She’s the anti-poverty campaigner and food writer who shot to fame by teaching us how to make the most of our pennies. But behind the scenes her world was unravelling
car calls at Jack Monroe’s home in Southend to take her to the photoshoot at noon. Nobody appears to be in. The driver rings the bell and calls her mobile. Nothing. 12.30pm. More ringing, more calling. Still nothing. 1pm. Her agent tries her. Then her publisher, then her former girlfriend. Still nothing. 1.30pm. We call off the shoot, and the car leaves. Everybody is beginning to panic.
Set design: Lisa Engel at Propped Up. Hair and makeup: Alice Theobald @Arlingtonartists using Morgan’s Pomade and Guerlain.Monroe is the anti-poverty campaigner and food writer who kept herself going by making the most of her pennies. She showed us how to survive in the age of austerity by being frugal in the extreme – making meals for 30p, and reusing every leftover. But I’m about to find out that it wasn’t as straightforward as that.
Despite her success, Monroe continued to plead poverty. Her critics started to dig deeper. Hold on, they would harrumph, she describes herself as a working-class kid with four and a half GCSEs , but when she first emerged she said she was middle-class and had had a good education.
As she talks, I’m looking at her arms. One tattoo merges into another, pretty much telling the story of her life. On her right hand a note is scribbled. I wonder if it’s a reminder. But it turns out to be another tattoo – of the quote “Find what you love then let it kill you,” usually attributed to Charles Bukowski. “I found what I loved, which is whisky, and it very nearly killed me,” she says. “This time two years ago, I was a wreck.
Class, she says, has always confused her – it changes, depending on who you mix with. As a child, she didn’t realise her parents were struggling for money much of the time. At grammar school, she found other children holidayed in Tenerife or went skiing while her family took the ferry to her maternal grandmother’s two-bedroom house in Northern Ireland or went caravanning in England. She must be working class, she thought.
Eventually, she got a job in the control room. “I loved every single aspect of it. I didn’t think I would, because it’s disciplined, authoritarian and male-dominated. You’ve got to polish your shoes and iron creases in your epaulettes. That structure and discipline was exactly what I needed.” The skills she learned still serve her well. “I can be very calm in a crisis. If the occasion calls for it, I can click into being very organised, methodical and analytical.
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