THE NEW POOR.

Hokitika Guardian, 10 January 1920, Page 4

THE NEW POOR.

PRE-WAR COMFORT KILLED BY TAXES WOMEN SLAVES. (London Daily Mail.) A woman reader writes: 1 ‘The < rticlos and letters which you have published under the title of ‘The New Poor’ are full of painful interest, but I wonder how many well-to-do people understand the real horrors of poverty. I am one of the New Poor.

“Before the war we were not rich, but sufficiently well off to take a little holiday, to go to the theatre, belong to a library, and not make the school life of our children a burden because of their shabby clothes and, their inability to do as the others do. In those days I did my share of the housework. I mended and made the ohildren’s clothes, sometimes I papered a room, once I white washed the kitchen, Indeed, I was quite a clever ‘odd job’ woman. - *

“But to-day I am utterly over-work-ed. My nerves are so worn! that I cannot sleep, or, if'l sleep, I dream i f bills. I add up rows of figures, always hoping that tho total will be less than it is, 1 am so irritable to my husband and children that it will be a wonder if they do not come to dislike mo. But the point I want to make is this: All my troubles are, made worse by the unsympathetic attitude' of others, “There comes ah end to what you can do by good management, though t verily bplicve that there are people who, if they found me dead of starvation on a desert island entirely made of asphalt, on which no living thing could grow, would say, ‘Well, of course, she need not haye starved if she had been a better manager.’

WOMAN’S HARDEST SACRIFICE. “When I was married I was a pretty girl, accustomed to comfort, pleasure, and admiration; non' my life is spent in working as no general servant would work, from seven o’clock in tho morning till eleven o’clock at night. Don’t people understand that this sacrifice of youth and good looks is one of the hardest of the poor woman’s trials? “I don’t believe even my husband understands ; he gets away from it all; he leaves the house at a quarter to nine and seldom comes hack until seven, and sees his men friends and deals with the affairs of the outside world, I know he doesn’t mean to add to my troubles ; all the same he leaves his clothes about on the chairs, lie never thinks of treeing his shoes or putting his trousers on stretchers.

“I have to do it for him because I cannot afford to let his clothes be worn out sooner than they need be. Perhaps you say it costs nothing to attend to one’s appearance. It costs time, it costs money. It costs something even to wash a hair-brush! “I heard a- man talking the other day of a woman he know who lived on some impossible sum, and kept her house beautifully and herself and her children well dressed and was always gay and smiling. J simply don’t „ believe it.

“The other day a friend gave ine one of her old dresses; it had to be turned, washed, remade; I had to buy coloured cotton, fasteners, a piece of new lining; the needle of my machine broke. I had to replace it; I spent money on gas to heat the iron to press my work. Do try to make people understand that everything costs money, that when you have come to what I call ‘penny poverty’ there is not a single thing that you can have or do that is: not going to cost something. “Everyone is ready to give ; dvice. ‘Take a smaller house,’ they say. Where am I to find the ready money with which to move if I could find a smaller .house? Instead of that I have to go on living in an inconvenient basement house, too large, too highly rented; the work wears me out, the cost of cleaning is more than I can afford. Do people realise that furniture polish, dusters, brooms, soap, all cost money? That you: cannot even be clean without spending something? “The war must be paid for. Ido not : grumble, at doing my share, though I think the very rich might well pay more so that people like myself should pay a little less. “But, for Heaven’s snke! do make them realise what it means to be really poor, and don’t let our lives be made harder than they need be by the knowledge that shabby houses and clothes, skimpy food, table-cloths which are not fresh, are accounted to us not as the results of sheer penny-poverty but as the results of bad management,”