Life Without Subsidies

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 431, 26 September 1947, Page 5

Life Without Subsidies

\ X 7E are tempted to label this article "Peace Comes to the Kitchen," but with difficulty resist. Peace is coming to the kitchen next week, but it is not the peace that passes understanding. It is the theoretical peace that starts a practical war. On Monday morning the housewife will lose the war privilege of subsidies on meat, bacon, and sugar, and at least her sense of security with tea. She will emerge suddenly from the umbrella that has sheltered her for more than three years and shop,. technically, under a wide and starless sky. And she will like it about as much as her husband liked his cold shower six or eight weeks earlier. She will complain for a day or two, look round for victims for a day or two, then settle into the new era and start looking ahead instead of backwards. But she will have her compensations. She will discover in a week or two that her coupons are beginning to annoy her less, and one day perhaps she will find herself forgetting them altogether. She will no longer buy everything that her book tells her she is allowed to buy, but ask herself how much she can afford. If the roast that now costs her 5/every Friday goes up to six shillings or seven, she will not care very much whether the chops on Tuesday meant three coupons or five, or, whether her husband on Wednesday wasted a coupon over his lunch in town. She will even begin before long to feel a vague sense of triumph and power, since the answer to all table complaints will rest in future in her husband's pocket and not in the coupon book in her shopping basket. If he wants more he will have to pay for more. If he accepts what he gets it will be because she, his loyal and competent wife, is keeping him as happy on one spoonful of sugar) as he used to be on two.