ON THE PERMANENT LIST
(1905)
Now also when I am old and grey-headed,
O God, forsake me not.
"Spend but a few days in the police-court," says Juvenal, "and then call yourself an unhappy man if you dare." Had he sat on a Board of Guardians, he would doubtless have included that also as a school of personal contentment.
All sorts of griefs and tragedies are brought up before us, some of them abnormal and Theban in horror, some of them so common that we seem to hear them unmoved: an honest man who cannot find employment, women with unborn babes kicked, starved, and deserted, children neglected or tortured, poor human beings marred in the making, the crippled, the diseased, the defective physically and mentally, too often the pitiful scapegoats for the sins of the race.
All these things seem too terrible for words or tears; it is the cheeriness and humour of the poor, their pluck and endurance, their kindness and generosity one to another, that bring a lump to the throat and a dimness to the eyes.
We are a very careful Board, and pride ourselves on the strict way in which we administer our small amount of out-relief; to get it at all one must be, as an applicant observed, "a little 'igher than an angel," and so it is the very aristocracy of labour that files past us this morning, men and women against whom even the Charity Organization Society could find no fault, a brave old army, seventy and eighty odd years of age, some of them bent and crippled with rheumatism and weight of years, short of breath, asthmatic, hard of hearing, dim in vision, but plucky to the last, always in terror of looking too ill or too old, and being forced into the workhouse.
A few, like Moses, do not suffer the usual stigmata of age. "Their eye is not dim, nor their natural force abated."
"How do you keep so young?" said our chairman, half-enviously, to an applicant eighty years of age, but upright still, with hair thick and untinged with grey.
"'Igh living does it, sir," replied the old man, as he took his food tickets for the week, amounting to 3s. 1¾d. One old lady of eighty-two runs a private school, and, in spite of the competition of free education and palatial school buildings, she has six pupils, whose parents value individual attention and "manners" at sixpence per head a week. She is fully qualified and certificated, and is a person of strong views and much force of character, and not only holds Solomon's opinions upon corporal punishment in theory, but still puts them into practice. I wonder which of us will have the conviction and energy to cane boys at eighty-two?
We are a very clean Board, and every half-year the relieving officer brings a report as to the condition of the homes; but some of the old people are so withered and shrunken, and their span of remaining life is so short, that there seems little left both of time and space in which dirt can collect, and I always hope death will free them before they are brought into the bleak cleanliness of the House.
Lately in the workhouse one old man took such an affectionate leave of me that I asked him if he felt ill. "Not yet, ma'am, but I have got to have a bath to-night, and the last one I took turned me so queer I was laid up ten weeks in the infirmary. It does you no 'arm, ma'am, very likely—I've 'eard say as the gentry is born and bred to it—but when they starts a-bathing of us poor people for the first time at eighty in them great long coffins full of water, no wonder our rheumatics comes on worse than ever. And then, ma'am, you forget as you ladies and gentlemen 'ave a drop of something hot to keep the cold out afterwards, and I don't blame you for it, but that we never gets."
On the whole, the old ladies keep themselves wonderfully clean and smart, and the cheap drapery stores in the vicinity of the workhouse do a great trade twice a year in violets and rosebuds at 1¾d. a dozen for the adornment of bonnets; feminine instinct is not atrophied by age, and the applicants know the value of a good appearance before "the gentlemen." The old men are not so clever, and when deprived of the ministrations of a wife they seem to have no idea of "mackling" for themselves, and too often lapse into a fatal condition of dirt and hugger-mugger. Sometimes the reports are brought by daughters, nieces, or neighbours, or sometimes "only the landlady"—that abused class showing often much Christian charity and generosity.
Some of the old people have led such blameless lives that members of the C.O.S. offer to take them up and save them from the Poor Law, a privilege they do not always fully appreciate.
"No, thank you, sir, I don't want to go there. I've 'eard of the Charity Organization, and the questions as they ask—Mrs. Smith told me they sifted and sifted her case and give her nothing in the end. I'd rather have a few ha'pence from you, sir."
"But you will be a pauper!" said one of the Guardians, in a sepulchral voice of horror.
"Oh! I don't mind that a bit, sir. My mother was left a widow and on the parish at forty. I'm sixty-seven, and I'd work if I could, but they turned me off at the laundry because the rheumatics has stiffened up my fingers, and I can't wash any more, and I don't see why I shouldn't come on the parish now."
Having no vote, and being accustomed to be classed in the category of "lunatics, criminals, and idiots," no wonder the term "pauper" conveys little opprobrium to women.
"Bother the House!" says another spirited old laundress, who complains that "a parcel of girls" are preferred before her. "I'm too young to come in there. I'm only seventy, and I'll wait till I'm eighty."
