Down and Out in Paris and London (23 page)

half a crown, but could never manage it. Here and there

were clerks out of work, pallid and moody. Among a group

of them a tall, thin, deadly pale young man was talking ex-

citedly. He thumped his fist on the table and boasted in a

strange, feverish style. When the officers were out of hear-

ing he broke out into startling blasphemies:

‘I tell you what, boys, I’m going to get that job tomorrow.

I’m not one of your bloody down-on-the-knee brigade; I

can look after myself. Look at that—notice there! ‘The Lord

will provide!’ A bloody lot He’s ever provided me with. You

don’t catch me trusting to the—Lord. You leave it to me,

boys. I’M GOING TO GET THAT JOB,’ etc. etc.

I watched him, struck by the wild, agitated way in which

he talked; he seemed hysterical, or perhaps a little drunk.

An hour later I went into a small room, apart from the main

hall, which was intended for reading. It had no books or pa-

pers in it, so few of the lodgers went there. As I opened the

door I saw the young clerk in there all alone; he was on his

knees, PRAYING. Before I shut the door again I had time to

see his face, and it looked agonized. Quite suddenly I real-

ized, from the expression of his face, that he was starving.

The charge for beds was eightpence. Paddy and I had

fivepence left, and we spent it at the ‘bar’, where food was

cheap, though not so cheap as in some common lodging-

houses. The tea appeared to be made with tea DUST, which

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Down and Out in Paris and London

I fancy had been given to the Salvation Army in charity,

though they sold it at threehalfpence a cup. It was foul stuff.

At ten o’clock an officer marched round the hall blowing a

whistle. Immediately everyone stood up.

‘What’s this for?’ I said to Paddy, astonished.

‘Dat means you has to go off to bed. An’ you has to look

sharp about it, too.’

Obediently as sheep, the whole two hundred men trooped

off to bed, under the command of the officers.

The dormitory was a great attic like a barrack room, with

sixty or seventy beds in it. They were clean and tolerably

comfortable, but very narrow and very close together, so

that one breathed straight into one’s neighbour’s face. Two

officers slept in the room, to see that there was no smoking

and no talking after lights-out. Paddy and I had scarcely a

wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some

nervous trouble, shellshock perhaps, which made him cry

out ‘Pip!’ at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise,

something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never

knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of

sleep. It appeared that Pip, as the others called him, slept

regularly in the shelter, and he must have kept ten or twenty

people awake every night. He was an example of the kind

of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep

when men are herded as they are in these lodging-houses.

At seven another whistle blew, and the officers went

round shaking those who did not get up at once. Since then

I have slept in a number of Salvation Army shelters, and

found that, though the different houses vary a little, this

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semi-military discipline is the same in all of them. They are

certainly cheap, but they are too like workhouses for my

taste. In some of them there is even a compulsory religious

service once or twice a week, which the lodgers must at-

tend or leave the house. The fact is that the Salvation Army

are so in the habit of thinking themselves a charitable body

that they cannot even run a lodging-house without making

it stink of charity.

At ten I went to B.’s office and asked him to lend me a

pound. He gave me two pounds and told me to come again

when necessary, so that Paddy and I were free of money

troubles for a week at least. We loitered the day in Trafalgar

Square, looking for a friend of Paddy’s who never turned up,

and at night went to a lodging-house in a back alley near the

Strand. The charge was elevenpence, but it was a dark, evil-

smelling place, and a notorious haunt of the ‘nancy boys’.

Downstairs, in the murky kitchen, three ambiguous-look-

ing youths in smartish blue suits were sitting on a bench

apart, ignored by the other lodgers. I suppose they were

‘nancy boys’. They looked the same type as the apache boys

one sees in Paris, except that they wore no side-whiskers. In

front of the fire a fully dressed man and a stark-naked man

were bargaining. They were newspaper sellers. The dressed

man was selling his clothes to the naked man. He said:

‘’Ere y’are, the best rig-out you ever ‘ad. A tosheroon

[half a crown] for the coat, two ‘ogs for the trousers, one

and a tanner for the boots, and a ‘og for the cap and scarf.

That’s seven bob.’

‘You got a ‘ope! I’ll give yer one and a tanner for the coat,

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Down and Out in Paris and London

a ‘og for the trousers, and two ‘ogs for the rest. That’s four

and a tanner.’

‘Take the ‘ole lot for five and a tanner, chum.’

‘Right y’are, off with ‘em. I got to get out to sell my late

edition.’

The clothed man stripped, and in three minutes their

positions were reversed; the naked man dressed, and the

other kilted with a sheet of the Daily Mail.

The dormitory was dark and close, with fifteen beds in it.

There was a horrible hot reek of urine, so beastly that at first

one tried to breathe in small, shallow puffs, not filling one’s

lungs to the bottom. As I lay down in bed a man loomed

out of the darkness, leant over me and began babbling in an

educated, half-drunken voice:

‘An old public schoolboy, what? [He had heard me say

something to Paddy.] Don’t meet many of the old school

here. I am an old Etonian. You know—twenty years hence

this weather and all that.’ He began to quaver out the Eton

boating-song, not untunefully:

Jolly boating weather,

And a hay harvest—

‘Stop that—noise!’ shouted several lodgers.

‘Low types,’ said the old Etonian, ‘very low types. Funny

sort of place for you and me, eh? Do you know what my

friends say to me? They say, ‘M—, you are past redemption.’

