Money, it’s a Gas/Grab That Cash With Both Hands and Make a Stash
A while back, fifteen years or so, I started writing a story for kids. Children’s literature, or YA, has never been my thing: not because I do not prize such writing — I do: some of the most important works of recent literature have been written for younger readers. But it is a kind of writing hard to do well, in a technical sense. You get more leeway with writing for adults, who will put up with a surprising amount of crap, prolixity, waffle, filler. For younger readers each sentence needs to hold their attention, and that attention needs to be maintained sentence by sentence. For new readers reading is a particular effort; if they are bestowing that effort on what you have written, it needs to be worth their while, sentences in turn paying off in themselves and moving the story along. It’s exacting, for the writer, and I have the greatest admiration for writers who manage it.
Still, when my kids were younger I did sometimes make-up stories for them, at bedtime; and occasionally I would venture past the borderlands of my comfort zone to try writing something aimed at younger readers.
So, yes: recently I came across a half-finished story I had essayed in this mode circa 2010. It is not, re-reading it after a decade and a half, too bad, actually. Nonetheless there is nothing I can do with it, and I don’t believe there’s any point in finishing it. The reason for that is: money. Not in that sense — I mean, the actuality of money.
The premise is: a boy in an unremarkable English family undergoes a remarkable change. He finds himself, one day, no longer able to eat food. When he puts food into his mouth each morsel turns stony; if he swallows it, nothing is digested. This is, of course, a shock, but there is a correlative: he discovers, moved to put a 2p coin in his mouth one day, that money is not only delicious but nutritious and digestible for him. As to how this magical transformation has happened, the story would eventually explain, if I finished writing it (the working title, The New Midas, gives the hint). My character can only eat actual money: monopoly money and the like is just paper to him. But proper coinage sustains him: 2ps taste like nuts, 10ps like nougat and pound-coins like chocolate. Banknotes are increasingly nutrition-rich the higher the denomination (£5 notes taste like lettuce leaves, £20 notes like slices of prosciutto). The highest and most sustaining food is gold itself, and in this case it doesn’t need to be actual gold coinage — though a single golden sovereign can keep my protagonist going for days. At one point an adult gives him a gold wedding ring, which he is able to eat easily and with pleasure. It is as formally licensed ‘promise to pay the bearer in demand’ IOUs for bullion that legal tender ‘works’ as food for him. I’ve have about half this story written and know how it would end.
But, as I say, I don’t think there’s any point in me completing it. Not because it doesn’t work as a story. Actually I think it works pretty well. It’s not a bad conceit, and what I’ve written sets it out and develops it interestingly, well-paced and with some nice set-piece scenes. But here’s the thing: I don’t think actual money, physical coins and notes, mean anything to kids now. My son Dan was going out for the day with friends a while back, and I offered him a tenner out of my wallet to get himself some lunch. He looked at me like I was Lord Farquhar-Verisopht, transported out of the nineteenth-century. ‘What’s that?’ It’s money, I told him. He dismissed it: my wife had transferred some money to him already, and it was on his phone. That’s what money means to him, and his generation.
This is quite the change (excuse the pun). When I was Dan’s age money was actual money: bundles of coins sagging in your trouser pocket, banknotes in your wallet. Buying things was passing this money across the counter and collecting your change (nowadays plenty of places won’t take actual cash any more; contactless or card only). But the physicality of money, its heft and quiddity, its smell — the image at the top, of an arcade ‘money waterfall’ game, where as a child I would sometimes play, feeding pennies or tuppences into the slots and, occasionally, reaping cascades of tumbling copper, lives in my memory as much for the smell of the winnings as anything. That doesn’t mean anything any more, I think: and kids reading my story, assuming they did, would have no point of imaginative purchase upon it. Times have changed.
