Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (90 page)

Generally, Thompson was struck in that city by how the ‘clash between what parents want and what educationists think they ought to have’ ran ‘right through the system’. After depicting, not implausibly, the fairly brutal home environment of many infant-school pupils – ‘these children return to a harassed mother, who has perhaps just rushed home from work, to the quick-tempered clout on the ear, the impatient command, the necessity for getting them out of the way, somehow, while mum gets hubby’s dinner ready, during which of course she has no time to be interested, as teacher has, in their small achievements’ – he went on: ‘The result is a mess, and when junior and secondary modern school teachers, with classes much too large, receive these unfortunate hybrids of enlightened education and unenlightened homes, they complain bitterly about “lack of discipline”. And yet these children will be, one hopes, just a little more enlightened than their parents.’

Thompson’s ruminations, up to this point entirely characteristic of a generation of activators in their unquestioning assumption of a hierarchy of values, culminated when he went to watch the girls of a secondary modern school in a ‘mixed’ area give a gymnastic display:

They had the lithe, long-limbed grace which schoolgirls have, and schoolboys have not. They swung from ropes and leapt over horses with a panache and freedom of limb which took my breath away. I found myself thinking, in the gloomy way one does, that in a few years they would be doping themselves with the pictures three times a week in order to endure their stuffy offices and factories; they would be standing packed in buses; suffering the sniggering, furtive, unlovely approach to love in a cold climate; growing old under the burden of children, household duties, fear of war. But does that matter? For an hour they had flowered to perfection. Why must we always want more, more?
¹⁷

‘Could you send me a carton of cigarettes?’ Vidia (V. S.) Naipaul asked his family in Trinidad soon after his arrival at Oxford in October 1950 to study at University College. ‘Everyone here smokes and everyone offers you, and I have fallen back into the habit . . . They are so expensive here.’ The next few months were a winter of not always welcome discovery. ‘I have eaten potatoes every day of my stay in England, twice a day at Oxford,’ he reported from London in December. And in January, back in Oxford:

The English are a queer people. Take it from me. The longer you live in England, the more queer they appear. There is something so orderly, and yet so adventurous about them, so ruttish, so courageous. Take the chaps in the college. The world is crashing about their heads, about all our heads. Is their reaction as emotional as mine? Not a bit. They ignore it for the most part, drink, smoke, and imbibe shocking quantities of tea and coffee, read the newspapers and seem to forget what they have read.

The following month, still in Oxford, the future novelist sounded like a future entrepreneur. ‘It is impossible to get rich,’ Naipaul grumbled to his family. ‘The income taxes are ridiculously high – about nine shillings in the pound after a certain stage, and it probably will go up with this heavy expenditure on re-armament.’ After noting that ‘everything has a purchase tax,’ he concluded: ‘For living, this country. For making money, somewhere else.’
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Naipaul was fortunate not to be a housewife during this first full winter of the 1950s – a winter of high prices and continuing, even in some cases worsening, shortages. Phyllis Willmott, by this time a young, hard-up mother living in Hackney, reflected in November on the damage being done to the Labour government, which she keenly supported:

I sometimes wonder whether
any
socialists apart from me are registered at our Co-op. ‘It’s near starvation – no other country in the world puts up with what we do. All the rest have all the meat they want,’ I heard someone moaning the other day. And the dreadful thing is that no one took the woman up on what she said. Certainly I didn’t. Everyone gave non-committal sighs and grunts. Of course, I should speak up. But why don’t I? One reason is because the housewife bit of me finds it hard to defend. I mean, 8d worth of meat! What housewife who has to queue for this can believe she and her other housewives have not got a grievance.

The Ministry of Food had badly messed up over the importation of meat, especially from the Argentine; the result was indeed a desperately inadequate weekly ration, working out at around 4 ounces of beefsteak or 5 ounces of imported lamb chops.

Another housewife, Nella Last in Barrow, recorded her shopping trip on the first Saturday of the New Year:

I wanted a rabbit – I didn’t feel like paying the 10d return on the bus to get 2/- worth of meat! I’d rubber Wellingtons, my W.V.S. overcoat and hooded mac on, but the cold seemed to penetrate & every one looked pinched & cold. I paid my grocery order & left one for Monday, & got last week’s & this week’s eggs – four. There was a really
good
display of meat in the window but no one was interested – tins of gammon ham about I should think 1 lb. were 9/6, & Danish & Dutch ‘minced pork in natural juices’ at 4/6 & 5/6 for quite a small tin. As one woman remarked ‘they don’t say any thing of the thick layer of fat, which with the “natural juices” made up more than half of the tin
I
got.’ By queuing, I could have got pork sausage for 1/10 a pound, but felt it mightn’t agree with either of us. Sausage nowadays seems to contain so
much
fat . . .

