CHAPTER VIII
BUYING, STORING, AND CARING FOR FOOD

The place where food is bought is important. How it is bought and when are also important questions. The usual plan for a Lambeth housekeeper is to make her great purchase on Saturday evening when she gets her allowance. She probably buys the soap, wood, oil, tea, sugar, margarine, tinned milk, and perhaps jam, for the week. To these she adds the Sunday dinner, which means a joint or part of a joint, greens, and potatoes. The bread she gets daily, also the rasher, fish, or other relish, for her husband’s special use. Further purchases of meat are made, if they are made, about Wednesday, while potatoes and pot herbs, as well as fish, often come round on barrows, and are usually bought as required. When she has put aside the rent, the insurance, the boot club money, and spent the Saturday night’s five or six shillings, she keeps the pennies for the gas-meter and the money for the little extras in some kind of purse or private receptacle which lives within reach of her hand. A woman, during the time she is laid up at her confinement, will sleep with her purse in her hand or under the pillow, and during the daytime she doles out with an anxious heart the pennies for gas or the two-pences for father’s relish. She generally complains bitterly that the neighbour who is “doing” for her has a heavy hand with the margarine, and no conscience with the tea or sugar.

The regular shopping is monotonous. The order at the grocer’s shop is nearly always the same, as is also that at the oilman’s. The Sunday dinner requires thought, but tends to repeat itself with the more methodical housewife, who has perhaps a leaning towards neck of mutton as the most interesting of the cheaper joints, or towards a half-shoulder as cutting to better advantage. It is often the same dinner week after week—one course of meat with greens and potatoes. Some women indulge in flights of fancy, and treat the family to a few pounds of fat bacon at 6d. per pound, a quality which is not to be recommended, or even to the extravagance of a rabbit and onions for a change. These women would be likely to vary the vegetables too; and in their accounts tomatoes, when tomatoes are cheap, may appear. It is only in the budgets of the very small family, however, that such extravagant luxuries would creep in.

In households where there is but one room there may be no storage space at all. Coal may be kept in the one cupboard on the floor beside the fireplace; or there may be such hoards of mice in the walls that no place is safe for food but a basin with a plate over it. One woman when lying in bed early in the morning unravelled a mystery which had puzzled her for weeks. She had not been able to find out how the food she kept on a high shelf of the dresser was being got at by mice. On the morning in question her eye was caught by movements which appeared to her to be in the air above her head. To her surprise, she realized that a long procession of mice was making use of her clothes-line to cross the room and climb down the loose end on to the high dresser shelf. They would, when satisfied, doubtless have returned by the same route had she not roused her husband. “But ’e ony terrified ’em,” she said sadly, “’e never caught one.” In such cases it is necessary for the housekeeper to buy all provisions other than tinned milk, perhaps, day by day. She probably finds this more extravagant—even to the extent of paying more for the article. Tea, butter, and sugar, by the ounce may actually cost more, and they seldom go so far.

Another reason for buying all necessaries daily is that many men, though in a perfectly regular job (such as some kinds of carting), are paid daily, as though they were casuals. The amounts vary, moreover. One day they bring home 4s. 6d., another 3s. The housewife is never sure what she will have to spend, and as the family needs are, so must she supply necessaries out of the irregular daily sum handed to her.

The daily purchases of the wife of a dustsorter are given below. The husband was paid 3s. a day in cash, which he brought regularly to his wife. He collected out of the material he sorted, which came from the dustbins of Westminster, enough broken bread to sell as pig-food for a sum which paid both the rent and the burial insurance. He also collected and brought home each evening enough coal and cinders to supply the family needs, and, curiously enough, he collected and brought home a sufficiency of soap. After paying 5s. for rent and 1s. for insurance, he had enough left from these extra sources of income for his own pocket-money. With rent, insurance, coal, and soap, provided, the housekeeper would have been well off indeed, as Lambeth goes, could she have laid out her money to better advantage. She never had more than 3s. at a time, and was accustomed to buy everything day by day. There was but one room. There were four children, who looked stronger than they were. The mother suffered from anæmia, and was not a particularly good manager, though she fed her children fairly well and seemed to be a moderately good cook. She had no oven. An account of how she laid out her 18s. is given on pp. 108, 109.

It is obvious that this is an extravagant way of buying. Not only is the woman charged more for some items, such as sugar and butter, which she prefers to margarine even at the extra price, but the daily purchase leads to larger amounts being used. Her husband is a teetotaller, but likes strong tea, and that very sweet. Hence 12 ozs. of tea, 3 lbs. of sugar, and 3 tins of milk. The baby was very young and the mother anæmic, and the 8d. for a girl to take it out is money usefully spent. Otherwise the infant would hardly ever have left the room, as her mother does the daily marketing when the baby is asleep. Since this account was made out the authorities have advised the family to take two rooms at an advanced rental of 2s., of which the father and mother each pay half. So the weekly list of purchases has now to be made out of 17s. The baby is six months old instead of five weeks, and the mother’s milk has completely failed her. Thus the expenses increase, while the housekeeping allowance is less.