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19
Even so, when they return to work, mothers may still be found
who come home at meal times to breast feed their babies.
Many of them are themselves underfed, ill, consumptive, worn
out with child bearing, and quite unfit to suckle their children.
For the mothers, brave and enduring, the struggle is a hard, a
severe one. Ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-shod, tired out with the day's work,
the mother returns home to feed and wash baby and the other
children, to clean up the tenement, to do the usual household
work, and to prepare supper for an unemployed or unemployable
husband who arrives at midnight, it may be, noisy and "three
parts drunk."
The mother has broken sleep, little rest, little and poor food.
Her wages are possibly enough for her and baby, but not enough
for others in addition.
The consequences to the baby are disastrous.
It becomes ill, wastes and eventually succumbs. The woman
pays, the mother suffers, the baby dies.
When the mother works the baby may be left with its grandmother,
with a neighbour or friend, or, quite commonly, with a
young girl aged from 11 to 16 years. It may be fed on condensed
milk, cow's milk, patent biscuits, " tops and bottoms," currant
cake, bath buns, boiled bread, boiled potatoes, chipped potatoes
patent foods, dry oatmeal, gruel, ' a bit of fried fish," tomatoes or
toffee apples.
Side by side with the proffering of these unsuitable foods there
still linger in mean streets the traditions that " two milks will not
mix," and that an ailing infant will do best '' on the milk of one
cow."
One father thought that next to good food there was nothing
like " a day in the cattle market to cure a baby with diarrhoea and
to prevent it." He put his theory into practice by taking his
infant once weekly to the market in York Road.