The pleasure of penny-pinching
no...@none.com
As a teenager, Anna Shepard was mortified by her mother's thrifty habits
- no heating, lukewarm baths and yesterday's leftovers. Now she's
inherited the 'frugal gene' - and she's proud of it
Saturday June 14, 2008
The Guardian
It's 1985. I am five years old and I'm staring at my lunchbox. All
around me, children are ripping into packets of Monster Munch and
Peperamis. I've got yesterday's quiche and a tomato sliced in half,
spilling seeds everywhere. And there's something else at the bottom,
possibly a homemade rock bun, but I can't be sure. There isn't enough
clingfilm to stop it from becoming unidentifiably soggy.
My school lunchbox was a testament to my mother's thrifty habits. Today
it would be celebrated as green and resourceful, a low-carbon meal made
from leftovers. Back then, I didn't give a hoot about food waste and
packaging. I wanted pickled onion crisps and a Penguin for pudding.
Article continues
It wasn't that my parents were tofu-munching hippies who spent weekends
waving banners. Growing up in a village outside Cambridge in the 80s, I
don't remember any of us having environmental worries, other than my
long-standing concern about African elephants being killed for their
tusks. But I did appreciate at an early age that we were spectacularly
good at saving resources. Electricity, gas, food, water: you name it, we
made it stretch further.
To do so, we called on the considerable powers of "eke, eke". This was
my granny's phrase (on my mother's side), and it described being sparing
with resources. If it sounds rather dour and puritanical for a
much-loved family philosophy, it never seemed like that to me. I
remember Granny peering into her larder to work out what we were going
to have for supper. She'd eye some meagre leftovers, giggle, and then
shriek "Eke, eke!" with a characteristically naughty expression. It
would be muttered when a modest-sized chicken was required to feed a
large number of Sunday lunch guests, or when we were expected to hold
back at an expensive restaurant.
My mother took pleasure in following her mother's lead. She would dash
around the house closing curtains to keep the heat in the moment it was
dark and stubbornly refuse to bin the mouldiest lump of cheese. Today,
if you were to walk into her kitchen, chances are she'd be baking bread
- one of her favourite pastimes as it provides a satisfying end for all
sorts of dry ingredients that need using up, from porridge oats to stale
bran flakes.
Over by the sink, you'd find a soggy tea bag, maybe two, awaiting second
use, and dotted around the Aga would be several saucers of leftovers -
some likely to contain as little as a few peas or a handful of pasta
shells. Meanwhile, upstairs, you'd doubtless come across a toothpaste
tube, or maybe a bottle of moisturiser, cut open with nail scissors to
reveal its final scrape.
This is not about saving money, although I'm sure finances played a
part. We weren't seriously hard-up. It was something else. A hangover
from wartime austerity, perhaps,...#65279; which both sets of
grandparents passed on to my parents when they were growing up in the
50s. An almost moral sense of obligation not to waste what you have but
make it go as far as possible.
Only as a teenager did it bother me. "Own up! Who left the kitchen door
open?" my father would bellow if anyone dared let the precious warmth
from the Aga escape. This, combined with my mother's insistence that we
all take lukewarm, shallow baths rather than turn on the immersion
heater, would leave me mortified when I had friends, never mind
boyfriends, to stay.
Invariably, when friends did arrive, the first thing we had to do was to
issue woolly jumpers and blankets. I did try to warn them, but my
friends seemed to think that a cold house meant you might need an extra
cotton pullover, not that the upstairs sink would freeze solid in winter
and you wouldn't dream of putting a toe into bed unless it was clad in
thick socks and there was a hot...#8209;water bottle there to greet it.
But it didn't take long after I left school to realise that there was
value in my upbringing. As a student, being able to throw together a
quick bean stew from store-cupboard basics and jazz up your wardrobe for
less than a tenner at Help the Aged are skills worthy of respect. I
stopped longing to live in a house heated to bikini-friendly
temperatures and began to make peace with my inner thriftiness.
