Poor, Contented, and Respectable.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 443, 5 February 1890, Page 3

Poor, Contented, and Respectable.

Mrs B. and Mrs P. are mother and daughter, and are both widows. They live in Phillbriek-street, off Cambridge Heath Road, London, and make cheap clothing for a highly respectable, high-priced firm. The mother is a woman close on sixty, and the daughter is turned thirty. Their room is a pattern of bright neatness, the bedding and clothing all spotlessly clean, and every piece of furniture as tree from dirt as the day it passed from the workman’s hands. The walls were unstained, the floor was snowy white, the little grate shone as brilliant as a happy Ethiopian ; whilst the plates and dishes glinted, so brightly polished were they. One had been a widow for six, and the other for five years. The younger woman lost her only child a year or so ago, and is just recovered from an attack of typhoid which has laid her up for eight weeks. Pale and weak, with a hacking cough, she was working for the household, her mother, who is less expert, helping. At making boys’ ‘ knicker ’ suits, toiling fourteen hours a day, they can, by joint industry, finish enough to earn 12s to 13s a week. Out of that 3s 6d has to be paid for rent each week, and then there is light and firing to provide. Yet both mother and daughter were absolutely trim in their plain attire. There they toiled, these two workwomen in their charming home. Overworked, underfed, weak, visibly failing in health, they spoke in tones of mild contentment, praising their employers, and blessing in quiet terms those good folks who had helped them when the Angel of Death threatened so recently to separate the real breadwinner fi-om the aged mother. We can picture no sweeter, happier corner in all London than the home of these two untiring, patient, loving women, living unselfishly for one another.