My dad was a Scotsman, which meant that whenever Mr Coward the milkman came on a Friday for his money, his tall body silhouetted in the glass of our back door, he would always give my dad any Scottish pound notes and fivers he had in his change because, as he said, ‘It’ll make you feel at home’, and my dad would sigh and swap the Bank of Scotland notes for Bank of England ones. In Mr Coward’s head my dad would gaze at the money while listening to Andy Stewart and eating shortbread.
I was fascinated by the strange and exotic cash he handed over and I was even more intrigued when Mr Coward, warming to the task he’d devised on freezing early mornings on his humming float, started giving me coins from different parts of the country: shillings from Jersey and pennies from the Isle of Man, clinking in my pocket like little metal maps of possibilities. I read in my weekly Treasure magazine, a kind of improving journal for curious children, that they used to have cardboard currency on the Isle of Man and a footnote to the piece said that ‘not much of the currency survives today’, which as a child I found an almost impossibly magical statement; I couldn’t articulate why but now I realise it was something to do with the properties of deep time versus the fragility of material things. They didn’t put that in Treasure.
If they could have cardboard currency on the Isle of Man, I reasoned, then I could make some cardboard cash of my own and spend it. It was, I told myself, a simple but beautiful idea.
We were off on holiday to Llandudno later that week and that was where the Summer of the Cardboard Coins began. And ended, I guess, but I’m more interested in beginnings. I had the idea that I would make some cardboard money from old Frosties packets and try and spend it in the shops on the seafront and in my head if I got asked about the bendy pennies I would say that the money was legal tender in Yorkshire and the coins would be so well made that the gullible assistants would be taken in and I would somehow have got something over on somebody somewhere which is all a ten-year-old boy who read the Beano and The Beezer ever wanted to do.
It was fairly simple to make the coins; I simply traced round some half-crowns on the cardboard and cut them out. Imagine my tongue stuck out; imagine my brow furrowed like a ploughed field. Imagine the discarded cardboard when I got it wrong. Imagine the tears and tantrums when I discovered that we had no more empty cereal packets and my mother had to decant cereal into plastic tubs so that I had more cardboard. I decided to use half-crowns as templates partly because they were big enough to work with and also because they always looked unwieldy and otherworldly and because of that they might pass in a corner shop as legitimate currency.
I spent a while devising a name for the money; I didn’t want to call them pounds shillings and pence because that seemed frankly dull and Mrs Stansfield said I was a clever boy who was good at making up stories so I should be able to make up backstories for loose change. In the end I settled on Salt. I was gazing around the room trying to think of a name and I’d rejected settee, windowframe and goldfish. My mother was pouring Cerebos salt into a salt pot and the name seemed to fit my jagged circles. I could have called the money Cerebos but I was embarrassed because I didn’t know how to pronounce it and even as a ten-year-old I intuited that if you made new money you should be able to talk about it with confidence.
Fast-forward now to Llandudno. Take a panning shot along a parade of shops and settle on a branch of WH Smith that I’m about to enter with my cardboard money in my purse. I’m nervous and excited. I feel like I’m about to perform a criminal act. With cardboard.
I go to the endless array of comics and I pick up a Dandy. It seems that Korky the Cat and I are in cahoots because this is the kind of stunt he would come up with. Somehow, because this is all happening in the endlessly music hall space of the seaside it won’t matter in the least that I’m buying something with buckshee dosh because here, littorally, anything goes.
I walk to the counter. A man who looks a bit like he wishes he was elsewhere takes my Dandy and looks at it. This is pre-history so of course he didn’t scan it because a barcode in those far-off days was a request not to wear trainers or to put on a tie. He looks at the price and rings it up on an ancient till. He tells me the price and I pretend I’m searching in my purse for the money. The cardboard feels very malleable, like old lard.
My mother and dad are at the other end of the shop; he is going to buy a Trout & Salmon magazine and she is trying to decide between Woman’s Own and Woman. I give the bloke two Cardboard Coins and say ‘I’m sorry I’ve nothing smaller. Can you change a Salt?’ and even as I say the words I know that this whole endeavour will be a seaside failure and not even a glorious seaside failure. It will be like the moment when my mate Mark tried to get into a Pink Floyd concert at Sheffield City Hall with a KitKat wrapper on which he’d written the words PINK FLOYD TICKET in red felt-tip. The man holds up the cardboard coins. He waves them at a man in a suit who I take to be the manager. All my lines about the history of cardboard coinage slip from my head. I need a prompt but one isn’t forthcoming.
I’ll tell you what I am at this moment: I am a character in a cartoon. I am in the Dandy. I’ve tried one jape too many. The besuited manager glides across the floor. I hope my mother decides which magazine she’s buying soon. Very soon.