Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

extraordinarily futile, acutely unpleasant life. I have

described the casual ward-the routine of a tramp's day-but

there are three especial evils that need insisting upon. The

first is hunger, which is the almost general fate of tramps.

The casual ward gives them a ration which is probably not

even meant to be sufficient, and anything beyond this

must be got by begging-that is, by breaking the law: The

result is that nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition;

for proof of which one need only look at the men lining up

outside any casual ward. The second great evil of a

tramp's life-it seems much smaller at first sight, but it is a

good second-is that he is entirely cut off from contact with

women. This point needs elaborating.

   Tramps are cut off from women, in the first place,

because there Are very few women at their level of

society. One might imagine that among destitute people

the sexes would be as equally balanced as elsewhere. But

it is not so; in fact, one can almost say that below a certain

level society is entirely male. The following figures,

published by the L.C.C. from a night census taken on

February 13th, 1931, will show the relative numbers of

destitute men and destitute women:

Spending the night in the streets, 6o men, 18 women.'

In shelters and homes not licensed as common lodging-houses,

1,057 men, 137 women.

In the crypt of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields Church, 88 men, 12

women.

In L.C.C. casual wards and hostels, 674 men, 15 women.

It will be seen from these figures that at the charity

1 This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportions probably

hold good.

level men outnumber women by something like ten to

one. The cause is presumably that unemployment affects

women less than men; also that any presentable woman

can, in the last resort, attach herself to some man. The

result, for a tramp, is that he is condemned to perpetual

celibacy. For of course it goes without saying that if a

tramp finds no women at his own level, those above-

even a very little above-are as far out of his reach as the

moon. The reasons are not worth discussing, but there

is no doubt that women never, or hardly ever,

condescend to men who are much poorer than

themselves. A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the

moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely

without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of

woman except-very rarely, when he can raise a few

shillings-a prostitute.

   It is obvious what the results of this must be: homo-

sexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But

deeper than these there is the degradation worked in man

who knows that he is not even considered fit for

marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a

fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as

demoralising as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not

so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him

physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that

sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut

off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself

degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No

humiliation could do more damage to a man's self-

respect.

   The other great evil of a tramp's life is enforced idleness.

By our vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he

is not walking the road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the

intervals, lying on the ground waiting for the casual ward

to open. It is obvious that this is a dismal,

demoralising way of life, especially for an uneducated

man.

   Besides these one could enumerate scores of minor

evils-to name only one, discomfort, which is inseparable

from life on the road; it is worth remembering that the

average tramp has no clothes but what he stands up in,

wears boots that are ill-fitting, and does not sit in a chair

for months together. But the important point is that a

tramp's sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a

fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose

whatever. One could not, in fact invent a more futile

routine than walking from prison to prison, spending

perhaps eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road.

There must be at the least several tens of thousands of

tramps in England. Each day they expend innumerable

foot-pounds of energy-enough to plough thousands of

acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses-in

mere, useless walking. Each day they waste between them

possibly ten years of time in staring at cell walls. They cost

the country at least a pound a week a man, and give

nothing in return for it. They go round and round, on an

endless boring game of general post, which is of no use,

and is not even meant to be of any use to any person

whatever. The law keeps this process going, and we have

got so accustomed to it that we are not surprised. But it is

very silly.

