The mini-Budget has set me desperately thinking about money again and the fiscal fragility of our times.
I don’t mind saying that some of us are not happy with this electronic, plastic credit-carded and coded world.
Some of us take to it like a duck takes to water. But at least a duck can keep her head above it.
Mysterious banks-in-the-wall that dispense money at all hours at the introduction of a pass card, computerised computations, video display terminal interrogation… they all scare me clean out of my overdraft. When I’m financially video displayed it can be very terminal indeed.
So I am making my last stand, a man resistant to all change except small change.
I still have the school penny bank book mentality and I’m proud of it.
Born and bred financially in an era when the bank man called at school and we young pupils enjoyed that magic moment of the entry in the bank book while breathing heavily on this scion of capitalism, I have always thought big and saved small.
Pocket-money pay day of brown pennies, shining threepences and occasionally the circular sleekness of the two bob bit was a time for mental arithmetic of the most serious and studied nature, juggling the cost of a comic with such brainwashing slogans as Thrift Means Merit, Pennies Grow to Pounds and Sensible Savers Make Solid Citizens.
And at least I eventually achieved solidity even if I didn’t make much sense.
Nevertheless, in those tender days, when the amount had been settled upon, the school bank book was brought from its place behind the clock. This was a stately clock that chimed through half a dozen country kitchens in its career and was a repository for cream cheques and fodder bills as well.
It was on the mantelpiece and, in the course of time, turned out to be the nearest thing I ever got to high finance.
One studied one’s school bank book, tucking away the allotted money, usually wrapped in grease-proof paper so that other people wouldn’t get their greasy hands on it.
There was a kilometre to cover to school, every step fraught with peril.
There were pig-tailed Delilahs waiting for me, moist of lip and bright of eye, saying they wouldn’t mind my being on their short list if we detoured to the store on the way and inspected the lolly jars, glinting with sugared lust.
But I knew what that money meant. It had meant cleaning out the fowlhouse, one of the great subjugations of youth practised earlier in the century.
Neighbouring bulls bellowed sonnets
It had meant feeding the calves, thrusting one’s fingers into the bucket of skim milk and letting these bovine slobberers nearly tear off one’s fingers under the delusion they were at their mother’s teats.
It meant minding cows on the road where the grass was lush while jolly neighbouring bulls bellowed sonnets across the paddocks.
Money gained from such travail was not lightly surrendered. And so to school on penny bank day, avoiding the small Ned Kellys and rural Shylocks, the kids who squandered their book money on perfidious puffballs.
Psst… lend us threepence and you can wear my footy guernsey.
Eventually the schoolhouse was reached safely and later one came into the presence of the bank man, who praised thrift and how-much-this-week, who greeted you as one would greet a future captain of industry or a landholder of consequence who at the moment had nothing much more than a sniffle and a jam smear on the left nostril.
So the money was taken, the transaction recorded, the bank man departing with his bag of thrift to be duly placed behind the great steel walls of the bank where that mysterious breeding process known as interest would begin.
I felt released, purged, uplifted after my school bank day. The book was taken home and the entry inspected by a suspicious mother. The bank book was returned to its place behind the wise old clock.
The fowlhouse inmates were working hard to provide me with new income, the calves bellowed for sustenance. Liquidity was abroad and Thrift Means Merit refrained through my brain.
So I have kept my penny bank-book psychology, unshaken by the cash inflows, the Wall Street rallies, the Futures furore and all the economic gobbledegook. Conditioned by caution, financially inarticulate and a non-freak at figures, I have remained in the backwaters of economic intercourse.
I still present my savings bank book and avoid all the glamorous cliches of plastic cards that leap at me from the walls of this temple of transactions.
“Your bank book is full. Do you really need a new bank book or will you easybank your way into the 20th century?” asks the beautiful, young teller.
I recoil from her as if she has offered me an asp. I watch her place the cancelled stamp on my old bank book.
“Be gentle with it,” I say.
She anoints my new bank book and slides it to me with amused fingers and I steal away, mouthing my balance.
Sometimes I wish we’d go back to the old-fashioned system of barter. At least then I’d know which side my bread was bartered on!
Max Fatchen