George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult
one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard"which, taken for
what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst
insult to a women, either in London
or Paris, is "cow"; a name which might even be a com-
pliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals.
Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as
an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning;
words, especially swear words, being what public opinion
chooses to make them. In this connection it is interesting
to see how a swear word can change character by crossing
a frontier. In England you can print «
Je m'en fous »
without protest from anybody. In France you have to print
it "
Je m'en f-----" Or, as another example,
take the word "barnshoot"a corruption of the Hindustani
word
bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this
word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even
seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of
Aristophanes' plays, and the annotator suggested it as a
rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian
ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what
bahinchut
meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had
lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.
One other thing is noticeable about swearing in
London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in
front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A
Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front
of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and
the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are
more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.
These are a few notes that I have set down more or less
at random. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing
with the subject does not keep a year-book of London
slang and swearing, registering the changes accurately. It
might throw useful light upon the formation, development
and obsolescence of words.
XXXIII
THE two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten
days. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had
learned parsimony on the road and considered even one
sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had
come to mean simply bread and margarine -the eternal tea-
and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or
two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco and all,
at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn
a few extra shillings by "glimming" in the evenings. It
was a precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a
little and eked out our money.
One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We
went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there
was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and
after two hours we were told that there was no work for
us. We had not missed much, for sandwich men have an
unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings a day
for ten hours' work-it is hard work, especially in windy
weather, and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes
round frequently to see that the men are on their beat. To
add to their troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or
sometimes for three days, never weekly, so that they have
to wait hours for their job every morning. The number of
unemployed men who are ready to do the work makes
them powerless to fight for better treatment. The job all
sandwich men covet is distributing, handbills, which is
paid for at the same rate. When you see a man distributing
handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he
goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.
Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life-
a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days
together there was nothing to do but sit in the under-
ground kitchen, reading yesterday's newspaper, or, when
one could get hold of it, a back number of the
Union Jack.
It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came
in steamed, so that the kitchen stank horribly. One's only
excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not
know how many men are living this life in London-it must
be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the
best life he had known for two years past. His interludes
from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid
hands on a few shillings, had all been like this; the
tramping itself had been slightly worse. Listening to his
whimpering voice-he was always whimpering when he was
not eating-one realised what torture unemployment must
be to him. People are wrong when they think that an
unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on
the contrary, 'an illiterate man, with the work habit in his
bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An
educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is
one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy,
with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of
work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such
nonsense to pretend that those who have "come down in
the world" are to be pitied above all others. The man who
really merits pity is the man who has been down from the
start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
It was a dull time, and little of it stays in my mind,
except for talks with Bozo. Once the lodging-house was
invaded by a slumming-party. Paddy and I had been out,
and, coming back in the afternoon, we heard sounds of
music downstairs. We went down to find
three gentle-people, sleekly dressed, holding a religious
service in our kitchen. They were a grave and reverend
seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable
harmonium, and a chinless youth toying with a crucifix. It
appeared that they had marched in and started to hold
the service, without any kind of invitation whatever.
It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this
intrusion. They did not offer the smallest rudeness to the
slummers; they just ignored them. By common consent
everyone in the kitchen-a hundred men, perhaps behaved
as though the slummers had not existed. There they stood
patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was
taken of them than if they had been earwigs. The
gentleman in the frock coat preached a sermon, but not a
word of it was audible; it was drowned in the usual din of
songs, oaths and the clattering of pans. Men sat at their
meals and card games three feet away from the
harmonium, peaceably ignoring it. Presently the slummers
gave it up and cleared out, not insulted in any way, but
merely disregarded. No doubt they consoled themselves by
thinking how brave they had been, "freely venturing into
the lowest dens," etc. etc.
Bozo said that these people came to the lodginghouse
several times a month. They had influence with the police,
and the "deputy" could not exclude them. It is curious
how people take it for granted that they have a right to
preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income
falls below a certain level.
After nine days B.'s two pounds was reduced to one and
ninepence. Paddy and I set aside eighteenpence for our
beds, and spent threepence on the usual tea-andtwo-
slices, which we shared-an appetiser rather than a meal.
By the afternoon we were damnably hungry and
Paddy remembered a church near King's Cross Station
where a free tea was given once a week to tramps. This
was the day, and we decided to go there. Bozo, though it
was rainy weather and he was almost penniless, would not
come, saying that churches were not his style.
Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting,
dirty types who had gathered from far and wide at the
news of a free tea, like kites round a dead buffalo.
Presently the doors opened and a clergyman and some
girls shepherded us into a gallery at the top of the church.
It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with
texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and a
hymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one
hymns; reading some of the hymns, I concluded that the
book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse.
There was to be a service after the tea, and the regular
congregation were sitting in the well of the church below.
It was a week-day, and there were only a few dozen of
them, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of
boilingfowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and
were given our tea; it was a one-pound jam jar of tea each,
with six slices of bread and margarine. As soon as tea was
over, a dozen tramps who had stationed themselves near
the door bolted to avoid the service; the rest stayed, less
from gratitude than lacking the cheek to go.
The organ let out a few preliminary hoots and the service
began. And instantly, as though at a signal, the tramps
began to misbehave in the most outrageous way. One
would not have thought such scenes possible in a church.
All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed,
chattered, leaned over and flicked pellets of bread among
the congregation; I had to re
strain the man next to me, more or less by force, from
lighting a cigarette. The tramps treated the service as a
purely comic spectacle. It was, indeed, a sufficiently
ludicrous service-the kind where there are sudden yells of
"Hallelujah!" and endless extempore prayersbut their
behaviour passed all bounds. There was one old fellow in
the congregation-Brother Bootle or some such name-who
was often called on to lead us in prayer, and whenever he
stood up the tramps would begin stamping as though in a
theatre; they said that on a previous occasion he had kept
up an extempore prayer for twenty-five minutes, until the
minister had interrupted him. Once when Brother Bootle
stood up a tramp called out, "Two to one 'e don't beat
seven minutes!" so loud that the whole church must hear.
It was not long before we were making far more noise than
the minister. Sometimes somebody below would send up
an indignant "Hush!" but it made no impression. We had
set ourselves to guy the service, and there was no
stopping us.
It was a queer, rather disgusting scene. Below were the
handful of simple, well-meaning people, trying hard to
worship; and above were the hundred men whom they had
fed, deliberately making worship impossible. A ring of
dirty, hairy faces grinned down from the gallery, openly
jeering. What could a few women and old men do against a
hundred hostile tramps? They were afraid of us, and we
were frankly bullying them. It was our revenge upon them
for having humiliated us by feeding us.
The minister was a brave man. He thundered steadily
through a long sermon on Joshua, and managed almost to
ignore the sniggers and chattering from above. But in the
end, perhaps goaded beyond endurance, he announced
loudly:
"I shall address the last five minutes of my sermon to
the
unsaved sinners!"
Having said which, he turned his face to the gallery
and kept it so for five minutes, lest there should be any
doubt about who were saved and who unsaved. But much
we cared! Even while the minister was threatening hell
fire, we were rolling cigarettes, and at the last amen we
clattered down the stairs with a yell, many agreeing to
