TRUTH IN THE BISCUIT TIN…
“Peek Frean, makers of famous biscuits” said the faded red label on the lid. The tin had rusted in the corners where the label had been worn away by use. Gently he prised the lid off. It was crammed with papers; they were receipts.
He picked out the first, and unfolded it. It was a hire purchase agreement for a bicycle costing nineteen pounds one shilling and ten pence; four pounds as a deposit with weekly repayments at three shillings and four pence. It was dated March 1956. His beloved Raleigh, his mother’s fourteenth birthday present – it had never occurred to him that it had taken her nearly two years to pay for it.
He delved deeper and out came more HP agreements and payment cards going back years. The few sticks of furniture for the cottage at Rowas Grange Estate at half a crown a week for two years. Then a rent book for the house in Mafeking Street at nine pounds and a penny every month. More furniture, on and on it went, everything ‘on tick’. Year after year, the never-never was the only way his mother had survived on her meagre wages.
By now the box was only half full. Next came bundles of receipts for odd payments to Beaconsfield and Pitt College. He had always assumed that his scholarship had covered everything. Dozens of them for odd sums, always in guineas, starting in September 1947, and ending nine years later, that Christmas when he arrived home and discovered her barely alive.
He emptied the last inch and a half of the box and was horrified to discover that every single one of the thirty or so slips were judgements of debt, usually for a few pounds issued by the Bath County Court going back years. In every case his mother had been ordered to pay back a few shillings every week.
Carefully, he sorted them into datal order, each year a separate pile on his bed. The plaintiff’s name for the numerous rent arrears was Lundy, and in most other cases the orders were signed by Colonel John Bradshaw (Registrar).
It was then that he noticed the folded sheet of newspaper almost stuck to the bottom of the tin. He took it out and carefully unfolded the faded front page of the Bath 1942 Chronicle for Wednesday 29th April.
An extract from chapter forty four of – ‘ Go Swift and Far – a Tale of Bath’ The first book of The Westcott Chronicles