Down and Out in Paris and London (20 page)

It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East Lon-

don women are pretty (it is the mixture of blood, perhaps),

and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals—Chinamen,

Ghittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a

few Sikhs, come goodness knows how. Here and there were

street meetings. In Whitechapel somebody called The Sing-

ing Evangel undertook to save you from hell for the charge

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Down and Out in Paris and London

of sixpence. In the East India Dock Road the Salvation Army

were holding a service. They were singing ‘Anybody here

like sneaking Judas?’ to the tune of ‘What’s to be done with

a drunken sailor?’ On Tower Hill two Mormons were trying

to address a meeting. Round their platform struggled a mob

of men, shouting and interrupting. Someone was denounc-

ing them for polygamists. A lame, bearded man, evidently

an atheist, had heard the word God and was heckling an-

grily. There was a confused uproar of voices.

‘My dear friends, if you would only let us finish what we

were saying —!—That’s right, give ‘em a say. Don’t get on the

argue!—No, no, you answer me. Can you SHOW me God?

You SHOW ‘im me, then I’ll believe in ‘im.—Oh, shut up,

don’t keep interrupting of ‘em!—Interrupt yourself! —po-

lygamists!—Well, there’s a lot to be said for polygamy. Take

the— women out of industry, anyway.—My dear friends,

if you would just—No, no, don’t you slip out of it. ‘Ave

you SEEN God? ‘Ave you TOUCHED ‘im? ‘Ave you shook

‘ANDS with ‘im?—Oh, don’t get on the argue, for Christ’s

sake don’t get on the ARGUE!’ etc. etc. I listened for twen-

ty minutes, anxious to learn something about Mormonism,

but the meeting never got beyond shouts. It is the general

fate of street meetings.

In Middlesex Street, among the crowds at the market, a

draggled, down-at-heel woman was hauling a brat of five by

the arm. She brandished a tin trumpet in its face. The brat

was squalling.

‘Enjoy yourself!’ yelled the mother. ‘What yer think I

brought yer out ‘ere for an’ bought y’ a trumpet an’ all? D’ya

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want to go across my knee? You little bastard, you SHALL

enjoy yerself!’

Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The moth-

er and the child disappeared, both bawling. It was all very

queer after Paris.

The last night that I was in the Pennyfields lodging-house

there was a quarrel between two of the lodgers, a vile scene.

One of the old-age pensioners, a man of about seventy, na-

ked to the waist (he had been laundering), was violently

abusing a short, thickset stevedore, who stood with his back

to the fire. I could see the old man’s face in the light of the

fire, and he was almost crying with grief and rage. Evidently

something very serious had happened.

THE OLD-AGE PENSIONER:’You—!’

THE STEVEDORE: ‘Shut yer mouth, you ole—, afore I

set about yer!’

THE OLD-AGE PENSIONER: ‘Jest you try it on, you—

! I’m thirty year older’n you, but it wouldn’t take much to

make me give you one as’d knock you into a bucketful of

piss!’

THE STEVEDORE: ‘Ah, an’ then p’raps I wouldn’t smash

you up after, you ole—!’

Thus for five minutes. The lodgers sat round, unhappy,

trying to disregard the quarrel. The stevedore looked, sul-

len, but the old man was growing more and more furious.

He kept making little rushes at the other, sticking out his

face and screaming from a few inches distant like a cat on a

wall, and spitting. He was trying to nerve himself to strike a

blow, and not quite succeeding. Finally he burst out:

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Down and Out in Paris and London

‘A—, that’s what you are, a——! Take that in your dirty

gob and suck it, you—! By—, I’ll smash you afore I’ve done

with you. A—, that’s what you are, a son of a—whore. Lick

that, you—! That’s what I think of you, you—, you—, you—

you BLACK BASTARD!’

Whereat he suddenly collapsed on a bench, took his face

in his hands, and began crying. The other man seeing that

public feeling was against him, went out.

Afterwards I heard Steve explaining the cause of the

quarrel. It appeared that it was all about a shilling’s worth

of food. In some way the old man had lost his store of bread

and margarine, and so would have nothing to eat for the

next three days, except what the others gave him in charity.

The stevedore, who was in work and well fed, had taunted

him; hence the quarrel.

When my money was down to one and fourpence I went

for a night to a lodging-house in Bow, where the charge was

only eightpence. One went down an area and through an al-

ley-way into a deep, stifling cellar, ten feet square. Ten men,

navvies mostly, were sitting in the fierce glare of the fire. It

was midnight, but the deputy’s son, a pale, sticky child of

five, was there playing on the navvies’ knees. An old Irish-

man was whistling to a blind bullfinch in a tiny cage. There

were other songbirds there—tiny, faded things, that had

lived all their lives underground. The lodgers habitually

made water in the fire, to save going across a yard to the

lavatory. As I sat at the table I felt something stir near my

feet, and, looking down, saw a wave of black things moving

slowly across the floor; they were black-beetles.

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There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets,

marked in huge letters ‘Stolen from No.—Road’, smelt

loathsome. In the next bed to me lay a very old man, a pave-

ment artist, with some extraordinary curvature of the spine

that made him stick right out of bed, with his back a foot

or two from my face. It was bare, and marked with curi-

ous swirls of dirt, like a marble table-top. During the night

a man came in drunk and was sick on the floor, close to

my bed. There were bugs too—not so bad as in Paris, but

enough to keep one awake. It was a filthy place. Yet the dep-

uty and his wife were friendly people, and ready to make

one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

XXVI

In the morning after paying for the usual tea-and-two-slic-

es and buying half an ounce of tobacco, I had a halfpenny

left. I did not care to ask B. for more money yet, so there was

nothing for it but to go to a casual ward. I had very little

idea how to set about this, but I knew that there was a casual

ward at Romton, so I walked out there, arriving at three or

four in the afternoon. Leaning against the pigpens in Rom-

ton market-place was a wizened old Irishman, obviously a

tramp. I went and leaned beside him, and presently offered

him my tobacco-box. He opened the box and looked at the

tobacco in astonishment:

‘By God,’ he said, ‘dere’s sixpennorth o’ good baccy here!

