PARTISAN REVIEW
given up because it had a bathroom and could be used as a living flat.
Having discovered two adequate rooms the publishers of the magazine
found themselves involved in a difference of opinion between the
Local Housing Committee and the Ministry of Housing and in the
end it took the influence of a senior Cabinet Minister plus a long
standing personal friendship with the landlord for them to be allowed to
rent them.
The shortage of houses is by far the greatest hardship of the work–
ing class. Rents are controlled at a reasonable level, but for a man and
wife and children a decent room in someone else's house, sharing the
kitchen and bathroom, is almost as completely unprocurable as a self–
contained flat. Apart from this, the working class is better off, and in–
dividually more self-confident, than ever before. Although food is
rationed there are canteens and "British Restaurants" where the meals
are good, cheap, and unrationed. In country districts there are many
ways of improving on the basic amounts allowed. A few good clothes
and nearly all the forms of entertainment a:re now, for the first time,
within the means of the average working-class family. One sign of the
improvement
is
the fact that over six hundred pawn shops are reported
to have closed down during the last five years, and the secretary of the
National Pawnbrokers' Association said recently that the pledging of
clothing and bedding on a weekly basis (which was very prevalent)
is now as dead as the dodo.
The middle classes are worse off than ever: they pay very high
taxes and their normal pleasures-hospitality, motoring, and comfort–
able holidays at home and abroad-are restricted to a thoroughly de–
pressing minimum. Nowadays the middle class wife spends nearly her
whole time queueing for food, and cooking and cleaning.
If
those
~ho
have young children are sometimes able to employ a nurse, then they
have an extra (rather exacting) person for whom to cook and clean. In
London, though less so in the country, the rigors of middle-class life are
mitigated by a morning cleaner who can, in most cases, be found
to
come in and help for several hours a day.
I have the impression that the rich are still living pretty richly.
Once a man's income has reached the level at which he can afford
servants, and provided that his wife is not too scrupulous about how she
gets her extra clothing coupons, his family can live almost as well now
as it did before the war. Stockbrokers and racehorse owners are especial–
ly well placed because they can arrange to have practically no income,
and thus pay little income-tax: they live mainly on "capital." Big
business men can often double and treble their real income by paying
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