Even they found her piece about period poverty to be too strong to print, though at least they paid her for it. She isn’t above selling stories about her wretched daily grind of budgeting to a trashy supermarket magazine.
“Lots of things about living in a woman’s refuge make me laugh,” she says, which is not the most common response. “We should be banned from all supermarkets except Aldi and Lidl and force-fed a diet of UHT milk and corned beef”, she writes, ‘grub for fallen women… Why didn’t I just shut up and know my place?” 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”.Īnd she is very, very angry about the well-paid newspaper columnists whose intemperate outbursts against the underclass are mirrored here by Carraway’s invective. Carraway is on the literary barricades and she genuinely has no fear – or shame or humility or any of the other emotions that keep people polite and in check. Lots of writers are called “fearless” because they take a shot at the government or patriarchy from a swivel chair in an office. Skint Estate is saved from being a self-pitying moan by Cash Carraway’s wit, her acute turn of phrase and her absolute lack of fear.
‘We are the walking wounded of the class war’ writes Cash Carraway, a south London single mum working for less than the minimum wage, negotiating the accommodation underworld of Gumtree, OpenRent ‘and the depravity of handwritten adverts in newsagents’ windows’ which offer a place to stay in return for sexual services.
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