Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

train was crawling into London through the eastern

slums, I still kept it up about the beauties of English

architecture. Nothing seemed too good to say about

England, now that I was coming home and was not hard

up any more.

   I went to B.'s office, and his first words knocked

everything to ruins. "I'm sorry," he said; "your employers

have gone abroad, patient and all. However, they'll be

back in a month. I suppose you can hang on till then?"

   I was outside in the street before it even occurred to

me to borrow some more money. There was a month to

wait, and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand.

The news had taken my breath away. For a long time I

could not make up my mind what to do. I loafed the day

in the streets, and at night, not having the slightest

notion of how to get a cheap bed in London, I went to a

"family" hotel, where the charge was seven and sixpence.

After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.

   By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later

I should have to go to B. for more money, but it seemed

hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must

exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set

me against pawning my best suit. I would leave all my

things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best

suit, which I could exchange for some cheap clothes and

perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on thirty

shillings I must have bad clothes-indeed, the worse the

better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a

month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew

Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I

remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers about

beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their

trousers. It was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to

starve in London, so there was nothing to be anxious about.

   To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where

the people are poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At

the first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but

unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the third he

was stone deaf, or 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 between 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,

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 his lips, then produced a

shilling and

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

argue, 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 patina 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 directions.

   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

disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I

discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had

put me instantly 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 badly 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 prison.

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

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

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

fourpence 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

cellar. Murmurous sounds came from the cellar, and a

wave of 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

unlighted 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. Someone 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 table, 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 recurred 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 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

coming 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 lodging-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,

finally going into a coffeeshop on Tower Hill. Anfinally

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 girl of fourteen handling the dishes.

Navvies were eating out of newspaper parcels, and

drinking tea in vast saucerless 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

poetic 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

threepence halfpenny, leaving me with eight and

twopence.

                          XXV

THE eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After

my bad experience in the Waterloo Road'. I moved

eastward, and spent the next night in a lodginghouse in

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

of others in London. It had accommo-

1 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

.

dation for between fifty 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.

   Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers,

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