had to almost starve. Not that it was much better
other weeks, for lately he had only been making six and a half hours a
day--from eight-thirty in the morning till four o'clock in the evening,
and on Saturday only four and a half hours--from half past eight till
one. This made his wages--at sevenpence an hour--twenty-one shillings
and sevenpence a week--that is, when there was work to do every day,
which was not always. Sometimes they had to stand idle three days out
of six. The wages of those who got sixpence halfpenny came out at one
pound and twopence--when they worked every day--and as for those
who--like Sawkins--received only fivepence, their week's wages amounted
to fifteen and sixpence.

When they were only employed for two or three days or perhaps only a
few hours, their 'Saturday night' sometimes amounted to half a
sovereign, seven and sixpence, five shillings or even less. Then most
of them said that it was better than nothing at all.

Many of them were married men, so, in order to make existence possible,
their wives went out charing or worked in laundries. They had children
whom they had to bring up for the most part on 'skim' milk, bread,
margarine, and adulterated tea. Many of these children--little mites
of eight or nine years--went to work for two or three hours in the
morning before going to school; the same in the evening after school,
and all day on Saturday, carrying butchers' trays loaded with meat,
baskets of groceries and vegetables, cans of paraffin oil, selling or
delivering newspapers, and carrying milk. As soon as they were old
enough they got Half Time certificates and directly they were fourteen
they left school altogether and went to work all the day. When they
were old enough some of them tried to join the Army or Navy, but were
found physically unfit.

It is not much to be wondered at that when they became a little older
they were so degenerate intellectually that they imagined that the
surest way to obtain better conditions would be to elect gangs of
Liberal and Tory land-grabbers, sweaters, swindlers and lawyers to rule
over them.

When Owen arrived at the yard he found Bert White cleaning out the
dirty pots in the paint-shop. The noise he made with the scraping
knife prevented him from hearing Owen's approach and the latter stood
watching him for some minutes without speaking. The stone floor of the
paint shop was damp and shiny and the whole place was chilly as a tomb.