George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
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.