Where de hell d’you get hold o’ dat? YOU ain’t been on de

road long.’

‘What, don’t you have tobacco on the road?’ I said.

‘Oh, we HAS it. Look.’

He produced a rusty tin which had once held Oxo Cubes.

In it were twenty or thirty cigarette ends, picked up from

the pavement. The Irishman said that he rarely got any oth-

er tobacco; he added that, with care, one could collect two

ounces of tobacco a day on the London pavements.

‘D’you come out o’ one o’ de London spikes [casual

wards], eh?’ he asked me.

I said yes, thinking this would make him accept me as a

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fellow tramp, and asked him what the spike at Romton was

like. He said:

‘Well, ‘tis a cocoa spike. Dere’s tay spikes, and cocoa

spikes, and skilly spikes. Dey don’t give you skilly in Rom-

ton, t’ank God—leastways, dey didn’t de last time I was

here. I been up to York and round Wales since.’

‘What is skilly?’ I said.

‘Skilly? A can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de

bottom; dat’s skilly. De skilly spikes is always de worst.’

We stayed talking for an hour or two. The Irishman was

a friendly old man, but he smelt very unpleasant, which was

not surprising when one learned how many diseases he suf-

fered from. It appeared (he described his symptoms fully)

that taking him from top to bottom he had the following

things wrong with him: on his crown, which was bald, he

had eczema; he was shortsighted, and had no glasses; he had

chronic bronchitis; he had some undiagnosed pain in the

back; he had dyspepsia; he had urethritis; he had varicose

veins, bunions and flat feet. With this assemblage of diseas-

es he had tramped the roads for fifteen years.

At about five the Irishman said, ‘Could you do wid a cup

o’ tay? De spike don’t open till six.’

‘I should think I could.’

‘Well, dere’s a place here where dey gives you a free cup

o’ tay and a bun. GOOD tay it is. Dey makes you say a lot o’

bloody prayers after; but hell! It all passes de time away. You

come wid me.’

He led the way to a small tin-roofed shed in a side-street,

rather like a village cricket pavilion. About twenty-five

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Down and Out in Paris and London

other tramps were waiting. A few of them were dirty old

habitual vagabonds, the majority decent-looking lads from

the north, probably miners or cotton operatives out of work.

Presently the door opened and a lady in a blue silk dress,

wearing gold spectacles and a crucifix, welcomed us in. In-

side were thirty or forty hard chairs, a harmonium, and a

very gory lithograph of the Crucifixion.

Uncomfortably we took off our caps and sat down. The

lady handed out the tea, and while we ate and drank she

moved to and fro, talking benignly. She talked upon reli-

gious subjects—about Jesus Christ always having a soft spot

for poor rough men like us, and about how quickly the time

passed when you were in church, and what a difference it

made to a man on the road if he said his prayers regularly.

We hated it. We sat against the wall fingering our caps (a

tramp feels indecently exposed with his cap off), and turn-

ing pink and trying to mumble something when the lady

addressed us. There was no doubt that she meant it all kind-

ly. As she came up to one of the north country lads with the

plate of buns, she said to him:

‘And you, my boy, how long is it since you knelt down

and spoke with your Father in Heaven?’

Poor lad, not a word could he utter; but his belly answered

for him, with a disgraceful rumbling which it set up at sight

of the food. Thereafter he was so overcome with shame that

he could scarcely swallow his bun. Only one man managed

to answer the lady in her own style, and he was a spry, red-

nosed fellow looking like a corporal who had lost his stripe

for drunkenness. He could pronounce the words ‘the dear

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Lord Jesus’ with less shame than anyone I ever saw. No

doubt he had learned the knack in prison.

Tea ended, and I saw the tramps looking furtively at one

another. An unspoken thought was running from man to

man—could we possibly make off before the prayers start-

ed? Someone stirred in his chair—not getting up actually,

but with just a glance at the door, as though half suggesting

the idea of departure. The lady quelled him with one look.

She said in a more benign tone than ever:

‘I don’t think you need go QUITE yet. The casual ward

doesn’t open till six, and we have time to kneel down and

say a few words to our Father first. I think we should all feel

better after that, shouldn’t we?’

The red-nosed man was very helpful, pulling the harmo-

nium into place and handing out the prayerbooks. His back

was to the lady as he did this, and it was his idea of a joke to

deal the books like a pack of cards, whispering to each man

as he did so, ‘There y’are, mate, there’s a—nap ‘and for yer!

Four aces and a king!’ etc.

Bareheaded, we knelt down among the dirty teacups

and began to mumble that we had left undone those things

that we ought to have done, and done those things that we

ought not to have done, and there was no health in us. The

lady prayed very fervently, but her eyes roved over us all

the time, making sure that we were attending. When she

was not looking we grinned and winked at one another,

and whispered bawdy jokes, just to show that we did not

care; but it stuck in our throats a little. No one except the

red-nosed man was self-possessed enough to speak the

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Down and Out in Paris and London

responses above a whisper. We got on better with the sing-

ing, except that one old tramp knew no tune but ‘Onward,

Christian soldiers’, and reverted to it sometimes, spoiling

the harmony.

The prayers lasted half an hour, and then, after a hand-