THE WAY THE POOR LIVE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume L, Issue 8999, 23 January 1906, Page 6

THE WAY THE POOR LIVE.

(By L. C. Cornford, in the London Standard.)

A dark and filthy passage leads direct from the street into the back yaj-d, which is choked with unmentionable obscenities. A steep and broken stair, caked with dirt, its balusters taken long ago for firewood, lises just within the front door. On the left hand a door, colored red, and crazily numbered in black paint-, opens into a seven-shilling room. A woman is sifting cinders on the floor. As the visitor enters she rises to begin at once, with the easy politeness of the poor, a domestic conversation. She has the even, tawny complexion of the cave-dweller, who scarce ever sees the face of the sun, or feels the wind on her cheek. In her dark eyes lives a latent defiance, instant to sparkle upon provocation. Her husband, who is out of health, sells trifles on a tray beside the pavement. Sometimes he will make as much as 2s in a twelve-hour day, but not often. There is a boy in the room, nursing his knee beside the fire. He has a fair, stolid countenance, and his clothes are festoons of rags. He ought to be set to a trade; but his parents, with an eye to immediate pence,, and with the usual entire disregard of the future, encourage him to sell papers. The selling of papers

is, of course, the ruin of such boys. They make a little, they learn nothing except quite delusive information! concerning hor3e-racing, and in due time they are walking the streets, destitute. There are four children besides our young friend by the fire who is meditating upon his future. Tea to twelve shillings a week does this family scrape up between them. Seven go for rent.

PITIABLE SQUALOR.

The two internal walls of the room are wooden partitions, colored a dxill red, the other walls being of a neutral tone that once was whitewash. The ceiling is broken,

revealing the laths. A bed, covered with a dingy covering, fills the corner behind the door. Another smaller bed has sacking and an old coat or two upon the mattress. The shelves beside the fireplace are' neatly set with, cups and saucers, and adorned with pink tissue paper. On the table beneath the shut window, are piled two old cigar boxes, a couple of tattered books, an empty bottle, a plate with a crust of bread on it, a dirty knife, a dirtier spoon, an empty mustard pot. and an old hat. The mantelpiece has its little row of ornaments, gilt vases and china figures. Some miserable relics of clothing are hung on a

line to dry.

A pale woman with a ohild some months old in her arms stops On her way to join in the conversation. She has seven children, has this lady, and she and her husband are both in the penny toy line. Four hours she stood beside the pavement yesterday, the child in her arms, proffering her tray of poor trifles, and she took exactly fourpenoe. Upon the same day her husband made tenpence. Climb the stairs with caution, and do not touch the handrail as you go. Upon the next floor is the same- kind of room — dull red partitions, clouded walls, broken ceiling, shut windows. Upon a little deal table in the middle of the floor are one or two cups, a knife, and a plate on which is a slice of cold pudding, which is the whole commissariat. Here, too, is the spare china, ranged on shielves, hung with pink tissue paper. A handful of coke is heaped in the corner beside the fire. " Upon the bed a stout boy is sleeping in his clothes beneath a rug. He is a paper seller, and he keeps late hours. He is wasting his youth as fast as possible in- that disastrous occupation. But with the rent at six and six what Avould you have? The woman is down upon her knees, scrubbing the floor. As the visitor enters 3119 rises, and stands for a moment, as if listening Then she takes a step forward and peers into the visitor's face. Her eyes are wide, and strangely filmed over, so that they are like the eyes of the dead. She is' nearly blind, and her case is hopeless, and beside the stout boy slumbering on the bed she has three children, who are at school Her husband is a casual laborer. We all know what that means. Despair draws nearer to her every day, looking into her darkening eyes ; yet she is wholly apathetic. She has no time to feel, in the unending, hopeless treadmill of daily circumstance — met but never conquered.

HOW THE CHILDREN LIVE.

In another house, not far off, the mother of .a small family is also scrubbing the floor. It is a top room, and tire water must be carried up three nights of stairs, for the only water supply is the tap in the back yard. She heats the water by putting the pail on the fire. On the bed aTe three small children, islanded there out of the way, and playing among the foul rags and the sacking. One is a thin, wan child of four, her light hair falling about a smudged and tearful face. She has been upset during the night. Yesterday she had no food all day, until evening, when her mother gave her a penny and sent her out to buy some. She bought roa.sted cheesenuts fwm a street-vendor, and ate them then and there. Her bead is burning, her pulse is rapid, her eyes are inflamed. She declines to go to bed, and her mother acquiesces. She must suffer Jvlong as she can. Another child, with j rich red hair, all unkempt, has just returned from hospital. She was there for

«x week^s, after pulling over the sauce -

pan boiling on the open fire. Her mother, with at sort of pride, pulls dawn her little dreJs and shows the thin chest,

which is all one white scar.

