SCARS OF POVERTY

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 17

SCARS OF POVERTY

Thomas Burke, author of "Limehonse Nights," felt and still feels the effects of early poverty. He has no patience with the saying that poverty is not a crime, for his own experience has taught him that it is punished as severely as though it were . a crimo. And any one who reads his description of it must agree that it is a real punishment. He tells us that "Tha main horror of being born poor is not material, but moral. Every man who has escaped carries secret scars of slights and insults and scorns. From this moral stigma of class against class I suffered far more than from the material miseries of poverty— hunger and insanitary homes and fatigue and wet boo.ts. On one of my holidays from school, two of my people were minding a big house in the country, the. property of an ancient family; and they were permitted to have me with them. I had the run of the estate, and on the family's return I met the children of the house in the paddock. "They said, 'Hullo!' I said, 'Hullo!' They said, 'Is the woodpecker's nest still in the tree behind the stables?' I said, ' I don't know.' They said, 'Let's all go and see.' We went, and wo got on well together for about an hour, until their mother arrived, when somehow the party was broken up. Next day I heard her talking to one of the gardeners. 'Who is that bad-mannered little fellow? . . . Who? . . . Well, teach him that the housekeeper's boy says 'Sir' when ho speaks to Master Charles and Master Leonard.' Aftur that we no more were friends. When I and the boys did meet in the garden or in the paddock, I addressed them as instructed; and that 'sir' became a barrier. Years later, when I had published my first volume of poems, I met them a:jain, and they were full of congratulations. But there was a memory between us that made those congratulations worthless."