England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
You can do a great deal with a pound a week. Let us consider for a
moment: rent, which includes all rates and taxes, five shillings a week;
gas, purchased on the beautiful and simple penny-in-the-slot system,
say, one shilling and threepence, and firing one shilling and
sixpence--at Brown's you only have a fire when it is really cold, and it
is wonderful how far you can make a halfpenny bundle of wood go when you
know the trick of it. Now we come to the not unimportant item of food.
It is quite easy; breakfast, consisting of an egg, which the grocer,
with pleasing optimism, insists upon calling "fresh," one penny; bread
and butter, per week, one shilling and sixpence; tea, milk, and sugar,
per week, one and fourpence. Lunch, a really good, substantial meal, of
savoury sausage or succulent fish and mashed potato, and a bun. If you
are a lady the bun is indispensable; for if there is one faith implanted
firmly in the feminine breast, it is that which accepts the penny bun as
a form of nutrition not to be equalled. Thrones totter and fall,
dynasties stagger and pass away, but the devotion of Woman to the Penny
Bun stands firm amidst the cataclysms of nature and nations. This
substantial lunch costs sixpence. On Sundays, you dine sumptuously at
home on a chop, or eggs and bacon, cooked over your gas-ring, and eaten
with the leisure which such luxury deserves. Tea, which if you are in
Celia's case, you take at home, consists of the remains of the loaf and
the milk left from breakfast, enhanced by a sausage "Made in Germany,"
or, say, for a change, half a haddock, twopence. Of course, this meal is
supper and tea combined.
If you tot all this up, you will find it has now reached the not
inconsiderable sum of fifteen shillings and tenpence. This is how the
rich person like Celia lives. There still remains a balance of four
shillings and twopence to be expended on clothing, bus fares, insurance
and amusement. Quite an adequate--indeed, an ample sum. At any rate, it
seemed so to Celia, who, at present, was well set up with clothes, and
found sufficient amusement in the novelty of her life and her
surroundings; for, only a few months back, she had been living in
comfort and middle-class luxury, with a larger sum for pocket-money than
had now to suffice for the necessaries of existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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