naked limbs constantly touching, and rolling against one
another whenever we fell asleep. One fidgeted from side
to side, but it did not do much good; whichever way one
turned there would be first a dull numb feeling, than a
sharp ache as the hardness of the floor wore through the
blanket. One could sleep, but not for more than ten
minutes on end.
About midnight the other man began making homo-
sexual attempts upon me-a nasty experience in a locked,
pitch-dark cell. He was a feeble creature and I could
manage him easily, but of course it was impossible to go
to sleep again. For the rest of the night we stayed awake,
smoking and talking. The man told me the story of his
life-he was a fitter, out of work for three years. He said
that his wife had promptly deserted him when he lost his
job, and he had been so long away from women that he
had almost forgotten what they were like. Homosexuality
is general among tramps of long standing, he said.
At eight the porter came along the passage unlocking
the doors and shouting "All out!" The doors opened,
letting out a stale, fetid stink. At once the passage was full
of squalid, grey-shirted figures, each chamber-pot in hand,
scrambling for the bathroom. It appeared that in the
morning only one tub of water was allowed for the lot of
us, and when I arrived twenty tramps had already washed
their faces; I took one glance at the black scum floating on
the water, and went unwashed. After this we were given a
breakfast identical with the previous night's supper, our
clothes were returned to us, and we were ordered out into
the yard to work. The work was peeling potatoes for the
pauper's dinner, but it was a mere formality, to keep us
occupied until the doctor came to inspect us. Most of the
tramps frankly idled. The doctor turned up at about ten
o'clock and we were told to go back to our cells, strip and
wait in the passage for the inspection.
Naked and shivering, we lined up in the passage. You
cannot conceive what ruinous, degenerate curs we looked,
standing there in the merciless morning light. A tramp's
clothes are bad, but they conceal far worse things; to see
him as he really is, unmitigated,
you must see him naked. Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow
chests, sagging muscles-every kind of physical rottenness
was there. Nearly everyone was under-nourished, and
some clearly diseased; two men were wearing trusses, and
as for the old mummy-like creature of seventy-five, one
wondered how he could possibly make his daily march.
Looking at our faces, unshaven and creased from the
sleepless night, you would have thought that all of us were
recovering from a week on the drink.
The inspection was designed merely to detect small-
pox, and took no notice of our general condition. A young
medical student, smoking a cigarette, walked rapidly
along the line glancing us up and down, and not inquiring
whether any man was well or ill. When my cell
companion stripped I saw that his chest was covered with
a red rash, and, having spent the night a few inches away
from him, I fell into a panic about smallpox. The doctor,
however, examined the rash and said that it was due
merely to under-nourishment.
After the inspection we dressed and were sent into the
yard, where the porter called our names over, gave us back
any possessions we had left at the office, and distributed
meal tickets. These were worth sixpence each, and were
directed to coffee-shops on the route we had named the
night before. It was interesting to see that quite a number
of the tramps could not read, and had to apply to myself
and other "scholards" to decipher their tickets.
The gates were opened, and we dispersed immediately.
How sweet the air does smell-even the air of a back street
in the suburbs-after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the
spike! I had a mate now, for while we were peeling
potatoes I had made friends with an Irish tramp named
Paddy Jaques, a melancholy
pale man who seemed clean and decent. He was going to
Edbury spike, and suggested that we should go together.
We set out, getting there at three in the afternoon. It was a
twelve-mile walk, but we made it fourteen by getting lost
among the desolate north London slums. Our meal tickets
were directed to a coffee-shop in Ilford. When we got
there, the little chit of a serving-maid, having seen our
tickets and grasped that we were tramps, tossed her head
in contempt and for a long time would not serve us.
Finally she slapped on the table two "large teas" and four
slices of bread and dripping-that is, eightpenny-worth of
food. It appeared that the shop habitually cheated the
tramps of twopence or so on each ticket; having tickets
instead of money, the tramps could not protest or go
elsewhere.
XXVIII
PADDY was my mate for about the next fortnight, and, as
he was the first tramp I had known at all well, I want to
give an account of him. I believe that he was a typical
tramp and there are tens of thousands in England like him.
