After Mum had calmed me down and enlarged at length on the foolishness of little girls interfering with huge boiling pots, she explained that times were tough and pigs’ heads were cheap. Chopped up, mixed with boiled ox feet, and pickled, they made a nourishing dish called brawn: a staple of her Welsh childhood.
I don’t think she actually said “Poor folks must live,” but I recalled the pig’s-head horror when I first read Jude the Obscure – the scene in which Arabella justifies to Jude the slaughter of pigs (though I can’t picture my gracious mother slinging a pig’s penis at my dad).
I wasn’t having any, I said. I didn’t like pigs’ heads, I didn’t like ox feet, and I didn’t like pickles.
“Very well,” said Mum, “you can have a boiled egg. All to yourself.” I waited for the egg story – how she’d had to share an egg with her brother in the Depression, how Grandpa had been gassed in the war and was often out of work, how my tiny granny had had to take in a fat old boarder and heave her out of bed every morning – but she spared me. She was probably fed up just thinking about it.
“Ho ho,” said Dad as I ate my egg. “If you don’t like brawn, you might like brains.” And darned if we didn’t get calves’ brains on toast for Sunday tea. The texture made me retch, so I suffered another egg and more jokes from Dad. But the offal-reprieve was conditional: I had to eat all of the egg.
“Wicked waste,” said my dad, tapping the decapitated top. “Eat the white.”
Wicked waste. A moral issue. And Dad had spent his war in the RAF in India, so we kids got the full starving-Indians party-piece (“Lecture 18C,” we called it). Like all kids of the fifties or sixties, we said nothing but thought, So shut up and send it to them.
The Curse of the Pig’s Head is not so easily shaken off.
But the world was forgetting all about the Depression and wars and rationing, so our own domestic battle-lines were drawn. By the end of the sixties we kids would flip up the thermostat if we felt cold. Mum and Dad would flip it down again and tell us to wear sweaters. Mum would moan at my brother for scoffing a pound of cheddar and two cans of peaches after school, and Dad’s mouth would tighten when he read the utility bills. But their predicted fiscal apocalypse never came to pass; more cheese and peaches always appeared; wires and pipes kept us fed, warm, and watered, and ever more aware of the seductive world of Stuff. Still, my parents were wary of this new prosperity. Mum ran up the occasional dress or skirt; Dad, the ex-grocer, tracked down bargains and stowed them in a bulging bedroom cupboard. He cornered the market on toothpaste and canned tomatoes.
I felt cornered, period. I was fed up with all the cheeseparing caution, the anxiety, the maxims. When I left home, I decided I would live life with a capital L, warm my hands at the fire of life, drink life to the lees, et cetera.
I did all of the above, but, to my surprise, it didn’t involve much capital expenditure. I was no good at spending money. Couldn’t do it. The Curse of the Pig’s Head is not so easily shaken off. My friends got used to my absence from restaurants and pubs and joked that I knitted my socks from leftover granola. (Absurd. I always cleaned the bowl.)
After a couple of decades’ practice, I got better at it, but it always made me uneasy. I didn’t need new towels just because I’d repainted the bathroom. The designer soufflé was great, but I could do just as well in my own kitchen. You deserve it, the ads were always telling me, and I tried to enter into the spirit of it all, but after every purchase I felt dispirited.
Then my husband and I split up, and I had to take over the mortgage. I took boarders. I bought one winter coat in five years, five dollars from a thrift shop. For five years I penny-pinched like a madwoman to hang onto my home, my daughter’s home. And I realized that I’d come home. I knew how to do this. Somewhere in my psyche, a pig grinned.
I’d become a cliché. Divorced mother of one. A suburbibore. A mauppie, soon to be an ouppie, with charming, tastefully renovated character house in desirable South Oak Bay.
The Dilemma
How soon we forget. The initial panic over, I relapsed. I bought high-end food. I spent too much on renos. I felt dispirited again, and this time, instead of taking over the mortgage, I had to take stock.
I’d become a cliché. Divorced mother of one. A suburbibore. A mauppie, soon to be an ouppie, with charming, tastefully renovated character house in desirable South Oak Bay, just steps from beach and parkland. Location, location, location. Mortgage, mortgage, mortgage.
I’d retained my 4-C eccentricities – no car, no credit cards, no computer, no cell phone – and I’d become a half-assed environmental activist, but I’d gone all soft around the edges. Like a suet pudding the water’s boiled into, my granny would have said. Too much stuff, too few goals. (I prefer “goal.” “Challenge” has sunk into the cynicism of the advertising dweebs – “Take the Whiskas Wet Challenge!” – and the bathos of the p.c. euphemists.) The last big goal, raising the fruit-of-the-womb to independence, had been realized, and the goals of my youth were the goals of youth.
