Down and Out in Paris and London (26 page)

——, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room

and be replaced by some other word.

The whole business of swearing, especially English

swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as

irrational as magic— indeed, it is a species of magic. But

there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our inten-

tion in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by

mentioning something that should be kept secret—usually

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Down and Out in Paris and London

something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange

thing is that when a word is well established as a swear

word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses

the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes

an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has

become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example—

. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this

word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morn-

ing till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing.

Similarly with—, which is rapidly losing its original sense.

One can think of similar instances in French—for exam-

ple—, which is now a quite meaningless expletive.

The word—, also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but

the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what

it once meant. The rule seems to be that words accepted as

swear words have some magical character, which sets them

apart and makes them useless for ordinary conversation.

Words used as insults seem to be governed by the same

paradox as swear words. A word becomes an insult, one

would suppose, because it means something bad; but m

practice its insult-value has little to do with its actual mean-

ing. For example, the most bitter insult one can offer to a

Londoner is ‘bastard’—which, taken for what it means, is

hardly an insult at all. And the worst insult to a woman, ei-

ther in London or Paris, is ‘cow’; a name which might even

be a compliment, for cows are among the most likeable of

animals. Evidently a word is an insult simply because it

is meant as an insult, without reference to its dictionary

meaning; words, especially swear words, being what pub-

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lic opinion chooses to make them. In this connexion it is

interesting to see how a swear word can change character

by crossing a frontier. In England you can print ‘JE M’EN

FOILS’ without protest from anybody. In France you have

to print it ‘JE M’EN F—‘. Or, as another example, take the

word ‘barnshoot’—a corruption of the Hindustani word

BAHINCHUT. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this

word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even

seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of Aristophanes’

plays, and the annotator suggested it as a rendering of some

gibberish spoken by a Persian ambassador. Presumably the

annotator knew what BAHINCHUT meant. But, because it

was a foreign word, it had lost its magical swear-word qual-

ity and could be printed.

One other thing is noticeable about swearing in London,

and that is that the men do not usually swear in front of the

women. In Paris it is quite different. A Parisian workman

may prefer to suppress an oath in front of a woman, but he

is not at all scrupulous about it, and the women themselves

swear freely. The Londoners are more polite, or more squea-

mish, in this matter.

These are a few notes that I have set down more or less

at random. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing with

the subject does not keep a year-book of London slang and

swearing, registering the changes accurately. It might throw

useful light upon the formation, development, and obsoles-

cence of words.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

XXXIII

The two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten

days. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had

learned parsimony on the road and considered even one

sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had

come to mean simply bread and margarine—the eternal

tea-and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or

two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco, and all,

at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn a

few extra shillings by ‘glimming’ in the evenings. It was a

precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a little and

eked out our money.

One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We

went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there

was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and after

two hours we were told that there was no work for us. We

had not missed much, for sandwich men have an unenvi-

able job. They are paid about three shillings a day for ten

hours’ work—it is hard work, especially in windy weather,

and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes round fre-

quently to see that the men are on their beat. To add to their

troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or sometimes

for three days, never weekly, so that they have to wait hours

for their job every morning. The number of unemployed

men who are ready to do the work makes them powerless to

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fight for better treatment. The job all sandwich men covet

is distributing handbills, which is paid for at the same rate.

When you see a man distributing handbills you can do him

a good turn by taking one, for he goes off duty when he has

distributed all his bills.

Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life—a

squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days to-

gether there was nothing to do but sit in the underground

kitchen, reading yesterday’s newspaper, or, when one

could get hold of it, a back number of the UNION JACK.

It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came

in Steamed, so that the kitchen stank horribly. One’s only

excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not

know how many men are living this life in London—it must

be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the

best life he had known for two years past. His interludes

from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid hands

on a few shillings, had all been like this; the tramping it-

self had been slightly worse. Listening to his whimpering

voice—he was always whimpering when he was not eating

—one realized what torture unemployment must be to him.

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man

only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an il-

literate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work

even more than he needs money. An educated man can put

up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils

of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling

up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.

That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who

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Down and Out in Paris and London

have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all

others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has

been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank,

resourceless mind.

