Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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People who are able bodied or well enough to work. Those that work but get top ups from Universal credit. 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.

Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read an eARC copy of Skint Estate. Cash is the definition of edgy, a truly distinctive voice' - Lionel Shriver, bestselling author of We Need to Talk about Kevin Read more Details We shouldn’t just need to be on the brink of something to just survive. We should be enjoying life. This book should be compulsive reading for all Daily Mail journalists and readers, who think that somehow people living on benefits in the UK all live in palaces with more income than "decent, honest working folk" etc etc ad nauseum. Carraway shine a bright unflinching light on modern-day poverty in the UK - zero working hour contracts, social housing, benefits eligibility, food banks - all of it a far cry from the images regularly portrayed in the media.Daisy May Cooper plays a young working class single mum living with her ten year old daughter in the brutal lonely landscape of austerity Britain. Give[s] powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain's current fracturing' OBSERVER 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”. Rain Dogs, the BBC’s new comedy drama from Skint Estate author Cash Carraway is many things: dark, hilarious, crushing, filthy, engrossing, powerful. But it is not, categorically, poverty porn. It would be an easy trap for the series, which follows Costello and Iris from house to house as they try to make each a home, to fall into. But Carraway’s own experience of living on the breadline, and a steadfast avoidance of romanticising the actualities of homelessness, keep the series firmly in reality. I finished this in one day. Cash has a brash, sometimes aggressive writing style that is both compelling and jarring to read. She can certainly get her point across, and it’s an important one at that. She talks of a violent childhood, leading to a violent adulthood and pregnancy. Alone, scared - but excited to finally have somebody to love, and be loved in return. She talks about being ignored and stigmatised throughout her time as a single mother - people just don’t listen to women like her. I knew going in this would be dark at times, bleak and depressing, but I wasn’t expecting it to raise so much anger in me. Anger at these women being overlooked, abandoned when they are at their most vulnerable by a government that doesn’t care. The shame and despair, relying on zero hour jobs and food banks to survive. Living below the poverty line, stealing sanitary towels because you can’t afford them, and thinking of suicide as your only escape from this life. At times it was devastatingly heartbreaking.

The darkly funny debut memoir from the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is a scream against austerity that rises full of rage in a landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows. 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. Some people may think that living in Britain has a safety net for ones that find themselves at a disadvantage to others.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. Visceral and powerful ... The writing is stark, jagged and at times unexpectedly hilarious. Brett Anderson The reason I can’t rate this higher is really down to the structure of the writing, which gets a bit messy towards the end of the book. A few chapters seem to loose steam, or have a strange writing style to them, and the chronology goes a bit haywire. Sometimes I also found the writing a bit too ‘out there’. I didn’t mind the swearing (although after a while it felt a bit gratuitous) but I’d have preferred some context with the strange porn style scene I got near the end - which goes made me feel uncomfortable and felt entirely out of place. It lessened her important message. Despite being beaten down from all angles, Cash clings to the important things - love for her daughter, community and friendships - and has woven together a highly charged, hilarious and guttural cry for change.

How does the celebrity charity edition of Hunted differ from the original? Well, the civilian fugitives rarely make appearances on live television while they are on the run. Can this high-risk gamble help actor couple Nikesh Patel and Nicola Thorp reunite? Meanwhile, podcasting comedians James Acaster and Ed Gamble raid a dressing-up box. Graeme Virtue Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled 10pm, Dave This is a regular occurrence in Costello’s life: men see her vulnerability as an opportunity to take sexual advantage of her. There is a lot of uninvited masturbation – and some invited; Costello is a sex worker, and one of her long-term clients and closest confidantes pays her to clean his flat while he touches himself. It may sound strange, but it’s a very sweet relationship. That Rain Dogs doesn’t treat Costello’s job as exotic or even sexy, instead just a regular way to make money, is refreshing. 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 angry about politicians sneering at the poor while owning the properties whose rents keep them in destitution; she is angry about “poverty porn” TV programmes that relish making an entertainment of the “economic gang rape that makes the poor and vulnerable the scapegoat for society’s decline”. 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.

There are missteps. What should be a deep dive into Costello’s dark family history is kept blankly surface-level. As brilliant and merciless as Rain Dogs is at skewering poverty voyeurism (“I will not be your liberal victim of the week”), the same point is endlessly replayed until it loses its bite. Still, what a bold, wild-hearted ride, and what a fiercely original performer Cooper is shaping up to be. Most are given jobs on the minimum wage which offers no add on top ups, rent goes up, utility bills increase and the public spendature is cut. While some episodes are better than others, it is a uniformly strong lineup: never dull, always vivid and never descending into mere agitprop. They all feel like real glimpses into real lives, providing windows on to realities that are too infrequently (and inaccurately) depicted in drama. The underprivileged and disfranchised appear often in documentaries, of course, but rarely escape a framing as zoological specimens. Wow. All I can say to this book is Wow. It was a real eye-opener; in my job i'm no stranger to working with people who are in the depths of poverty but actually reading this deep and real experience of someone living below the poverty line was quite harrowing. I cannot imagine how Cash had such power to get up every day and carry on living. She was let down by almost everyone in her life; family, friends, loved ones, and professionals who are meant to be there to support you in the worst of times.

In the end, malnourished from weeks of eating nothing but pasta and with her housing benefit stopped due to an administrative misjudgement, she is evicted from her flat. She has to accept what she has always resisted: being moved out of her beloved London. She has finally been “socially cleansed”: placed in homeless housing in Kent, a place she despises for its racism. From the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is the hard-hitting, blunt, dignified and brutally revealing debut memoir about impoverishment, loneliness and violence in austerity Britain - set against a grim landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows - skilfully woven into a manifesto for change. 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. This is the memoir of a woman who is not a stain on society. She’s not a shameful secret, stealing money from the government. She’s not lazy, or greedy. She’s a single mother, raising a child in a city she loves, with no support network and a history of domestic abuse. Cash Carraway is just one voice in millions that we never hear. Forgotten and ignored. This is her story, her life - but unfortunately it’s far from unique.This book is just something else. It is a book that should be read by everyone. Most importantly by the people who wouldn’t read it. It can not be described as enjoyable. It is a difficult subject matter that is told with gritty truth, anger and a splash of the narrator’s dry humour. But it is powerful. It is a call to arms. At times, these two first-time memoirists seem almost too self-consciously eloquent about their struggles to be thought of as representative. But their books nonetheless give powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain’s current fracturing: the fact that half a generation can afford no settled place from which they can start to build a life.