To these items of vague knowledge she added a few particulars. As to income, I learnt that her husband—a labourer on a farm some three miles away—earned fifteen shillings a week during the winter, and rather more in the summer months, when he was allowed to do "piece-work." The piece-work had the further advantage of permitting him to begin so early in the day—four o'clock was his time in summer—that he usually got home again by four in the afternoon, and was able to do better than most men with his garden. Amongst other things, he raised flowers for sale. He was wont to send to a well-known nursery in Norfolk for his seeds—china-asters and stocks were his speciality—and he reared his plants under a little glass "light" which he had made for himself out of a few old window-sashes. His pains with these flowers were unsparing. Neighbours laughed at him (so his wife assured me, with some pride) because he went to the plants down on his hands and knees, smoking each one with tobacco to clear it from green aphis. He also raised fifty or sixty sticks of celery every year, which sold for threepence apiece. Meanwhile he by no means neglected his main business as a cottage-gardener—namely, the growing of food-crops for home use. By renting for five shillings a year an extra plot of ground near his cottage, he was able to keep his large family supplied with potatoes for quite half the year. It was much to do. They wanted nearly a bushel of potatoes a week, the wife said; and if that was so, the man was adding, in the shape of potatoes at half a crown a bushel, the value of more than three pounds a year to his income. No doubt he grew other vegetables too—parsnips, carrots, turnips, and some green-stuff—but these were not mentioned. A little further help was at last coming from the family, the eldest daughter having begun to pay half the rent out of her earnings as a servant-girl.
Help certainly must have been welcome. There were two other girls in service, and therefore off their parents' hands; but six children—the youngest only a few months old—were still at home, dependent on what their father and mother could earn. Of these, the eldest was a boy near thirteen. "I shall be glad when he's schoolin's over," the mother said; and she had applied for a "labour certificate" which would allow him to finish school as a "half-timer," and to go out and earn a little money.
Since their marriage, twenty-three years earlier, the couple had occupied always the came cottage, at a rental of three shillings a week. After the first twenty years—the property then changing owners—the first few repairs in all that long period had been undertaken. That is to say, the outside woodwork was painted; a promise was given to do up the interior; the company's water was laid on; and—the rent was raised to three-and-sixpence. The woman thought this a hardship; but she said that her husband, looking at the bright side of things, rejoiced to think that now the water from the old tank, hitherto so precious for household uses, might be spared for his flowers.
After the rent was paid—with the daughter's help—there were about fourteen shillings left. But the man was an "Oddfellow," and his subscription was nine shillings a quarter, or eightpence halfpenny a week. In prudence, that amount should perhaps have been put by every week, but apparently prudence often had to give way to pressing needs. "When the club money's due, that's when we finds it wust," the woman remarked. "Sometimes I've said to 'n, 'I dunno how we be goin' to git through the week.' 'Oh,' he says, 'don't you worry. We shall get to the end of 'n somehow.'"
But she did not explain, nor is it easy to conceive, how it was done. For observe, the weekly bushel of potatoes did not feed the family, even for half the year. "A gallon of potatoes a day, that's what it is," she had said; and then she had enumerated other items. "A gallon of bread a day," was needed too, besides a gallon of flour once a week "for puddings." In other words, bread and flour cost upwards of six shillings weekly. Seeing that this left but eight shillings for eight people, it is small wonder that the club-money was rarely put by, and great wonder how the family managed at all when the club-money was wanted in a lump. It must have been that they went short that week. For instance, they would do without puddings, and so save on flour and firing; and the man would forego his tobacco—he had never any time to visit the public-house, so that there was nothing to be saved in that direction. Yet assuming all this, and assuming that the eldest daughter advanced a few extra shillings, still the situation remains baffling. On what could they save, out of eight shillings? Probably one or other of the children, or may be the mother herself, would make an old pair of boots serve just one more week, until there was money in hand again; and that would go far to tide the family over. Yet the next week would then have to be a pinched one; for, said the woman, "boots is the wust of all. It wants a new pair for one or t'other of us purty near every week."
So far this woman's testimony. It is corroborated by what other cottagers have told me. A man said, looking fondly at his children: "I has to buy a new pair o' shoes for one or other of us every week. Or if I misses one week, then next week I wants two pair." Others, again, have told of spending five to six shillings a week on bread. But of the less essential items one never hears. Even of clothes there is rarely any talk, and of coal not often; nor yet often of meat, or groceries. I do not suggest that meat and groceries are foresworn, but it would appear that they come second in the household expenses. They are luxuries, only to be obtained if and when more necessary things have been provided. With regard to firing—a little coal is made to go a long way in the labourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes—it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales," for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources are really spread out. Apart from a few cases of palpable destitution, it is not obvious that any families in the village suffer actual want; and seeing that inquiries in the school in recent winters have failed to discover more than two or three sets of children manifestly wanting food, one is led to conclude that acute poverty is of rare occurrence here. On the other hand, all the calculations suggest that a majority perhaps of the labouring folk endure a less intense but chronic poverty, in which, at some point or other every day, the provision for bare physical needs falls a little short.