Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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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. 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.

We shouldn’t just need to be on the brink of something to just survive. We should be enjoying life. 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. 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. 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. Give[s] powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain's current fracturing' OBSERVERThis 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. Alone, pregnant and living in a women's refuge, Cash Carraway couldn't vote in the 2010 general election that ushered austerity into Britain. Her voice had been silenced. Years later, she watched Grenfell burn from a women's refuge around the corner. What had changed? The vulnerable were still at the bottom of the heap, unheard. Without a stable home, without a steady income, without family support - how do you survive? 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”. Working class single mothers are vilified in the media. Benefit scum, lazy, Jeremy Kyle fodder. The women who really anger the Daily Mail types. The type of women that the white middle aged men on faceless social media platforms like to say things like ‘they shouldn’t have kids if they can’t afford them’ and ‘they should be sterilised for wasting my tax payers money’ you know exactly who I’m talking about. They are the people that should read this book.

I really urge everybody read this. And sit with your discomfort. Listen, learn, and stop falling for the poverty porn lies pedalled by our media, our government, and those who have more money than the people they hate could ever dream of.Cash lämnar mannen och ägnar sin graviditet att jobba ihop 10 000 pund på en peepshow, summan som behövs för att skaffa bostad och vara hemma med barnet. Men när dottern äntligen kommer blir Cash deprimerad och ensam och funderar på att ta sitt liv. Tyvärr blir det inte lättare, det blir värre. 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. Some people may think that living in Britain has a safety net for ones that find themselves at a disadvantage to others.

Inspired by Skint Estate, the drama is described as “a wild and punky tale of being trapped below the poverty line and doing everything it takes to escape.” Cash reminds herself of the important things; love for her daughter; community and friendship; and through this, Britain (government) need to change to protect those vulnerable in society and give them a “leg up”. After the birth of her daughter, she has a landline fitted so that “in lieu of maternity leave” she can work as a telephone clairvoyant. She also earns extra income as, in turn, a mystery shopper, a low-level drug dealer, a cleaner and by selling her human-interest stories to the Daily Mail. “Poor women can’t afford morals,” she comments.

About insidecroydon

TW: domestic abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, explicit language and discussions of sexual content As this writer puts it “they lose their minds on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas, all the days supposed to be spent with family” I'm a scrounger, a liar, a hypocrite, a stain on society with no basic morals - or so they say. After all, what else do you call a working-class single mum in temporary accommodation? 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.

Holding it all together is Cooper, in what is sure to be a career-defining performance. Tough and frustrated, the star of This Country lets us feel sorry for her character but never allows it to tip over into pity. Costello is a woman who can handle herself, and Cooper’s unhesitant skill of switching from comedy to tragedy within the space of a scene is a marvel. One scene halfway through the series, in which Costello breaks down having had all her money stolen, took my breath away. Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read an eARC copy of Skint Estate. 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. Cash Carraway tells you her story. The story of a single mother doing everything she can to survive. ToThough their voices are very different, in some ways each woman’s journey to writing her book – their hoped-for route out of the situations they describe – is comparable. Both had challenging teenage years; both went to university; both took too many drugs and had disastrous relationships; both imagined they lived in a country with adequate safety nets for those prepared to work, and discovered in the decade of austerity and the benefits cap that they did not. One crucial fact, in the context of each, is precisely the same, however. In the 20-odd years since they came of age, average house prices in Britain have risen seven times faster than average wages. Along with millions of others, they are the casualties of that economic fact. Davies creates a life in which she “still feels skint but no longer poor” Cash Carraway puts me in mind of Nelson Algren or Hubert Selby with their stories of degraded urban life, in this case with the vowels of Penge rather than New York. She is more overtly political than either of them, however, with an incisive invective. She sees almost too clearly to bear how circumscribed her life is, just as her father’s was before her. She says his first question to the doctor, after being diagnosed with cancer, was: “How long will I be able to work?” “I don’t think that’s a question you should have to ask,” says Tara, furiously, opening up the world of generational poverty with a line of dialogue. 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 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.