One poor old man has his relief stopped because his wife is reported as "a drinking woman," though he is told he may still draw the money if his wife enters the House. "Thank you, sir, my wife does not come into the workhouse. She has a glass sometimes, but she is never the worse for liquor, and she's been a good wife to me. Spiteful gossip, sir. Good morning!" and he walks out, an honourable and loyal gentleman fallen on evil days.
Sometimes cold and starvation is worse than they thought, and they do come in; sometimes they die. The body of an old man was lately fished out of the pond, and at the inquest it was stated that he had lost his employment after thirty years at one place. The firm had changed hands, and the new manager had told him, brutally, "he wanted no old iron about." At seventy-five one is a drag in the labour market, and the poor old fellow, feeling acutely that he would only be a burden on his sons and his daughters, asked neither for out-relief nor indoor-relief, but stood his mates a drink with his last shilling, and took the old Roman method.
However, light seems dawning through the darkness, and I think many Poor Law Guardians will rest better in their beds knowing that old-age pensions seem to have come into the sphere of practical politics.
THE PAUPER AND THE OLD-AGE PENSION[2]
On January 1st the receipt of Poor Law relief ceases to be a disqualification for old-age pensions, and some interesting statistics have been compiled by the Daily Mail which show that only about 17 per cent. of old people in the workhouses are applying for their 5s. per week. These are the figures for England and Wales. In the Metropolitan area, where rents are high, and the smallest room cannot be had under two shillings or half a crown a week, the proportion will be lower still.
At first sight these figures are very disappointing, and it seems to some of us who have counted so much on this reform as if we cannot escape from the evils of the workhouse system. But a little thought will show how impossible it is for this generation of old folk to take advantage of the change; the wished-for has come too late; they have burnt their ships, or rather their beds, sold up "the little 'ome"; they have neither bag nor baggage, bed nor clothing. They are like snails with broken shells. There is no protection against the rude world, and once having made the sacrifice, few people over seventy have the pluck to start life afresh. It is hardly worth while; for them the bitterness of death is past.
A committee of our Board has held three special sessions for the purpose of interviewing these old people, and the answer has come with wearying monotony, "No, thank you, five shillings would be no good to me. I have nowhere to go." Some have sons and daughters, but "heavy families" and crowded rooms dry up filial piety. There is no place for the aged father or mother in our rack-rented city, and the old people accept their fate with the quiet philosophy of the poor. The long string of human wreckage files past us, some bowed and bent with the weight of years, others upright and active, some with the hoary heads of the traditional prophets, others black-haired and keen-eyed still, for the "high living" of the workhouse, as is often remarked, preserves youth in a miraculous way. Some are crippled and half-blind, others suffer with deafness—an ailment of poverty, which very naturally grows worse under inquisitive questioning—and nearly all have rheumatism. A curate once told me that he was summoned to a sick parishioner who was "troubled in mind," and wanted to make his peace with Heaven, but the only sin he could remember was "the rheumatics." The disease seems to be a national sin.
One hears the country accents of the United Kingdom—the burr of Northumbria, the correct English of East Anglia, the rough homeliness of Yorkshire and the Midlands, the soft accents of Devonshire and the West, the precision of the foreign English of the Welsh mountains, the pleasant ring of the Scottish tongue, the brogue of old Ireland. Few seem Londoners. Take any group of people, and see how few of her children London seems to bring to maturity.
It is our last meeting to-day, and we go to visit those who cannot attend, the sick and bed-ridden in the infirmary—a mere form, for these are vessels which will sail no more, sea-battered, half-derelict, nearing port, and for them the dawn will break in the New Jerusalem. Some are palsied and paralysed and half-senile, but now and again keen old eyes look at us from the whiteness of the ratepayers' sheets and regret they are "too old to apply."
Very ancient folk live in these wards, and their birthdays go back to the tens and twenties of last century, one old lady being born in the historic year of 1815. An old man, jealous of her greater glory, says he is 109, but our register of age gives the comparatively recent date of 1830. Few of them seem to have any friends or visitors. Children are dead, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have forgotten them; but they do not complain, age mercifully deadens the faculties, though their terrible loneliness was once graphically written on my brain by the speech of an old Irishwoman: "I am quite alone, lady; I have no friends but you and the Almighty God."
We have interviewed 103, and only eleven have applied for the pension. The wished-for, as I have said, has come too late; but another generation will be saved from "the House" and will be able "to die outside," so often the last wish of the aged.
The merciful alteration in the law will save this generation of "outdoor poor." Old people in the late sixties have no longer been dying of starvation in the terror of losing the pension through accepting poor relief, and the greater independence of the State pensioner is heartening many. "On the Imperial taxes," said an old gentleman with a somewhat low standard of cleanliness, "I can be as dirty as ever I like."