During the war, when good food was so hard to get in even high-priced restaurants, I formed the habit of taking my own lunch. In a little while I realized that this habit had another value besides that of insuring me pure, cleanly prepared food—it enabled me to accept invitations to meals with tenement-dwellers without embarrassment to them or myself.
The day to which I refer on entering their flat I found the family in the act of sitting down to their midday meal. This was not my first meal with the mother and school-children, though it was with the father of the family. Being at work on a building near his home he had come in to lunch.
“Do you think wages can remain at their present level?” I questioned.
He shook his head—his mouth being filled for the time being by boiled potato and roast beef.
“And I ain’t saying that we wanter keep ’em as high as they are,” he added, as soon as he could speak. “Things can’t go down as long as wages are as high as they are. We wants things to go down. It’s ridicklus the prices we has to pay for the things we eat and wear when we’re not at war. Food and clothes oughter be plentiful and cheap, but that don’t mean that wages has got to be what they was before the war.”
“What does it mean?” I asked, and I realized that not only the mother but every one of the five children were listening.
“It means that we’ve got to have our share, that’s what it means.” Though his words were emphatic he was not the least bit rude, for my being a wage-earner insured my sympathy with his point of view. “I’m tired seeing my missus skimp and slave, and not have a second frock to her back, nor a second pair of shoes, like she done before the war. She’s got glad rags now, not so many of ’em, but I’m going to see that she gets more. Well, she can’t get more if the builder and contractor pockets all the profits while we workers hardly gets our salt.”
“It ain’t that so much—my having Sunday clothes,” the mother put in, as, having helped herself to a boiled potato and gravy she took her seat. “It’s the children. They’re growing up and I wants they should have good food and a chance to get through school before they goes to work.”
“Through high school, mum,” the eldest girl corrected. “I want to be a teacher.”
Another time I lunched with a family of which the father was a plumber and at table. It is an unusual occurrence, or was at that time, to find the man of the house at home in the middle of the day, except on Saturdays and Sundays.