We Need to Talk About Money

Otegha Uwagba

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008350383
• eBook ISBN: 9780008350406
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

In this combined memoir and cultural commentary, Uwagba explores her own complicated relationship with money, exploring what her experiences say about the world around us.

A deeply honest account of the ups and downs wrought by money, We Need To Talk About Money explores issues and dynamics that will be familiar to most. This is a book about toxic workplaces, and sexist bosses. About getting payrises, and not getting payrises. About class and privilege and racism and beauty standards. About shame and pride, compulsion and fear.

In unpicking the shroud of secrecy surrounding money – together with our collective refusal to talk openly about it – this is a searing account that will uncover some shocking truths about our complex relationships with money.

Chapter 1

SCHOLARSHIP KID

I arrived in London on a rainy September morning, goose-pimple pricked flesh buried deep under a thick scarf and woollen tights, eyes wide in disbelief at the relentless greyness of it all. Then, and now, London seemed to me a city inexplicably enamoured of the colour grey, and determined to celebrate it in every one of its joyless permutations. Everywhere I looked, there it was glaring back at me, this never-ending parade of grey. Grey buildings, grey skies, grey streets. Grey everything.

September 1995. In the time-honoured tradition of countless immigrants before them, my parents had packed up their lives in Nigeria and come to the UK with their young family in tow – me, aged 5, and my two older sisters, S. and C., who were 8 and 9 years old. Given how young I was when we arrived, most of what I know of those early months are things my parents have since told me, as my own memories have mostly faded into a patchwork of half-remembered fragments: a pattern, a taste, a smell. My sisters, my mother and I came first, with my dad only able to join us a while later – which meant that for the first six months my mother had the unenviable task of making ends meet while single-handedly raising three young children, and trying to figure out an unfamiliar and at times unforgiving system. The four of us spent those first few months crowded into a one-bedroom council flat with faded rose-pink carpet that had been worn to grey in the spots where a thousand footsteps had trodden before. Though we didn’t exactly depend on the kindness of strangers, we certainly benefited from it – that pink-carpeted lodging came courtesy of an older cousin, who had readily vacated his own flat to crash at a friend’s, so that we could make use of his place while we found our feet. It was this cousin too, who stepped in to look after me and C. one evening, after S. had suffered an asthma attack so severe that my mother had raced with her to the nearest emergency room. She returned home hours later, exhausted, to find a freshly-made lasagne waiting for her, and two well-fed daughters oblivious to the drama of her evening. Then there was the office admin who took pity on my mother having to ferry each of us to different primary schools while we waited for places to become available for all three of us at the same school, slyly bumping us up the waiting list so that within a few months my mother only had to make one drop-off before going to work, instead of three.

Eventually we found a place of our own, the five of us taking up residence in a slightly bigger council flat a few miles from where we’d initially settled. Money was still tight, but with the specific brand of resourcefulness seemingly innate to immigrant families on a budget, over the years we made that little rented flat our own. My meticulously house-proud mother turned fabrics bought at the local market into sweeping floor-to-ceiling curtains, and filled every corner of the flat with a cornucopia of carefully maintained plants. Meanwhile my father was enlisted to paint our bathroom an encouraging shade of sunshine yellow and put up shelves in the pastel pink bedroom I shared with S. (C., being the oldest, had a room to herself.) Bit by bit we accumulated the various souvenirs of family life, until eventually every surface was filled with ceramics and decorative mugs and the gap-toothed school photos that my parents insisted on buying each year. I still remember the collective pride when we could finally afford to have our carpets replaced with wood laminate flooring, which, my mother pointedly informed us all, would be much easier to clean.

It’s always tricky to make firm assertions about how much money is ‘enough’, given what a subjective benchmark that is, but the simple fact is that in those early years we did not have enough. Only in adulthood did my father reveal to me his anguish over the time he’d realised my parents couldn’t afford a new pair of school shoes to replace the ones I’d outgrown, prompting me to cheerfully inform them that we were ‘poor as church mice!’ (a notion I’m sure held far more excitement for me than it did for them, rendered in my child’s imagination with a touch of Dickensian romance).

