… this is the beginnings of a children’s story about the process and proceeds of savings – not something on which I am actually particularly well qualified to pontificate, but maybe I meant to to be as much as lesson to myself as to any young readers…
Once upon a time there was a little black sack made of rough-woven fabric. Its top was tied shut with a piece of old, fraying rope, a simple knot to be undone by the quick twist of a human hand. Most of the time the little sack tried to lurk in dark corners or hide under sofas and beds where it would be hard for human hands to find it. That’s because it was a money sack and its job was to hold pieces of gold. Humans were supposed to put pieces of gold into its dark little opening for safe-keeping, and then take them out again later if they needed them. If the gold pieces stayed in the darkness inside the sack long enough, something magical would happen: big gold pieces would make little gold piece babies and if they stayed in the sack even longer, they would grow into big grown-up gold pieces that made babies of their own. But this was a small immature money sack. He didn’t know enough about ropes and types of knots yet to be able to stop greedy hands diving into him and snatching out gold pieces almost as soon as they came in. So there were very few them inside him and they never stayed for long, certainly not long enough to make gold piece babies. He still had so much to learn.