New Money, by Glenys Ormerod
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
On the Monday the money changed, my father was flat on his back in Hope Hospital with his disc, and my mother had the twins at home with measles, so it was me behind the counter at Lomax’s at seven in the morning, in his brown overall with the sleeves turned back three times.
I had practised all weekend. I had the conversion chart stuck to the till, and the new coins laid out in a saucer like sweets: the big seven-sided fifties, the tens, the fives, each worth exactly one old shilling, and the tiny halfpennies that rolled off the counter if you breathed on them. I knew it all. I had said it over in bed on Sunday night like my times tables. At seven o’clock, with the bell going over the door, I found I did not know anything at all.
Mr Garside came first, for his Woodbines, and paid with a florin, and I stood with it in my palm as if somebody had handed me a stone from the moon. Two shillings. Ten new pence. I knew that. I knew that. My face was burning, the queue was growing behind him, and every one of them was watching my hands.
‘Take your time, Lorraine love,’ said Mrs Micklethwaite from the back, which was worse.
By nine I had stopped shaking. By ten I had stopped looking at the chart. A man from the gas board told me a loaf ought to be nine new pence, and I told him, politely, that it was ten, and showed him on the chart, and he went off grumbling, and I felt about seven feet tall. I wanted my father to walk in and see me do it.
Then old Mrs Pilling came in at dinnertime and tipped her purse out on the counter: pennies, threepenny bits, a sixpence worn as thin as a fingernail. ‘I’ll not learn it,’ she said. ‘I’m eighty-one. You’ll have to do it for me.’ So I did. I counted her old money into new, slowly, out loud, the way you would read to a child, and she watched my face the whole time, not the coins.
When she had gone I went into the back and stood among the potato sacks for a minute. I did not know why. I had got it right. That was the strange part. I had got everything right, and I still felt as though something had been taken off the counter while I was not looking.
How does the writer show Lorraine’s thoughts and feelings about running the shop on the day the money changes?
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You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.