Even still, my childhood felt plentiful – rich, even. During the summer holidays my sisters and I would play outside for hours, hopscotching across cracks in the pavement and swinging from the branches of the overgrown willow that stood stoically in the middle of our estate, seemingly resigned to its fate as a makeshift climbing frame. We’d take it in turns to ride the pink bike our parents had bought us and count out our pennies for corner shop excursions, working out how many Maoams our funds could stretch to on the way there, and singing the jingle from the TV ad on the way back. When the weather turned cool and autumn set in, I’d rush home from school, impatient for the straight-from-the-oven sausage rolls and sugary cups of tea I knew were waiting for me, to be consumed while watching The Animals of Farthing Wood. There was the joy, verging on mania, that ensued when I opened a carefully wrapped package one Christmas morning to find the Spiceworld cassette tape, the casing of which was promptly broken in the melee that followed. The family holiday taken in a caravan by the sea, where one night we simply ordered a Chinese takeaway and listened to the rain lashing down outside, sleepy and sated from the tang of hoi sin.

Young and oblivious, I never noticed the drug dealers loitering on the stairwell leading up to our flat that my father assures me were a regular late-night fixture. I was 10 when Damilola Taylor, a Nigerian boy the same age as me, was stabbed and killed on a Peckham estate in an act of such violent obscenity that it dominated the headlines for months afterwards. One child, killed by two others, Danny and Ricky Preddie: all three of their names would become shorthand for the perils of council estate life. Even at that young age I noticed how that news story in particular seemed to commandeer my parents’ attention, temporarily suspending conversation whenever it appeared on the seven o’clock news, but it’s only now that I’m older that I’ve begun to fully understand why. Like mine, Damilola’s parents had left Nigeria for the UK in search of the fabled ‘better life’, only to have their child cruelly snatched from them on a housing estate not two miles from ours. The image splashed across nightly news bulletins and newspaper pages for months after Damilola’s death – a school photo in which he could be seen smiling sweetly out at the camera – could easily have been one from my family’s mantelpiece.

Still, things slowly improved for us over the years, my parents working tirelessly to make our lives more comfortable. I was 10 when we were finally able to afford a car, my dad surprising us by arriving home one afternoon and beckoning us out onto the balcony that overlooked our estate, pointing out a second-hand Toyota that was now, unbelievably, ours. Before that, car journeys had always felt to me like a sublime luxury, given how infrequently they occurred – the occasional lift from visiting friends, or a rare minicab ride if the supermarket shop was too heavy to carry home by bus. We spent the rest of that afternoon cruising around the local area, and for months afterwards my dad was able to leverage my excitement at the novelty of having a car into getting me to help him wash it on Sunday afternoons.

My parents made sure my sisters and I always had everything we needed – and most of the things we wanted, too – from a new school bag and a fresh supply of stationery at the start of each school year, to the latest CDs and the metallic blue rollerblades that became my pride and joy. We were always – always – immaculately turned out, my mother viewing our personal presentation as an extension of hers, and never failing to deploy a strategic elbow nudge if ever she spotted us slouching. Under her tutelage, I took to methodically ironing a fresh shirt each morning before school, a habit I carried with me all the way to university, where it was of course swiftly jettisoned. My childhood was a revolving door of piano, violin, gymnastics and tennis lessons, all procured at low cost thanks to various community organisations that my mum had found, and all of which I unceremoniously abandoned one after the other.

But as hard as my parents tried to make money a non-issue in our lives, from an early age I sensed that it was. Little pitchers have big ears, as the saying goes. When it came to money, I couldn’t help but absorb the pressure my parents were under in trying to provide for three daughters who churned through an endless cycle of new wants and needs. I noticed everything: the way my mother would grumble about the cost of fruit at the local market, going to multiple stalls to get things at a marginally lower price even if it ended up taking us twice as long; or the way she furrowed her brow if the £20 she’d topped up the gas meter with seemed to have run out more quickly than usual. Whenever I accompanied either of my parents to the supermarket for the weekly shop, I’d pay careful attention to the figure that appeared on-screen at the checkout, my eyes flicking to theirs if it seemed unexpectedly high, searching their face for a reaction. I was painfully aware of money, and how it worked, and that it was not infinite. Even though I harboured the same desire for new clothes and toys as most children, I’d feel incredibly guilty if something I wanted (or worse, needed) required my parents to spend what I deemed to be an inordinate sum of money, and so I learned to self-regulate between what I wanted and what I thought my parents could afford. I was never the child who begged for a Nintendo or an expensive pair of trainers, because I knew intuitively that those things were beyond our means.

Sometimes late at night, I’d hear my parents talking about money, the low hum of their tense conversations filtering through my bedroom wall as I strained to hear what was being said. In my presence, they’d often switch to Yoruba so that they might have otherwise private conversations publicly, and though I couldn’t understand exactly what they were saying, it was easy enough to decipher their money worries from their body language alone. The message I absorbed was this: that money was something to be wrangled, to be twisted and stretched into place, an adversary one had to be vigilant around, lest it caught you out and put you in danger.

