Down and Out in Paris and London (19 page)

pretended to be so. The fourth shopman was a large blond

young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked

at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly be-

tween thumb and finger.

‘Poor stuff,’ he said, ‘very poor stuff, that is.’ (It was quite

a good suit.) ‘What yer want for ‘em?’

I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as

much money as he could spare. He thought for a moment,

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Down and Out in Paris and London

then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on

to the counter. ‘What about the money?’ I said, hoping for a

pound. He pursed Us lips, then produced A SHILLING and

laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue—I was going to ar-

gue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to

take up the shilling again; I saw that I was helpless. He let

me change in a small room behind the shop.

The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black

dungaree trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my own

shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my

pocket. It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such

clothes. I had worn bad enough things before, but nothing

at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless,

they had—how is one to express it?—a gracelessness, a pa-

tina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness.

They were the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace seller, or

a tramp. An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man,

obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked

again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt

was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of

persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as

soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all di-

rections.

I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the

move all the time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that

the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not

speak to anyone, imagining that they must notice a dispar-

ity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I discovered

that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me in-

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stantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to

have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow

that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No

one had called me mate before in my life—it was the clothes

that had done it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the

attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a bad-

ly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him

with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a

dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s

clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not

to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the

same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in pris-

on.At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read

about doss-houses (they are never called doss-houses, by

the way), and I supposed that one could get a bed for four-

pence or thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or something

of the kind, standing on the kerb in the Waterloo Road, I

stopped and questioned him. I said that I was stony broke

and wanted the cheapest bed I could get.

‘Oh,’ said he, ‘you go to that ‘ouse across the street there,

with the sign ‘Good Beds for Single Men”. That’s a good kip

[sleeping place], that is. I bin there myself on and off. You’ll

find it cheap AND clean.’

It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in

all the windows, some of which were patched with brown

paper. I entered a stone passage-way, and a little etiolated

boy with sleepy eyes appeared from a door leading to a cel-

lar. Murmurous sounds came from the cellar, and a wave of

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Down and Out in Paris and London

hot air and cheese. The boy yawned and held out his hand.

‘Want a kip? That’ll be a ‘og, guv’nor.’

I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety un-

lighted staircase to a bedroom. It had a sweetish reek of

paregoric and foul linen; the windows seemed to be tight

shut, and the air was almost suffocating at first. There was

a candle burning, and I saw that the room measured fifteen

feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it. Already

six lodgers were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with all their

own clothes, even their boots, piled on top of them. Some-

one was coughing in a loathsome manner in one corner.

When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a

board, and as for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder like

a block of wood. It was rather worse than sleeping on a ta-

ble, because the bed was not six feet long, and very narrow,

and the mattress was convex, so that one had to hold on to

avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that

I could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes

only consisted of the sheets and a cotton counterpane, so

that though stuffy it was none too warm. Several noises re-

curred throughout the night. About once in an hour the

man on my left—a sailor, I think—woke up, swore vilely,

and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of a bladder

disease, got up and noisily used his chamber-pot half a

dozen times during the night. The man in the corner had a

coughing fit once in every twenty minutes, so regularly that

one came to listen for it as one listens for the next yap when

a dog is baying the moon. It was an unspeakably repellent

sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man’s

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bowels were being churned up within him. Once when he

struck a match I saw that he was a very old man, with a

grey, sunken face like that of a corpse, and he was wearing

his trousers wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing

which for some reason disgusted me very much. Every time

he coughed or the other man swore, a sleepy voice from one

of the other beds cried out:

‘Shut up! Oh, for Christ’s—SAKE shut up!’

I had about an hour’s sleep in all. In the morning I was

woken by a dim impression of some large brown thing com-

ing towards me. I opened my eyes and saw that it was one of

the sailor’s feet, sticking out of bed close to my face. It was

dark brown, quite dark brown like an Indian’s, with dirt.

The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the

wash, were almost raw umber colour. I got up, dressed and

went downstairs. In the cellar were a row of basins and two

slippery roller towels. I had a piece of soap in my pocket,

and I was going to wash, when I noticed that every basin

was streaked with grime—solid, sticky filth as black as

boot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodg-

ing-house had not come up to its description as cheap and

clean. It was however, as I found later, a fairly representative

lodging-house.

