‘I was a free school meal kid, so know we have to help more’ says Times Radio host Gloria De Piero
STANDING in the free school meals queue, I felt as if I had a huge arrow pointing at my head with the word “poor” on it in capital letters.
While I know now there is no shame in it, I can remember the burning embarrassment I felt as a teen about this obvious mark of my status.
I was a “have-not” in a world of “haves”.
Today, at 47, my life is a world away from those dark times, but those feelings of shame and fear come flooding back every time I am confronted with stories of deprivation.
This happened most recently with footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to extend free school lunches into the summer — a stark illustration of the woeful failure of our country to tackle the blight of child poverty.
It is a blight that hung over several years of my own childhood — and I was not alone.
Lack of money was far from uncommon in my working-class corner of Bradford.
As a teenager I naively undertook topless photoshoots to bring in extra cash to buy the cheap fashions my friends took for granted.
When you have no money, an apparently easy way to earn some is incredibly seductive.
As a teenager I naively undertook topless photoshoots to bring in extra cash to buy the cheap fashions my friends took for granted
Yet being poor was not just defined by the absence of things, but by how you felt — a permanent, lingering sense that you were different from everyone else.
Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of love in my home. My parents, Giorgio and Maddalena, are Italian immigrants who moved to the UK in the Sixties to work in Bradford’s textile mills in search of the better life they fervently desired for me, their only child.
They settled in a two-up, two-down terrace home which they still live in to this day.
Thankfully, a government grant in the late Nineties allowed them to finally install some central heating and double glazing.
No such “luxuries” when I was growing up. Even when they were both working, their wages were pitifully small and could not stretch to heating a whole house.
It was always absolutely freezing, with a single one-bar fire to heat the entire place.
Birthdays and Christmases without presents
At night, you would dread going up to your cold bedroom, although Mum would put boiling water into used bleach bottles to make hot water bottles — a necessity on freezing winter evenings, even if they did sometimes leak.
I can count on one hand the amount of times we went out for a meal in my whole childhood, and takeout fish and chips was a rarity.
But there were plenty like us in our terraced street.
Then when I was around nine my dad had a breakdown, the culmination of years of struggling with a bipolar disorder and its crashing highs and lows.
This time he had to go in to hospital — the first of what would be many admissions to psychiatric hospitals over the following years.
I did not really talk about it to anyone — few people did back then.
But the impact was huge, and not just emotionally.
Dad’s mental health problems meant he could no longer work, while Mum then felt she had no choice but to give up her own job to look after him.
Suddenly my proud mum and dad were a benefits family, reliant on a fortnightly cheque which was never quite enough to cover our needs.
Some weekends, when she did not have a bean in her purse, Mum would go to the corner shop and ask for a loaf of bread and some boiled ham on credit to make the sandwiches I had begged to get for Monday’s lunch bag.
Seared in my memory is standing alongside her on one occasion when the shopkeeper refused — I imagine because she still had not settled her bill from the week before. Mum did not cry, although I want to now when I think about it.
This change in our circumstances meant that rites of passage taken for granted in many homes often passed largely unnoticed.
There were several birthdays and Christmases without presents, as there was simply no money for extras, not even crackers.
The time I was taken by a friend’s parents to an ice cream diner for her eleventh birthday felt as exotic as going to the moon.
‘Seedy backstreet affair’ of a modelling agency
As for clothes, I had so little that on “wear your own clothes day” at school, I stayed at home.
It was only when aged 13 or so when I got a Saturday job at the ice cream kiosk in the local market that I could buy the odd cheap fashion item.
Aged 15 I signed up for a “modelling agency” — in reality a seedy backstreet affair — which would pay me more in an hour than I could earn in eight at the ice-cream kiosk.
For a few of their photoshoots I posed topless, something which caused a media storm when the photos came to light 20 years later.
But it is something I refused to apologise for, then and now.
All I saw was a short cut to money, and until you have walked a mile in someone else’s shoes, no one has the right to judge. Ultimately, my salvation was learning.
Mum and Dad had no money, but they had ambition for their only daughter, dragging me around museums and filling our ramshackle terrace with second-hand library books bought for a penny.
It meant that even though I discovered the joys of bunking off school at 15, my educational backdrop was enough to scrape me the GCSEs and A-levels I needed to get a place at what is now Birmingham City University to study sociology.
It took me a long time to settle.
At first I cried myself to sleep most nights, a fish out of water in this largely middle-class world.
In my first year, I averaged a 2:2, but as I grew in confidence, I drank in every word of it and left with a first-class degree.
From there, journalism and politics beckoned me.
As a senior political journalist on GMTV, I interviewed politicians and prime ministers inside a glitzy media world of expense accounts, wine and canape receptions.
In 2010, I was elected Labour MP for Ashfield, a role I held until last year.
Today my husband James jokes that I always ruin going out for dinner because I can’t forget the fact that while we are spending money eating out, other people are struggling to put food on the table.
My time representing my constituents reinforced the fact that there is as much talent behind the window of a council house as a sprawling mansion.
For all the talk about smashing glass ceilings, there is not enough focus on the people who cannot get into the building in the first place — something reinforced by the inequalities exposed by lockdown.
I fervently hope that as a country, we will all come together to narrow that gap, not make it wider.
- G&T, Gloria De Piero’s show with Tom Newton Dunn, is live every Sunday from 10am to 1pm on Times Radio.
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