One of the most formative influences on our relationship with money is, unsurprisingly, the relationship our parents have with it. Most of us learn about money – or not – from our parents, inheriting their beliefs, behaviours and anxieties as surely as we inherit their genes. This is what psychologists call ‘financial socialisation’, the process by which we construct both our conceptual and emotional understanding of money. Perhaps you grew up in a household where money was never talked about, and to this day it remains an indecipherable mystery to you. You never learned how it worked, or about key financial concepts – no parental wisdom about budgets and saving handed down to you over the dinner table, in between lectures about chewing with your mouth closed and not playing with your food. Perhaps your parents lavished you with expensive presents and toys as a way of demonstrating their love, and now as an adult that is how you too show affection to those you hold dear, a scenario that at its best makes you a generous friend or partner, the one who always gets a round in, and at its worst makes you someone easily exploited by the people around you. Perhaps money was tight growing up, but your parents felt compelled to keep up appearances, and now your relationship with money revolves around how you appear to the outside world. You guiltily rack up thousands of pounds worth of credit card debt on expensive clothes and Instagrammable holidays, because deep down how wealthy others perceive you to be matters more to you than your financial reality. Our parents’ relationships with money very often become ours, though the manifestation of those influences can at times be more oblique – think of the child from an impoverished background who grows up to be a millionaire, spending extravagantly because, finally, they can (only to be dismissed as ‘nouveau riche’). In my case, the pattern was fairly linear; my parents’ caution sowing the seeds for a similar wariness in me. I developed a latent anxiety around money, though that wouldn’t bear fruit until many years later when I was at liberty to decide how to manage my own finances.

I was an incredibly bright child, something that might seem rather boastful to announce so unreservedly were it not a fact that would direct how the rest of my childhood played out. I’d learned to read by the age of 3, fascinated by my older sisters’ mastery of what to me seemed like the coolest magic trick in the world, and demanding that my mother teach me as well. By the time I arrived in London aged 5, my schoolteachers reported to my parents that it wasn’t a question of whether or not I could read, but rather which books I hadn’t yet read, given how frequently I’d be presented with a book at school only to declare that I’d already read it at home. I was consistently at the top of my class, and so far advanced for my age that one particularly enterprising teacher would occasionally have me mark my classmates’ work once I’d finished my own (though to be fair, this probably said more about the resource challenges she was facing than it did my intelligence).

What’s more, I actually enjoyed learning. Loved it, in fact. I’d read news stories about child prodigies who’d sat their A levels early and wonder whether I might be able to do the same, and dreamt of the day I might be invited to take up my place at Mensa with the same enthusiasm that most children await a letter from Hogwarts. I was studious and meticulous, and smart enough to realise how smart I was, basking in the warm glow of praise from teachers and parents alike. I was probably also a little precocious.

I was lucky, too, that my parents took an active interest in my education, regarding school as just one facet of many to be deployed in their quest to ensure my sisters and I realised our full potential. While my mother taught us French and borrowed a language course from the local library so she and I could learn Spanish together, my father oversaw my education in maths, shrewdly perfecting a low-involvement/high-yield system. He’d assign me practice papers that I’d complete (while timing myself), mark (also myself, using the answers provided at the back of the book), at which point I’d report my score back to him so that I could be congratulated, before settling down to complete another paper. I never realised the extra work I did at home was to any specific end – I was nerdy enough to find pleasure in achievement for achievement’s sake – but I know now that the stakes for my parents were always high. They knew that being a Black, foreign-born immigrant to the UK, my best chance of success would be to have an unimpeachable education, though they were careful never to burden me with the heaviness of that reality – instead it was simply made clear to me and my sisters that poor grades would not fly in our household. My parents pushed our teachers as much as they pushed us too, wary of the ease with which Black children are overlooked at school, and determined that that would not be our lot. (Countless studies have shown that Black students are more likely to be punished or excluded than their white counterparts, with teachers also tending to predict them lower grades than the ones they actually go on to achieve.)[1] A long-running family joke is that every teacher my sisters and I ever had soon learned to fear my parents, who never hesitated to write a strongly worded letter or – if the occasion called for it – make an in-person visit to the school gates if they felt some aspect of our educational needs wasn’t being met. There were, unfortunately, countless such incidents.

