On the dole
PERSONAL COLUMN ARTHUR BARTON
The other day my bus stopped opposite a large disused church. Rain was falling and the little crowd of men progressing towards the doors shuffled forward with bent heads. Some- thing familiar in their attitude—half arrogance, half shame—made me rub the window and look again. I had been right. These were the unemployed queueing up at their local labour exchange.
The young man with the brief-case 'looked out too. Then he settled back into his expen- sive overcoat and delivered himself to us. 'Do some of 'em good. They've been on top too long. It's a healthy sign—a spot of unemploy- ment.' No one took him up on it, and the bus rolled on, but I couldn't forget what I'd seen .—the look, in spite of smart gaberdines and decent caps, that we all had in the 'thirties— bewilderment, shame, the beginning of bitter- ness.
, I grew up with unemployment all around me. When I was twelve my father died. He hadn't worked for five years. Often there was no food at home except bread and margarine. My boots were mended until the cobbler • re- fused to touch them again. Then I tried -to keep out the rain with pieces of old cycle inner tubing. I wore two jerseys so that the holes in one might coincide with sound pieces in the other. At the local grammar school I was a kind of charity boy. We lived on about ten shillings a week and a grocery ticket worth 7s 6d which I used to collect from the relieving officer every Friday.
I took the first job I could get and was lucky to get any. For five years I worked in a shipyard drawing office. I earned 9s 6d at sixteen and 25s at twenty-one. Then, 'owing to the unprecedented slump in shipbuilding'— I still have my notice to quit somewhere--wy services were dispensed with. I was on the dole.
For the next five years I earned nothing. At first it was rather fun. There were lots of us and we would answer advertisements in the papers or go up and down the river to neigh- bouring shipyards and engineering works getting put on their books. It would only be a question of time. Meanwhile we stayed in bed late, borrowed from the housekeeping money for our cigarettes and sauntered down to the Co-op Hall every Wednesday to sign on, and every Friday to collect our seventeen shillings.
We were young and hopeful, but we couldn't help noticing the older men with their tired faces and grim mouths. They had been there for years and had small patience with our nave schoolboy attitude. Sometimes one or another would faint with weakness and hunger, and often they would argue viciously with the harassed dole clerks. These clerks were gener- ally and somewhat unfairly hated. They couldn't help having jobs, but sometimes they were petty tyrants and it was sickening to see them exercising their limited but very real power on a hulking illiterate ex-riveter, who, worried to death about a sick wife and shoeless children, had given way to insolence.
Gradually we began to put any future out of our minds and live for the day. I can even remember being tolerably happy. Was it sub a sin at twenty-one? Woodbines were five Or twopence and you could get a cinema seat of a sort for fourpence. The pictures were a great drug. There in the smoky dark while Colman and Barrymore, young Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne flickered across the screen we could forget the cold streets outside and the sad, resentful mothers at home. 'Won't you ever get a job?' they would say, and the long, inevitable, useless rows would start.
In summer we went for long walks in the country. You had to make it a long walk to find any, and we could never get out of sight of a pit-head or factory chimney, but throw- ing ourselves down on a green bank • under white clouds of hawthorn we would luxuriate in May sunshine. We would shout bold lewd remarks to the girls of alien pit villages and discuss everything under the sun—everything, that is, except work. That, it was agreed, was a thing of the past.
I do not remember that we were especially keen on politics. We tended tá accept our situation and didn't analyse it. Religion, on the other hand, was of great interest to us. Popular revivalist meetings were always well attended, partly because they, like the pictures, afforded warmth and fellowship and colour. But we were genuinely interested. I remember speaking from an orange box in the market square under the influence of the Oxford Group, and later I thought of entering the Church and read Greek with the vicar. Perhaps it was only a wish for education and social security. At all events, I abandoned it after a while and went back to writing a blank-verse play about Joan of Arc.
All this time, of course, I was signing on. twice a week. Shuffling up and down the stone steps, marshalled by the police because we were so many, we achieved the homogeneity of prisoners of war. We ceased to be very much at ease with chaps who were working. Many of us stopped taking any pride in our appearance. A grubby white muffler took the place of collar and tie.
We grew lazy. In theory each of us would have done anything for the right to be called a working man, roadmaking (often suggested for us), harvesting in Canada—anything. In practice we had grown too tired and dispirited to look for work and some had even got adept at avoiding it. These, let it be said, were few —though when I went to London I got the im- pression that persons in the south thought we were all like that. I suppose it excused them from the uncomfortable feeling that a million or so of their countrymen were in want.
Some things natural to my age, like court- ship and marriage, were denied me. Love, of course, cannot be denied, and it plagued me most of the time. The princess and the swine- herd may be a pretty fancy, but the swineherd's desperate longings and the hopelessness of his circumstances are real enough to him, even when the princess is only a girl in the next street, a member of a family where—wonder of wonders—father has a job.
It all seems a long time ago now. I suppose we've all made some sort of life for ourselves, au we out-of-works who roamed the town for so long. We are married, maybe, and in our fifties and have families of our own, children who have never had to wait for a 'meal or wear a leaky shoe (we'll see to that: one legacy of those years is a feverish wish to compen- sate ourselves through our children for what we didn't have). I find I've lost some capacity for material enjoyment. We had to travel light and lost the power of simple sensual enjoy- ment. If every time you see a well-filled table it reminds you of all the times when you had a meal at the expense of your mother who was secretly and resolutely starving herself, if every time you buy a new coat or new shoes you remember the half-naked barefoot children running to school in the east wind that sweeps up the river from the sea, your pleasure is tempered with pity and remorse. This can be bitter and corrosive. It works differently with different people, or eVen in opposite ways in the same persons at different times.
Some say that suffering is good for us, and Others that it is unnatural and distasteful. Looking back on my own (very small by com- parison with that of some of my companions in misfortune, and yet genuine) I can sometimes take the former view. Big it would be a smug and contemptible thing to think that years of misery are worth while because of an occa- sional mild spiritual regeneration. Like active Service in a war, unemployment gives you something of value; like war, it is to be avoided. One hopes and prays that the handful of men I saw queueing in the rain will not swell to the vast crowds that ate their hearts out in idleness thirty years ago.
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