In another

house a family occupies two small roomd, the larger of which is lighted only by a closed skylight. ~ They, too, are in tlie penny toy line, and ten to twelve shillings is the most they can make. The women in the adjoining rooms come together' in the foul, dark passage, eager to-falk; for talk, though objectless, is always a relief. They are all in like case; one of them has lost a baby from whooping congh, and barely saved the other*' child. Another" has A husband who earns iair .wages and drinks

them away. So they are all enclosed in a net of evil circumstances. Of such are the inhabitants of the furnished room, which is, it is hardly necessary to remark, no better than an ulcer, eating into the core of civilisation. The Housing and Sanitary Acts give ample powers to local bodies — always provided that the borough can afford to buy out the landlord — and the ulcer remains, extirpated here and there, to appear again yonder. Deal with the matter how you will, every argument comes inevitably to the same point, the crux of the problem, which, in a word, is the system of land tenure. It is small wonder that every discussion of the question among workmen themselves inevit ably resolves itself into the advocacy of .some sort of Socialism.

At the same time, it 4s idle to cast the whole blame upon a vicious system. Much of the fault belongs to the individual. There is hardly a man who, had he a will, could not soon or late wrench himself free from the poisoned kennel of the furnished ioom. A case of point, among others A married man, with three ohildren, a casual laborer, fell to the furnished room. He had a vice—it matters not what — which kept him there, and nearly destroyed his family. But not quite. His will was roused, and he broke free. How IBy means of his parish clergyman and the panson's valiant body of assistants. They failed, and this failed, and still parservered. To-day that prisoner, escaped a slow death, has his two comfortable rooms in a respectable quarter; his ohildren are well fed and clean; himself is a man to be trusted. He works early and late, and sets his hand to any odd job, and he makes eighteen shillings a week. He has five children now, and the miracle of keeping them fed and clothed and clean is daily performed on eighteen shillings a week.

Such is the value of personal equation in the case of the East End parson — a value which the social reformer, in the building of his systems, can no more afford to disregard than he can afford to ignore the alternation of day and night. Another- instance. You have seen the children in the furnished room, their home. You shall see them when t!he parson has succeeded in partly removing them from that vile contact in «. different district from the one whose habitations I have .(not without discreet suppressions, to spare your feelings) described,'- but 'in which the same conditions are present.

WORK AMONG GIRLS.

In Spitalfields the rector has secured part of an airy, oroomy house, in which are a sitting room, scullery, bathroom, and dormitories. Here the girls, whose parents live in one room, so soon as they begin to go out to work, come in every night to sleep. The Nest — as they call it — ie under the charge of a lady, who teaches the girls cleanliness, order, good manners, and good conduct. The .result is wonderful. These poor children become well-mannered, good girls, neat in dress and clean in person. More: they learn the charm of decency, and they are even able to improve their parents to strike for better things. I have seen one of these girls in her home, and. poor work-girl as- she was, she shone like a star in that dark place. And while this institution is the highest form of charity, the girls retain their proper independence, for each pays a proportion weekly of her scant wages.

A HALF-CIRCLE OF WOMEN.

In a ceitain by-street, which is reached by turning from a main thoroughfare into a* quiet, xoad bordered by secret-looking by the badge of respectability (the muslin houses, the windows all discreetly veiled curtain), and thence into another, in which tJhe curtain becomes a blind, which is absolutely the last thing to be relinquished in times of emergency, there is a ball warehouse, overhung by a crane, like a gallows. The front of the building, to the first floor level, is open to the street,, wearing an aspect of sudden and startling publicity. For here, seated amid a grove of coarse piled sacking, is a semi-circle of women, all stitching upon dirty sacks with great needles and thick twine. They wear strands of twine twisted about their right hands, to take the head of the needle. They are powdered all over with white powder — hair, cheeks, woolen scarf, and shawl. The white powder is the flour from the second-hand flour-bags, which the man who collects them from the retail 6hops is even now handing out from a small cart. He is a 6tout, short man, with a clear grey eye and clear red cheeks. He says that his life is very hard, because he has to be out in his cajfc in> all weathers for ever collecting sacks. But he is so fat and welllooking that -he fails to awaken sympathy. It is the dejected, thin, trough-coated pony, dropping its Head over shaky forelegs, that is to be pitied. There is something witchlike in the half-circle of women, bent over their coarse toil, plying swift needles. Their faces, tanned and dusty, have something of toe sullen hardness of the savage J which one sees in the repellent look of the ! roadside tramper. But two are markedly distinct from the rest. One has a pleasant, open,. impudent countenance; the other is thin, with very dark eyes, which squint, and a certain feverish activity of movement.

