At the beginning we lived in a poky little maisonette and had a job to get by on my wages. Later, when I was transferred to the West Bletchley branch, things were better, but Hilda’s attitude didn’t change. Always that ghastly glooming about money! The milk bill! The coal bill! The rent! The school fees! We’ve lived all our life together to the tune of “Next week we’ll be in the workhouse.” It’s not that Hilda’s mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, and still less that she’s selfish. Even when there happens to be a bit of spare cash knocking about I can hardly persuade her to buy herself any decent clothes. But she’s got this feeling that you ought to be perpetually working yourself up into a stew about lack of money. Just working up an atmosphere of misery from a sense of duty. I’m not like that. I’ve got more the prole’s attitude towards money. Life’s here to be lived, and if we’re going to be in the soup next week—well, next week is a long way off. What really shocks her is the fact that I refuse to worry. She’s always going for me about it. “But, George! You don’t seem to realise! We’ve simply got no money at all! It’s very serious!” She loves getting into a panic because something or other is “serious.” And of late she’s got that trick, when she’s glooming about something, of kind of hunching her shoulders and folding her arms across her breast. If you made a list of Hilda’s remarks throughout the day, you’d find three bracketed together at the top—“We can’t afford it,” “It’s a great saving” and “I don’t know where the money’s to come from.” She does everything for negative reasons. When she makes a cake she’s not thinking about the cake, only about how to save butter and eggs. When I’m in bed with her all she thinks about is how not to have a baby. If she goes to the pictures she’s all the time writhing with indignation about the price of the seats. Her methods of housekeeping, with all the emphasis on “using things up” and “making things do,” would have given Mother convulsions. On the other hand, Hilda isn’t in the least a snob. She’s never looked down on me because I’m not a gentleman. On the contrary, from her point of view I’m much too lordly in my habits. We never have a meal in a teashop without a frightful row in whispers because I’m tipping the waitress too much. And it’s a curious thing that in the last few years she’s become much more definitely lower-middle-class, in outlook and even in appearance, than I am. Of course all this “saving” business has never led to anything. It never does. We live just about as well or as badly as the other people in Ellesmere Road. But the everlasting stew about the gas bill and the milk bill and the awful price of butter and the kids’ boots and school fees goes on and on. It’s a kind of game with Hilda.