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."