire
• I completely understand Kerry Hudson’s feeling of fear at the checkout when her card was rejected. I am 74 and remember childhood poverty, the shame of being turned away from the corner shop where we could get no more credit and having to tell my mother that I couldn’t get the shopping she’d sent me for, or the shame of having to tell various “tallymen” who knocked at our door that my mother was out while she hid in the kitchen. The hatred of poverty has shaped my life and, just like Kerry, I have made sure that my children have never known it. But it is still rife.
A while ago I was in a queue at a supermarket checkout behind a mother and her daughter, who I guess was seven. She had all her items checked through, but the vouchers she had from the government to cover school meals over holidays wouldn’t work, so she and her child had to go home empty-handed. I was too far behind her to offer to pay, and when I got home I shed tears for her, her child and the shame they must have felt. But the real shame is on the sort of society that allows this to happen.
Bill Walsh
East Hoathly, East Sussex
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