Friday Sept. 26th 2008.

I suppose the present state of our economy is very much on my mind, therefore I decided to write out my memories of the Great Depression for the benefit of my grandchildren. My memories of the period are those of a child, but they are still very vivid. Of course I didn’t understand the causes and effects, other than how they affected the life of my family and our friends and neighbors. I was very surprised when I came to the USA in 1956 to discover that so many Americans were unaware that the Great Depression affected people worldwide, and not just in this country.

FOR MY GRANDCHILDREN…….

I hope this may interest you some day. Parts of it may make you a little sad, but it was not all bad. I survived the Depression and I learned that if you have a loving family then you can get thru anything and can keep going until things get better. And they do get better.

I was born on Nov. 1st 1930, the second of four children, so the Depression had already begun and my parents were feeling the effects. My parents had four children before the Depression ended. I was 8 years old before my father got his first job.

My father was a shipyard worker like the majority of the men in our town. The shipyards had all closed down due to lack of orders and the majority of the men in town were unemployed. I remember that my parents and their friends always had a worried look. Being unemployed had a very bad effect on the men and there was an air of hopelessness about them. They had nothing to do and nowhere to go so they tended to gather at street corners. I can only guess what they discussed. I imagine they cursed the government, the rich people and likely discussed football (soccer.) When the men drank alcohol then it was not unusual for street fights to break out…. It was often over religion.

My father and a friend had pooled their money to buy hair clippers and they cut the hair of all their children and relatives. We didn’t always like our haircuts but we were not given a choice. Only the grown women in the families had the right to refuse….. They cut their own hair or had a friend cut it for them. Hairdressers were a luxury reserved for weddings.

My father repaired all of our shoes. I remember that clearly because I loved to watch him resole our shoes. He would buy a piece of leather, soak it overnight in water, and place the shoe on it and hammer the nails in. Then he would trim the leather making sure he didn’t waste any that could be used for half heels or half soles, or even the tiny pieces that could be used for reheeling high heels. He used to repair radios for other people, and sometimes watches and clocks. I suppose he got paid a few coins for doing it or else someone might buy him a beer.

Since unemployment was so widespread, most men received “buroo” (unemployment) money every Friday. I think “buroo” is a corruption of the word bureau. It was very little, but usually covered the rent with little left for food. We rented an apartment which was owned by the town council and paid rent weekly. If you didn’t pay the rent then you were evicted and found yourself on the sidewalk surrounded by your furniture and whatever else you owned. By the time that happened you usually had very few possessions anyway. Most people sold off most of their belongings to try to keep up with the rent. The picture of women sitting on the sidewalks with their cold and crying children still haunts me. The fathers were usually out trying to borrow money to pay the rent. I was always afraid it might happen to us someday and needed constant reassurance from my mother that this would not be the case.

The thing that bothered me most about that period in time was always feeling hungry. I don’t mean we never had treats, but so many times it seemed we went to bed hungry because we had to save some bread for breakfast. We didn’t get to choose what kind of cereal we wanted, in those days I think the choice of cereals was porridge (oatmeal) or corn flakes. Porridge was cheaper and corn flakes were treats. If we had bread then we would also have toast.

It was not all bad though. Sometimes my mother would give us money to choose a treat…. It might be an apple, a banana, or even a pastry. Those were luxuries and it was exciting. When we sat down to eat our main meal in the evening, often my mother would not eat. She would have a cup of tea and a piece of bread. She would tell us she wasn’t hungry. I grew up thinking that when one stopped being a girl and became a woman then you no longer had an appetite. I didn’t realize my mother was leaving the food for us. Incidentally, we NEVER had any leftovers.

In those days I didn’t feel sorry for myself. Everyone around us was in the same boat. As far as I knew, this was just the way it was and might always be. I didn’t know anything different.