The first lias no children, but she has a husband out of work — a docker." The second is a - widow with one child.

"She, over there," 6aid the pleasant lady, conversationally, " *as two children. Speak up, Molly! You got two children, ain't yer!*'

Molly is a thick bundle of a woman, with a square grim face and rough black hair. Her hair and hex clathers, and the sacks she sits among, are all powdered over and mingled inddetingui&hably together. '

"A boy and a girl. - Goes to school," says Molly. "I goes 'ome dinner-times and gives 'em their dinniar. They're out in the ataeets till I comes 'ome."

"And I've goi six," another lady chimes in, complacently. She is the only one of the group who is sitting idle, stroking her .knees, and gazing vacantly iofco the etroet. "Twopence a dozen ain't muck

to keep 'em on. And there's plenty glad to get it, our way."

Twopence a dozen is the rate for mending and patching old sacks, whiob are then sold second-hand.

"Please God," says the finsfc lady, "I don't spend such another winter as last. I come 'ere first thing in the morning without so much as a cup o' tea in the cold. The children? I kept 'em in bed. Many and many's the time I kept 'em in bed from the cold."

Eightpence a ten is paid for making sacks. The number in the ten varies ac■coivJing to size. My friends consfkfor&d o> tan in four hours as a recowJ. Say six hours. How does that work out? And' these are the favored few who congratulate themselves that they are in work. Away back in the din, noisy streets the husband is moodily tramping, and the children axe waiting about on the pavement. That is what lies behind tha£ half-circle of seated figures in the open space beside the pavement, plying bairbarous toil all day.

"THEY ARE GALLED GIRLS."

Back along those secretive streets, with the inevitable shabby man loitering at the corner, and along a dusky thoroughfare, over the Toof s of • whose houses look the masts of ships 1 , and into a large open yard, piled with great barrels. In those barrels oranges and lemons are preserved in salt water until it is time to make them into marmalade amd candied peel. For this is a jam factory, in which women nic employed. They are all called girls — that is the generic term. Some of these are girls indeed., unmarried, and working for themselves; the rest are married, working for husband out of work, and children, or they are widows. There isone whose husband, a sailor, is stricken with paralysis. She is about to become a mother, and) will' have to leave her employment. What then? The husband of another is a chronic invalid. She is counted lucky to have no onoldrem, Of the rest of the married women, nearly all liave husbands out of work. Nino hours they labor in the factory; and when they go home there a*e the suppe-rs to get, the children to put to bed, the housework to do. "And I could have this 'ere yard full of girls to-mottrow morning at eight shillings a week," said the foreman. Every day he turns away applicants. If the work slackens he must discharge a proportionate number of girls. The rise in 'the price of sugar, restricting tne jam output, threw many haaids out of work. Business is business, and if there is not enough jam being produced to show a profit on wages, naturally the. superfluous,girls must ,go. The relative proportion is reckoned out to a fraction. In a wide room, dimly lit by electric lamps, the girls stand at long Benches, ladling marmalade from a huge copper bowl into seven-pound jars. They are pale, sinewy, 'Creatures, with homely, honest .faces. In a shed adjoining more girls are washing glass bottles in Huge tubs. In the room below candied peel is being manufactured. The air . .blows freshly from the trlver across the quiet yajd. There are many worse places than this ' jam factory. Ihe girls come to it from j far— from Poplar, Bow, and even from Kentish-town. To hundreds without ihe gates, married, widow, and single, the factory represents the desirable and unattainable remedy for,, pressing ills. Here, again, behind tlie picture of. these strong and patient women are the wandering husband, tlie neglected children.

I Near by is a sombre square of featureless houses, with blinded window®. In the midst 6tands a pallid, yellow scEool building-, railed in among melancholy trees. Narrow counts, like tributary rivers, discharge little troops of crying, noisy children into the square. Behind those blinded windows women are sewing —sewing all day long, from eight to eight, in close rooms. For this is one of the quarters of the Jew who takes contracts from th«- wholesale tailors. The tale is ever the same. He can always get as man hands as he wants. When work is slack some are discharged.