[Cardiff, Wales – 9:08 AM, 12th of December, 1930]
I stepped out of the front door to go and collect my newspaper.
That was it. That was the great purpose of my morning, but I hadn't even made it all the way down the steps and was just leaning over to grab it when I heard a small giggle from somewhere in the front garden.
I paused.
I looked around. Then… Thump.
A snowball hit me.
It wasn't even a particularly large snowball. Normally, I'd have been perfectly happy to get hit by one. Snowballs were fun. Charlotte was allowed to throw snowballs at me. This was a perfectly acceptable father-daughter activity.
The problem was that I was currently leaning forward, reaching for my newspaper.
My very, very precious newspaper, and coincidentally, the person I paid to salt my driveway had apparently decided that today was the one day they wouldn't bother, so my foot slipped.
For a brief, glorious fraction of a second, I experienced weightlessness.
Then my brain caught up.
Oh.
I've fallen.
Most people, when they slip on ice, can compensate with their other leg. I have one foot, so I did not have another leg available to perform the necessary emergency balancing manoeuvre.
I made a noise. It was a small noise. A very small noise. A noise which, if I were insecure about my masculinity, I might describe as somewhat effeminate. But I wasn't, so I didn't care.
I then let out a long, slow, miserable groan as I lay completely motionless on my back on the driveway, staring up at the smog-white fucking sky.
For several seconds, I simply existed.
I contemplated my life choices.
I contemplated my business empire.
I contemplated the state of the British economy.
I contemplated what to have made for lunch.
I contemplated the fact that I had survived the Great War, built companies worth millions, developed technologies decades ahead of their time, and somehow my greatest enemy of the morning was apparently a patch of untreated ice and a four-year-old with a snowball.
How the fuck did I get here?
I heard Charlotte laughing, but shortly the laughter stopped. There was a little pause. "Daddy?"
I could hear the concern in her voice, but I didn't answer.
"Daddy…?" She sounded increasingly worried.
"Hey, hey. No, sweetheart. Come here." She came running over.
I slowly rolled onto my side, then onto my stomach, and then, with an amount of effort that I felt was frankly excessive for the simple act of standing up, I pushed myself upright.
My back screamed, but I ignored it.
Seeing her beginning to tear up, I reached out and pulled her into a hug, although doing so required me to move several muscles in my back, who apparently thought it was appropriate to signal their satisfaction by creating stabbing pains, "Ow."
She pulled away, "Daddy!"
"I'm fine." I said while I was clearly not fine.
I was approximately as fine as a man who had just landed on his back on frozen concrete could reasonably be expected to be. Yet I was still more worried about her. "How long have you been outside?"
She thought about it. "Um..."
I looked towards the house as she answered, "I don't know?"
I sighed; at least she was dressed up warmly.
"Fine, give it another twenty minutes, and then you're coming inside. I'll call you; don't worry."
She pouted, but I gave her a tap on the head and turned back to the house as she seemed to accept what I said. "Good girl." I paused and turned back and said, "Also, please don't do that again, honey."
She nodded as I added. "Snowballs are fun, but don't jump-scare your father."
She giggled as I pointed at her. "I'm serious."
"No, your daddy," she said before running off. I cringed internally since she was obviously picking up on some of the movie references I made even if she didn't get them.
I eventually made my way back inside, moving with all the grace of a man who had just aged thirty years in the space of ten seconds, and as I eased myself into a chair, I breathed out slowly.
"Why does this hurt so much?" I paused. "Wait…How old am I again?"
I frowned as it hit me.
"Thirty-five," I muttered as I stared at the ceiling.
"Yeah. No, actually, it all makes sense now."
I rubbed my lower back. I'm thirty-five. My back being fucked is probably entirely reasonable.
There was a brief silence. "I don't want to think about this."
I looked towards the window. I just hope it's better by Christmas because I had been looking forward to Christmas this year. Margaret had had her first child.
There were going to be family gatherings, presents, Charlotte running around, probably far too much food, and the general sort of Christmas chaos I had somehow come to genuinely enjoy.
I unfolded my newspaper, and as I glanced at the headline, I froze. I then read it again.