Both my parents were orphans, so we didn’t have close relatives. Family is very important at all times but is especially important during lean times. If you have family then you can often pool resources and that helps. If you have cousins then you might get some of their outgrown clothes, as much as you might not like to. It was always a problem when we needed shoes. Even though my father could repair them, he couldn’t stop our feet from growing! Someday when you grow up you may read Angela’s Ashes. In that book the author talks about going to the Parish for help with money, food and clothing. We could have gone to the parish for help too, but my father, like so many poor working class men, was too proud to allow it. The people who went to the Parish got warm winter clothing for their children and they were better dressed than a lot of other kids.

One of our highlights in those days was going on picnics. Several families would take off together and walk up the hill outside town. We would have jam and bread, and we would make tea over a fire to drink. We always had fun even though it often rained. We used to take raincoats with us on picnics. If it rained before we took off on a picnic then we would sit on a floor somewhere and eat our sandwiches. Unless you had relatives you could go visit, few people ever went on vacation. We only once had a vacation when I was a kid. We exchanged houses for a week with another family who lived about 20 miles away. They lived near the beach but it pretty much rained the whole week so it was a bit of a disappointment.

Another big source of entertainment was listening to the radio. We would sit around the radio like people sit and watch TV now. We listened to comedy shows and often to radio plays. Most families had one radio only so listening to the radio was a shared family activity. Everyone in our family liked to read so we used the library a lot.

In those days, we as children had much more freedom to go out and play than you have. It was a different time and place. There were always lots of kids around and few people had cars, so mostly you played in your own neighborhood. So many of the toys were home made. People would make bikes from bits and pieces of old bikes they found, and scooters and go-carts were usually home made. We played with balls and jump ropes. We played a lot of games of Cops and Robbers and Cowboys and Indians. We made our own ‘guns’ and bows and arrows. In summer the girls would sit and crotchet shawls. Since we didn’t have much wool then we would rip them out and start all over again. Playing ‘wee shop’ was a biggie…. We would gather broken glass and pretend to sell it. Playing school was another favorite, both in summer and winter. We used to sit around as a group and sing the latest pop songs. We all loved to tell ghost stories and scare ourselves. Even without money we had a lot of fun in those days. You can make your own fun.

The Depression was much harder on parents than it was on the kids. The kids might lack stuff and might be hungry at times, but the parents were the people who had to do the worrying and try to protect their children. The adults were the ones who knew what was going on and they were the ones who had to worry about what the future might hold. The adults were the people who had to say “No, we can’t afford it” to children who couldn’t understand why. The parents were the ones who hurt most during that time of my life.

If we didn't have money for leather to repair shoes, then we stuffed newspaper or cardboard in our shoes to keep the rain out. That only worked until you stepped in the first puddle! We never threw away shoe laces..... we often had knotted laces, odd colored laces, and sometimes even used string which we would die with black ink to make them look like real shoestrings. If we had holes in our socks then they had to be darned. Men and boys didn't darn their own socks, but girls learned to darn at a young age and were expected to darn their own socks. Most socks in those days were made of wool. I was darned good at darning but I would never think of doing so now. It takes too long and often felt uncomfortable and hurt your feet.

I had very few clothes in those days. I never had more than one pair of shoes, or two pairs of socks. Two dresses, 2 blouses, one skirt, two sweaters and two pairs of underpants. We didn't have washers and dryers in those days, so clothes were washed by hand and laundry was hung outside to dry if it wasn't raining. If it was raining they were dried on a 'pulley' (overhead rack) in the kitchen or in front of the fire. If your clothes were not dry then it was tough luck and you wore them damp!

Most people didn't have ready cash to buy clothes in those days, so my mother used Provident Cheques. This was a kind of credit and the interest rate was about 50%. They were issued by the Provident Cheque Co. the cheques were for one Pound each and they cost one shilling plus a shilling a week for twenty weeks, the cheques could be spent in town at shops displaying the Provident sign. A man came to the door every week to collect the money and you had better be there to pay him or you would be cut off from future cheques. The result was that most people like our family were always in debt but they had no other means of getting clothes.