Round about a Pound a Week. Mrs. Pember Reeves
they meet the wall. Where the landing should be, but is not, two doors leading into a front bedroom and a back stand opposite one another, and open directly on to the steps themselves. Coming out of a bedroom with a child in their arms, obscuring their own light from the door behind them, many a man and woman in Lambeth has trodden on the edge of a step and fallen down the stairs to the ground below. There is no hand-rail, nothing but the smooth wall on each side.
Of the four little rooms contained in such a house, perhaps not one will measure more than 12 feet the longer way, and there may be a copper wedged into the tiny kitchen. A family of eight persons using three rooms in a house of this kind might let off the lower front room to an aunt or a mother at a rent of 2s. 6d. a week, live in the kitchen, and sleep in the two upstairs rooms. The advantage of such a way of living is its privacy. The single lodger, even if not a relative, is less disturbing than would be another family sharing another house. When the lodger is a relative, a further advantage is that a child is often taken into its grandmother’s or aunt’s room at night, and the terrible overcrowding is relieved just to that extent.
In some districts four rooms may be had for 8s. a week—on the further side of Kennington Park, for instance. Here the plan of the house is more modern. The stairs face the front door, have a hand-rail and any light which the passage affords. The front room may be 12 feet square, and the kitchen, cut into by the stairs, 10 feet square. There is a tiny scullery at the back, which is of enormous value, as the 10 feet square kitchen is the living-room of the family—sure to be a fairly large one or it would not take four rooms. Upstairs are three rooms. Two at the back will be very small, and the front one, extending the whole breadth of the house, perhaps 15 feet by 12 feet. A family of ten persons, now living in a house like this, lets off one of the small back bedrooms at a rental of 2s., and occupies the four remaining rooms at a cost of 8s. a week. The copper belongs to the woman renting the house, who makes what arrangements she pleases with her lodger in regard to its use.
There are four-roomed cottages in Lambeth where there is no passage at all. The front door opens into the front room. The room behind opens out of the front room. The stairs lead out of the room behind, and twist up so as to serve two communicating rooms above. Here the upstairs tenants are forced to pass through both the rooms of the lower tenants every time they enter or leave the house. The inconvenience and annoyance of this is intense. Both exasperated families live on the edge of bitter feud.
There are two-roomed cottages reached by alley-ways, where both tiny rooms are below the level of the pathetic garden at the door. Here one sanitary convenience serves for two cottages. Here the death-rate would be high, but not so high as the death-rate in the dismal basements.
Where two families share a six-roomed house, the landlady of the two probably chooses the ground-floor, with command over the yard and washing arrangements. The upstairs people contract with her for the use of the copper and yard on one day of the week. The downstairs woman hates having the upstairs woman washing in her scullery, and the upstairs woman hates washing there. Differences which result in “not speaking” often begin over the copper. Three rooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs would be the rule in such a house, the downstairs woman being answerable to the landlord for 13s. a week, and the upstairs woman paying her 6s. Each woman scrubs the stairs in turn—another fruitful source of difficulty. Some of these houses are frankly arranged for two families, although the landlord only recognises one tenant. In such cases, though there is but one copper, there will be a stove in an upstairs room. In some houses the upstairs people have to manage with an open grate and a hob, and nearly all of them have to carry water upstairs and carry it down again when dirty.
On the whole, the healthiest accommodation is usually to be found in well-managed large blocks of workmen’s dwellings. This may be as dear as three rooms for 9s., or it may be as cheap as three very small rooms for 5s. 6d. The great advantages are freedom from damp, freedom from bugs, light and air on the upper floors, water laid on, sometimes a yard where the children can play, safe from the traffic of the street. But there are disadvantages. The want of privacy, which is very great in the cheaper buildings, the tendency to take infection from other families, the noise on the stairs, the inability to keep a perambulator, are some of them. Then there is no such thing as keeping the landlord waiting. The rent must be paid or the tenant must quit. The management of most buildings exacts one or two weeks’ rent in advance in order to be on the safe side. A tenant thus has one week up her sleeve, as it were, but gets notice directly she enters on that week. In some buildings the other people, kindly souls, will lend the rent to a steady family in misfortune. A carter’s wife—one of the cases in the investigation—had her rent paid for ten weeks, while her husband was out of work and bringing in odd sums far below his usual wage, by the kindness of the neighbours, who saw her through. She was in good buildings, paying a low rent, and as she said, “If I’d a-got out of this I’d never a-got in agen.” She paid off the money when her husband was in work again at the rate of 3s. 6d. a week.
The three-quarters of a small house or the half of a larger house are likely to be less healthy than “buildings,” because houses are less well-built, often damp, often infested with bugs which defy the cleanest woman, have as a rule no water above the ground-floor, and may have fearful draughts and no proper fireplace. Their advantages are the superior privacy and possibly superior quiet, their accessibility from the street, and, above all, the elasticity with regard to rent. On the whole, the actual landlord is by no means the monster he is popularly represented to be. He will wait rather than change a good tenant. He will make no fuss if the back rent is paid ever so slowly. To many respectable folk, keeping the home together on perhaps 22s. a week, this is an inestimable boon. It is wonderful how, among these steady people, rent is made a first charge on income, though naturally, given enough pressure, rent must wait while such income as there is goes to buy food.
Rents of less than 6s. a week are generally danger-signals, unless the amount is for a single room. Two rooms for 5s. 6d. are likely to be basement rooms or very small ground-floor rooms, through one of which, perhaps, all the other people in the house have to pass. One of two such rooms visited for fifteen months measured 8 feet by 12 feet, had doors in three sides of it, and was the only means of exit at the back of the house.
Two sets of basement rooms at 5s. 6d. visited during the investigation were extremely dark and damp. In both cases the amount of coal burned was unusually large, as was also the amount of gas. One of these basements was reached by stairs from within the house, the other from a deep area without. The former was warmer, but more airless, while the latter was impossible to warm in any way. The airlessness of basement dwellings is much enhanced by the police regulations, which insist on shut windows at night on account of the danger of burglary! Both the women in these two homes were languid and pale, and suffered from anæmia. The first had lost three children out of seven; the second, one out of four.
Four and six paid for two rooms meant two tiny rooms below the level of the alley-way outside—rooms which measured each about 12 feet square. A family of six persons lived in them. Four children were living, and five had died.
The question of vermin is a very pressing one in all the small houses. No woman, however clean, can cope with it. Before their confinements some women go to the trouble of having the room they are to lie in fumigated. In spite of such precautions, bugs have dropped on to the pillow of the sick woman before the visitor’s eyes. One woman complained that they dropped into her ears at night. Another woman, when the visitor cheerily alluded to the lovely weather, answered in a voice of deepest gloom: “Lovely fer you, miss, but it brings out the bugs somethink ’orrible.” The mothers accept the pest as part of their dreadful lives, but they do not grow reconciled to it. Re-papering and fumigation are as far as any landlord goes in dealing with the difficulty, and it hardly needs saying that the effects of such treatment are temporary only. On suggesting distemper rather than a new paper in a stuffy little room, the visitor was met with the instant protest: “But it wouldn’t keep the bugs out a minute.” It would seem as though the burning down of such properties were the only cure.
The fault is not entirely that either of the sanitary authorities or of the immediate landlords. Nor is the blame to be given to the people living in these houses. In spite of being absurdly costly, they are too unhealthy for human habitation. Sanitation has improved vastly in the last