TOO MUCH TO EAT AND SPEND?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 101, 30 May 1941, Page 14

TOO MUCH TO EAT AND SPEND?

HE wife of a friend of mine has discovered what she calls a problem of over-production. Her little boy at school gets given to him by the school authorities every morning an apple and a half-pint bottle of milk. That extra nourishment takes the fine edge off his appetite so that he doesn’t want his proper lunch, but by the time school is over, about 3 o’clock, he is hungry, and really needs what I used to call in my childhood "a piece," meaning a slice of bread and butter. The mother has gone to a lot of trouble over the years in building up a routine of three regular meals with vegetables and so on, and now sees it upset by an additional meal given during school hours. What is she to do? I don’t know, because, although my little Richard goes to the same school, and in fact usually gets two apples as well as the milk, he demolishes the lot and his usual meals as well without any visible ill-effect. If the country ever has to get round to presenting a quarter of mutton to each school child, then that might raise a point or two, k Ey * HE husband of this woman has a problem which is quite different. On two occasions recently, he has been asked

to advise boys who have come to Wellington to work about the best type of openings for them. One of these boys worked when he was 16 in a stock agent’s office for 30/- a week, then a year later branched out into dairy factory work at £5 a week. Any advice my friend could offer him was rejected with disdain. Career; starting at the bottom and working up; getting a good grounding in a business and similar sound advice meant nothing to this boy. He wanted a job with big money, and let the future look after itself. Well, the boy went his way, and my friend met him again last week and asked how he was getting on. "O.K." said the boy. "I’m working in a factory making munitions, and I made £10 this week." Naturally this was a bit of a shock to my friend, but he guessed this included overtime, so he asked: "What about when you are on a 40-hour week?" "Oh!" said the boy, "I only get £6/10/- a week then!" bo * * F this wasn’t enough, a second case cropped up about the same time. A youth, aged 18, who had been working in a coal mine down the coast, came to Wellington looking for easier work and he also rejected any fatherly advice about starting from scratch. He got a job doing heavy loading of (I think) cans of ice-cream on to lorries. For this he gets £5/10/- a week. He pays 30/a week board. What does a boy of 18 do with £4 a week in his pocket? Now most boys of 18 are just getting started in their careers, and earning something like a couple of pounds a week at the outside. In my younger days it would not be unusual for a boy of 22 to get about 32/6d a week, but under present legislation the basic wage for boys at 21 is £3/16/- a week. But the two cases I have just told you about are boys of 17 and 18! I know nothing more about them than what I have repeated, but I’ll warrant they are being thoroughly demoralised. They are going to kick hard against going into territorial camp or the army in two or three years’ time at 7/- a day. They are.going to grow up without learning anything, which is serious enough, but not so serious as a whole attitude of mind geared to demanding and wasting large sums of money each week. " a * | DON’T know the answer to either of these problems, and there is no prize money for anyone else’s answer. It is curious, though, that one of them, the extra meal at school, is a purely New Zealand phenomenon, but the other is a wartime problem which must loom up very seriously in the huge new factories of England and America and which to my mind presents a case for equality of sacrifice. They are both

problems of this unhappy, maladjusted 20th century. We have too much coffee, or cotton, or meat, or apples and have to find some way to use up the bounties of nature, and at the same period boys leave more or less useful careers to take up unproductive work and get paid more money than their fathers ever knew. The old aphorism about the schoolmaster "passing rich on £40 a year" is, of course, only a museum piece, but there are lots of cases in every town in this Dominion of decent working parents who got a bit of fun out of life and brought up families on no more than ordinary award wages. I know a tram motorman in Wellington whose wife kept things going with a cow and a couple of dozen pullets when he was away at the last war, but four of their children got a university education. Are there as many of those sort of people as there were? Or is the answer of that boy of 17-that he ONLY got £6/10/for a 40-hour week-rather more coms mon than I suspect?