THE COST OF LIVING.
(To ras 'Borten or ram " Srzergroa."1 Sza;—When Uncle Joseph in Stevenson's Wrong Box lectured on the comparative cost of living in London, Baghdad, Spits- bergen, Cincinnati, and Nijni-Novgorod, he drove his-audience to distraction by the tiresomeness of his subject. But a dis- course on " How to Live" Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year " would now certainly create the sensation it did 'among the unemployed whom Miss Heseltine described as "those -nice people in the Isle of Cats." This must'be any excuse for sending you some recent experiences in the cost of living in aBoy Scout camp. We lived cheerfully, though damply, for five days at the time of the last •August Bank Holiday, in -a tent pitched amid ruined lead mines 850 feet above the sea at Priddy on the Mendip Hills. We had four meals a day, and each meal averaged 4id. a head. Our number, including myself, was twelve, and we all shared alike, and no one-was- refused food if he wanted more. The.Scouts ranged in age from eighteen to eleven, and the only food they were asked to bring themselves was sugar, and at the end all -said definitely that they had had enough and that they liked what they got. Of course, they did the cooking themselves, which made them take an interest in what they ate. Here are some of our meals. Smiday.—Break- fast : Cocoa and milk, three half-quartern loaves were out -up and some slices spread with margarine and potted meat, and others with treacle. Dinner consisted of a vegetable stew of onions and potatoes thickened with pea flour, 21b. of bully beef, bread and treacle. For tea we hid bread, margarine, and jam, and, of course, tea with plenty of milk. Supper consisted of rice with treacle and bread and cheese. Some days we had oatmeal for breakfast, and once we fried bacon. Cheese we had for dinner on the two days when we did not have bully beef, and sometimes for supper, and such extras as potatoes cooked in the ashes, and four pounds of plain biscuits filled in the odd corners. We had a plentiful supply of cakes for tea, on one occasion brought us by friends, but we provided them, a party of four, with the and bread and butter. On the last night we invited the kind people from the farm to supper. They had given us leave to camp, and would take no.nafment. In the dark, amid sheets of rain, they came, father and mother and four small children. It was a merry party in a disused engine house, doorless and windowless, so that the smoke of our fire needed no chimney to take it away. Here our guests had perhaps the oddest supper of their lives—bully beef and bread and cocoa, and by the blaze of the fire they, for the first time, saw the ceremony of a Scout enrolment. Before we came home I asked the Scouts, as we were sitting round our last meal, to tell me for future guidance if they had had enough and the sort of food they liked, and they all said " Yes," and from what I have heard they told their parents the same. If the weather had not been so very wet, and cooking had been easier, we might have used rather more bacon, but I 'do not think the total of is. bd. a day each would have been altered.
What other Scout camps have coat I do not know, but when we got home we found a Bristol troop camping in our village, and there were rumours of sausages, and their bully beef was not in one-pound tins like ours, but in much larger receptacles. But then they went home in a motor-lorry, and we had marched back. I have not the least desire to criticize them, for they were good Scouts, and they and their officers were on the best of terms with us. All I want to say is that it is possible " to live cheerfully" at the rate, not of £40 a year, but of £25 18e. 8d., though, of course, something would have to be added for the " occasional spree" of Michael Finebury.—I am, Sir,
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