[All Rights Reserved.] STORIES THE POOR

Otago Witness, Issue 2809, 15 January 1908, Page 82

[All Rights Reserved.] STORIES THE POOR

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN

By M. Loane,

Author of "Love Stories of the Poor," etc,

The fundamental reason why the countryman forsakes the village for the town is because, as -a sentient being, he naturally seeks circum&ta.nces which he believes will reduce bis p^ins and increase his sa/tisf actions.

The reason why he believes that this more favourable environment will be found in a great cdty may in some caees be because he is by nature unsuited to outdoor work, or to work that must to a great extent be done without the stimulus of constant companionship, but it is usually because he has not the right educ&tcon either to enable Mm to enjoy the pleasures that the country affords or to reduce 1 its undeniable hardships and discomforts to a bearable point.

Very many of those anxious to maintain, or create, or reinstate — which ever word they may chance to use — a large rural population do not in the least know what Tuiral life meant to the poor of the previous three generations, nor have ,they any practical knowledge of what it mean 6 to them -at the present moment. For their ideas of tlhe past they seem to be cthiefly indebted to novelists — not contempoirary novelists, but mere romancists, amd their conception of living reality seems to be founded partly ppon hasty reading of hastily-formed generalisations and partly upon imagination of an unsympathetic and totally untrained description.

LUXURIES OF THE LABOURER.

Delightful pictures are drawn in novels of the old-fashdoned farm and its peace and plenty. We may perhaps catch a glimpse of the labourers at the lower end of the table, but they are always lads, or else crusty and trusity old; bachelors. Where the paints of these young people may be, how they themselves must live if they get married, does not seem to concern the writers or his readers, and yet by how many the labourers outnumbered the farmers, and how wretched their average condition was! At the present day they are decidedly better off, but does the life of a country labourer, the total return t!ha.t he getsi for his work, bear a fair comparison (from his point of view, and counting only the advantages that he can appreciate) with the total return received by town labourers who axe, roughly speaking, his equals mentally anl physically?

Here are three out of many similar oases wihddh came under my notice during the current year. A middle-aged man appealed to me for help to bury his youngest child, aged four, who had died after a brief illness. It was only .the funeral expenses, he said, that he was unable to meet, and he was anxious that the interment should take place as soon as possible, as he had another child of seven dangerously ill.

"I thank my God," he added, "that as long as she lived she had everything she wanted, both from me and her mother. No doubt she's gone to a better place, but I do take it hard to lose her, for she always stuck to me. The moment I was hack -from my work, there she was, and there wasn't a word you could say to her that she didn't understand. The last three nights I never had my clothes off." I knew nothing of the man's circumstances, but I was impressed by his sincerity, and finding tha.t his master — a working farmer — and several villagers of still .narrower means had subscribed, I did the same, postponing my inquiries into has statements until after the funeral.

I foumd -that 'he had five children entirely dependent on him, and that his wife was in very poor health. He was a steady and regular worker, acquainted with the whole round of farm labour. Bis wages "were thirteen shillings a week ; a garden of which he had not enough time at his disposal to make full use, and a fourroomed cottage, in exceedingly bad repair and in such an isolated position tha* his wife received very little of the neighbourly help of which she was in so much need. The walls and floor of the house were damp, and a man trying to describe the state- of the roof said to me, "You could put «. wheelbarrer through it," but even this scarcely gives an adequate idea of Jts oostdition. I douibt if there was a ■qfiaw yard where * man could not have thrusb wm flat thaxniigih it from inside or out. The kitchen had a stone floor, and as damp stone rote all the cheaper kinds of floor covering it was almost bare ; the door opened straight into it, and _ was opposite the fireplace, but in this room the children had] to be ninaed because there wae no fireplace anywhere «lee. The little girl had never been, ill before, and in all probability had not Bucccsabea so much to the disease as to the ioxt^tions mder which dhie was nursed, added to *<h£ lack of timely adrice as to the best practical method of counteracting the influence of these conditions. There was no nurse in the district, the parish doctor had been sent for rather late, and being nuch occupied had not- obeyed the summons until the afternoon of tibe following day.

AN INSTRUCTIVE COMPARISON.

In "what circumstances would a town labourer of equal steadiness and intelligence have been living? In all probability bio wages would not have been under 230 throughout the year, and he would have worked on an average two hours a day less to earn that amount. The rent and taxes of a email house, not as far distant from his work as the agricultural labourer's often is from his, would be about Ee. TbdU dwelling, unlike the cottage, would be yrioA an 4 water tight, and

have drainage and a regular water supply ; all the floors would be boarded, and threij rooms out of the four or five would have fireplaces. The children would be close to their school, a serious consideration during the first few years of their attendance, and the wile would be near the shops instead of painfully carrying home her heavy purchases. The advantages of various insurance societies would be much more pressed on him, and he would belong to one or more; there would always be neighbours close at hand to help his wife or keep an eye on the children, and trained nurses to rely on in times of special stress.

