He was a patient little fighter, and had, with his lame leg, kept up somehow with the ranks of the workers, and had never begged a meal or a shilling in his life, and was, in a way, happy for all his frustrated longing for the open life of the country.
Out from Newcastle-on-Tyne another day of my tramp I picked up with a worker in the building trade. He was not a tramp, for he had a house of his own and a wife of whose house-wifery he was very proud. But he was unemployed, and had been for some months. That morning he had got up at five o'clock to tramp eight miles to a suburb of Newcastle in the hope of getting a place on a little church-repairing job employing three masons. He had not succeeded, and was tramping the eight miles back again. A penny fare on the tram would have saved him some two miles, but pennies were not to be spent lightly.
A homely, domestic man, typically English in his virtues and in the limitations of his virtues, was my mason friend. In the good times of the past he used to make 35s., 37s. 6d., and £2:1:6 a week at his trade, "steady work and constant." As a bachelor he found that all his money went as fast as he made it. After one long spell on £2:1:6 a week he had nothing at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for some of it back in the middle of the week like some men did. Thirty shillings she had, regular, when he was in work, and she saved some of it." Whatever the balance was, 5s. or 7s. 6d. or 11s. 8d., was for himself. That was his pocket-money, and he spent it in a moderate and sensible roystering, and on other comforts of the manly life.
The virtues of his wife as a housekeeper he talked of sturdily. Such a thing as baker's bread—"nasty, unwholesome stuff"—was never seen in his house: it was all home-baked bread. Part of the secret of the housekeeping in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material" of their meals, having the food cooked free. I was interested to learn that 11-1/2d. a week was charged to each of the lodgers for the flour used in his bread—not an extravagant weekly expenditure on that item of food.
THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE
A good average man this, not at all heroic, common-sensible, and strictly moderate in his virtues, keeping a very good margin of his wages for himself, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in work, and nothing at all but the lodgers' money at other times; probably, too, she is happy enough. May a change of fortune soon bring steady work!
Studied from the English country-side the life of the lowly appeared to me often pitiful but rarely abject. It was relieved from squalor by much heroic courage; and by evidences of that beautiful love of the green fields which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more depressing, for there one encounters a vast army in which are mingled inextricably poor victims worthy of the fullest compassion, and cunning "wasters" who, finding it easy to live without work, are resolved not to work.
To the "professional unemployed," I believe, the autumn entry into London is a blessed relief. He knows all the charities which can be worked for food and shelter. He has put in his penitential period in the country to give a reasonable air to the tale that he has been in work, and prepares with zest to tap the old springs of alms. London promises him winter comfort, human companionship; warm nights in shelters, when politics can be discussed and the state of the nation learnedly argued; amusing tests of his skill in bamboozling charitable societies. To the genuine seeker for work a first impression of London must be terrifying. The place is so vast, so inchoate. It seems to suggest a great organised mass into which no newcomer can hope to penetrate.