George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London Страница 23

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 as "head of the house," and was arbiter

of disputes and unpaid chuckerout.

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

underground, very hot and drowsy with coke fumes, and

lighted only by the fires, which cast black velvet shadows

in the corners. 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 favourite, 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 realised that there are

people in England who live on nothing but the oldage

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. So you 'as about four an' fourpence

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;

everything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier.

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

festering 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 underfed, 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 bistro

and the sweatshop.

   It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East

London women are pretty (it is the mixture of blood,

perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals -

Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk

scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness knows how.

Here and there were street meetings. In Whitechapel

somebody called The Singing Evangel undertook to save

you from hell for the charge 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

denouncing them for polygamists. A lame, bearded man,

evidently an atheist, had heard the word God and was

heckling angrily. 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!-

polygamists!-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 twenty 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 want to go across my knee? You little bastard, you

shall

enjoy yerself!"

   Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The mother

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

queer after Paris.

   The last night that I was in the Pennyfields lodginghouse

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

scene. One of the old-age pensioners, a man of about

seventy, naked 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

sullen, 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 suc

ceeding. Finally he burst out:

   "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 alley-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 Irishman 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 blackbeetles.

   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

pavement 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

curious 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 deputy and his wife were friendly people, and

ready to make one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or

night.

                         XXVI

IN the morning after paying for the usual tea-andtwo-

slices 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 after-

noon. Leaning against the pigpens in Romton 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 other 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

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

Romton, t'ank God-leastways, dey didn't de last time I