He was a tallish man, aged about thirty-five, with fair
hair going grizzled and watery blue eyes. His features
were good, but his cheeks had lanked and had that greyish,
dirty in the grain look that comes of a bread and margarine
diet. He was dressed, rather better than most tramps, in a
tweed shooting jacket and a pair of old evening trousers
with the braid still on them. Evidently the braid figured in
his mind as a lingering scrap of respectability, and he took
care to sew it on again when it came loose. He was careful
of his appearance altogether, and carried a razor and
bootbrush that he would not sell, though he had sold his
"papers" and even his pocket-knife long since.
Nevertheless, one would have known him for a tramp a
hundred yards away. There was something in his drifting
style of walk, and the way he had of hunching his
shoulders forward, essentially abject. Seeing him walk,
you felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow
than give one.
He had been brought up in Ireland, served two years
in the war, and then worked in a metal polish factory,
where he had lost his job two years earlier. He was
horribly ashamed of being a tramp, but he had picked up
all a tramp's ways. He browsed the pavements
unceasingly, never missing a cigarette end, or even an
empty cigarette packet, as he used the tissue paper for
rolling cigarettes. On our way into Edbury he saw a
newspaper parcel on the pavement, pounced on it, and
found that it contained two mutton sandwiches, rather
frayed at the edges; these he insisted on my sharing. He
never passed an automatic machine without giving a tug
at the handle, for he said that sometimes they are out of
&nbs
p; order and will eject pennies if you tug at them. He had
no stomach for crime, however. When we were in the
outskirts of Romton, Paddy noticed a bottle of milk on a
doorstep, evidently left there by mistake. He stopped,
eyeing the bottle hungrily.
"Christ!" he said, "dere's good food goin' to waste.
Somebody could knock dat bottle off, eh? Knock it off
easy."
I saw that he was thinking of "knocking it off" himself.
He looked up and down the street; it was a quiet
residential street and there was nobody in sight. Paddy's
sickly, chap-fallen face yearned over the milk. Then he
turned away, saying gloomily:
"Best leave it. It don't do a man no good to steal.
Tank God, I ain't never stolen nothin' yet."
It was funk, bred of hunger, that kept him virtuous.
With only two or three sound meals in his belly, he would
have found courage to steal the milk.
He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and
come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting
a free meal. As we drifted through the streets he would
keep up a monologue in this style, in a whimpering, self-
pitying Irish voice:
"It's hell bein' on de road, eh? It breaks yer heart goin'
into dem bloody spikes. But what's a man to do else, eh?
I ain't had a good meat meal for about two months, an'
me boots is getting bad, an'-Christ! How'd it be if we was
to try for a cup o' tay at one o' dem convents on de way
to Edbury? Most times dey're good for a cup o' tay. Ah,
what'd a man do widout religion, eh? I've took cups o' tay
from de convents, an' de Baptists, an' de Church of
England, an' all sorts. I'm a Catholic meself. Dat's to say,
I ain't been to confession for. about seventeen year, but
still I got me religious feelin's, y'understand. An' dem
convents is always good for a cup o' tay . . ." etc. etc. He
would keep this up all day, almost without stopping.
His ignorance was limitless and appalling. He once
asked me, for instance, whether Napoleon lived before
Jesus Christ or after. Another time, when I was looking
into a bookshop window, he grew very perturbed because
one of the books was called Of the Imitation of Christ. He
took this for blasphemy. "What de hell do dey want to go
imitatin' of Him for?" he demanded angrily. He could
read, but he had a kind of loathing for books. On our
way from Romton to Edbury I went into a public library,
and, though Paddy did not want to read, I suggested that
he should come in and rest his
legs. But he preferred to wait on the pavement. "No," he
said, "de sight of all dat bloody print makes me sick."
Like most tramps, he was passionately mean about
matches. He had a box of matches when I met him, but I
never saw him strike one, and he used to lecture me for
extravagance when I struck mine. His method was to
cadge a light from strangers, sometimes going without a
smoke for half an hour rather than strike a match.
Self-pity was the clue to his character. The thought of
his bad luck never seemed to leave him for an instant. He
would break long silences to exclaim, apropos of nothing,
"It's hell when yer clo'es begin to go up de spout, eh?" or
"Dat tay in de spike ain't tay, it's piss," as though there
was nothing else in the world to think about. And he had a
low, worm-like envy of anyone who was better off-not of
the rich, for they were beyond his social horizon, but of
men in work. He pined for work as an artist pines to be
famous. If he saw an old man working he would say
bitterly, "Look at dat old keepin' able-bodied men out o'
work"; or if it was a boy, "It's dem young devils what's
takin' de bread out of our mouths." And all foreigners to
him were "dem bloody dagoes"-for, according to his
theory, foreigners were responsible for unemployment.
