Decimal Day was Monday, 15 February 1971. I was eight and had been told that money was changing, although the pound was staying the same. This seemed an unnecessary way to organise it.
Mum had a conversion card on the kitchen table. It showed old money on one side and new money on the other. She had been looking at it for weeks and still checked it whenever somebody asked a question. This did not increase my confidence in the new system.
Before that day, there had been twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. I had only recently learnt to manage this. The country then decided that a pound would contain one hundred new pence instead. Adults called this simpler, which was easy for them to say after making children learn the first version.
When I came home from school, Mum put several coins on the table. Some were new. Some were old coins that could still be used. She asked me to sort them.
I sorted them by colour and size.
‘By value,’ she said.
This was the same mistake I had made with Gran Collins the year before. I had not improved as much as I thought.
Gran came round later and looked at the conversion card without picking it up. She said she could work it out in her head. Mum asked how much ten shillings was in new money. Gran answered correctly, then said she would continue calling it ten shillings.
‘You can call it what you like,’ Mum said. ‘The shop won’t.’
Gran said the shop would understand her.
This was probably true. Shop assistants had understood Gran through several systems and did not usually get much choice.
Mum had kept some old coins in one purse and new ones in another. She said this was only until she got used to them. The two purses lasted for months. One held the money she understood and the other held the money she was expected to use.
At school we had done sums with decimal points. The teacher said the new money would make arithmetic easier. It did, once I stopped trying to convert everything back into shillings. At home, nobody stopped doing that for years.
Dad came in from work and asked what was for tea. Mum told him, then asked whether he had used the new money.
‘Paid for my bus,’ he said.
‘Any trouble?’
‘No.’
That was Dad’s complete report on national decimalisation.
After tea, I counted the coins again. This time I used the values. Mum said I had it now.
Gran asked what the total would have been in old money.
Gran asked the next question before Mum had put the coins away.