12/13/25 "
‘Jehovah’s Witnesses told me I would die at 15 – so I didn’t save for a pension’
Fame & Fortune: award-winning author on religion, divorce and her dream car
Kit de Waal is an award-winning author who left school at 16. Her debut novel, My Name is Leon, was published when she was 56, and became a bestseller.
It was turned into a TV movie for the BBC and is now on the GCSE English Literature syllabus. With her first advance, Kit set up a scholarship for writers from disadvantaged backgrounds.
She has two adopted children and lives in Leamington Spa with her adult son.
How did your childhood affect your attitude to money?
My father was an African-Caribbean bus driver from St Kitts. He saved up all the money he had to go home to the West Indies. My Irish mother worked very, very menial jobs to make ends meet.
Both of them gave the message that money was tight, hard to come by and not to be spent.
What was your first proper job?
I left home at 16 because my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness – I didn’t want to be involved in that any more. I worked as a secretary for Hoskins, a company that made hospital bedsteads and exported them to the Middle East.
I filled out bills and export forms for £20.00 per week – it was crushingly boring.
What impact did growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness have?
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in an imminent Armageddon. When I was a child, the appointed year was 1975, when I would be 15.
Money – believed to be the root of all evil – would be dispensed in God’s new paradise. He would provide food and housing and meaningful, mostly manual, employment.
Although I stopped being a Jehovah’s Witness when I was 16, a year after the appointed date, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought Armageddon might happen. I never really subscribed to the notion of a career, or even getting older.
I’d never need a pension or critical illness cover. The rational side of my mind told me to get with the programme, but the indoctrination bit deep. I always suspected that there would be some kind of divine rescue from old age and poverty.
I’ve had to force myself to take ageing seriously, to get a pension and provide for the inevitable. It hasn’t been easy."...... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/pensions/not-save-pension-world-was-ending/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first