In the second instance the youngest of eignt children (six still at home) contracted pneumonia, and she also had to be ■nursed in the stone-floored kitchen, which opened immediately on to the garden, and was the only possible means of entrance and exit for the whole family. Not only this, but keeping up a fire at night made one of the two bedrooms uninhabitable owing to the choking smoke which somehow reached it. The five children had to take possession of the front room,^and both parents slept in the kitchen with the invalid. The child was strong and healthy, and the mother devoted, and it was 'not until the eigth day that she died. Under the ordinary housing conditions of a town, and with a doctor who would have attended a case of that nature six or eight times instead of twice, and with a nurse to give authoritative and detailed advice, I firmly believe that the child's life could have been saved. She, too. was specially dear to her father. The eldest of the family told me "the last night mother was so worn out that we made her go to bed with the children, and father and I sat up together. At ,6 o'clock I made him some toast for his breakfast, and Kitty brightened up, and asked him for a piece of it, and he buttered a little strip for her. She only just put her lips to it, and gave it back to him, but he went off to work quite cheerful, thinking she was better, but he can hardly have been gone 20 minutes when she died."

Had either of these men much reason to love the country?

In the third instance, a man and his wife, both about 80 years of age, frugal people, who had saved a small independence, were living in a cottage with one room and an outhouse downstairs, and two' bedrooms upstairs. • There was no drainage and no water supply. As a personal favour they were allowed to fetch half a bucketful of drinking water every morning from a house a hundred yards away (the nearest spring wa6 about eight times that distance), and for the rest they depended on a- single rain-water barrel. A neighbour had offered to give them a second one, but the "guttering was so riddled with holes that they could not have filled it without an amount of labour of which they were no longer capable. In ihe early part of the winter the old man was attacked by mortal illness, and for three months of bitter weather he lingered in a flreless bedroom, measuring about Bft by 7ft, and decidedly less than 7ft in height. He was a remarkably tall man, and in his best days could have found little to spare between his head and the ceiling. For some years after they rented the house there had been a chimney to this room, but it had fallen, down : the landlord did not choose to replace it, and they could neither compel him to do so nor afford to do it themselves. They had no children left, and during the la6t six weeks a relative from a distance came to help with ~the nursing. She was a most worthy young women, and endured the discomforts courageously, but she spent most of her leisure moments in explaining to the villagers that if her old uncle had chosen to " live up " in a large town he would have had a good bedroom with a fireplace and a sash window.

"THE TERRORS OF TOWN."

It happened to be a village where theinhabitants err on the side of easy contentment and passive endurance, and have a great fear of town life, but she made a considerable amount of impression upon them.

Exaggerated ideas of the horrors of town life are often met with in the country ; I have sometimes been distressed to find the poorest and most ill-housed cottagers giving theiir pence and their pity on the strength of appeals which came dangerously near being false pretences. Curiously enough, this belief in the ,extreme misery of towns may co-exist with a great desire to visit them. "How I should like to take my Emma to Manchester," said a woman living on the outskirts of a small town. I asked why, for as Emma was only six I could not" imagine for what purpose she was to be taken there. "Oh," I should like her just to see all the miserable cliildren running about with no shoes and stockings, and hardly a rag to cover them ! " The objection I find most commonly brought forward by villagers against a country life is the 'great length of working houra in the summer, and the need for men and boys to supplement their wages by further work in their own gardens, coupled with the great difficulty of making any use of the comparative leisure of the winter. There is a general prejudice against women doing any vegetable gardening, even when they have no young children and much -time on their hands. There are special complaints of the weariness of attending on animals, and very little liking for them or understanding of their ways. Loneliness is found less bearable now that children have become so dependent upon the excitement of school life, and the lack of constant companionship during working hours is considered a trial ; town workers are great talkers and countrymen wish to be." There is generally, though by no means invariably, a lack of all intellectual interest in country woTk, and the more active-minded men are depressed by the scarcity of books and the absence of opportunities of selfimprovement on the only lines on which they can i»>onoeive the existence of culture.

There is a widespread prejudice that all clever people desert the rural districts, and that only aged persons and idiots remain — especially idiots.

RURAL EDUCATION

The frequent accusation of stupidity brought against villagers reminds me of a iady who tried to pass herself off at a health resort as aki invalid. After watching her for a few minutes a shrewd old North Country woman exclaimed : " Eh, but Ah'd laike to see the well ones where you cooni fro' ! " If those left in the country are the stupid ones, I can only wonder that towns do not more richly abound in genius. Many of the cleverest have remained behind — that is to say, those who have received, or given themselves, the education which enables them to get and keep possession of the best houses and the best gardens, and to constantly improve and add to them. Is it possible to find out in what way these persons were trained to make the best of country life, to conquer its difficulties, and profit by its advantages? If so, we might be at last on the road towards a right system of rural education. Personally, I cannot believe that the solution of the problem " how to stem the rural exodus" is to be found in small farming, which means poverty and idleness for many of the holders, poverty and ceaseless drudgery for most, and an uncertain amount of what, in towns, we should brand with the name of "casual emplo3'ment " for the landless men, who must inevitably sink far below the position of the labourers on large farms, where they get work all the year round. The solution might rather be arrived at by the gradual reorganisation of country work in such a manner that it would be possible for the men to have more leisure, and their families to have more domestic comfort.

"I'm (never free,"' sighs the industrious countryman, while his lazy brother takes care of himself by remaining idle for ■weeks at *a time, * living on his garden and the general family resources if he is a householder, and very often "simplifying life " by being a lodger when he chooses to work, and going into. the workhouse for a few .months when he wearies of it.