‘It’s just heart-breaking work trying to keep them all dry-shod,’ a mother of five children declares. ‘They have always, one or other of them, their toes or heels sticking out.’ ‘One might think lads had hoofs instead of feet from the way their shoes go,’ another mother once informed me. ‘These were new a fortnight ago, and just see! There’s hardly a bit of sole left.’ Tears came into her eyes as she held the shoes up for me to look at. Among the respectable poor, not only of the hand-working class, but of the lower-middle class, and this is the poorer of the two in these war days, the great trouble in life is the finding of shoes, the hopeless struggle to keep children’s feet well covered. Year by year, in every town in England, women are worried into their graves, because, let them do what they will, one pair of shoes wears out before they have the wherewithal to buy another. In every town, too, women lose their health and strength because, when they ought to be asleep, they will persist in working, that they may have the money to pay the cobbler. To see their boys and girls going about without even a patch to hide the holes in their shoes, seems to be more than most mothers can bear. And the saddest part of the business is they are sacrificing themselves quite uselessly, to a mere fetish. For very few of them have any thought of hygiene in their heads, when they toil and moil, pinch and save, that their children may have shoes: their thought is all of respectability. They are firmly convinced that to let them go barefoot would be to rob them of all claim to rank with the respectable, would be to dub them little ragamuffins in fact, and thus render them pariahs. And better than that work all night, no matter what it may lead to.