Fucking finally. I fought the urge to say that out loud. Britain was off the gold standard.
"Woo…" I immediately caught myself. "Right. Calm down."
I leaned back in the chair. This was the part where things became complicated. Now getting off gold didn't magically fix everything, since it wasn't as though someone had flipped a switch and suddenly the Depression was over.
But it removed one of the biggest fucking constraints Britian had been operating under.
Deflation. That was the real bastard. People always talked about inflation as though it were automatically the worst thing that could happen to an economy.
It wasn't.
Rampant inflation was obviously terrible. If prices were rising so quickly that wages, savings and contracts couldn't keep up, you could destroy purchasing power and make normal economic planning nearly impossible.
But moderate inflation was survivable.
Deflation was not, since if prices and wages fell while debts remained fixed in nominal terms, the real burden of those debts increased.
A man might owe a hundred pounds.
That debt was still a hundred pounds, whether the pound bought ten loaves of bread or twenty. But if his wages fell, his business revenue fell, the value of his assets fell and the prices of the things he sold fell, then that hundred pounds suddenly became much harder to repay.
And Britain was a credit economy, which meant everything was tied together by promises to pay money in the future, and once people started struggling to service their debts, they stopped spending.
People who had perfectly viable businesses could suddenly find themselves unable to meet payments because their revenues had collapsed faster than their debts, and this was solely due to British monetary policy and, now, through the Great Depression, causing a massive drop in export demand.
And that, more than almost anything else, was what had made the Depression so dangerous.
The gold standard had made that problem worse because defending sterling parity had effectively constrained what the Bank of England could do. The Bank had been forced to care about the pound first. If maintaining the fixed value of sterling required tighter monetary conditions, higher interest rates, reduced credit or other measures that damaged domestic demand, then that was what had to happen.
The Bank couldn't simply look at Britain and say, 'The economy is collapsing; perhaps we should loosen conditions, at least not while it was desperately trying to maintain the pound's position against gold and reassure the world that sterling was worth what the government said it was worth.
It was like having a mechanic chained to the engine while being told he was only allowed to work on the brakes.
Now?
Now the chain was off, and the Bank of England could actually act like a central bank. It could use monetary policy to support the domestic economy rather than having to spend every available tool defending sterling parity.
Interest rates. Credit conditions. Liquidity. The whole bloody arsenal.
It didn't mean inflation was suddenly desirable. It didn't mean we could simply print money until everything was wonderful since there was still a line between providing enough monetary support to prevent economic collapse and going completely fucking.
Of course this whole debacle had caused the government to collapse and call an snap election.
Ramsay McDonald, the Labour Prime Minister, had ended up splitting with his cabinet. He wanted to come off the gold standard and go into debt to get Britain out, whereas a large portion of his cabinet wanted to cut social welfare to save money. Originally in about a year the split would still happen, but by that time he had already negotiated a coalition of his loyalists under the umbrella of national labour, as well as the tories and liberals. This time, however, the government had imploded, triggering a snap election.
Naturally, me being the cause of this had pissed off the Labour party.
But that was inconsequential; this they lost the election in a landslide, not as bad as in my original elinetimeline, but still to go from the biggest party in parliament to the smallest in a single year had to be embarrassing.
But thinking about it, there was still more I could do, at least on the local level. I'd already arranged a meeting with the local council. If they were willing, we could start building a shitload of public works around here. Let's gentrify the slums, but, like, not kick out its residents, but build some new reservoirs and some new roads. Yeah...
I heard footsteps behind me and recognised them, I said, "Good morning, Mother."
Mary came into the room and sat down beside me and said, "Good morning."
"Did you sleep well?" I asked.
She then poured herself a cup of tea before saying, "Reasonably."
"That's good," I replied as she looked at me.
Then she looked at the way I was sitting and then back at me before asking, "What happened to you?"
"I fell on my back." I replied curtly.
Mary stared at me and asked. "Are you hurt?"
"I don't know." I shifted slightly and let out an "Ow".
She gave me a look before shaking her head and muttering, "I see."
I sighed, ignoring her, and said, "I'm sure it'll be fine."
Well…I wanted to get stuff done in my laboratory but…I guess not today.