In my final year at university, studying the home front in the second
world war, I learned of a different context for making do and mending. I
liked the idea of rationing and digging for victory. It reminded me of
home. And it began to occur to me that the habits I'd been brought up
with weren't weird and stingy; they were planet-saving. I could be
pea-green and all I'd have to do would be to follow my mother's lead.
So what began as a gradual absorption of family habits grew into a
personal passion and then into a career. That I am now a journalist
writing about green living is largely thanks to the good fortune of
having a mother who lived by waste-not want-not principles; the same
ones we are advised to get back in touch with to fight climate change. A
long line of thrifty women behind her, whose domestic habits were seen
as nothing more than good housekeeping, are responsible for making me
the eco-minded adult I am today.
This came to light last year when I started writing a book with the aim
of encouraging people to tweak their life to make it greener. "You're
not eco; you're 'eke, eke'," my mother announced proudly when I
explained the synopsis.
My boyfriend is less impressed. I infuriate him with what he calls
"false economies". Saving stale lumps of bread to turn into breadcrumbs
and storing them in jam jars, and requesting that he brings back the
silver foil from his sandwiches so I can wipe it, fold it and use it
again, are two such practices that provoke raised eyebrows. "You're
kidding yourself if you think this makes a difference," he mutters. But
he is slowly learning that this is a family compulsion. That I have
managed to turn these stingy habits into something green and valuable is
the wonder of it.
Unlike my teenage self, I now delight in telling people about my
mother's latest experiment using a giant roll of clingfilm to insulate
windows, or the henhouse that is being built at the bottom of the garden
for four feathery new arrivals. And in the past few years, the exchange
of green habits has flowed in both directions. When I raved about my new
wormery, my mother quietly listened. "I'd quite like one of those
myself," she mused. A few months later, she announced that she, too, had
her own worm bin - having waited until there was a secondhand one going
cheap in the village.
Now that I'm five months pregnant, my latest eco worry is whether I'll
ever reach this point with my own children and inspire enthusiasm in all
things green. I can't help wondering how I'll cope if my frugally reared
sprogs announce their plans to scoot around in gas guzzlers or embark on
ethically dubious careers. And when I face the inevitable lunchbox
dilemma, will I stay strong on my devotion to leftovers or submit to
popular demand as I longed for my mother to do?
Whatever lies ahead, experience tells me that family values usually
emerge triumphant, if not when your children are teenagers, then later
when they are twentysomethings. It is harder than you might think to
turn your back on frugal genes, and there is nothing like moving away
from home, establishing your own domestic regime and embarking on a
family, to make you think fondly about habits that you grew up with. I'm
sure I'm not alone in doing many things - from peeling potatoes to
storing elastic bands - in certain ways, for no other reason than
because that is how they were done when I was young.
Perhaps it is nostalgia, but I'm also aware that as I grow older, so,
too, does my mother. The time we have to share recipes and gardening
tips no longer stretches out beyond what is imaginable. Reality dawns,
and I know it will end one day, and I'll be left alone with her voice in
my head but no more opportunities to learn from her.
That's why, every month or so, I abandon my independent life, my London
flat, even my fledgling courgette plants, to go home. To pull up a
kitchen chair, while my mother kneads the bread dough, and to feast on
one of her "eke, eke" stews (a dish made from a leftover roast that
started life perfectly normally but after several days ends up as
carrots and gravy), brings me more pleasure than ever before.
And when I re-enter my own life and find myself polishing off pasta for
breakfast rather than let it go to waste, or topping yesterday's
bolognese with last weekend's mashed potato, I am proud to admit that it
is not only green concerns motivating me; it is also because I am my
mother's daughter.
· How Green Are My Wellies? Small Steps and Giant Leaps to Green Living
with Style, by Anna Shepard, is published by Eden Project Books
Al Bundy
no...@none.com wrote:
> http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2285540,00.html
>
>
> As a teenager, Anna Shepard was mortified by her mother's thrifty habits
> - no heating, lukewarm baths and yesterday's leftovers. Now she's
> inherited the 'frugal gene' - and she's proud of it
>
I even take pennies and drill holes in them to use as washers for Pop
rivets. They are bigger than normal and never rust. Sometimes a penny
can be worth more than a penny.