Roundabout
Widows Might
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN Many of them are purely practical. The national widows' pension is quite inadequate and even now the earnings limit has gone up a widow with children is doing well if she man- ages to keep going at all. There is a maze of complication surrounding the actual getting of the pension—wives of men insured before 1948 may get 10s. a week flat rate whatever their age; wives who are forty-nine when their husbands the get nothing till the old age pension though widows of fifty get the pension right away, but widows of forty-nine get nothing until they are sixty and get the old age pension. Thousands of women are absolutely unskilled, and can earn only a few pounds at best. We are used to meeting widowhood as an argument for keeping up tech- nical or university education; but it is at far lower levels that the thing is heartbreaking: women to whom even working a telephone switchboard, having any qualification at all in home nursing, even being able to garden effec- tively would mean the difference between skilled and unskilled labour. Of course some widows can and do train; but for those with small child- ren or no interim money this is impossible.
One of the things that help to keep this situa- tion deplorable is the irreconcilable difference in viewpoint between a working man and the Government. Mrs. Torrie told me of one bus- driver's widow with five children who went to the bus-station to try to persuade her husband's mates to take out some insurance for.their wives, as she was having such a pitifully hattl struggle: their altitude, to a man, was 'I'm giving these bastards enough as it is.' To them, their weekly national insurance contribution is a respectable premium; to the Government it is still charity, the first economy in lean times; and the huffy lone of voice taken in all debates on the sub- ject shows that, whatever the widows think, the Gmernment thinks it is doing well to give them anything at all. But practical problems are only the half of it—the mental adjustment can be worse. I asked Mrs. Torrie (and one or two widowed friends) for a few pointers for those who are not in- different but merely ham-handed in the treatment of the bereaved, and did get some kind of com- mon picture. They all thought people tended to give the widow an intolerable amount of atten- tion to begin with, and then forgot all about her during the long slow drag back to normal life. Vague offers of help arc no good—firm offers of specific actions are better. And widows have to be sucked back into the stream of things. 'If anyone had rung me up after a fortnight and asked me out for a drink,' one of my friends said. `But they didn't.' A chance to go away and stay with close friends or to meet other people in very small groups where the absence of a partner is not apparent, or to eat a lively lunch with a man in a good restaurant are the sort of things which help; advice, being, told to prill yourself together, and the unending presence of busybodying acquaintances are the things which emphatically do not.
Obviously all widows do not react in the same way, even setting aside the obvious case where a revolting mate drinks himself into an early grave to the relief of all. But there does seem to be a pattern to this business of adjustment. The wives who were dependent obviously do worst: trained not to think or plan for herself or even cope to the minimum extent of paying the bills, the widow of a dominating man is like a snail without a shell and absolutely defenceless. But equally helpless is the woman whose policy has always been to keep herself to herself, making few friends—and none of them inconvenient ones.
This question of the willingness of the original couple to scoop in unlucky outsiders has a logic to it which is enough to make your flesh crawl on the bones. One knows, of course, in general that moral equations have a way of adding up: that honour thy father and mother that thy days may be long upon the earth means that if you support a society where parents are. honoured your own children may get the message and honour you. What is shattering is the ruthlessness with which such equations can work out even in particular, if Mrs. Torrie's observations are right. The couple that took in lame ducks, that bothered about other people's troubles is the couple that leaves a widow first of all with the
kind of friends who do not evaporate at the first sign of trouble, and secondly sufficiently.
acquainted with grief to know how to face it. 'Do as you Would be done by' is a cosy and harmless precept; when it becomes `Do as you are going to be done by,' it is terrifying.
Mrs. Torrie is virulent in her hatred of women's magazines for the way in which they turn women back on themselves, their homes, their husbands: those whose husbands are living it makes insensitive, those whose husbands have died, defenceless. And 1 think there is another grim aspect too. Whatever the man may have meant about having won first prize in the lottery of life if you are born British, there.is no doubt that the moderately happy married woman has won first prize in feminine terms. And with the,natural tendency of good women to confuse good luck with good morals, there is a sort of smugness about the married which is undeniable.
They have made it, they have arrived, they are in out of the cold; and it is bard cheese for the others. That this is an insult to a seriously happy marriage goes without saying; but we all do it. 1 have often thought it would be extremely good for married women to spend a week without a wedding ring for a change: to feel what it is like to be judged as a spinster, to be without protection and without anyone to complain to; second-class citizens in the sense in which most married women enforce it. it would be a salutary reminder that no one is safe for ever, and that the wind blows all the colder on those who have been over-insulated.
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