A suit of cheap cloth and two sleeves of chalk gray.
This is before liberation, when legal currency was depreciating every day and prices were rising day by day. A teacher described the life of hunger and cold. The whole poem is:
A suit of cheap cloth, two sleeves of chalk gray .
If you don’t have enough to eat three meals a day, you will often frown in all seasons.
Get up at five o'clock, and the sixth hall wants you to play.
Without payment of wages for nine days, all ten families will be without food.