LEGACY ENDS ORDEAL

Evening Star, Issue 21719, 14 May 1934, Page 1

LEGACY ENDS ORDEAL

AMAZING POVERTY MOTHER AND SON IN HOT A woman sixty-four years old and A man of forty—mother and son—have lived in England in the twentieth century at Wisbech. St. Mary, in a hub near Cambridgeshire 6ft long, 4ft wide, oft 6in high. They lived there for nine years.

'Hie mother and son owned no beds. If they had possessed them, they had no room to erect them, says a correspondent of the ‘ Daily Express.’ They slept in ch airs—the woman in an armchair, the son in a hard bentwood kitchen chair. They slept there for nine years. .

No one came to see them; neither local authority nor sanitation inspector- neither kindly neighbour—there was none—nor -minister of religion. The villagers were scared or them; five white oats—emblems of witchcraft •—sat on the roof of the hut cat&wariling to the moon. Within a stone’sthrow ran. the highway of civilisation, the main Eenland road, thronged with motoring luxury, cycling comfort, pedestrian content. And 300 ft away—say, rather, 300 years away—two people dragged out the existence of the medieval dungeon, where food was dependent on the caprice of a warder and close walls were designed to prevent the inmates from lying down. But now their martyrdom is over. A windfall legacy has ended their penury. SOME STRANGE SIGHTS. : The mother and son are Mrs Cathe'rine Eliza Piggott and Mr Archibald David Hugh Piggott. The correspondent went to see them—hut he saw only the hut. It stands on county council property. It should be translated bodily into a museum of the dwellings of the dawn of civilisation. A rotting armchair, a battered wooden chair, a wooden box, and a leaky oil stove . . . that was _ all the furniture. Rents gaping in the walls, stuffed futilely with paper. . . . A rat scampering across the floor—hence the cats. . . . Pendent from the roof, paper bags filled with hats of the fashion of 1919. . . . For Mrs Piggott had not always been poor. She was an heiress—the daughter of Mr and Mrs Isaac: Page, of Great Horksley Manor House, near Colchester. She married the late Mr _ David Piggott, an elementary school teacher.' She set him up in a school in Ealing. Later she financed a school for him in Cross. . The PigssoftSj mother and son, were found in tOe.i/HiXury of a three-ropmed' l ,' ’ cottao-e, in this village. Mrs Piggottj ; s little.’ * ov-h-iired woman in .black, vivaciousv ueSpite ■'hep vdeafness; from her chair to shake hands witn' •• the caller. Her son came forward in his rough farm labourer’s gaiters. “You must take us as you find us,” he said. “My mother and I have been in this cottage only a few days. But—we have beds at last.” He pointed proudly to two iron single bedsteads. STORY OF THE PAST. “I cannot tell you how strange w« feel sitting in a large room after the years in our own hut. Its size appals me. When I take a step forward I feel as though I were going, to fall against the wall. I suppose a bird which has* escaped from ay cage must feel just like we feel now. “But what about your legacy?” the man was asked. “We don’t know very much about it yet. We don’t even know how mucii has been left to us,” was the reply. “ It all began by a letter we received the other -week' from a firm of Col- ; Chester solicitors saying that if my ‘ mother’s parents were the people the writer believed, then ‘ we shall he able to give her good news and help her financially.’ “Then the solicitor came to see us.He left us £3 on account until other formalities were settled, and here we are.” ; Mr Piggott began talking about the distant past. “ A couple of years after her marriage my mother had an income of her own of about £I,BOO a year. She drew on both, income and capital to set up my father as; the head master of an expensive private school—Theobald’s College, in Waltham Cross., I was born about that time. But things went badly with my, father. Finally he went bankrupt, went down and down until we were almost penniless. , ; ( “At last in desperation my father emigrated-alone—to Canada. There he died. My mother and I went back to Cambridge. 1 scraped some money together and started a fish business. It failed. Then I went into the cloth, ing business. But my entire capital—■nearly £3oo—which I had kept hidden, was stolen. After that things tvent from had to worse. LIVING ON ROOT'S. " Nine years ago we came here. W« had heard" there was money to he made in the fruit-picking season. We were both taken on as extra hands, but my mother suffers from heart attacks and neuritis. She wasn't able .to work for long. “ I scraped together a few pounds and bought the hut we have just left. It was leased by the county council to a small-liolder who let mo live there for a ground rent of 12s fid a year. So poor did we become that even this fell into arrears for more than three years. “I have not the heart to tell you what we have gone through during the last nine years. I got odd jobs as a farm labourer. Many a time we had no food at all in the hut. I lived on roots like a child in a fairy story.

“Once—the winter before last —I had nothing to eat for three clays. Mother never knew it and does not know it to this day, for I left a small supply of bread in the house for her. ‘‘You may ask why we did not go to the workhouse. I was determined not to do that while I could keep a roof over our heads—even though it was not a very big roof,” the man added, with a bitter pride.