A cold wind passes, hailing in the Autumn season. Soon now there will be no such luxury as light shawls and summer parasols. Slippers will give way to winter boots on the feet of even the most refined of women and graceful necklines will go covered by wool and fur.
Sounds all peaches and cream doesn't it?
Warm fires and hot drinks to keep away the chill of winter gales, warm the spirits, lubricate the vocal chords to birth endless discussions, debates, philosophies or merely polite conversation.
But this is not one of those stories.
Here one wears the same stout boots spring to winter and if they wear out, we wrap them in rags to keep them together and pray that we can afford new ones for the winter yet to come. The scent of roses and lavender are as absent as fresh air, shaven chins and buttons that match.
Here many live with the clothes on their backs, the empty purses to mock the empty bellies.
The food en even grater slap in the face when it hurts to chew with rotten teeth. Water like milk and charcoal and of a similar texture. Pigeons and ravens competing equally as the cities vultures for any skerrick of moth or maggot that the slaughter yard keepers may evict into the streets.
Men, women and children working fingers to bone and the bone to powder at countless workhouses. And within those windowed coffins the death toll at the hands of heavy machinery amounts to unfathomed scores.
Machines that cost livelihoods at first, now claim lives.
Great contraptions of steel and steam grinding their teeth of cogs and gears defying anyone so much as to step out of line and punish with their iron maws.
So on we work, the threat of poverty ever present, knocking with bent bony finger at our doors.
With conditions being as they are, neighbors are no longer neighbors but competitors, fiends and thieves that would steal the bread from our mouths, the laces from our boots or the hair off our heads had they only the chance.
Could any of us have known that the price of progress would cost so much more than ever it can hope to repay?
