Round about a Pound a Week

by Mrs. Pember Reeves

Why? Well cooked the day before, and eaten with milk and sugar, all children liked porridge. But the mothers held up their hands. Milk! Who could give milk—or sugar either, for that matter? Of course, if you could give them milk and sugar, no wonder! They might eat it then, even if it was a bit burnt. Porridge was an awful thing to burn in old pots if you left it a minute; and if you set the pot flat on its bottom instead of holding it all to one side to keep the burnt place away from the flame, it would “ketch” at once. An’ then if you’d happened to cook fish or “stoo” in the pot for dinner, there was a kind of taste come out in the porridge. It was more than they could bear to see children who was ’ungry, mind you, pushin’ their food away or ’eavin’ at it. So it usually ended in a slice of “bread and marge” all round, and a drink of tea, which was the breakfast they were accustomed to. One woman wound up a long and patient explanation of why she did not give her husband porridge with: “An’, besides, my young man ’e say, Ef you gives me that stinkin’ mess, I’ll throw it at yer.” Those were the reasons. It is true that to make porridge a good pot which is not burnt, and which is not used for “fish or stoo,” is needed. It is also true that to eat porridge with the best results milk is needed. If neither of these necessaries can be obtained, porridge is apt to be burnt or half cooked, and is in either case very unpalatable. Children do not thrive on food they loathe, and men who are starting for a hard day’s work refuse even to consider the question. What is the mother to do? Of course, she gives them food they do like and can eat—bread and margarine or bread and jam, with a drop of hot weak tea. The women are very fond of Quaker oats when they can afford the luxury, and if milk is provided to drink with it. They can cook a little portion in a tin enamelled cup, and so escape the family saucepan.

Another difficulty which dogs the path of the Lambeth housekeeper is, either that there is no oven or only a gas oven which requires a good deal of gas, or that the stove oven needs much fuel to heat it. Once a week, for the Sunday dinner, the plunge is taken. Homes where there is no oven send out to the bakehouse on that occasion. The rest of the week is managed on cold food, or the hard-worked saucepan and frying-pan are brought into play. The certainty of an economical stove or fireplace is out of the reach of the poor. They are often obliged to use old-fashioned and broken ranges and grates which devour coal with as little benefit to the user as possible. They are driven to cook by gas, which ought to be an excellent way of cooking, but under the penny-in-the-slot system it is a way which tends to underdone food.

Table appointments are never sufficient. The children hardly sit down to any meal but dinner, and even then they sometimes stand round the table for lack of chairs. Some women have a piece of oilcloth on the table; some spread a newspaper. So many plates are put round, each containing a dinner. The eating takes no time at all. A drink of water out of a tea-cup which is filled for each child in turn finishes the repast.

Equipment for cleaning is one of the elastic items in a budget. A Lambeth mother would like to spend 5d. on soap, 1d. on soda, 1d. on blue and starch. She is obliged in many cases to compress the expenditure to 3d. or 5d. all told. She sometimes has to make 2d. do. There is the remains of a broom sometimes. Generally there is only a bucket and a cloth, which latter, probably, is the quite hopelessly worn-out shirt or pinafore of a member of the family. One woman heard of soda which could be bought in The Walk for less than the traditional 7 pounds for 3d., and, in her great economy, supplied her house with this inferior kind. She scrubbed and washed and cleaned with it till her poor arms lost all their skin, and she was taken into the workhouse infirmary with dangerous blood-poisoning. There she stayed for many weeks, while sisters and sisters-in-law took care of her children at a slight charge for mere food, and the husband, who was earning steady wages, looked after himself. He said it was more expensive without her than with her, and never rested till he got her home again.

The cleaning of the house is mostly done in the afternoons, when dinner is disposed of. Scrubbing, grate-cleaning, bed-making, are attended to after the return to school and to work of the children and husband. The baby and ex-baby are persuaded to sleep then, if possible, while the mother, with due regard to economy of soap, cleans out her little world. She has hardly finished before the children are back for tea, and after tea the washing up.

Two pennyworth of soap may have to wash the clothes, scrub the floors, and wash the people of a family, for a week. It is difficult to realise the soap famine in such a household. Soda, being cheap, is made to do a great deal. It sometimes appears in the children’s weekly bath; it often washes their hair. A woman who had been using her one piece of soap to scrub the floor next brought it into play when she bathed the baby, with the unfortunate result of a long scratch on the baby from a cinder in the soap. She sighed when the visitor noticed the scratch, and said: “I sometimes think I’d like a little oven best, but now it do seem as if I’d rather ’ave two bits of soap.” The visitor helpfully suggested cutting the one piece in two, but the mother shook her experienced head, and said: “It wouldn’t last not ’arf as long.”

