Mrs. Sophie Chimes was determined to get some coal, no matter how little, and no matter if it meant standing all day long in the queue. But after two hours in a bone-chilling wind, Mrs. Chimes collapsed. Neighbors carried her to her small, cold, prefabricated dwelling in the bomb-scarred slums of London's Whitechapel.
Revived, Mrs. Chimes broke up two small orange crates (cruelly labeled "Sunkist") and kindled a puny blaze in her stove. She went to the icy window, peered down the street in the hope of a glimpse of her husband. Unemployed now, he had gone out ahead of her to queue up at the greengrocer's for a few potatoes. Mrs. Chimes turned to her tiny kitchen and a pile of clothes awaiting washing. She sighed:
"I've got no time for doing the 'ouse. In the daytime I'm out queuing for coal and in the evening we get into bed to get warm. My 'usband, 'e's a Labor man, but now 'e don't know what to think. It seems all these politicians are the same once they get into power."
Foreign Weather. Thousands of Britons were not as badly off as the Chimeses were in the first week of The Crisis, but millions were. Every Briton had his own personal crisis as the underlying fact of his nation's woefully low coal production was brought to a head by mean, frosty, snowy, windy weather. The Crisis itself had been a stunning blow (TIME, Feb. 17). Now, as it deepened, it was worse in many ways than the blitz at its worst: it hit everybody. The Government extended its five-hour domestic power switchoff and blackout of cities, villages, industries from Land's End to John o' Groats.
The below-freezing weather seemed to be under the control of foreign devils intent on Britain's downfall (the islands were in the middle of a high-pressure area that extended from central Russia to northern Iceland).* It lashed coal ships to their piers and snow-blocked 75,000 coal-laden railroad cars. Britons shivered in unheated trams, trains and subways (most transport was drastically cut), squinted under nickering candlelight in unheated offices (there was a run on aspirin, a coal-tar derivative, for eyestrain headaches), came home to huddle around the kitchen stove and to hope that a threatened cut in gas would not add to their miseries. London's Central Electricity Board was typical of the general discomfort: it met in overcoats, by candlelight (see cut).
Britons were in a bristling, grumbling mood. But they stood and took it again. There was no disorder as factories closed indefinitely; by this week unemployment was up to 2,000,000 and rising fast; 1,255,000 had registered for the pittance of the dole (about $10 a week for a family of four). The British national character and the British political mood stood out in their words and deeds.
Right to Left. Boomed the clear, cultured voice of a thin, scholarly-looking man lunching in his heavy ulster at a Soho restaurant: "I say it's the judgment of the Almighty on the British people for voting Socialist."
Whined a flower girl on the steps of lamplit St. Paul's Cathedral: "All my flowers shriveled up, and the buds go brown with frost. Politics, I don't understand 'em. It's warmth I want."