Quite true, I AM past redemption. I’ve come down in the

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world; not like these—s here, who couldn’t come down if

they tried. We chaps who have come down ought to hang

together a bit. Youth will be still in our faces—you know.

May I offer you a drink?’

He produced a bottle of cherry brandy, and at the same

moment lost his balance and fell heavily across my legs.

Paddy, who was undressing, pulled him upright.

‘Get back to yer bed, you silly ole—!’

The old Etonian walked unsteadily to his bed and crawled

under the sheets with all his clothes on, even his boots. Sev-

eral times in the night I heard him murmuring, ‘M—, you

are past redemption,’ as though the phrase appealed to him.

In the morning he was lying asleep fully dressed, with the

bottle clasped in his arms. He was a man of about fifty, with

a refined, worn face, and, curiously enough, quite fashion-

ably dressed. It was queer to see his good patent-leather

shoes sticking out of that filthy bed. It occurred to me, too,

that the cherry brandy must have cost the equivalent of a

fortnight’s lodging, so he could not have been seriously

hard up. Perhaps he frequented common lodging-houses in

search of the ‘nancy boys’.

The beds were not more than two feet apart. About mid-

night I woke up to find that the man next to me was trying

to steal the money from beneath my pillow. He was pretend-

ing to be asleep while he did it, sliding his hand under the

pillow as gently as a rat. In the morning I saw that he was a

hunchback, with long, apelike arms. I told Paddy about the

attempted theft. He laughed and said:

‘Christ! You got to get used to dat. Desc lodgin’ houses

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Down and Out in Paris and London

is full o’ thieves. In some houses dere’s nothin’ safe but to

sleep wid all yer clo’es on. I seen ‘em steal a wooden leg off a

cripple before now. Once I see a man—fourteen-stone man

he was—come into a lodgin’-house wid four pound ten. He

puts it under his mattress. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘any—dat touches

dat money does it over my body,’ he says. But dey done him

all de same. In de mornin’ he woke up on de floor. Four fell-

ers had took his mattress by de corners an’ lifted him off as

light as a feather. He never saw his four pound ten again.’

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XXX

The next morning we began looking once more for

Paddy’s friend, who was called Bozo, and was a screev-

er—that is, a pavement artist. Addresses did not exist in

Paddy’s world, but he had a vague idea that Bozo might be

found in Lambeth, and in the end we ran across him on

the Embankment, where he had established himself not

far from Waterloo Bridge. He was kneeling on the pave-

ment with a box of chalks, copying a sketch of Winston

Churchill from a penny note-book. The likeness was not at

all bad. Bozo was a small, dark, hook-nosed man, with curly

hair growing low on his head. His right leg was dreadfully

deformed, the foot being twisted heel forward in a way hor-

rible to see. From his appearance one could have taken him

for a Jew, but he used to deny this vigorously. He spoke of

his hooknose as ‘Roman’, and was proud of his resemblance

to some Roman Emperor —it was Vespasian, I think.

Bozo had a strange way of talking, Cockneyfied and yet

very lucid and expressive. It was as though he had read good

books but had never troubled to correct Us grammar. For

a while Paddy and I stayed on the Embankment, talking,

and Bozo gave us an account of the screeving trade. I repeat

what he said more or less in his own words.

‘I’m what they call a serious screever. I don’t draw in

blackboard chalks like these others, I use proper colours

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Down and Out in Paris and London

the same as what painters use; bloody expensive they are,

especially the reds. I use five bobs’ worth of colours in a

long day, and never less than two bobs’ worth*. Cartoons

is my line—you know, politics and cricket and that. Look

here’—he showed me his notebook—‘here’s likenesses of all

the political blokes, what I’ve copied from the papers. I have

a different cartoon every day. For instance, when the Bud-

get was on I had one of Winston trying to push an elephant

marked ‘Debt’, and underneath I wrote, ‘Will he budge it?’

See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you

mustn’t put anything in favour of Socialism, because the

police won’t stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constric-

tor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The

copper came along and saw it, and he says, ‘You rub that

out, and look sharp about it,’ he says. I had to rub it out. The

copper’s got the right to move you on for loitering, and it’s

no good giving them a back answer.’

[* Pavement artists buy their colours in the form of pow-

der, and work them into cakes in condensed milk]

I asked Bozo what one could earn at screeving. He said:

‘This time of year, when it don’t rain, I take about three

quid between Friday and Sunday—people get their wages

Fridays, you see. I can’t work when it rains; the colours get

washed off straight away. Take the year round, I make about

a pound a week, because you can’t do much in the winter.

Boat Race day, and Cup Final day, I’ve took as much as four

pounds. But you have to CUT it out of them, you know; you

don’t take a bob if you just sit and look at them. A halfpen-

ny’s the usual drop [gift], and you don’t get even that unless

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you give them a bit of backchat. Once they’ve answered you

they feel ashamed not to give you a drop. The best thing’s

to keep changing your picture, because when they see you

drawing they’ll stop and watch you. The trouble is, the beg-

gars scatter as soon as you turn round with the hat. You

really want a nobber [assistant] at this game. You keep at

work and get a crowd watching you, and the nobber comes

casual-like round the back of them. They don’t know he’s

the nobber. Then suddenly he pulls his cap off, and you got

them between two fires like. You’ll never get a drop off real

toffs. It’s shabby sort of blokes you get most off, and foreign-

ers. I’ve had even sixpences off Japs, and blackies, and that.

They’re not so bloody mean as what an Englishman is. An-

other thing to remember is to keep your money covered up,