Depression Life

Press, Volume C, Issue 29506, 6 May 1961, Page 3

Depression Life

A North Country Maid. Bv Mary Craddock. Hutchinson. 160 pp. The special quality which distinguishes this autobiography is the unembittered detachment with which the author describes the problems and circumstances of her youth. Mary Craddock’s father was a coal-miner, who, shortly after the General Strike of 1926 was forced through crippling rheumatism to leave the mines and become one of the swelling list of unemployed. Under the humiliating eye of bureacracy. as exemplified by the “means test," the two eldest, bread-winning members of the family. Jane, a school-teacher, and Fred, newly taken on in the pits—were unable to contribute to its support without depriving it of the necessary, if meagre, life-blood injected into it ‘by the National Assistance Board. Consequently they were obliged to board out, and could onlyj slip an unobstrusive pound, to their mother when visiting their home. All this formed a pattern of experience which was to grow more and more common in industrial circles in England during the depression.! Perhaps its worst features were the “not wanted" feel-1 ing of men whose abilities; were to remain unexploited through no fault of their own, and the almost unconscious arrogance of those still ini employment, and aware of the importance conferred on them by this fact. The per-1 petual affront to their pride, was more difficult for the; unemployed to endure than the hardships inseparable: from poverty. Yet the Craddocks in their: grey half-world were not unhappy all the time. As each, one of the five children i except Fred who married a tiresome woman and was felt, to have let the clan down): developed a special skill or ability, the rest strove by every means to give that one his or her “chance” to ex-! ploit it. “Father’s” prize-! winning leeks, and the impotent rivalry of his nextdoor neighbour are material for an amusing story, and the humiliation of being sent to a “workhouse” hospital to get over a bad burn which the panel doctor had neglected illustrates with pathos indignities suffered by the poor, and deeply resented as such by the victim, Mrs Craddock. The vignette of I a foolish cousin who married a local Casanova and livedi to regret it is another com-: pletely faithful slice of life;! and the author's scholarship from high school to Durham University foreshadows an academic distinction which' was realised by her taking a first in English when she graduated. This is a Book Society recommendation, and richly deserves that distinction.