anything but tea-and-two-slices."
"But isn't it very hard to take an interest in things-
things like stars-living this life?"
"Screeving, you mean? Not necessarily. It don't need
turn you into a bloody rabbit-that is, not if you set your
mind to it."
"It seems to have that effect on most people."
"Of course. Look at Paddy-a tea-swilling old moocher,
only fit to scrounge for fag-ends. That's the way most of
them go. I despise them. But you don't need to get like that.
If you've got any education, it don't matter to you if
you're on the road for the rest of your life."
"Well, I've found just the contrary," I said. "It seems to
me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for
nothing from that moment."
"No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can
live the same life, rich or poor. You 'can still keep on with
your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself,
'I'm a free man in here' "-he tapped his forehead-"and
you're all right."
Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened
with attention. He seemed a very unusual screever, and he
was, moreover, the first person I had heard maintain that
poverty did not matter. I saw a good deal of him during
the next few days, for several times it rained and he could
not work. He told me the history of his life, and it was a
curious one.
The son of a bankrupt bookseller, he had gone to work
as a house-painter at eighteen, and then served three years
in France and India during the war. After the war he had
found a house-painting job in Paris, and had stayed there
several years. France suited him better than England (he
despised the English), and he had been doing well in
Paris, saving money, and engaged to a French girl. One
day the girl was crushed to death under the wheels of an
omnibus. Bozo went on the drink for a week, and then
returned to work, rather shaky; the same morning he fell
from a stage on which he was working, forty feet on to the
pavement, and smashed his right foot to pulp. For some
reason he received only sixty pounds compensation. He
returned to England, spent his money in looking for jobs,
tried hawking books in Middlesex Street market, then
tried selling toys from a tray, and finally settled down as
a screever. He had lived hand to mouth ever since, half
starved throughout the winter, and often sleeping in the
spike or on the Embankment. When I knew him he
owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in, and his
drawing materials and a few books. The clothes were the
usual beggar's rags, but he wore a collar and tie, of
which he was rather proud. The collar, a year or more
old, was constantly "going" round the neck, and Bozo
used to patch it with bits cut from the tail of his shirt so
that the shirt had scarcely any tail left. His damaged leg
was getting worse and would probably have to be
amputated, and his knees, from kneeling on the stones,
had pads of skin on them as thick as boot-soles. There
was, clearly, no future for him but beggary and a death
in the workhouse.
With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor
shame, nor self-pity. He had faced his position, and
made a philosophy for himself. Being a beggar, he said,
was not his fault, and he refused either to have any
compunction about it or to let it trouble him. He was the
enemy of society, and quite ready to take to crime if he
saw a good opportunity. He _ refused on principle to be
thrifty. In the summer he saved nothing, spending his
surplus earnings on drink, as he did not care about
women. If he was penniless when winter came on, then
society must look after him. He was ready to extract
every penny he could from charity, provided that he was
not expected to say thank you for it. He avoided
religious charities, however, for he said that it stuck in
his throat to sing hymns for buns.
He had various other points of honour; for instance, it
was his boast that never in his life, even when starving,
had he picked up a cigarette end. He considered himself
in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he
said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be
ungrateful.
He spoke French passably, and had read some of Zola's
novels, all Shakespeare's plays, Gulliver's Travels, and a
number of essays. He could describe his adventures in
words that one remembered. For instance, speaking of
funerals, he said to me:
"Have you ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India.
They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment I
almost jumped out of my skin, because he'd started
kicking. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat-
still, it give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit
like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and
went off with a bang you could have heard fifty yards
away. It fair put me against cremation."
Or, again, apropos of his accident:
"The doctor says to me, 'You fell on one foot, my man.
And bloody lucky for you you didn't fall on both feet,' he
says. 'Because if you had of fallen on both feet you'd
have shut up like a bloody concertina, and your thigh
bones'd be sticking out of your ears!"
Clearly the phrase was not the doctor's but Bozo's
own. He had a gift for phrases. He had managed to keep
his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him
succumb to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even
starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for
meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who
does not so much disbelieve in God as personally
dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that
human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said,
when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him
to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were
probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious
theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because
the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars,
with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far
poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on
earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence,
on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought
cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very
exceptional man.
XXXI
THE charge at Bozo's lodging-house was ninepence a
night. It was a large, crowded place, with accommodation
for five hundred men, and a well-known rendezvous of
tramps, beggars and petty criminals. All races, even black
and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were
Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad
Urdu he addressed me as "tum"-a thing to make one
s
hudder, if it had been in India. We had got below the
range of colour prejudice. One had glimpses of curious
lives. Old "Grandpa," a tramp of seventy who made his
living, or a great part of it, by collecting cigarette ends and
selling the tobacco at threepence an ounce. " The Doctor"-
he was a real doctor, who had been struck off the register
for some offence, and besides selling newspapers gave
medical advice at a few pence a time. A little Chittagonian
lascar, barefoot and starving, who had deserted his ship
and wandered for days through London, so
vague and helpless that he did not even know the name of
the city he was in-he thought it was Liverpool, until I told
him. A begging-letter writer, a friend of Bozo's, who
wrote pathetic appeals for aid to pay for his wife's funeral,
and, when a letter had taken effect, blew himself out with
huge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He was a
nasty, hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that,
like most swindlers, he believed a great part of his own
lies. The lodging-house was an Alsatia for types like
these.
