LIVING ON THE MILKLINE

SUPERMARKETS are currently cutting the price of milk in hopes of enticing business away from the milkman (speaking of which, I have yet to see a milkwoman on the home delivery route.) RTE radio sent a reporter out to find what consumers thought of this. When a woman told him that she would continue to buy from the milkman, despite the extra cost of about one pound a week, he asked her why.

If the reporter had been female, the question might not have been asked, the answer being so obvious. In the event, the two words given in reply – that “It’s handy” – satisfied the reporter and he went off to interview someone else. He should not have. There are millions of listeners out there, half of whom – the male sex – probably thought that it was “handy” to have milk delivered to the doorstep in the way that it is handy to have power-steering in a car, or take-away food for dinner, or a portable phone, or a remote-control for the television set – or any one of the numerous luxuries, including a private jet place, which the well-off can afford to indulge. It’s handier to have an easy life than a hard life, and money smoothes our passage through it.

That is not, however, the reason why the majority of working women have milk delivered to their doorsteps in the morning. That is not what they mean by “handy.” The majority who work as mothers have milk delivered to their homes because how else are they going to feed their children at an early hour? Leave them at risk while they run down to the shops?

A reporter who knows what life is like for those who have to perform this daily chore would have teased out the implication of the word “handy” in that context. A reporter who doesn’t know – who doesn’t have children to feed – should have had the imagination to realise that a mother who needs to have milk waiting on the doorstep first thing in the day is a woman whose work is already cut out for her.

Let’s put it another way. Farmers don’t have automatic milking-parlours because they’re “handy” and allow a few hours extra sleep in the morning. Agricultural reporters know that. Send them out to interview someone who’s just installed the gleaming milking machine and you can be sure listeners will be treated to the sound of the two of them drooling over the working advantages of automation.

The cows are happier, because they’re not standing around in full-uddered agony waiting their turn. The farmer is happy because the quick turn-over allows for herd expansion, which means greater profits, and the time saved allows for greater attention to the health of the herd, which means increased output and even greater profit, not to mention more time to attend to other work.

Any service which releases men to work even harder than usual, or eases a difficult work-load is lauded, applauded, teased out and expanded upon, but the advantages of home-delivery of milk are misleadingly represented as, and reduced to being, merely “handy” – the impression is created and left hanging that the lazy cow is a spendthrift who rolls over in the warm bed on a cold morning while the hardworking father of the children faces the frost in order to keep her in the cream in which she wallows.

Lest there be any young Hot Press pigs who think that this is indeed so – who probably lie abed until the moment when mammy calls “Breakfast” – let us spell out why a woman needs to have fresh pasteurised milk delivered to her doorstep if she is to do her job properly:

In the closing years of the last century, infants died because of milk-borne disease. In the closing years of this century, children die from being left alone in the house. If a woman were to leave them unattended while she ran to the shops to buy fresh milk, she might come home to find them electrocuted. Shops in modern housing estates are usually located at least ten minutes from the doorstep. The return journey, plus waiting time to pay for purchases, gives a child at least twenty-five minutes to drown, burn, fall, smother, or kill siblings.

The mother could of course bring all the children with her, howling, hungry, at risk of flu and frostbite (assuming one of them isn’t sick in bed, which children often are) which of course would add another half-hour to the journey (the wee fuckers walk slowly.)

She’d also have to get them half an hour earlier in order to dress them for the great outdoors, and by the time they got home, now exhausted and still not having had the nourishment necessary to start the day, she would be behind with the dinner, and the little creeps would start howling hungrily all over again. (Do I have to point out, by the way, that the supermarket to which she has dragged her children at dawn in order to save a pound a week on her milk bill, doesn’t open till nine and is not child-friendly? Try parking a pram in any one of them.)

Besides which, there are mornings when a mother wakes up without two pennies to rub together, never mind thirty-three for the price of a pinta. Supermarkets do not give credit. Milkmen do. One third of the population of this country is living on the milkline or below it. Please don’t throw in the red herring of unemployed fathers who could run to the shop to fetch the stuff, thereby saving the vital few bob. Men are not yet that perfect, and a huge number of mothers are single parents.

Handy? Between them, mothers and milkmen keep children from dying, RTE please note. In another column, we shall explore why there are no milk-delivery women.