He looked at women with a mixture of longing and
hatred. Young, pretty women were too much above him to
enter into his ideas, but his mouth watered at prostitutes.
A couple of scarlet-lipped old creatures would go past;
Paddy's face would flush pale pink, and he would turn and
stare hungrily after the women. "Tarts!" he would
murmur, like a boy at a sweetshop window. He told me
once that he had not had to do with a woman for two
years-since he had lost his job, that is-and he had
forgotten that one could aim higherthan prostitutes.
He had the regular character of a tramp-abject, envious,
a jackal's character.
Nevertheless, he was a good fellow, generous by nature
and capable of sharing his last crust with a friend;
indeed he did literally share his last crust with me
more than once. He was probably capable of work too, if
he had been well fed for a few months. But two years of
bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly.
He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his own
mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was
malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed
his manhood.
XXIX
ON the way to Edbury I told Paddy that I had a friend
from whom I could be sure of getting money, and
suggested going straight into London rather than face
another night in the spike. But Paddy had not been in
Edbury spike recently, and, tramp-like, he would not
waste a night's free lodging. We arranged to go into
London the next morning. I had only a halfpenny, but
Paddy had two shillings, which would get us a bed each
and a few cups of tea.
The Edbury spike did not differ much from the one at
Romton. The worst feature was that all tobacco was
confiscated at the gate, and we were warned that any man
caught smoking would be turned out at once. Under the
Vagrancy Act tramps can be prosecuted for smoking in the
spike-in fact, they can be prosecuted for almost anything;
but the authorities generally save the trouble of a
prosecution by turning disobedient men out of doors.
There was no work to do, and the cells were fairly
comfortable. We slept two in a cell,
"one up, one down"-that is, one on a wooden shelf and
one on the floor, with straw palliasses and plenty of
blankets, dirty but not verminous. The food was the same
as at Romton, except that we had tea instead of cocoa.
One could get extra tea in the morning, as the Tramp
Major was selling it at a halfpenny a mug, illicitly no
doubt. We were each given a hunk of bread and cheese to
take away for our midday meal.
When we got into London we had eight hours to kill
before the lodging-houses opened. It is curious how one
does not notice things. I had been in London innumerable
times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the
worst things about London-the fact that it costs money
even to sit down. In Paris, if you had no money and could
not find a public bench, you would s
it on the pavement.
Heaven knows what sitting on the pavement would lead to
in London-prison, probably. By four we had stood five
hours, and our feet seemed red-hot from the hardness of
the stones. We were hungry, having eaten our ration as
soon as we left the spike, and I was out of tobacco-it
mattered less to Paddy, who picked up cigarette ends. We
tried two churches and found them locked. Then we tried a
public library, but there were no seats in it.-As a last hope
Paddy suggested trying a Romton House; by the rules they
would not let us in before seven, but we might slip in
unnoticed. We walked up to the magnificent doorway (the
Rowton Houses really are magnificent) and very casually,
trying to look like regular lodgers, began to stroll in.
Instantly a man lounging in the doorway, a sharp-faced
fellow, evidently in some position of authority, barred the
way.
"You men sleep 'ere last night?"
"No."
"Then-off."
We obeyed, and stood two more hours on the street
corner. It was unpleasant, but it taught me not to use the
expression "street corner loafer," so I gained something
from it.
At six we went to a Salvation Army shelter. We could
not book beds till eight and it was not certain that there
would be any vacant, but an official, who called us
"Brother," let us in on the condition that we paid for two
cups of tea. The main hall of the shelter was a great white-
washed barn of a place, oppressively clean and bare, with
no fires. Two hundred decentish, rather subdued-looking
people were sitting packed on long wooden benches. One
or two officers in uniform prowled up and down. On the
wall were pictures of General Booth, and notices
prohibiting cooking, drinking, spitting, swearing,
quarrelling and gambling. As a specimen of these notices,
here is one that I copied word for word:
"Any man found gambling or playing cards will be
expelled and will not be admitted under any
circumstances.
"A reward will be given for information leading to
the discovery of such persons.
"The officers in charge appeal to all lodgers to
assist them in keeping this hostel free from the
DETESTABLE EVIL OF GAMBLING."
"Gambling or playing cards" is a delightful phrase.
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 17