When I was around 9 or 10 years old, a teacher caught me and some friends passing notes in class – a rare episode of misbehaviour on my part. Scribbled on various scraps of paper were a litany of childish grievances, ranging from what we perceived to be the favouritism one of our male teachers displayed towards the boys in our class, to my vehement criticism of another teacher’s dishevelled appearance and ‘bad coffee breath’. Along with my fellow co-conspirators, I found myself in a world of trouble, stripped of playtime privileges and forced to eat lunch in isolation for the rest of the week. All of our parents were informed.

But one teacher, Mrs Leighton, who was notorious for the apparent contempt with which she seemed to regard the children she taught, began to single me out, making sly digs and comments whenever we encountered each other. After a few days of this, my parents noticed that I was arriving home from school each afternoon increasingly despondent, and eventually they managed to prise the reason out of me. Ashamed, I tearfully recounted what had been happening – and my parents immediately swung into action. The letter below, which still shocks me to read, was drafted that very evening and addressed to my school’s head teacher.

Dear Mr Levine,

The school secretary has informed us about an incident at school this week involving Otegha and some friends passing inappropriate notes. A meeting has been arranged to discuss the matter with her form teacher this coming Friday.

In the meantime, we want to bring to your attention some of Otegha’s experiences at school this week:

1. On Tuesday 28th, Ms Leighton verbally assaulted Otegha, ostensibly in reaction to the incident referred to above, saying ‘Your arrogant parents said we don’t adequately challenge you.’ This must be a direct reference to a request we made of Otegha’s form teacher, Mr Stevens, many months ago (not Ms Leighton, whom we have never met before!). The request was made during the discussion of Otegha’s performance, and was supposed to be part of a confidential review of her progress and academic achievements at school. We do not feel we should be penalised for making this request. Indeed, we have never been informed that said request was improper. We made that request believing that the quest to enhance the academic progress and performance of our daughter – or any other pupil at the school for that matter – should not be the trigger for unwarranted cynicism. However, it appears this is not the case, and that request has now become the catalyst for a verbal assault on Otegha, as implied by the reference to ‘your arrogant parents’.

2. Later on the same day, Ms Leighton further verbally assaulted Otegha when she described her as being ‘two-faced’. We believe this unsavoury remark, which later caused Otegha to burst into tears, was entirely gratuitous. As with the one referred to above, this comment was made in bad taste and as part of a premeditated agenda.

3. The next day on Wednesday 29th, and in continuation of the siege on Otegha, Ms Leighton confiscated the badge awarded to Otegha as a member of the school council. We are not aware of the capacity in which she acted thus. However, we are of the opinion that even if it was connected to the incident Otegha was previously involved in, Ms Leighton’s action was premature and her tactic intimidating. After all, the matter had neither been discussed with us nor resolved. In any case, Ms Leighton did not appoint Otegha to the school council – her classmates democratically elected her! It is reasonable to expect that, should it have been so decided, there would be a less traumatising and intimidating way of deselecting her as class president. Ms Leighton continued her verbal assault of Otegha, telling her, ‘You must think you’re a little goddess.’

4. The same Wednesday, just before Otegha and the rest of her classmates were due to go swimming, Ms Leighton told her she was barred from going. If Mr Stevens had not intervened, Otegha would have been bullied into submission.

We are quite ready to dismiss the reference to us as ‘arrogant parents’ as malicious and arrant nonsense. We consider it to be part of the hazard of parenting. However, we are unwilling to see Otegha subjected to any further verbal assault, intimidation and bullying by an adult and teacher in the person of Ms Leighton – or indeed any other teacher or member of staff. We believe that Otegha is entitled to fair treatment that is compatible with our desire for her emotional stability, well-being and safety whilst at school.

We urge you to look into this matter.

Carefully printed at the bottom of the two-page missive were both my parents’ signatures, and the following morning my father hand-delivered it to the head teacher, arriving at the school office and insisting on an immediate appointment. By lunchtime, I’d been reinstated as school councillor, and Mrs Leighton never bothered me again.

Looking back on it now, it seems fairly obvious that she’d decided my parents, and by extension I, had become too ‘uppity’ for her liki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Scholarship Kid
• 2. Dreaming Spires
• 3. ‘Please Sir, Can i Have Some More?’
• 4. Boys’ Club
• 5. The Right Type of Black
• 6. The Beauty Tax
• 7. Invisible Labour
• 8. Death of the Girlboss
• 9. Rumspringa
• 10. A Room of One’s Own
• 11. Homecoming
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• About the Author
• Also by the author
• About the Publisher