Round about a Pound a Week. Mrs. Pember Reeves
be low if some of these houses are to be considered habitable at all, and if others are to be inhabited by two, and often by three, families at the same time.
The landlords might use a different system with advantage to the great majority of their tenants. To insist on letting a whole house to tenants who are invariably unable to afford the rent of it is to contract out of half the landlord’s risks, and to leave them on the shoulders of people far less able to bear them. A woman who can barely stagger under a rent of 6s., 7s., or 8s., may at any moment find herself confronted with a rent of 10s. 6d. or 15s., because, in her desperate desire to let at all, she is forced to accept an unsatisfactory tenant. Turned into a landlord in her own person, she is wonderfully long-suffering and patient, but at the cost of the food of her family. If ejectment has to be enforced, she, not the real landlord, has to enforce it. She goes through great stress rather than resort to it. Houses intended for the use of more than one family should, I consider, be definitely let off to more than one family. Each tenant should deal direct with the landlord.
The tenants might do more for themselves if they understood and could use their rights—if they expected to be more comfortable than they are. They put up with broken and defective grates which burn twice the coal for half the heat; they accept plagues of rats or of vermin as acts of God; they deplore a stopped-up drain without making an effective complaint, because they are afraid of being told to find new quarters if they make too much fuss. If they could or would take concerted action, they could right a great many of the smaller grievances. But, when all is said and done, these reforms could do very little as long as most of the present buildings exist at all, or as long as a family of eight persons can only afford two, or at most three, small rooms to live in. The rent is too dear; the houses are too old or too badly built, or both; the streets are too narrow; the rooms are too small; and there are far too many people to sleep in them.
The question is often asked why the people live where they do. Why do they not live in a district where rents are cheaper, and spend more on tram fares? The reason is that these overburdened women have no knowledge, no enterprise, no time, and no cash, to enable them to visit distant suburbs along the tram routes, even if, in their opinion, the saving of money in rent would be sufficient to pay the extra outlay on tram fares. Moreover—strange as it may seem to those whose bi-weekly visit to Lambeth is like a bi-weekly plunge into Hades—the people to whom Lambeth is home want to stay in Lambeth. They do not expect to be any better off elsewhere, and meantime they are in surroundings they know, and among people who know and respect them. Probably they have relatives near by who would not see them come to grief without making great efforts to help them. Should the man go into hospital or into the workhouse infirmary, extraordinary kindness to the wife and children will be shown by the most stand-off neighbours, in order to keep the little household together until he is well again. A family who have lived for years in one street are recognised up and down the length of that street as people to be helped in time of trouble. These respectable but very poor people live over a morass of such intolerable poverty that they unite instinctively to save those known to them from falling into it. A family which moves two miles away is completely lost to view. They never write, and there is no time and no money for visiting. Neighbours forget them. It was not mere personal liking which united them; it was a kind of mutual respect in the face of trouble. Even relatives cease to be actively interested in their fate. A fish-fryer lost his job in Lambeth owing to the business being sold and the new owner bringing in his own fryer. The man had been getting 26s. a week, and owed nothing. His wife’s brothers and parents, who lived near by, combined to feed three of the four children; a certain amount of coal was sent in; the rent was allowed to stand over by a sympathetic landlady to whom the woman had been kind in her confinement; and at last, after nine weeks, the man got work at Finsbury Park at 24s. a week. Nearly £3 was owing in rent, but otherwise there was no debt. The family stayed on in the same rooms, paying 3s. a week extra as back rent, and the man walked daily from south of Kennington Park to Finsbury Park and back. He started at five in the morning, arrived at eight, and worked till noon, when he had four hours off and a meal. He was allowed to lie down and sleep till 4 p.m. Then he worked again till 10 p.m., afterwards walking home, arriving there at about one in the morning. A year of this life knocked him up, and he left his place at Finsbury Park to find one in a fish-shop in Westminster at a still slightly lower wage. The back rent is long ago paid off, and the family, now with five children, is still in the same rooms, though in reduced circumstances. When questioned as to why he had remained in Kennington instead of moving after his work, the man pointed out that the back rent would seem almost impossible to pay off at a distance. Then there was no one who knew them at Finsbury, where, should misfortune overtake them again, instead of being helped through a period of unemployment, they would have nothing before them but the “house.”
It is obvious that, in London at any rate, the wretched housing, which is at the same time more than they can afford, has as bad an influence on the health of the poor as any other of their miserable conditions. If poverty did not mean wretched housing, it would be shorn of half its dangers. The London poor are driven to pay one-third of their income for dark, damp rooms which are too small and too few in houses which are ill-built and overcrowded. And above the overcrowding of the house and of the room comes the overcrowding of the bed—equally the result of poverty, and equally dangerous to health. Even if the food which can be provided out of 22s. a week, after 7s. or 8s. has been taken for rent, were of first-rate quality and sufficient in quantity, the night spent in such beds in such rooms in such houses would devitalise the children. It would take away their appetites, and render them more liable to any infection at home or at school. Taken in conjunction with the food they do get, it is no wonder that the health of London school-children exercises the mind of the medical officials of the London County Council.
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