Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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Endlessly resourceful, Carraway works as a stripper in an upmarket West End club. When she falls pregnant, she switches to a job as a peep-show model — as one of her better-paid jobs, it allows her to save up three months’ rental deposit on a flat. Skint Estate is a carefully crafted memoir with each section satisfactorily wrapped up, for the ending to reflect the beginning of each chapter. It is ranged around themes or locations rather than being chronological, and her college and senior school years are absent.

There isn’t anything she does not want to share from “my tragic and dirty little life” from her vagina size (small) to her suicide (unsuccessful). Mainly, however, this book is about the crippling cost of living in London under the minimum wage, doing fragmentary bits of jobs she can fit in with childcare. As she says: “Everyone has their price. It’s not always monetary. Mine is though. 20 quid.”Cash Carraway blir som 16 åring utkastad av sin gränslösa och destruktiva mamma. Pappan försvann strax före och skaffar snabbt en ny familj, utan att ta ansvar för dottern. Cash hamnar i destruktiva relationer och när hon är runt 29 blir hon gravid, till sin glädje. Äntligen kan hon få den familjen hon saknar. Den blivande pappa slår sönder ansiktet på henne när han får veta och hotar att se till att hon får ett missfall, om hon inte ordnar en abort själv. TW: domestic abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, explicit language and discussions of sexual content Beneath the barrage of gutsy, in-your-face swagger, there is a vulnerability. Cash Carraway’s memoir of her life as a single mother on the margins of austerity Britain is touching and, surprisingly, given its subject matter, very funny too. Cash is *determined* to tell her woeful story of poverty and deprivation even if the facts don’t seem to tally with it. Why let such boring details get in the way of a ripping yarn? And she’s determined to make it the government’s fault, and to blame All Men (except scruffy ones who don’t wear suits and make art, those men are allowed a small pass). Plus, she thinks no one can possibly have problems or sadness if they’re not on the breadline. How boring, how cliched, how...utterly infuriating. Although, saying all that, the author has an incredible gift with words. She’s very talented but maybe instead of streaming words together that make no sense, maybe she could right in a way that does. I did find myself laughing at some parts; Cash has great humour and I did sympathise with her and her daughter. Her past that syncs into her present is an extraordinary story to tell, I’m not denying that. She’s fought against a system that seems to despise the poor and the disabled and for that I can only praise her for. She can be an inspiration to many people.

Carraway gives her struggle a practised edge of bleak ironies. Her book has developed, in part, from a fictional one-woman spoken word show, “ Refuge Woman”, which she has toured in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Battersea Arts Centre. These origins give it a tendency to search for a killer one-liner, or dramatic extreme, when the story can stand well enough on its own. Her life is, she writes, “an invite to Daily Mail comments screaming: Where’s the dad??” She is one of “2 million demonised single women in the UK banished from the sisterhood… because we can’t afford to cook Deliciou sly Ella… and don’t have Farrow & Ball No 26 Down Pipe on their living room walls”. Cash is an absolutely exceptional writer and shares the rawest moments of her life in this memoir of life below the poverty line. A women’s refuge that literally crumbles around the women and their children in the weeks after Grenfell. Visits to food banks. Sex work. Whatever work will help pay the bills. The absolute disregard to an entire class of people by those at the top, who are elected time and time again by people who claim to care. News, views and analysis about the people of Croydon, their lives and political times in the diverse and most-populated borough in London.This takes you from women’s refuges and police cells to peep shows and strip clubs. Where bankruptcy, temporary accommodation, food banks and period poverty are regular occurrences. This book shows you how our current benefit system is not working. How the government is cleansing London if it’s working class and people are turning a blind eye. On the beat … police officer Adam Naismith with police dog Wolf. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan/Firecrest Films/BBC

This second mother and child story, of her relationship with her daughter, is the one pure thing in this dirty world, and her fierce love for “Biddy” the principal redeeming quality of Carraway, who would otherwise appear as bitter and cynical. She is also very funny. “Lots of things about living in a woman’s refuge make me laugh,” she says, which is not the most common response. She isn’t above selling stories about her wretched daily grind of budgeting to a trashy supermarket magazine. Even they found her piece about period poverty to be too strong to print, though at least they paid her for it.

LIZ JONES recommends a visceral account of one woman's experience of life on the margins in Britain now

Det är en högst politisk text: hur dyrt det är att vara fattig, att ses som en belastning för samhället, hur det konservativa partiet (tory) drar in på sociala skyddsnät för ensamstående mammor (”de får skylla sig själva”, ”skaffa inte barn om du inte har råd”), när skyddshemmet för utsatta kvinnor kollapsar (taket ramlar in) och det tar 8 timmar för någon slags personal att komma, problemet när hyresrätter (som uppfördes för socialt utsatta personer) privatiseras och får marknadshyror. Hur omöjligt det är att hosta upp 6 månaders förskottshyra i deposition, att jobba för 1 pund i timmen, att bara kunna jobba när barnet är i skolan (eftersom barnomsorg är så dyrt att bara medelklassen har råd) och vilka slags jobb som finns kvar. Hur nästan omöjligt det är att ta sig ur situationen. Hur kvinnor alltid är offren. Give[s] powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain's current fracturing' OBSERVER Cash Carraway said: “The show is about a brash yet intelligent working-class single mum who not only lives in extreme inner-city poverty but a state of ridicule and humiliation as she attempts to improve her life. Gabriel Gbadamosi’s Regeneration takes a more lyrical approach to the scars left by early horrors, dipping in and out of poetry, patois, prose and different periods of time, to no less powerful effect. Gary Beadle plays Gary, simmering with impotent rage, piecing together the fragments of memory and hoping that the one piece of advice his mother left him will be enough to protect him from the uncaring, indifferent powers that be this time round.