SIR. —Being a regular reader of the Spectator. I have just
finished reading the third article in the series Making Ends Meet. and I have come to the conclusion your title is quite wrong: it should be How We Live In Luxury. How these poor, poverty-stricken people, struggling along on incomes ranging from fsoo-noo per annum, manage to exist I cannot imagine, but I would just like to give them an idea how a family do just about make ends meet on £400 a year.
I am a police constable's wife whose gross earnings are roughly £400 a year. We are buying our own house, having sunk our entire war- time savings of £1,000 into it, and still have to pay a mortgage of £70 a year plus rates of £25. National Health and superannuation payments account for at least £26 a year. We have two children, aged four and one, to feed and clothe, and the most we can allow for food is £3 10s. per week, or £182 a year (this includes 5s. family allowance per week). We have to he very careful with 'electricity, which we use for cooking as well as lighting, and which averages £12 a year. Our coal bill is around £13 a year. We neither smoke nor drink and go to the cinema about four times a year. My husband fortunately needs to spend little on clothes, but on the £1 a week that is left after the bare necessities are accounted for we have to provide clothes and repairs for two growing children and myself, repairs and replacements and ,decorating of the house, such extras as birthdays and Christmas, and all the odd unfore- seen things that crop up from time to time. Holidays have now become a memory of the past. I may add that in our income of £400 a year are included all my husband's allowances—bicycle, house, &c. Our only way of getting a house at all was to buy one. Two years ago we could manage without too much worry, and we did manage a holiday, but if prices keep on rising we shall in a very short space of time be living beyond our income, and as all our capital is in the house we shall then quite literally not make ends meet.—Yours, &c., EDNA WILLIAMS. 19 The Woodlands, Upton. Wirral.
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