I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward, fi-

nally going into a coffee-shop on Tower Hill. An ordinary

London coffee-shop, like a thousand others, it seemed queer.

and foreign after Paris. It was a little stuffy room with the

high-backed pews that were fashionable in the ‘forties, the

day’s menu written on a mirror with a piece of soap, and a

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Down and Out in Paris and London

girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating

out of newspaper parcels, and drinking tea in vast saucer-

less mugs like china tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew,

muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon.

‘Could I have some tea and bread and butter?’ I said to

the girl.

She stared. ‘No butter, only marg,’ she said, surprised.

And she repeated the order in the phrase that is to London

what the eternal COUP DE ROUGE is to Paris: ‘Large tea

and two slices!’

On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying

‘Pocketing the sugar not allowed,’ and beneath it some po-

etic customer had written:

He that takes away the sugar,

Shall be called a dirty——

but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last

word. This was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost three-

pence halfpenny, leaving me with eight and twopence.

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XXV

The eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. Af-

ter my bad experience in the Waterloo Road* I moved

eastward, and spent the next night in a lodging-house in

Pennyfields. This was a typical lodging-house, like scores

of others in London. It had accommodation for between fif-

ty and a hundred men, and was managed by a ‘deputy’—a

deputy for the owner, that is, for these lodging-houses are

profitable concerns and are owned by rich men. We slept

fifteen or twenty in a dormitory; the beds were again cold

and hard, but the sheets were not more than a week from

the wash, which was an improvement. The charge was

ninepence or a shilling (in the shilling dormitory the beds

were six feet apart instead of four) and the terms were cash

down by seven in the evening or out you went.

[*It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are much

commoner in south than north London. For some reason

they have not yet crossed the river in any great numbers.]

Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers,

with free firing and a supply of cooking-pots, tea-basins,

and toasting-forks. There were two great clinker fires, which

were kept burning day and night the year through. The work

of tending the fires, sweeping the kitchen and making the

beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One senior lodger,

a fine Norman-looking stevedore named Steve, was known

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Down and Out in Paris and London

as ‘head of the house’, and was arbiter of disputes and un-

paid chucker-out.

I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep under-

ground, very hot and drowsy with coke fumes, and lighted

only by the fires, which cast black velvet shadows in the

comers. Ragged washing hung on strings from the ceiling.

Red-lit men, stevedores mostly, moved about the fires with

cooking-pots; some of them were quite naked, for they had

been laundering and were waiting for their clothes to dry. At

night there were games of nap and draughts, and songs—‘

I’m a chap what’s done wrong by my parents,’ was a favou-

rite, and so was another popular song about a shipwreck.

Sometimes late at night men would come in with a pail of

winkles they had bought cheap, and share them out. There

was a general sharing of food, and it was taken for granted

to feed men who were out of work. A little pale, wizened

creature, obviously dying, referred to as ‘pore Brown, bin

under the doctor and cut open three times,’ was regularly

fed by the others.

Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Till

meeting them I had never realized that there are people in

England who live on nothing but the old-age pension of-

ten shillings a week. None of these old men had any other

resource whatever. One of them was talkative, and I asked

him how he managed to exist. He said:

‘Well, there’s ninepence a night for yer kip—that’s five an’

threepence a week. Then there’s threepence on Saturday for

a shave— that’s five an’ six. Then say you ‘as a ‘aircut once

a month for sixpence —that’s another three’apence a week.

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So you ‘as about four an’ four-pence for food an’ bacca.’

He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread

and margarine and tea—towards the end of the week dry

bread and tea without milk— and perhaps he got his clothes

from charity. He seemed contented, valuing his bed and fire

more than food. But, with an income of ten shillings a week,

to spend money on a shave—it is awe-inspiring.

All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping,

west as far as Whitechapel. It was queer after Paris; ev-

erything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier.

One missed the scream of the trams, and the noisy, fester-

ing life of the back streets, and the armed men clattering

through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and

the faces comelier and milder and more alike, without that

fierce individuality and malice of the French. There was less

drunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling, and more

idling. Knots of men stood at all the corners, slightly un-

derfed, but kept going by the tea-and-two-slices which the

Londoner swallows every two hours. One seemed to breathe

a less feverish air than in Paris. It was the land of the tea urn

and the Labour Exchange, as Paris is the land of the BIS-

TRO and the sweatshop.