ENVY? (I.P.)

I have never thought of myself as a jealous, or envious person. Come to think of it, it is quite hard to explain the difference between those two words. What are the nuances? In my opinion envy is a rather sad ‘if only’ longing sort of emotion, whereas jealousy is more evil and destructive..... but maybe that is another line of contemplation.

I am well aware, and getting more so as I get older, that I deeply resent the fact that, although my whole family has always endeavoured to keep its collective nose clean - worked hard, paid our taxes, kept within the law, (in other words a fairly normal English family living in a pretty rough part of SE London), we seldom seem to see any benefits to ourselves for this relatively blameless existence, whereas others whom we support with said taxes etc seem to have the leisure to enjoy life much more than we do, without putting in any effort, while survival for us has always been a struggle to keep our heads (just) above water.

This reminds me of what my extremely hard-working Dad, an RAF Burma veteran, once told me when he was looking after his widowed Mum in her later years. He would ride up to the West End each day from Lewisham on his push-bike to work, then back again many hours later, calling in on his Mum on the way. She lived in a council flat in Bellingham, where the family had been placed after being bombed out of their homes in Peckham several times during the war. My late Grandad, a decorated soldier of the Great War, had worked for the War Cabinet during WW2, and consequently had left Nan a small Civil Service pension.

The widowed lady next door to her, of similar age, had only her Old Age Pension plus such other benefits as existed in the 60s, and my Dad would often fetch her money etc from the Post Office when he collected my Nan’s. From this, and conversations with said lady, he knew that she was actually a little better off than my Nan was, as Nan’s ‘extra’ pension excluded her from the various other benefits her neighbour enjoyed. He often wondered what the point was of my Grandad working into his 70s to accrue what should have been a bit of extra comfort for his wife, when others got exactly the same standard of living for nothing. Not that he held it against this lady personally; indeed he was fond of her and helped her as much as his own Mother. Still, even way back then I could see the unfairness in this situation.

Many years on, my own Mum having passed away, I found myself in a similar position, looking after my Dad. I took on his finances too, and it was like déjà-vu! He had worked for many years as the maintenance manager for a London college, and consequently had a small pension. Yes you’ve guessed it. This money which he had worked for all his life, excluded him from any rent/rates rebate or pension add-ons, putting him in the same position as any person (dare I say here even those recently arrived in this country) who had paid little or nothing into the society pot and were able to claim everything going. My Mum had often mentioned that they could have done with the money that went into Dad’s pension when we were small, and indeed I feel things would have been a little easier for them all round if they had not had this ‘extra’ money in their old age.

And now that my dear Dad, becoming increasingly frail, has had to go into a Nursing Home at the age of 91 and a half, both his state pension and his private pension are taken to pay for his care; in other words he is paying a lot more for his care than his neighbour in the next room, who has only his Old Age Pension and has been in receipt of multiple benefits for many years. The effect of this is that my Dad never ever actually saw any advantage at all from the pension he had worked and paid for all his life.

So yes, I am indeed resentful of those getting something for nothing while we slog away til we drop; but is this Envy? Or Jealousy? Or righteous indignation?

I felt this most keenly when my eldest daughter was a baby. To my utter surprise, always having thought of myself as a career girl, I was utterly desolate when I had to go back to work when my firstborn was about a year old. There was no two ways about it: the mortgage had to be paid by both my partner and myself and food put on the table. I temped for a while (which I hated), then was offered a great job as a bi-lingual secretary. Much as I loved this job, each day when I waved goodbye to my little girl (luckily my own Mum looked after her) I counted the hours til I could go home and see her again. As I embarked on the long bus journey into London, I would watch Mums with their children and think : ‘I’ve got a little girl like that, why aren’t I with her?’. And when I saw someone with a pretty little girl with golden curls like my daughter, my heart would break.

‘And for what?’ I would think. Then one day after work I went into Boots and rifled amongst the reduced childrens’ clothes, to see if there was anything I could afford. Another Mum with a small, well-dressed child came in and went straight away to the latest clothes, not giving the reduced rail a second glance. She selected what was to me an expensive pair of trainers and a nice coat, and paid for both with what I saw to be welfare vouchers. I queued behind her to pay for the coat I had selected; it wasn’t quite what I had wanted but was half price so would do. And that was when I learned that hard work and diligence doesn’t pay, and nothing I have seen or heard of in my life since has changed my mind on this.

We increased our mortgage to buy a larger house a couple of years later when I was expecting my second child. Our new home was an ex-council house on a council estate, and we were quite unusual amongst the families I met at the school gates, in that at least one of us worked. I was therefore rather bewildered to note that we seemed to be the poorest amongst our new acquaintances, all of whom had Council houses and were claiming benefits. For example, by the time we had mustered the money to buy a video recorder, most of them were on their second or third, and the bikes and toys their children had, mine could only dream of. New furniture came and went in their houses, whilst we knew ours would more or less have to last a lifetime.

Is this envy on my part, or merely frustration at the lack of proper rewards for working?

Whilst on maternity leave, I knew there was no way I could look at any parents with their children without going raving bonkers with longing for my own, and I was lucky enough to find a rare home typing job, enabling me to choose my work pattern. Mind you, this did not do much to ease my disgruntlement, as I thumped away on my typewriter for hour after boring hour, looking longingly through my window at my unemployed neighbours playing on the grass with their kids.

In vain through the years I have tried to overcome the green-eyed monster causing me to resent others who seem to be living off the back of families like ours who have to work not just for their own living, but for that of everyone else. At this late stage when I should be retired, I have come to the conclusion that there is no fairness here: no-one who actually works will ever be allowed to enjoy any advantage over those who, for whatever reason, do not. Except of course those already rich.

It is too late for us, but my hardworking daughter, that beautiful little cherub with the golden curls of yesteryear, and her equally conscientious husband have watched the same thing still happening all around them, and have decided they must bring their family up in a country where diligence and honesty is allowed to reap its just rewards.

And this country ain’t it.

So, in a few short weeks, once again I shall wave goodbye to my precious daughter and no doubt spend the rest of my life looking enviously at mothers out walking with theirs: but this time, there will be no going home.