How to be poor

resist buying sugar in bulk. They thought it a tremendous
bargain, not to be missed, so they bought enough sugar for their life-time and
the life-time of their children and grandchildren. When the sugar arrived they
found that they had nowhere to store it — until it occurred to them that their
loo was a very spacious one. So that was where they piled up their sugar. Not
only did their guests feel rather strange whenever they were offered sugar to
put into their coffee, but the loo became extremely sticky.

    To offer bargains is a commercial
trick to make the poor poorer. When greedy fools fall for this trick, it serves
them right. All the same, if bargains were prohibited by law, our standard of
living would immediately rise by 7.39 per cent.
     
     
    And now to the verb, to bargain. This means to negotiate with the aim of beating the price down. The English
like to think that bargaining is a filthy oriental habit and pride themselves
that they never bargain. Well, they do not bargain in shops, but they do
bargain when they buy a house or a second-hand car. Big business is always
bargaining about millions of pounds, and British Trade Unions do hardly
anything else but bargain. In spite of all this, however, bargaining may still
be a filthy oriental habit which has gained a foothold here. The English,
however, are bad bargainers — which is not the same thing as not being
bargainers at all.
    When you listen to a proper oriental
bargain you would think neither love nor money would make the vendor part with,
say, an antique table, while as for the buyer, he wouldn’t accept it even as a
gift. The vendor seems to be in love with the piece and praises it to the
heavens; the buyer finds faults with it, and suggests contemptuously that it is
a fake. A proper oriental bargain is interrupted several times: the buyer
rushes out of the shop (in order to return two minutes later), or the vendor
refuses even to answer the latest, most insulting offer. Religion comes into
it, too: the vendor swears by Almighty God, or Allah, or by the life of his
mother (who died long ago), that he paid considerably more for that table than
he was asking for it even in the first place, and the buyer swears equally
solemn oaths that he would not pay such an outrageous price for this ramshackle
rubbish even if he could afford it, which is not the case. A proper oriental
bargain always ends in a deal and in friendly handshakes.
    At the beginning of the war I worked
as a freelance journalist, mostly for the BBC, and my first wife also had a job
there. As I was free in the mornings I did all the household shopping. Our
greengrocer in St John’s Wood High Street was a fat old Italian woman, Mrs
Salamone. She spoke perfect Cockney without a trace of foreign accent, but
preferred to talk, shout and quarrel with her innumerable children and
grandchildren in her native Italian. We, the customers, queued up patiently to
ask for, say, a cabbage. “Ninepence,” she would declare. A bit stiff for a
cabbage all the English customers would think secretly, but they — and myself —
would nevertheless pay up without murmur, and were, indeed, grateful to Mrs
Salamone for selling us a cabbage at all. The only exception was another
Italian lady Signora T.
    “How much is this — ‘cabbage’?” she
would ask aggressively, her tone suggesting that the real word for the
vegetable was “garbage”.
    “Ninepence.”
    Signora T would laugh ironically as
if she had heard a really amusing joke.
    “You don’t mean this half-rotten,
miserable, soft cabbage, hardly suitable for pigs?”
    Mrs Salamone would indicate gloomily
that she did mean that very cabbage. Signora T would go on: “Ninepence? Sheer
highway robbery. It’s criminal. It’s profiteering. Sixpence.”
    Mrs Salamone, obviously much too
dignified to answer, would turn to the next customer.
    “Sixpence ha’penny,” said Signora T
as a last offer. Mrs Salamone still refused even to look at her and Signora T
would flounce away... only to return three minutes later with an offer of
sevenpence. After a long and loud session of bargaining and quarrelling,
Signora T would have her cabbage for eightpence.
    For a long time I wondered why Mrs
Salamone bothered to waste her time with the Signora at all. She had plenty of
customers who gave her no trouble. Slowly it dawned on me — the evidence for it
became clear — that Signora T was Mrs Salamone’s favourite customer, the only
one whom she