Criminal! My Shoplifting Summer of Shame! (1993)

When I was a student, I was completely broke.

I met a lot of other students who also said they were broke - but what they really meant was: 'I can't touch my savings because that's money from the sale of Great-Grand-Mama's house and Mummy and Daddy would hit the roof.'

I suppose everybody thinks they're poor when they're a student, but there's 'can't afford to go backpacking across Europe in the Summer' poor and then there's 'picking sausage rolls out of a bin' poor.

I tried getting temporary or part-time jobs in the long gaps between University terms - but most of the time I had to sofa-surf at my Nanna's house on Tyneside or at various student houses in Lancaster and Morecambe. Sometimes I wouldn't know where I was going to be living from one week to the next. I did get some work from a removal firm in Darlington, but it wasn't regular and I certainly couldn't rely on it.

This was during the early days of the Student Loans system. Grants were frozen (and gradually reduced) before being replaced completely. The government had also stopped housing benefit for students. If your family didn't have money, you had to learn to live with debt.

I didn't have anybody to ask for help. My step-dad couldn't find a job in the UK so Mam had gone to live with him in the Middle East. In those pre-internet days they might as well have been on another planet. I wasn't in touch with Dad and I really don't think I'd have asked him for help, anyway. He was a stranger to me by that point. 

One of my University 'friends' complained about his parents because the car they'd bought him had a faulty cassette player. 

His. Parents. Bought. Him. A. Car. 

But the stereo was a 'piece of shit' so his life was a 'nightmare' and his parents 'didn't give a fuck about him'. It was like listening to bullshit from a fucking parallel universe. 

Was I jealous of these whining private school kids and the deep pockets of their parents? 

Yes, yes I was.

I did ask Car-stereo-twat if he realised how lucky he was. He frowned and seemed a bit cross - he didn't know what I was on about. I told him it must be nice to go through University without having to worry about money or debt but he said he was in debt - to his parents. The pressure his parents put on him to do well was a 'nightmare' and 'loads worse than owing money to a bank'. Yes. It was a fucking parallel universe. 

He also said I shouldn't complain about being broke because he'd seen me drinking in the college bar and I always seemed to have a few cans of lager in the fridge. It turned out that I just needed to get my priorities right. Car-stereo-twat smoked a few joints every single day and took Ecstasy most weekends but that was OK because his folks were well off. I wonder if his parents knew about his priorities. Heaven forbid I should use any of my Student Loan to drink in a college bar or spend 59p on a can of Co-op lager... 

I had one friend - Howard* - who was in a similar situation. In our Second Year he completely ran out of money and unlike most of our housemates he couldn't phone Daddy and ask for a cheque. Howard quite liked cannabis and that's probably why he ran out of money before I did. I completely shied away from drugs at University (apart from alcohol) because I was so scared of the people who sold them.

I tried to prop Howard up for the last few weeks of term by halving everything I had. Bread, milk, Fray Bentos pies, Co-op Lager - we shared them. Nobody else in the household bothered. They'd all been best mates with Howard when he was passing around a pipe in the Autumn term but once he was broke in the Summer they wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire. Maybe they thought his idea of 'broke' was the same as theirs. 

One of our other house-mates waved a cheque under our noses - five weeks before the end of the Summer term his 'Daddy' sent him a thousand pounds to 'tide him over til the holidays'. 

Again - was I jealous of these kids and their well off parents?

Too fucking right I was.

The long Summer break was probably the most difficult time. Howard stayed in Lancaster and was working three jobs. He'd managed to find a couple of hours here and there cleaning offices and doing the dishes at a care home, but he was still broke. His landlord had asked for a 'retainer' (a couple of hundred quid) to 'hold' his room over the Summer. And that was on top of the deposit everybody in the house had already paid. 

There was a shortage of student housing in Lancaster and the landlords could pretty much charge whatever the fuck they wanted. The University looked the other way.

That's how I ended up spending the second half of Summer 1993 in Lancaster. Howard had to stay because he couldn't afford to go home after paying his deposit and the retainer. I suppose I could've stayed at my folks' empty council house in Newton Aycliffe (they never did tell the council they were living abroad) but I thought I might as well be broke in Lancaster as anywhere else. At least I'd have some company and we might be able to pool our resources. 

I had about £50 left of my removal money and Howard was working to pay his rent. We watched a lot of telly, drank a lot of tea and talked wistfully about how much better things would be once the new term started. We lived on toast and looked for bargains in the discount/damaged/out-of-date baskets at the Co-op. We laughed a lot and made light of our 'nightmare' lifestyle. We knew things could be a lot worse. 

At first I thought we'd be OK. I thought we'd be able to muddle through until the next Student Loan payments were due in September - but we soon found ourselves being ripped off in unexpected ways. 

