This child poverty/hunger business intrigues me. I was born in 1947, and my earliest memories involve a living room lit by a gas lamp with a mantle and, although we had running water, we still had a pump in the scullery which drew water from a well beneath the house. I also have a hazy memory of the day they "put the electric in".
My dad was a manual worker and mum mostly brought us up, and did odd cleaning jobs. Dad used to work for the council during the day, come home for his tea, and then go out again for two/three hours doing private work as a painter and decorator.
Time is a great healer, and old age has a habit of erasing certain memories, but I genuinely don't recall being starving or malnourished. There was always food on the table. Perhaps nothing lavish, but we never went to bed hungry.
Now, here we are, six decades (and more) later, with the general standard of living way, way above what it was in the 1950s, and we have - apparently - thousands of children being starved to death by a savage and uncaring government. It revolves around the issue of school meals.
For forty years or so, I was a teacher, mostly in state schools, and I know that the prosperity of an area was judged on the basis of how many FSM (free school meals) pupils were on the books. Going back to my own story, I think I generally went home for lunch, and on occasions where that was difficult, I took sandwiches. My parents had what was then called Child Allowance. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling it was payable for the first child, but not the second.
So, here in 21st century England, what has happened? We either have a descent into Third World malnutrition, or some very wealthy people with socialist leanings are whipping up a storm about parents simply unable to find the money to put food into the mouths of their children. I know what I think, but your views are, as ever, welcome.
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