   Granting the futility of a tramp's life, the question is

whether anything could be done to improve it. Obviously

it would be possible, for instance, to make the casual

wards a little more habitable, and this is actually being

done in some cases. During the last year some of the

casual wards have been improved-beyond recognition, if

the accounts are true-and there is talk of doing the same

to all of them. But this does not go to the heart of the

problem. The problem is how to turn

the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into a self-

respecting human being. A mere increase of comfort

cannot do this. Even if the casual wards became positively

luxurious (they never will)' a tramp's life would still be

wasted. He would still be a pauper, cut off from marriage

and home life, and a dead loss to the community. What is

needed is to depauperise him, and this can only be done by

finding him work-not work for the sake of working, but

work of which he can enjoy the benefit. At present, in the

great majority of casual wards, tramps do no work

whatever. At one time they were made to break stones for

their food, but this was stopped when they had broken

enough stone for years ahead and put the stone-breakers

out of work. Nowadays they are kept idle, because there is

seemingly nothing for them to do. Yet there is a fairly

obvious way of making them useful, namely this: Each

workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen

garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented

himself could be made to do a sound day's work. The

produce of the farm or garden could be used for feeding

the tramps, and at the worst it would be better than the

filthy diet of bread and margarine and tea. Of course, the

casual wards could never be quite selfsupporting, but they

could go a long way towards it, and the rates would

probably benefit in the long run. It must be remembered

that under the present system tramps are as dead a loss to

the country as they could possibly be, for they do not only

do no work, but they live on a diet that is bound to

undermine their health; the system, therefore, loses lives

as well as money. A

1 In fairness it must be added that a few of the casual wards have been

improved recently, at least from the point of view of sleeping

accommodation. But most of them are the same as ever, and there has

been no real improvement in the food.

scheme which fed them decently, and made them produce

at least a part of their own food, would be worth trying.

   It may be objected that a farm or even a garden could

not be run with casual labour. But there is no real reason

why tramps should only stay a day at each casual ward;

they might stay a month or even a year, if there were work

for them to do. The constant circulation of tramps is

something quite artificial. At present a tramp is an

expense to the rates, and the object of each workhouse is

therefore to push him on to the next; hence the rule that he

can stay only one night. If he returns within a month he is

penalised by being confined for a week, and, as this is

much the same as being in prison, naturally he keeps

moving. But if he represented labour to the workhouse,

and the workhouse represented sound food to him, it

would be another matter. The workhouses would develop

into partially self-supporting institutions, and the tramps,

settling down here or there according as they were needed,

would cease to be tramps. They would be doing something

comparatively useful, getting decent food, and living a

settled life. By degrees, if the scheme worked well, they

might even cease to be regarded as paupers, and be able to

marry and take a respectable place in society.

   This is only a rough idea, and there are some obvious

objections to it. Nevertheless, it does suggest a way of

improving the status of tramps without piling new burdens

on the rates. And the solution must, in any case, be

something of this kind. For the question is, what to do

with men who are underfed and idle; and the answer-to

make them grow their own food - imposes itself

automatically.

                       XXXVII

A WORD about the sleeping accommodation open to

a homeless person in London. At present it is impossible

to get a

bed in any non-charitable institution in London for

less than sevenpence a night. If you cannot afford

sevenpence for a bed, you must put up

with one of the following substitutes:

   I. The Embankment. Here is the account that Paddy

gave me of sleeping on the Embankment:

   "De whole t'ing wid de Embankment is gettin' to sleep

early. You got to be on your bench by eight o'clock,

because dere ain't too many benches and sometimes

dey're all taken. And you got

  to try to get to

sleep at once. 'Tis too cold to sleep much after twelve

o'clock, an' de police turns you off at four in de mornin'.

It ain't easy to sleep, dough, wid dem bloody trams flyin'

past your head all de time, an' dem sky-signs across de

river flickin' on an' off in your eyes. De cold's cruel. Dem

as sleeps dere generally wraps demselves

up in newspaper, but it don't do much good. You'd

be bloody lucky if you got t'ree hours' sleep."

   I have slept on the Embankment and found that it

corresponded to Paddy's description. It is, however,

much better than not sleeping at all, which is the alter-

native if you spend the night in the streets, elsewhere

than on the Embankment. According to the law in

London, you may sit down for the night, but the police

must move you on if they see you asleep; the Embank

ment and one or two odd corners (there is one behind

the Lyceum Theatre) are special exceptions. This law

is evidently a piece of wilful offensiveness. Its object, so it

is said, is to prevent people from dying of exposure;

but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die of

exposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris there is no

such law. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine

bridges, and in doorways, and on benches in the squares,

and round the ventilating shafts of the Metro, and even

inside the Metro stations. It does no apparent harm. No

one will spend a night in the street if he can possibly help

it, and if he is going to stay out of doors he might as well

be allowed to sleep, if he can.

   2. The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little

higher than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hang

over, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope

in front of them, and they lean on this as though

leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet,