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Intimate Conversations about Money, or Everyone Money in Case they Don’t Die. The search for ways of seeing into the lives of others through the process of writing an interview book Wendy Jones Goldsmiths, University of London Thesis submitted for the PhD in Creative Writing 1 Signed declaration The work presented in this thesis is my own. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any degree or diploma of the university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgement has been made. Signed: Wendy Jones September 27th 2012 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professors Blake Morrison and Les Back for their patience, generosity and insight in helping me write this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr George Frankl. 3 Abstract This PhD consists of two parts. The first part, the creative writing component, is a 70,000-word non-fiction book called Intimate Conversations about Money or Everyone Needs Money In Case They Don’t Die. The book comprises an introduction and twenty-one edited interviews with British people speaking about their experiences of money. The second part is a 30,000 critical commentary entitled Everyone Needs a Jolly Good Listening to. It includes a discussion of the process of writing the creative component of the PhD. The salient characteristics and history of interview-based books are explored. There is an examination and discussion of the components of the interview: listening, asking questions, recording, and creating a relationship with the interviewee. The process of transcription and editing interviews is also examined and discussed. 4 Table of Contents Part I: Creative Component Intimate Conversations about Money or Everyone Needs Money in Case They Don’t Die 6 Introduction 13 Chapter One: Kevin Wright 19 Chapter Two: Maxine Evans 32 Chapter Three: Michael Landy 39 Chapter Four: Stella 48 Chapter Five: Rakesh 58 Chapter Six: Sister Shelia 65 Chapter Seven: Gary Bridges 75 Chapter Eight: Daniel Henton 84 Chapter Nine: Rachel Hampton 92 Chapter Ten: Dean Forster 102 Chapter Eleven: Tony Baker 108 Chapter Twelve: Paula Cooper 116 Chapter Thirteen: Anne Marie Woodall 127 Chapter Fourteen: Derek Staunton 138 Chapter Fifteen: Eileen Weatherstone 148 Chapter Sixteen: Bill Drummond 154 Chapter Seventeen: Rene Carayol 160 Chapter Eighteen: Howard Sunrise 174 Chapter Nineteen: Neil Shashoua 183 5 Chapter Twenty: Mark Boyd 189 Chapter Twenty-one: Will Driver 201 Conclusion 212 Part II: Critical Commentary ‘Everyone Needs a Jolly Good Listening To’ The search for ways of seeing into the lives of others 215 Introduction 216 Chapter One 232 Section i) Listening 232 Section ii) Asking Questions 238 Section iii) Recording 247 Section iv) Creating a Relationship 252 Chapter Two 259 Part One: The Typescript 259 Part Two: Editing the Typescript 286 Conclusion 304 Bibliography 315 6 INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS ABOUT MONEY Or Everyone Needs Money in Case they Don’t Die Wendy Jones 7 ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ Matthew Ch 6, v, 21 8 For Solly, who likes spending money in toy shops. 9 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 13 CHAPTER ONE 19 Kevin Wright: ‘All of the things that I thought were important aren’t’ CHAPTER TWO 32 Maxine Evans: ‘I have more than £100,000, a bit less than £24800,000’ CHAPTER THREE 39 Michael Landy: ‘I went through three or four years looking at how I could destroy all my worldly belongings’ CHAPTER FOUR 48 Stella: ‘lt was just mind-blowing when I got paid, to have that much money in one session’ CHAPTER FIVE 58 Rakesh: ‘There’s no way out of getting out of paying.’ CHAPTER SIX 65 Sister Sheila: ‘I renounce forever the world and its possessions’ CHAPTER SEVEN 75 Gary Bridges: ‘My bonus last year – which was two and a half million quid – is not unusual’ CHAPTER EIGHT 84 Daniel Henton: ‘Pretty much the only two real things you can do with money are wipe your bottom with it or burn it’ CHAPTER NINE 92 10 Rachel Hampton: ‘Debtors Anonymous has made me think that it’s not how much money I’ve got, it’s about what I do with it!’ CHAPTER TEN 102 Dean Forster:‘ If my whole body’s on fire, I could be paid anything up to six or seven grand’ CHAPTER ELEVEN 108 Tony Baker: ‘Spend it. In the midst of life we are in death’ CHAPTER TWELVE 116 Paula Cooper: ‘Some people say, “You rather the money than seeing your children”’ CHAPTER THIRTEEN 127 Ann Marie Woodall: ‘If you take your mind off the money, the abundance comes in’ CHAPTER FOURTEEN 138 Derek Staunton: ‘People never throw money away’ CHAPTER FIFTEEN 150 Eileen Weatherstone: ‘I kept looking everyday on the teletext about the blasted shares and they were going down, down, down’ CHAPTER SIXTEEN 156 Bill Drummond: ‘If I have an obituary, I know the main thing will be about burning a million pound’ CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 160 Rene Carayol: ‘I want to win and I’m really comfortable winning and I feel like death when I lose’ CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 176 Howard Sunrise: ‘It’s easier to beg than go out and do crime’ 11 CHAPTER NINETEEN 185 Neil Shashoua: ‘My mind-set is, “Got to save money in case the Nazis come”’ CHAPTER TWENTY 190 Mark Boyd: ‘It’s become really normal for me not to have money’ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 201 Will Driver: ‘I remember the first time I lost a million dollars. I do it regularly!’ CONCLUSION 212 12 Introduction Money is very private. And it was that privacy that I set out – with my tape recorder – to explore and write about in this book. It started out as an intellectual quest: What is money? What will people do for money? I wanted the personal and the intimate. I thought if money had a soul and voice I would find it through talking to people, through conversation and revelation. What started as an intellectual enquiry took a sudden turn when my partner left. I was standing on the landing and he was halfway down the stairs when he turned around and said, ‘You may as well know, I’ve met someone else.’ He took a jar of honey from the kitchen, walked out of the house and stayed out all night. I was so shocked that I stayed awake for four days and a patch of my hair fell out. He was adamant he was keeping the house and I didn’t fight. So I became what I never thought I would be: a single mother in a council flat on a council estate living off benefits. My son was fourteen months old. The whole thing took five weeks. Suddenly the subject of money became more than an interesting topic to explore for a book; it was now a stressful, sometimes desperate, area of my life. At times the question was, ‘Food or rent?’ which is a difficult question to answer. Unlike everyone else I knew, we no longer had stairs, a car, a garden. Instead, we got food stamps. I learned not to buy any processed food but instead to make cake, juice, soup and bread myself. I learned that if I bought a £6 skirt from Primark and starched it, it would look fine. I learned that I had to stay generous, have people round and trust that money to buy food would come. The main use of my expensive education seemed to be in how I could make the small amount of money we had cover our needs. 13 I told hardly anyone how poor we were; it felt undignified. Max Arthur in his book The Edwardians relays the story of a young girl at the turn of the last century who went to work in broken, leaky shoes. The girl’s boss bought her a new pair of shoes. When the girl’s mother saw the shoes, she was furious and threw the new shoes in the gutter. I came to understand something of what the mother felt about the need for dignity. I chose poverty, really. I decided not to go back to work, but to be with my little boy: it was better for him and it was what I wanted. In time our anguish, shock and loss abated. I looked after my little boy, cleaned, cooked, washed clothes and wrote this book. I decided that I would be the solid ground Solly stood on – that there would be no childcare, no nannies and childminders. It didn’t matter how poor we were going to be, I would be reliable, available, committed. It was a bit gruelling at times; sometimes I went to bed and cried about how poor we were. But it didn’t really matter, not really. And mine was a self-chosen poverty. I could have gone back to being a special needs teacher earning £26,000 a year, two thousand more than the national average income. Unable to afford childcare and not wanting to impose too much on generous friends, I took my little boy along to many of the interviews I conducted. He sat watching a Paddington DVD on my laptop while I talked, and to his eternal credit he only said on one or two occasions, ‘Mummy, Mummy have you nearly finished yet? I’m getting boreder and boreder!’ I typed and edited when he went to bed. Mothers invent out of necessity. When I started writing this book, all excitement and eagerness, I had a home, a job and money: the week before I found out I was pregnant I bought a £800 coat.