It was a dull rime, and little of it stays in my mind, except

for talks with Bozo. Once the lodging-house was invaded by

a slumming-party. Paddy and I had been out, and, coming

back in the afternoon, we heard sounds of music down-

stairs. We went down to find three gentle-people, sleekly

dressed, holding a religious service in our kitchen. They

Were a grave and reverend seignior in a frock coat, a lady

sitting at a portable harmonium, and a chinless youth toy-

ing with a crucifix. It appeared that they had marched in

and started to hold the service, without any kind of invita-

tion whatever.

It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this in-

trusion. They did not offer the smallest rudeness to the

slummers; they just ignored them. By common consent ev-

eryone in the kitchen—a hundred men, perhaps—behaved

as though the slummers had not existed. There they stood

patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was

taken of them than if they had been earwigs. The gentleman

in the frock coat preached a sermon, but not a word of it was

audible; it was drowned in the usual din of songs, oaths,

and the clattering of pans. Men sat at their meals and card

games three feet away from the harmonium, peaceably ig-

noring it. Presently the slummers gave it up and cleared out,

not insulted in any way, but merely disregarded. No doubt

they consoled themselves by thinking how brave they had

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been, ‘freely venturing into the lowest dens,’ etc. etc.

Bozo said that these people came to the lodging-house

several times a month. They had influence with the police,

and the ‘deputy’ could not exclude them. It is curious how

people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at

you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a

certain level.

After nine days B.’s two pounds was reduced to one and

ninepence. Paddy and I set aside eighteenpence for our

beds, and spent threepence on the usual tea-and-two-slic-

es, which we shared—an appetizer rather than a meal. By

the afternoon we were damnably hungry and Paddy re-

membered a church near King’s Cross Station where a free

tea was given once a week to tramps. This was the day, and

we decided to go there. Bozo, though it was rainy weather

and he was almost penniless, would not come, saying that

churches were not his style.

Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting,

dirty types who had gathered from far and wide at the news

of a free tea, like kites round a dead buffalo. Presently the

doors opened and a clergyman and some girls shepherded

us into a gallery at the top of the church. It was an evangeli-

cal church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with texts about blood

and fire blazoned on the walls, and a hymn-book contain-

ing twelve hundred and fifty-one hymns; reading some of

the hymns, I concluded that the book would do as it stood

for an anthology of bad verse. There was to be a service after

the tea, and the regular congregation were sitting in the well

of the church below. It was a week-day, and there were only a

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Down and Out in Paris and London

few dozen of them, mostly stringy old women who remind-

ed one of boiling-fowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery

pews and were given our tea; it was a one-pound jam-jar of

tea each, with six slices of bread and margarine. As soon as

tea was over, a dozen tramps who had stationed themselves

near the door bolted to avoid the service; the rest stayed,

less from gratitude than lacking the cheek to go.

The organ let out a few preliminary hoots and the service

began. And instantly, as though at a signal, the tramps be-

gan to misbehave in the most outrageous way. One would

not have thought such scenes possible in a church. All round

the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered,

leaned over and flicked pellets of bread among the congre-

gation; I had to restrain the man next to me, more or less by

force, from lighting a cigarette. The tramps treated the ser-

vice as a purely comic spectacle. It was, indeed, a sufficiently

ludicrous service—the kind where there are sudden yells of

‘Hallelujah!’ and endless extempore prayers—but their be-

haviour passed all bounds. There was one old fellow in the

congregation —Brother Bootle or some such name—who

was often called on to lead us in prayer, and whenever he

stood up the tramps would begin stamping as though in a

theatre; they said that on a previous occasion he had kept

up an extempore prayer for twenty-five minutes, until the

minister had interrupted him. Once when Brother Bootle

stood up a tramp called out, ‘Two to one ‘e don’t beat seven

minutes!’ so loud that the whole church must hear. It was

not long before we were making far more noise than the

minister. Sometimes somebody below would send up an

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indignant ‘Hush!’ but it made no impression. We had set

ourselves to guy the service, and there was no stopping us.

It was a queer, rather disgusting scene. Below were the

handful of simple, well-meaning people, trying hard to wor-

ship; and above were the hundred men whom they had fed,

deliberately making worship impossible. A ring of dirty,

hairy faces grinned down from the gallery, openly jeering.

What could a few women and old men do against a hundred

hostile tramps? They were afraid of us, and we were frankly