Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

presently the porter and the Tramp Major brought our

supper across from the workhouse. Each man's ration was

a half-pound wedge of bread smeared with margarine, and

a pint of bitter sugarless cocoa in a tin billy. Sitting on the

floor we wolfed this in five

minutes, and at about seven o'clock the cell doors were

locked on the outside, to remain locked till eight in the

morning.

   Each man was allowed to sleep with his mate, the cells

being intended to hold two men apiece. I had no mate, and

was put in with another solitary man, a thin scrubby-faced

fellow with a slight squint. The cell measured eight feet by

five by eight high, was made of stone, and had a tiny

barred window high up in the wall and a spyhole in the

door, just like a cell in a prison. In it were six blankets, a

chamber-pot, a hot water pipe, and nothing else whatever.

I looked round the cell with a vague feeling that there was

something missing. Then, with a shock of surprise, I

realised what it was, and exclaimed:

   "But I say, damn it, where are the beds?"

   "

Beds?" said the other man, surprised. "There aren't no

beds! What yer expect? This is one of them spikes where

you sleeps on the floor. Christ! Ain't you got used to that

yet?"

   It appeared that no beds was quite a normal condition

in the spike. We rolled up our coats and put them against

the hot-water pipe, and made ourselves as comfortable as

we could. It grew foully stuffy, but it was not warm

enough to allow of our putting all the blankets underneath,

so that we could only use one to soften the floor. We lay a

foot apart, breathing into one another's face, with our

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

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.