Howard's house had a pre-payment system for the gas and electric. We had to buy 'top-up cards' to feed into the meter in order to keep the lights on. This was a complete fucking scam - if you couldn't afford a top-up card (minimum spend: £5) you had to go onto 'emergency credit' which was charged at a higher rate. It was a shitty spiral - the less you had, the more expensive gas and electric became.

And those friendly folks at the Bank would slap you with a £25 charge if you accidentally blew your overdraft by two or three quid. This could happen if the cash machine didn't have any £5 notes so you had to withdraw £10 to buy a top-up card for the electricity meter. They'd send a letter saying you'd 'exceeded your limit' and charge you for the privilege. They'd push you even further into debt and threaten you with another £25 letter if you couldn't immediately sort it out... They might agree to extend your overdraft but that meant paying more interest or a 'one-off arrangement fee'. 

The poorer the Bank made you, the more they could charge you. Another shitty spiral. And another time when I'd much rather have been in debt to my family instead of a faceless high street Bank or a greedy landlord.

Luckily, Howard discovered a source of free food. There was a Bakery on campus and it was open right through the Summer holidays, even though 99% of the staff and students had gone home. Six days a week, the Bakery made loads of fresh stuff and most of it was thrown away at 5pm. 

We'd wait until about five minutes after they closed and then grab bags full of bread and cakes out of their industrial sized wheelie bins. I told myself we were doing something heroic and making a valid point about the wastefulness of capitalism - but it still felt weird picking sausage rolls and chocolate eclairs out of black bags. 

We did pass on some of our loot to a few other people we knew in Lancaster - some of them had freezers and they filled them up with slightly dented loaves of bread.

But it didn't last. The Bakery must have realised what we were doing and padlocked the bins. I was almost relieved - I'd had visions of being caught raking through the rubbish by campus security or an irate baker.

  If we couldn't afford food and if the shops wouldn't let us have the stuff they couldn't sell, Howard said we'd just have to start stealing. This was before everybody went CCTV crazy and most shops still relied on store detectives or bloody big mirrors to spot thieves. 

Howard worked out a system: we both knew I was too cowardly and anxious to do the actual shoplifting, so I'd be his decoy. I'd take a shopping basket and fill it with a couple of carrots, a few potatoes or a small bag of rice (probably spending 80 or 90p at the most). As long as we were seen to be buying some groceries, the staff would never suspect us of shoplifting. 

Howard would walk around the aisles alongside me, stuffing various items into his pockets and down his sleeves. 

I worried that it was all a bit obvious - this was in the middle of Summer and Howard was wearing a huge coat. Wouldn't the staff think it was weird? Wouldn't they notice us wandering around the shop for half an hour only to spend 80p on some loose vegetables?

I'd stand at the checkout with my heart pounding in my ears - I felt guilty so I assumed I must look guilty. I could feel my hands shaking and I could hear my voice wobble as I said 'thank you' and paid for those few bits of shopping. 

Howard always seemed so cool and calm, but I was a mess. I could barely cope as a decoy, there was no way I'd have been able to walk through the checkout with a tin of peas down my coat-sleeve.

I tried to rationalise it - stealing had to be better than going hungry or dropping out of University. How is it possible to end up with that kind of choice? It wasn't some romantic Oliver Twist/Artful Dodger existence, it was fucking sad. Pitiful. I felt sorry for Howard and I felt sorry for myself. 

I wanted somebody to stop us. Maybe we'd get a criminal record, maybe we'd get kicked out of University - but at least things would have to change. And that had to be better than looking for food in bins or knicking from the local shops. But the staff in the shops didn't notice or didn't care. We weren't stealing expensive bottles of spirits or perfume (the kinds of things you could sell) and we got away with it.

Howard became quite a choosy shoplifter. He started selecting fancy ingredients and not just grabbing what he thought he could get away with. By late August we were eating homemade chicken curry, chilli con carne or lasagne - but we'd only paid for an onion or a few mushrooms. We'd spend any spare money on Co-Op Lager and toast our fine feasts with cheap supermarket beer.

As the Summer ended, I moved back onto campus. Final Year students didn't usually get rooms at the University but I'd been lucky: they held a lottery for any spare places and my name was drawn out. It was a massive relief - the rent was about £5 a week cheaper and the University didn't ask for a deposit or a 'retainer'.

Howard lived in town and carried on shoplifting (he found other decoys) and branched out into non-essential items like Vodka and family sized bars of Dairy Milk. It became something we laughed about - and I tried to forget about all the fear and the guilt. 

I would have been a rubbish criminal.

Much much later Howard told me that somebody did eventually catch him. A bloke at the local Sainsbury's stopped him and said; 'I don't like the way you shop, son - find somewhere else'. 

And that was it.

*He wasn't really called Howard. I think that's the only detail I've changed.