Round about a Pound a Week. Mrs. Pember Reeves
certainly the worse for drink on Saturday nights; but never once during sixteen months of weekly visiting did he omit to bring his wife her full allowance. He had kept his job for many years, and the explanation is that he was given tips at the theatre for which he worked. The tips he, not unnaturally, considered to be peculiarly his own.
One other man, who could make fair wages when in work, turned out thoroughly unsatisfactory. He was not a drunkard, but he would have been if he could have afforded it. Otherwise the record is fairly clear. Men who earned overtime money or who received tips might spend some of it on beer, but the regular wage was too close a fit to allow of much indulgence. Many of the men were teetotallers, and some did not even smoke.
It was found to be necessary, in order to secure the success of the investigation, to inaugurate a system of accurate accounts. In no case were these accounts already in being, and it was therefore the task of the visitors to teach each woman in turn to keep a record of her expenditure for the week. As the greater part of this volume is to do with these weekly budgets, this is a good opportunity to explain why they are credible evidence of real conditions.
A working man’s wife in receipt of a regular allowance divides it as follows: Rent; burial insurance; coal and light; cleaning materials; clothing; food. A short experience in helping her to sort her items on paper shows the investigator how to prove their accuracy. Rent is easy. There is always the rent-book if the family deals direct with the landlord; and if the rooms are sublet from the real tenant, the woman who sublets them is only too anxious to explain either that rent is owing or that it is paid regularly, and how much a week it is. Burial insurance is easy. The insurance-book tells the whole story. With regard to such items as coal, gas, soap, and food, experience enables an intelligent investigator to compare accounts of women who do not know of one another’s existence in such a manner as to know, almost before the woman has spoken, what she is likely to be spending. If a woman says that she is buying 1 cwt. of coal a week in the winter, and paying 1s. 6d. for it, dozens of other accounts of which she knows nothing corroborate her. If she says she is burning 1¾ cwt. in the winter, and spending 2s. 7½d., the price is known to be correct; it only remains to question the quantity. In one case the reason is that the rooms are basement rooms, very damp and very dark. In another there are eight children, with a very large copper fire to be kept going on washing-days. In a third no gas is laid on, and all the cooking has to be done by the stove. All these conditions are there to be seen. With regard to food the same test applies. Is the budget peculiar, or does it bear out thirty others, allowing, of course, for difference in size of family and in size of income? If it is peculiar, why? The explanation is generally simple and obvious. In cases where there is no explanation—of which there have been two only—the family is not visited any further. As a matter of fact, the budgets have borne out each other in the most striking manner. There seems to be so little choice in the manner of keeping a family on 20s. a week.
The women were with one consent appalled at the idea of keeping accounts. Not that they did not “know it in their heads,” as they anxiously explained; but the clumsy writing and the difficult spelling, and the huge figures which refused to keep within any appointed bounds, and wandered at will about the page, thoroughly daunted them.
Eight women were found who could neither read nor write. They said that it was not thought of much consequence when they were girls; but they evidently found it extremely humiliating now, from the difficulty with which the acknowledgment of their disability was pumped out of them. Of these eight, three had husbands who undertook the task for them. The men’s handwriting was excellent, the figures and spelling clear and correct, but at first details were lamentably absent. “Groceries,” even “sundries,” were common entries, and, as the scribe was always away at work, the visitor was left to the mercy of bursts of memory on the part of the mother, whose anxious efforts to please at any cost might land everybody concerned in further difficulties. The only method in such cases was to make her sit down and shut her eyes, pretend the visitor was her “young man” (generic term for husband), and think it out all over again. Pencil in hand, the eager listener caught and made accounts out of such recollections as these: “ ’E give me twenty-two bob a Satterday. After I put Ernie ter bed I went shoppin’ in the Walk.” Long pause. “I know I got ’arf a shoulder er mutton at 1s. 9d., an’ 3 pounds er pertaters, and they was 1½d., an’ a cabbage w’ich ’e said was as fresh as a daisy, but it turned out to be all fainty like w’en I come to cook it.” When the record is taken down in proper form, it is compared with the masculine accounts. If the two agree, jubilation; if not, why not? And we begin all over again. After a few weeks of such experiences the husband always reformed.
Other illiterate women employed an eldest child of perhaps ten or eleven years of age. In these cases a certain kind of painstaking accuracy could be relied upon, but, far from resorting to masculine short-cuts, these little secretaries usually went to the other extreme, and gave way to a prolix style, founded, doubtless, on the maternal manner of recollecting. One account, kept in large copybook hand by Emma, aged eleven, began as follows: “Mr. G’s wages was 19 bob out of that e took thruppons for es diner witch is not mutch e bein sutch a arty man. The rent was six and Mrs. G payed fower an six because Bobby’s boots was off is feet and his knew ones was one an six witch makes six and that leaves 12 an 9 and out of that,” etc. It took four pages of painstaking manuscript in a school exercise-book to complete one week. This serial story had to be reduced, though with regret, to the limits of ordinary accounts.
Other young scribes had special tricks, such as turning their fractions upside down or running two or more words into one. “Leggerbeef” and “dryaddick” recurred week after week in one book, and “lberpeces” in another. The first two only had to be pronounced to solve their own riddle, but the third had to be worried through recollection after recollection till it turned out to mean “1 lb. of pieces,” or 1 lb. of scraps of meat.
The women who kept their accounts for themselves were found to be better arithmeticians than they were writers. Their addition had a disconcerting way of being correct, even when the visitor seemed to get a different total. But, then, the spelling was sometimes beyond the sharpened wits of the most experienced Fabian women to comprehend. Great care had to be taken not to hurt their feelings as they sat anxiously watching the visitor wrestling with the ungainly collection of words and figures. “Coull” did not mean coal, which appeared as “coles” quite clearly lower down. It was Lambeth for cow-heel. “Earrins too d” meant “herrings, 2d.” “Sewuitt” is simple, more so than “suit,” a common form of “suet”; but “wudanole” and “curince” gave some trouble. They stood for “wood and oil” and “currants.” Seeing the visitor hesitate over the item “yearn 1d.,” the offended mother wrote next week “yearn is for mending sokes.”
Some of the women—in fact, the majority—wrote a good hand and spelled fairly well. Those who had before marriage been in work where anything of the kind was expected of them—such as that of a tea-shop waitress or of a superior domestic servant—quickly turned into interested and competent accountants. But the older women, and those who had had no reason to use a pencil after leaving school, had completely lost the power of connecting knowledge which might be in their minds with marks made by their hand on a piece of paper. These women were curiously efficient in a kind of mental arithmetic, though utterly at sea directly pencil touched paper. On the whole, accounts came into being sooner than at first sight seemed possible.
The women were suspicious and reserved. They were all legally married women, because the hospital from whose lists their names had been taken dealt only with married women. They conquered their reserve in most cases, but not in all. Some were grateful; some were critical. At the beginning of each case the woman seemed to steel herself to sit patiently and bear it while the expected questions or teaching of something should follow. She generally appeared to be conscious that the strange lady would probably like to sit in a draught, and, if complimented on her knowledge of the value of fresh air and open windows, she might repeat in a weary manner commonplaces on the subject which had obviously been picked up from nurse, doctor, or sanitary inspector.
They spoke well of their husbands when they spoke of them at all, but it is the children chiefly who fill their lives. The woman who said, “My young man’s that good ter me I feel as if somethink