When I was a kid, my mother used to regale us with tales from the Great Depression.

From our comfortable middle-class setting, it was hard to believe she was talking about the same country.

Her father was out of work as the country pitched into an economic morass in the early 1930s. She would tell us – calmly but resolutely – that they did not always know where their next meal was coming from.

For Christmas one year she got an orange – and was happy to get it.

Things were that tough.

But she always made a point that has stayed with me all these years. She said that while living through the Great Depression was no treat, the reality of it was that it was not that big a drop-off from what their lives had been before the economy nosedived. As a family they had often struggled.

She always worried about what might happen if things took a similar turn today. She wasn’t convinced that today, with our advance lifestyle, we could accept a simpler, tougher existence.

We’re finding that out now. Back then, people did not have all that much to begin with, so when hard times hit, they simply shrugged and went about living through the tough times.

Today, we are pampered, used to the comforts of our lives. The fall is much farther than it was in 1929.

We live comfortable lives. We’re not all that used to scraping by. We’re beginning to see that is not always guaranteed.

My mom’s words echo in my head these days, and I recalled them on Sunday as I read the similar remembrances of Great Depression survivors in the Sunday Times.

Marge Hoon sounded just like my mother. She talked about how her father found work with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.

“That’s the only way we had any income,” she said.

She also said something that could have come right out of my mother’s mouth.

It was a differerent era, a different time, indeed different people. No one bought things they could not afford. Today’s housing crisis, spurred in large part by mortgages given to people who clearly could not afford them, simply would never have been considered then.

“People were not buying the houses like they are now and getting themselves in debt,” Hoon commented.

Exactly.

Mildred Johnson talked of how they grew a lot of their own food and take in some money by selling what they did not use.

They were a different breed. I wonder now if we could hold up today under similar conditions.

And I fear we just might get the chance to find out.