Diary Entry, 14th October 1952
Thornwick, a windswept coastal town where the sea bites the cliffs and the gorse blooms fierce in summer, holds a modest workingman’s estate. Rows of concrete block houses stand like sentinels against the North Sea, their windows fogged with the salt-kissed air. The 1950s hum with talk of rebuilding and progress, yet here, time feels stilled, like a fly trapped in a resin drop. All eyes turn to the cannery—our livelihood, our burden. Wages are meager, but the coastal bounty and factory shifts keep us afloat, just.
In a dull block on the first floor lives the Forge family. From the outside, they’re no different from the dozens of others—pale curtains, chipped front doors, the smell of fish stock clinging to the air. But step inside, and it’s a kingdom of penny-pinching.
Harold Forge, the patriarch, is a man of contradictions. Broad-shouldered, with a face like a bulldog set in perpetual scowl, he’s a legend at the cannery for his sharp hands and sharper eye for waste. Colleagues nod at him with wary respect, but in his own home, Harold is a tycoon of thrift.
My mother, Eleanor, once had a laugh that rang like wind chimes—before Harold turned our home into a museum of miserliness. She now moves like a shadow, fingers counting ration coupons as she mends our threadbare clothes. My brother George, at twelve, is clever but cowed, avoiding his father’s eye like it might crack the world open.
The neighbors mutter. The Thompsons have a wireless, the Carters a new stove, while the Forge house feels hollow, as if emptied by a ghost of avarice. The hallway’s chest, locked with a padlock from the docks, holds no gold, just flour and potatoes measured in fractions, like a chemist’s scales.
Dawn breaks the same every week. At six, Harold jingles the keys to the chest, waking Eleanor and George. “Come here, woman,” he barks. She stumbles, wrapped in a moth-eaten shawl, as George crouches behind his door, fists curled. Harold scoops oatmeal into a chipped bowl—two spoonfuls for Eleanor, three for himself, one for George. The same pattern repeats with potatoes, butter—always razor-thin slivers. “Don’t waste a crumb,” he growls. George’s silence is loud, his resentment a storm waiting to break.
At school, George shrinks from the world. Birthdays? Not in his vocabulary. “Friends are a luxury,” Harold warns. “Money’s for survival, not fluff.” Only books, free from the library, offer him escape. Once, he brought home a ragged kitten, its eyes wide with the same hunger he felt.
“Out,” Harold snarled. “You’ll eat with that thing?” George wept in the garden, the cat disappearing into the brine-slick streets.
That night, Eleanor, her face thin as a shilling coin, tried to plead. “Harold, George needs new boots. His are holes.”
“Holes can be mended,” he spat.
“And the lads at school laugh,” she begged.
“Laughter’s cheap,” he hissed, the slap echoing like a factory gong.
George, hearing it all, wept behind his door.
Years passed. George left for the technical college in Hull, swallowed by the world he’d been taught to fear. He saved every penny, even when roommates invited him to the pictures or pubs. “Black Day savings,” he muttered, like a creed.
College was a cage. Girls smiled at him—until they saw his hunched shoulders and tight purse-strings. Then there was Olivia, bright and sharp, who asked him to the canteen. “You look like you’ve never seen a cup of tea,” she laughed.
George hesitated. First time he spent a penny without calculating the return.
He married her, but the old ghosts trailed him. “No curtains?” Olivia asked, staring at the stark windows. “It’s fine,” he mumbled.
By their first anniversary, the bargain had frayed. “George, you’d rather live like paupers than spend a tuppence?” she snapped.
“Paupers waste money,” he replied, his father’s voice alive in his bones.
Olivia left, her heels clicking like a death knell. “Live, George, before you die of penny-pinching.”
Now, I sit in his empty flat, the tea gone cold, the clock ticking like a debt unpaid. Harold taught us to hoard, but love and joy can’t be stored in a chest. The wages we save, the lives we miss—they’re gone forever.