Exactly a week later, a third housewife, Judy Haines in Chingford, was also getting fed up. ‘I went out after dinner and what a joint!’ she recorded. ‘The ration is so small it’s very difficult to tell what cut it is at the best of times. Argentina seems to be putting a fast one across us, knowing we need her meat, & we’ll have no more of it.’ She added, ‘There’s a fuel crisis on, too.
We
have a good supply of coal but let our coke run low as it’s off ration & supposed to be plentiful and we’re out of it for some time.’

A meat shortage, a fuel crisis, a flu epidemic, a hastily conceived and overambitious rearmament programme having a sharp impact on the consumer: altogether, it was not a happy picture in early 1951. By March it was being reported that as many as 1,700 in a single day were making enquiries about how to emigrate to Canada. But Richard Dimbleby would have none of it. ‘I can only speak for myself,’ he declared in his staunchly patriotic column in the
Sunday Chronicle
. ‘Nothing on earth would ever persuade me to have my home anywhere but in England, where my ancestors have lived ever since they sacked and burned the farms of East Anglia fifteen hundred years ago.’
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About the same time, Mass-Observation put the question to the female members of its panel: ‘What are your feelings about housework?’ Predictably, there was no shortage of replies, from housewives of varying ages and varying degrees of contentment:

I think housework becomes infinitely easier with the right tools. I consider
every
housewife should be able to have a washing machine, a proper wringer, a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. Without these tools, a lot of the work is a drudgery and the result is either the woman doggedly keeps on at her work becoming a kind of martyred housewife, or she just skips the lot and a fusty dusty house results. (37)

I like Monday least as after a slight relaxation of work on Sunday I find it very hard to get going again on Monday. I dislike washing as I have such a heavy morning and get very tired through standing at the sink. I dislike having my hair damped by steam but refuse to wear any head-covering. Hate the wrinkled appearance of my hands on Monday and usually feel cold. (40)

I don’t kick against pricks that are unavoidable, but don’t pretend I find housework entrancing. (56 )

The job I like least is ‘washing the front’ which my mother-in-law insists ought to be done every week – and because I couldn’t sit back and see her doing it – I have more or less taken this on altogether – I must admit she does it occasionally if I let it go more than about 10 days.
(
25
)

I have a strong sense of beauty and order, and rather enjoy housework. (59)

I think housework is an utter waste of time when there are so many more interesting things to be done. (27)

Whether she enjoyed it or loathed it, housework was now an inescapable part of life for the servantless and as yet relatively gadgetless average middle-class woman. ‘Such a programme for today!’ recorded an exhausted Judy Haines on the last Wednesday of March. ‘House-worked like a nigger all morning. Baked during afternoon. Really felt dazed by nightfall.’

Mass-Observation also asked its male panellists how they imagined women felt about housework. ‘Women usually really enjoy housework,’ replied an industrial chemist, drawing on his experience as an unmarried 28-year-old. ‘Those who hate housework are rare.’ A married civil servant, 37 and with two boys, was far less sanguine about his wife’s attitude: ‘I would indeed be a fool if I did not know that she gets fed up to the teeth with it at times living as we do in two rooms and a scullery with no bathroom.’ But according to a married police inspector, 48, ‘women are keenly jealous of the house – they regard it as their province and to trespass on the preserves is to risk wrath’. Another, higher-profile panellist, Ralph Wightman of
Any
Questions?
, would have agreed. Asked during a programme from the Corn Exchange in Plymouth the previous autumn if it was still ‘a man’s world’, his answer was wholly unreconstructed:

I think that, generally speaking quite seriously, in this country, most woman’s work is at home – that’s a platitude I know but it is true, and they can make up their minds just how they do the work and when they do it – they usually do it in a most inefficient manner I might say. But – they’re the person who decides this is the day for the bedrooms and tomorrow is the day for the washing and next day for the ironing and they fix it and they do it. Whereas, most men, almost all of us, have got to do in our working life precisely what we’re told, and that is much less pleasant, much less independence – real independence, and after all, we do earn most of the money anyway, so why shouldn’t we have a little relaxation occasionally when we’re allowed to escape from this terrific dominance of the home.
(LAUGHTER.)

A little deserved relaxation, then, for the menfolk – but most Saturday afternoons not for the long-suffering supporters of Accrington Stanley, who in March 1951 took their scarves, mufflers and rattles to Valley Parade and watched their team go down to a 0–7 defeat at the hands of Bradford City. Two injuries reduced the visitors – in what were still pre-substitute days – to nine men. The suffering was not yet over, and the
Accrington Observer
described the match’s aftermath:

The driver pulled his vehicle up, dashed round to the luggage compartment and dragged out the first-aid kit. Swabs were needed to staunch the flow of blood. A few minutes later, he did the same thing, this time because there was an inert passenger in need of revival to consciousness. From a nearby house, a kindly soul produced a cup of hot tea. An ambulance on its way from a battlefront? No, just Accrington Stanley on a routine journey home from yet another heartbreak match in this, the blackest season in the club’s history.
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