An easy stroll from Thrift Street to Credit Crescent

Close to where I lived as a child there were two mid-Victorian streets, Upper and Lower Thrift Street.

The builder wanted to name the virtue that permitted him to prosper. He also immortalised the names of his relations in adjacent streets - Ethel, Edith, Cyril and Alfred. All, no doubt, benefited from the parental thrift.

I believe the houses in Thrift Streets were for sale to the virtuous poor - pioneer owner-occupiers, embodiment of Victorian values, back to which Mrs Thatcher wanted to take us.

Thrift certainly played a large part in our lives. We looked after the pennies. We wasted not, and although we wanted little, want wasn't entirely abolished by our habits of frugality.

Something was set aside for rainy days, many of which duly came in our social climatic zone. Older people still went to bed early, believing that to use electricity was "burning daylight".

We never knew whether enough was as good as a feast, because feasting was rare. People walked long distances to work, but superfluous journeys by foot were a waste of shoe leather.

Women were the supreme scrimpers and savers. In back rooms, as the red coals burned low and the chenille cloth on the table fluttered in the draught, they sat late with darning mushroom, stitching in time, repairing fraying heels of socks, turning worn sheets to the middle.

In almost every cellar was a metal last for mending shoes. Old people didn't believe in spectacles, they read the News of the World with a magnifying glass.

Some used free self-medication from the fields - comfrey leaves for sprains, even cobwebs to stop bleeding. They were proud they could make a meal out of nothing - a penn'orth of pot-herbs, a bloater and yesterday's bread sold at the bakery early in the morning.

Even their holidays were penitential - a picnic with a bottle of liquorice water and fish paste sandwiches, perhaps a week in a boarding house in Lowestoft - suet pudding for both courses, once with gravy and then with jam.

The greatest fear of these penny-pinching people was of debt. They told horror stories of acquaintances who had "fallen into the moneylenders' hands".

They knew debt would never be paid off, since interest consumed much of their income - a development confirmed by the experience of many third world governments in our time. They lived in fear they might end up in the workhouse - to which, of course, many people in the south have been condemned, in infernal sweatshops, where they help "service" debts their governments have contracted.

They had a horror of credit. To take goods on the never-never was abhorrent - items consumed before they had been paid for were stolen. When they looked back, they expressed pride that they had gone through the world owing a farthing.

"Who goes a borrowing, goes a-sorrowing." They could look anyone in the eye - even the Maker they still expected to meet - and give an account of themselves.

They were not modest: survival entailed heroic self-abnegation. They brought up their children to a virtuous austerity and felt they had accomplished what they had been put here to do. They expected little and got less.

They were stingy and stoical, values that penetrated the community. The improvident were virtual outcasts. As time went by they became stranded, their frugality redundant, their virtues became deviancy and their principles an object of scorn. When the good times came, they said it wouldn't last. Their children would live to regret their wasteful extravagance.

When Mrs Thatcher invoked Victorian values these had already been junked, as the by-passed practitioners of them recognised. Thatcher stressed archaic values, the better to conceal their disappearance. The rhetoric roused echoes among an older generation, but this made no difference to people who went deeper into debt. And the world prospered.

What would they have made of it now debt is our natural economic element? How would they react to the institutionalised living beyond our means, the hypothecated future, a world used up in advance? Was their restraint merely a reflection of discipline required for poorly rewarded labour? How swiftly these values have fallen away, overtaken by the equally compelling necessities of the very opposite of everything they believed.

It is easy to present affluence as progress, and to pity those under the delusions of an age of darkness. It will all go on for ever, won't it, the way we live now? The moneylenders' hands proved to be more tender than that generation could ever have imagined.

Indebtedness is a downy cushion, the day of redemption written into our mortgage arrangements. Nothing can ever change. But that is what they thought also, with their lives of frugal making and mending; and look what happened to them.

· Jeremy Seabrook is a writer and journalist