Living on the Dole

By HUGH

MARTIN.

JUST how it is done can never be known except by doing it, which is painful. There is no such thing as a completely typical case, nor does imagination help much. But we can discover by observation one or two general principles which will help us to understand.

Living on the dole—that is to say, living, not brokenly existing—must plainly mean, in the first place, looking at the everyday details of the means of subsistence through a powerful microscope. One has to learn to watch through the microscope many almost infinitely little things, the animalculae of domestic economics, which are generally ignored even by the very poor. And, in the second place, one must learn to forget for the time being about big, fundamental things ; in other words, to stop thinking..

Now the first practical note an observer makes when trying to discover how to live on the dole (without the pain of doing it) is that the women seem to be carrying on more happily than the men, a conclusion contrary to one's sentimental leanings. Mrs. Brown is happier than Mr. Brown simply because she is not out of work. She is happier because, although it is at first terribly difficult to learn to use the microscope, she has a job of work to do, an important job, a job that is valued by some- body, a job that occupies all her time and most of her thoughts, the job of making fifteen shillings do the work of a pound. To be sure, her children are pale and thin and fretful. Her two rooms (if she is lucky enough to have two) have been stripped of all but the barest necessaries. But the job is there and has to be done day by day. She is earning her keep, and a good bit over, and her self-respect remains. She does the work bravely and with reasonable efficiency.

Exactly how, then ? Well, Mrs. Brown, of Kentish Town, has a husband and six children, and a dole to administer of 34s. 3d. a week. Brown brings the money home on Friday afternoon. Five of the children have been getting free dinners at school five days a week— excellent dinners that cost the Education Authority about fourpenee each—but for the rest they have had on those five days not much more than two thin slices of bread and margarine for breakfast, and two more for tea. Directly after tea they go to bed to save firing, and prevent them from getting hungry again.

When father comes home with his 34s. 3d., two shillings go to buy an extra meal for the whole eight— the best home meal of the week, with a bit of fish and chips, possibly. Then on the Saturday morning five shillings are laid out by Mrs. Brown upon provisions for the week-end, a scrap of foreign meat at eightpence a pound, bread, vegetables, jam, tinned milk, other groceries. Nine shillings more have to be found for rent That leaves 18s. 3d., which goes something like this : s. d.

Baker

.. 3 0

Coal'

• .. 2 6

. 0 10 Funeral insurance, with arrears ..

• • 3 0 Clothing club ..

• . 1 0 Furniture, &c.

.. 0 6

10 10 Brown keeps two shillings for pocket money, and 'bus fares when he is out looking for a job, leaving Mrs. Brown 5s. 5d. (mainly for more bread) to last till Friday comes round again. And she will make it last, with the help of the microscope, in whose use she grows more expert every week. Such an existence looks from the outside intolerable, a starvation of mind and body, an ugly, hopeless, futile drudgery. Yet Mrs. Brown does at least succeed in saving it from squalor, in the worst sense of the word, and in that she is very nearly " typical." She is in the first-line trench, and the order of the day is " carry on."

Hers is a hard furrow to plough, but Brown's furrow —Brown being what he is, a thoughtful fellow with a twenty years' habit of work, who has been " out " for eighteen months—is possibly harder, his job being merely to keep cheerful and healthy and prevent that brain of his from what he calls thinking "—to keep sane, in a word. His search for work has become purely auto- matic, so it hardly helps the brain. Strange to relate, he manages to gamble a little on his two shillings a week, but that solace has to be left in the main to the unmarried lads. Half a pint of beer in the warm, sociable bar- parlour is right out of reach at present prices. So, as a rule, is the luxury of a fourpcnny seat at the pictures. And, strange to relate, for he used to be fond of reading, he hates the free library now.

In fact, Brown sits at home most of the day moping. In tens of thousands of homes on the dole it is the same. The man is, for all the common purposes of social life, of citizenship, of mental. spiritual and physical develop- ment, dead. Every day is like the day before and the day after, empty. A living death. One sees it in his face, gone ash-coloured and drawn, with a sick-dog look about the eyes.

That was the position, at any rate, three weeks ago. Then a new interest came into Brown's life, and the lives of some of his mates, an interest provided by the classes for the unemployed. At first he flatly refused to go, in spite of Mrs. Brown's tactful pressure. What, he asked, was the use ? He didn't want to be amused, or educated. He knew his job, didn't he ? (this a trifle truculently). If he could bring home a few shillings he would go, but otherwise he " couldn't get his mind down to it."

When he did consent to give the classes at the Mary Ward Settlement a trial, it was because the children Were " on their uppers " and he could learn boot- repairing there. Now he is taking elementary French on Mondays, and goes over to the Working Men's College on Fridays for a course of lectures and discussions on " human problems of to-day." His wife is delighted. She notices a marked difference in him already. As he puts it, he is not thinking so much. That is to say, at last he has something to think about. One can hardly exaggerate the way in which it eases his wife's round of dreary toil not to have him there for so many hours, Staring into the tiny fire with that look of a sick dog.

It is little enough, but something is being saved from the wreck by these classes, and more will be saved, for Brown means to join the physical training class at the

Settlement. He was -a brawny, active fellow before the dole and idleness claimed him, but now he is sadly changed. In the tenement upstairs a young man, formerly consumptive, has been actually using his enforced leisure of the life to recreate his own physique and create in his four children a physique that is the pride of the street. That has set Brown at his old game of thinking, and by the time he has seen this bad patch through he will probably have learnt to master body as well as mind.