The day my pay got pinched

George Morgan

1938

My father Les, died in 1938 when I was only 14-year-old. In those days you left school the first chance you got to get a job and bring some money into the household. On the day in question I'd been working for the Forestry Commission at Bowden Moor near Melrose in the Scottish Boarders.

I used to cycle from my home in Galashiels to Bowden Moor or, if the weather was bad with snow, I'd take the train to Melrose and walk all the way up the hill to the moor which is what I'd done that day. The work involved sawing into lengths trees that had been blown over, kneeling down in slush and snow. The Sawmill was built in a hollow and when the snow melted you were working in icy cold water half way up your legs.

The first time I worked with a fellow I thought of as an old man, although he was probably no more than 35 or 40. He was wee and wiry and could work hard. He taught me how to saw; always pulling never pushing once the sawing started, nothing moving except your arms. At the time I was cutting railway wagon bottoms. The lengths had to be picked up out of freezing water and put through the saw, cold spray going over you, unable to feel your hands for the cold. You got used to it; we were all in the same boat.

The pay was 25/- a week, paid fortnightly. My mother was looking forward to that extra money coming in. My mother hadn't had an easy life. She'd lost her first love, my eldest brother's dad, in the First World War and then she lost my dad when she was only 40. She worked hard. I can still picture her in the outside washhouse, steam everywhere, scrubbing away on a washboard, doing all the washing by candlelight.

Anyway, at the end of the first fortnight at Bowden Moor I got my pay, signed for it and put it in the pocket of an old Army jacket I wore. I buttoned the pocket and hung the jacket in the shed, no more than 50 yards from where I was working. When we finished work that night some of the lads were going to have a bag of chips in Melrose before catching the train back to Galashiels. I went into my pocket to take out some of the money for chips and it was gone... all of it. There was no money there.

I walked all up and down the road again looking to see if it could possibly have dropped from my pocket. Then it dawned on me, someone had stolen my first two weeks' pay from my jacket while it was hanging in the shed. That was that.

I was just a young lad. I'd worked hard in cold and miserable conditions for two weeks for nothing. And the worst of it was my widowed mother, who'd been so looking forward to this extra money coming in, would have to wait another two weeks.

I'll never forget it.