Failing to listen
Sir: Alexander Chancellor's report (21 March) of the vile treatment of a 20-yearold student by a London branch of the Midland Bank forcibly takes me back to the Oxford 01 1946, where I was an ex-RAF married undergraduate at Wadham.
My wife was carrying our first child, and our annual income, by government grant, was, I recollect, some £400. We were then in credit at our local bank, which was the Midland at its Cornmarket branch, to the tune of five or six pounds, with a new term's grant approaching. One morning my wife called at the bank to ask the manager for permission to overdraw to the extent of £15.
When I returned from the morning's lecture (by C.S. Lewis, at Magdalen, I remember) to our flat in Holywell, I found my poor wife in tears. The bank manager had, fairly enough, asked why we wanted our small overdraft? 'Because I am going to have a baby, and we need a pram.' Whereupon he launched into a tirade, saying that young people in our position, subsidised by the government, had no business to have children; that we were irresponsible; and that she should be ashamed of herself.
We got our f15 overdraft in the end; our new pram; our new baby and — as soon as I could afford it — a new bank. This is why, whenever I hear that appalling jingle beseeching me to 'talk to the "Middleund" . . . the listening Bank', I want to throw up.
David Pugh
24 Aghmer Square, St Austell, Cornwall
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