Clothing is, frankly, a mystery. In the budgets of some women 6d. a week is set down opposite the item “clothing club” or “calico club.” This seems meant to provide for underclothing—chiefly flannelette. One shilling is down, perhaps, against “boot club.” Other provision in the most thrifty family there seems to be none. A patient visitor may extract information, perhaps, that the father gets overtime pay at Christmas, and applies some of it to the children’s clothes, or that he is in a paying-out club which produces anything from 13s. to 26s., or thereabouts, at the end of the year. But in the great number of cases there is no extra money at Christmas, or at any other time, to depend upon. In the poorer budgets items for clothes appear at extraordinary distant intervals, when, it is to be supposed, they can no longer be done without. “Boots mended” in the weekly budget means less food for that week, while any clothes which are bought seem to be not only second-hand, but in many instances fourth- or fifth-hand. In the course of fifteen months’ visiting, one family on 23s. a week spent £3 5s. 5½d. on clothes for the mother and six children. Half the sum was spent on boots, so that the clothes other than boots of seven people cost 32s. 9d. in fifteen months—an average of 4s. 8d. a head. Another family spent 9d. a week on boots and 9d. a week on clothes in general. There were four children. Some families, again, only buy clothes when summer comes and less is needed for fuel. The clubs to which extra careful women, or women with more money for housekeeping, subscribe, are generally run by a small local tradesman. Whether they work for the benefit of their clients, or whether, as seems far more likely, they are run entirely in the interests of the proprietors, has not been a subject of research for the investigation. They fill a want. That is evident. Women bringing up a family on 20s. or even more a week need to have a definite expenditure in order to know where they are. They like to buy the same things week after week, because then they can calculate to a nicety how the money will last. They like to do their saving in the same way. So much a week regularly paid has a great attraction for them. If the club will, in addition to small regular payments, send someone to call for the amount, the transaction leaves nothing to be desired. A woman who can see her way towards the money by any possibility agrees at once. Payment by instalment fascinates the poor for the same reason. It is a regular amount which they can understand and grasp, and the awful risk, if misfortune occurs of losing the precious article, together with such payments as have already been made, does not inflame their imaginations. If people living on £1 a week had lively imaginations, their lives, and perhaps the face of England, would be different.

Boots form by far the larger part of clothing expenses in a family of poor children. Most fathers in Lambeth can sole a little boot with some sort of skill. One man, a printer’s handyman, spends some time every day over the boots of his children. He is a steady, intelligent man, and he says it takes him all his spare time. As soon as he has gone round the family the first pair is ready again. The women seldom get new clothes; boots they often are entirely without. The men go to work and must be supplied, the children must be decent at school, but the mother has no need to appear in the light of day. If very badly equipped, she can shop in the evening in The Walk, and no one will notice under her jacket and rather long skirt what she is wearing on her feet. Most of them have a hat, a jacket, and a “best” skirt, to wear in the street. In the house a blouse and a patched skirt under a sacking apron is the universal wear. Some of the women miraculously manage to look clean and tidy; some do not. The astonishing difference made by a new pink blouse, becomingly-done hair, and a well-made skirt, on one drab-looking woman who seemed to be about forty was too startling to forget. She suddenly looked thirty (her age was twenty-six), and she had a complexion and quite pretty hair—features never noticed before. These women who look to be in the dull middle of middle age are young; it comes as a shock when the mind grasps it.

In connection with clothing comes the vexed question of flannelette. To a mother, they all use it. It is warm, soft, and cheap. The skirts for two children’s petticoats can be bought for 4d.—the bodies, too, if the children are tiny and skill is used. What else can the women buy that will serve its purpose as well? It is inflammable—the mothers know that, but they hope to escape accident—and it is cheap enough to buy. Better, they think, a garment of flannelette than no garment at all! They would use material which is not inflammable if there were any they could afford which is as warm and soft and unshrinkable as flannelette. The shops to which their calico clubs belong stock flannelettes of all the most cheap and useful and inflammable kinds. Flannel, merino, cashmere, woollen material of any kind, are dear in comparison. Enough unshrinkable stuff to make a child a new warm, soft dress can be bought for 6d. A woman with 6d. to spend will buy that stuff rather than let her child go without the dress. It is what we should all do in her place. A child must be dressed. Give any London magistrate 6d. a week on which to dress four children; give him a great deal of cooking, scrubbing, and housework, to do; put a flannelette shop round the corner: in exactly four weeks each of those children would be clothed in flannelette.