But I’d been good at goals, especially the short term money-saving kind, and I missed them. Futile to think of burning the mortgage or retiring, though a tide of excellent precepts flooded my mind. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. Waste not, want not. And I recalled with glee the Junior Scrooge Club (I can’t remember its real name, if it had one) mentored by that senior Scrooge, the Bank of Montreal. They gave out sturdy cards with blocks of a hundred slots, and you had to slide a dime into each one. Oh, the satisfying weight when the block was filled, when each slot was stuffed with a dime wrung from renouncing Wrigley’s and chips and Mountain Dew, or painfully earned by shearing back the encroaching turf from lawn flagstones, 10¢ a flag. Then the smug trip to the bank. And another, and another. At year’s end I un-Scroogily blew it all, principal and interest, on Christmas presents. The bank would no doubt have preferred to divert it to their Young Rockefeller program, but I beguiled the hours gloating over the Eaton’s Christmas catalogue: Evening in Paris perfume, fleece-lined tartan slippers, traveller’s shoeshine kit in calf leather (black or brown), and Deluxe Dried Fruit Selection on Wicker Tray, for the peach-eating brother.
The Plan
The memory of that sturdy decimal block of silver still enchanted me, and slowly a scheme was born: not ten dollars, but a thousand. A month. For a year.
This drive to save money predated any purpose or goal. It was an end in itself. But just for fun I sat down with pencil and pad and spent a delectable half-hour dream-scribbling: what would I do if I won $12k in a lottery? I don’t buy lottery tickets, so this serendipity seemed unlikely, but would one not feel even more tickled if one had earned this $12k? And, I reasoned, would one not be inclined to put this hard-wrung money to Good Use instead of blitzing it away on glitz and bling?
There I sat in a three/four-bedroom house, just me and my furry retainers, making no fiscal, social, or environmental sense.
One would. I would, anyway. And the best use I could think of was Paying Down the Sodding Mortgage. I couldn’t burn it, but I could singe its beard. And the best way to do that was Making the House Pay. There I sat in a three/four-bedroom house, just me and my furry retainers, making no fiscal, social, or environmental sense. Advertised apartments in Victoria were besieged by scores of desperadoes; students were couch-surfing and loitering palely in libraries. I would take boarders again. But, charming and tastefully renovated character house though my home might be, it would need a deal of tweaking before I would be willing to share it again. Twelve grand could buy a lot of tweaks.
I sharpened the trusty pencil. Net pay, mutter mutter. Minus mortgage and taxes, mutter mutter. Minus insurance, RRSP contribution, bus pass and charitable commitments, mutter mutter mutter – and after the thousand-dollar savings bite, the aptly-named residue was (drum roll, please) $322. Three hundred and twenty-two bucks a month for everything: food, utilities, repairs, clothing, toiletries, entertainment, catnip mice. Well, all I can say is, what a good thing I don’t drive or snort coke.
Principles were established:
1. The environment must not suffer. Thrift – frugality – usually shrinks the ecological footprint, and I’ve been trying to reduce mine to a thumbprint before I shuffle off and obliterate it altogether. However, one could thriftily acquire one’s daily recommended protein intake from a styrofoamed double greaseburger with frankencheese (available at time of writing for $1.49 from your local industrial foodcorp), and I could heat my living-room and adjacent chambers by gradually stuffing my sprawling woodpile into my inefficient fireplace. No will do.
2. I will do nothing unethical (my call).
3. None but I shall feel necessity’s sharpest pinch. The fruit-of-the-womb (hereafter known as the FW) will return from university at Christmas, but I’ve cheated a bit by building in some festive wiggle-room (a two-hundred-dollar stocking fund). As for the summer, she’ll have learned a few thrifty tricks of her own by then, and we’ll muddle through. Or not. I won’t let Skirmish, the ancient border collie, see the wolf on the other side of the dog-door, and, as for the cats, they could stand to lose a few pounds among them. They’ll thank me. Of course they will.
4. If I can’t make it on $322 a month, I’ll go housemining, digging out and selling off books, clothing, and housewares. If I still can’t make it, there are always the Rummoli pennies – but enough negative thinking. We’ll burn those bridges when we come to them.
5. I’m doing this for myself, not as a prescription for others. I’m emphatically not doing it to imply that the poor could pull themselves up by the foodscraps if they really wanted to. It’s one thing for a person to live thriftily in her own home in Oak Bay, enjoying beach-walks and birdsong, leafy lanes, jolly neighbours, and cornucopian gardens. It’s quite another to live with three kids in a mouldy apartment surrounded by troglodytes. For me it’s a game; I can pack it in whenever I like.
6. I won’t endorse any products or companies. I won’t even mention their names.
7. I shall refer to my campaign as “thrift,” a cheerful, practical word connoting hard work and good character, and deriving from “thrive.” Although “frugality” rubs elbows with the Latin for “fruit,” it’s a dour and ugly word. Classical sources speak with loathing of the pinch-faced goddess Fruga, and St Frügl was, of course, a Swedish ascetic who subsisted on weeds and mice and flour made from fleas; eventually he grew so thin that his abbot used him as a curtain rod. However, I’m fond of the verb “froog” and the gerund “frooging” (which you may seek in vain through any dictionary), sounds recalling somehow the happy hippie days of blessed, and doubtless faulty, memory.
So it’s hey for the life penurious,
And ho for the water and bread!
Away with all trifles luxurious!
(By summer I’ll wish I were dead.)
Let the game begin.
Hilary Knight lives in Oak Bay, Victoria, B.C. and tries to teach English at the University of Victoria. Her blog recounts a year of living thriftily, September 2007 through August 2008.
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