While I was with Bozo he taught me something about
the technique of London begging. There is more in it than
one might suppose. Beggars vary greatly, and there is a
sharp social line between those who merely cadge and
those who attempt to give some value for money. The
amounts that one can earn by the different "gags" also
vary. The stories in the Sunday papers about beggars who
die with two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers are,
of course, lies; but the better-class beggars do have runs of
luck, when they earn a living wage for weeks at a time.
The most prosperous beggars are street acrobats and street
photographers. On a good pitch-a theatre queue, for
instance-a street acrobat will often earn five pounds a
week. Street photographers can earn about the same, but
they are dependent on fine weather. They have a cunning
dodge to stimulate trade. When they see a likely victim
approaching, one of them runs behind the camera and
pretends to take a photograph. Then as the victim reaches
them, they exclaim:
"There y'are, Sir, took yer photo lovely. That'll be a
bob."
"But I never asked you to take it," protests the victim.
"What, you didn't want it took? Why, we thought
you signalled with your 'and. Well, there's a plate wasted!
That's cost us sixpence, that 'as."
At this the victim usually takes pity and says he will
have the photo after all. The photographers examine the
plate and say that it is spoiled, and that they will take a
fresh one free of charge. Of course, they have not really
taken the first photo; and so, if the victim refuses, they
waste nothing.
Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists
rather than beggars. An organ-grinder named Shorty, a
friend of Bozo's, told me all about his trade. He and his
mate "worked" the coffee-shops and public-houses round
Whitechapel and the Commercial Road. It is a mistake to
think that organ-grinders earn their living in the street;
nine-tenths of their money is taken in coffee-shops and
pubs-only the cheap pubs, for they are not allowed into
the good-class ones. Shorty's procedure was to stop
outside a pub and play one tune, after which his mate,
who had a wooden leg and could excite compassion, went
in and passed round the hat. It was a point of honour
with Shorty always to play another tune after receiving
the "drop"an encore, as it were; the idea being that he
was a genuine entertainer and not merely paid to go
away. He and his mate took two or three pounds a week
between them, but, as they had to pay fifteen shillings a
week for the hire of the organ, they only averaged a
pound a week each. They were on the streets from eight
in the morning till ten at night, and later on Saturdays.
Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes
not. Bozo introduced me to one who was a "real" artist-
that is, he had studied art in Paris and submitted
pictures to the Salon in his day. His line was copies of
Old Masters, which he did marvellously,
considering that he was drawing on stone. He told me
how he began as a screever:
"My wife and kids were starving. I was walking home
late at night, with a lot of drawings I'd been taking round
the dealers, and wondering how the devil to raise a bob
or two. Then, in the Strand, I saw a fellow kneeling on
the pavement drawing, and people giving him pennies. As
I came past he got up and went into a pub. 'Damn it,' I
thought, 'if he can make money at that, so can L' So on
the impulse I knelt down and began drawing with his
chalks. Heaven knows how I came to do it; I must have
been lightheaded with hunger. The curious thing was
that I'd never used pastels before; I had to learn the
technique as I went along. Well, people began to stop and
say that my drawing wasn't bad, and they gave me nine-
pence between them. At this moment the other fellow
came out of the pub. 'What in are you doing on my
pitch?' he said. I explained that I was hungry and had to
earn something. 'Oh,' said he, 'come and have a pint with
me.' So I had a pint, and since that day I've been a
screever. I make a pound a week. You can't keep six kids
on a pound a week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking
in sewing.
"The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next
worst is the interference you have to put up with. At
first, not knowing any better, I used sometimes to copy a
nude on the pavement. The first I did was outside St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields church. A fellow in blackI suppose
he was a churchwarden or somethingcame out in a
tearing rage. 'Do you think we can have that obscenity
outside God's holy house?' he cried. So I had to wash it
out. It was a copy of Botticelli's Venus. Another time I
copied the same picture on the Embankment. A
policeman passing looked at it, and
then, without a word, walked on to it and rubbed it out
with his great flat feet."
Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the
time when I was with him there had been a case of
"immoral conduct" in Hyde Park, in which the police had
behaved rather badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde
Park with policemen concealed in the trees, and the
legend, "Puzzle, find the policemen." I pointed out to him
how much more telling it would be to put, "Puzzle, find
the immoral conduct," but Bozo would not hear of it. He
said that any policeman who saw it would move him on,
and he would lose his pitch for good.
Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or
sell matches, or bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few
grains of lavender-called, euphemistically, perfume. All
these people are frankly beggars, expl
oiting an appearance
of misery, and none of them takes on an average more
than half a crown a day. The reason why they have to
pretend to sell matches and so forth instead of begging
outright is that this is demanded by the absurd English
laws about begging. As the law now stands, if you
approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call
a policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if
you make the air hideous by droning "Nearer, my God, to
Thee," or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or
stand about with a tray of matches-in short, if you make a
nuisance of yourself-you are held to be following a
legitimate trade and not begging. Match-selling and street-
singing are simply legalised crimes. Not profitable crimes,
however; there is not a singer or match-seller in London
who can be sure of £5o a year-a poor return for standing
eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars
grazing your backside.
It is worth saying something about the social position
of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and
found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot
help being struck by the curious attitude that society
takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is
some essential difference between beggars and ordinary
"working" men. They are a race apart, outcasts, like
criminals and prostitutes. Working men "work," beggars
do not "work"; they are parasites, worthless in their very
nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not
"earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic
"earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated
because we live in a humane age, but essentially
despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no
essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that
of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it
is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by
swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up
figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all
weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis,
etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course -
but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as
a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others.
He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent
medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 19
