Chapter 5: The Lost Money Purse

From 1923 by Harry Leslie Smith

I was a child of six when the 1929 stock market crashed and precipitated the Great Depression. My parents thought they could flee this economic devastation by upping sticks to Bradford. Instead, the dragon of poverty followed them through its streets with the same destructive intent as it had done in Barnsley. The working class had nowhere to hide from Great Depression. They had no savings and no assets but their ability to toil for substandard pay. The government abandoned the working class to a dole that guaranteed famine when the factories shuttered, mines closed, and textile mills powered down. Millions of men were without employment. They were abandoned by the government and left to wither and rot like fruit that had fallen to the ground in autumn. My family moldered with those millions.

Despite my mother securing a reduced rent in the doss we lived in, we still were in rent arrears. My mum, for awhile charmed the landlord into patience for his rent, but not for long. So, one night before the bailiff came and under black, cold Yorkshire skies, we slipped from our doss house lodgings and on to unfriendly streets.

My mother found us another set of rooms to live in that were more decrepit than the last. This new residence was in a wretched slum that possessed furtive characters that seemed to have lived their entire existence at the edge of the gutter as if they were like water rats that feared the light. My sister and I did not take well to this new lifestyle because our hunger quickly turned to malnutrition as leg ulcers and boils began to plague us.

During those days in that brutal neighbourhood, we lived famished from sun up to sundown, until one-day good fortune seemed to shine down upon my family. My mum had gone out to pawn her wedding ring, and as she walked along Manningham Lane; she spied a leather bag with a chain clasp around it. She picked it up and noticed that it had the name of a department store stenciled across it.

Curious and hungry, she proceeded to open it and discovered fifty pounds in notes and silver in the purse. It was a store’s bank purse, and an accounting clerk must have dropped it in the street while on his way to make a deposit. It crossed her mind to pocket the money and not say a word to anyone because fifty pounds was a king’s ransom to a family living on less than a pound a week. However, my mother’s conscience and the knowledge that she was many things but not a thief wore her down.

My mother walked over to the store whose clientele were the well-heeled residents of Bradford who had escaped the misery of the Great Depression. Inside, she spoke with the manager. He was officious and thanked her coldly for her honesty. The manager rewarded my mother’s good turn by presenting her with a tin of stale, broken biscuits.

My mum fled the store, ashamed and furious that her honesty had paid her so unjustly. Civic duty meant her children went hungry, went without toys, went without clothes, and went without a future. Her good deed was valued by the store’s manager to be worth no more than a tin of broken biscuits, in a city where children were dying from hunger.

My mother spent that night in bitter silence and on occasion glared at the tin of broken biscuits that rested on our empty kitchen table as if it were an enemy. My sister and I crept to our beds, hungry and afraid that our mum's rage was about to cause further harm to our family.

The following morning, my mum returned with me to the department store holding the tin of broken biscuits as if was a neck she wanted to throttle. At the store, she demanded to see the manager. The obsequious attendant asked if the manager would know the reason for her visit.

“He bloody well will,” my mother intoned.

Several minutes passed before the manager appeared. When he did, my mum slammed down the tin of broken biscuits at the counter table by the till, with so much force, it made other customers in the shop stop in their tracks.

“You can start by taking these bloody things back, ”my mother shouted at the manager.

Aghast, the manager asked, “Back? But why?”

“I found fifty pounds of your money yesterday. You think a few broken biscuits are fair compensation for my kindness to your store?”

The manager arrogantly and dismissively replied, “Yes.”

“Bollocks,” retorted my mum, my good deed is worth at least a few pounds.”

“A few pounds?” the manager said incredulously.

“But that is a lot of money,” the manager told her.

“It’s a lot less than losing fifty pounds,” my mother replied.

“I can’t possibly…” the manager responded with haughty disgust.

“Look,” my mother said, as she pushed up close to the manager’s face. “Give me a just reward, or I am going to scream, that you throw crumbs to a poor mother with two little kids to feed and a sick husband to care for.”

The manager was flustered and looked confused that someone so abysmally poor as my mother could demand more than she was given. He didn’t know what to do. But he feared a scene because other customers in the store had taken notice of my mum’s outrage. So, he relented, and my mother was given four pounds under the condition she never return to their establishment.

“With pleasure,” she cackled, and then my mother with me tow left the store. It was a glorious victory for my mother. For the rest of her life, she told this story to anyone willing to hear it because she had stood up to authority and won. The money she had wrestled from that store as a just reward for her good deed was enough to keep us fed and housed for two months. Mum, from then on, was both the sun and the moon in our family. It became clear to my young eyes that my mum and not my father was going to drag us to safety during the harsh economic times of the 1930s. I would, however, soon learn dragging someone to safety does not mean they come out of a catastrophe without scars, resentment, or sadness.