No More Learning

I find this entry in my diary for
that day:

‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single
one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women
merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual
difference? ’

On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who were going to
England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and
I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up
for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are,
indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs,
mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with
veritable hops — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good
country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was
not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the scenery,
the art, the literature, the laws — everything in England was perfect.

Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked. ‘Splendid! ’ I said. ‘And
you should just see the London statues! Paris is vulgar — half grandiosity and half slums.
But London — ’



Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside
was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast
like idiots staring over an asylum wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,
cocking their eyes at the hotel. ‘Built by French architects,’ I assured them; and even
later, when the 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-comer 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 linger.

‘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 Us 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 fdth,
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 doss-houses, 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’ 11 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 wann. 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
comer 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, su nk en 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 ah. 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 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.


CHAPTER 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 lodging-house in
Pennyfields. This was a typical lodging-house, like scores of others in London. It had
accommodation 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.

[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. ]

Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers, with free firing and a supply of
cooking-pots, tea-basins, and toasting-forks. There were two great clinker fires, which
were kept burning day and night the year through. The work of tending the fires,
sweeping the kitchen and making the beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One



senior lodger, a fine Norman-looking stevedore named Steve, was known as ‘head of the
house’, and was arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out.

I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep underground, very hot and drowsy
with coke fumes, and lighted only by the fires, which cast black velvet shadows in the
comers. Ragged washing hung on strings from the ceiling. Red-lit men, stevedores
mostly, moved about the fires with cooking-pots; some of them were quite naked, for
they had been laundering and were waiting for their clothes to dry. At night there were
games of nap and draughts, and songs — ’ I’m a chap what’s done wrong by my parents,’
was a favourite, and so was another popular song about a shipwreck. Sometimes late at
night men would come in with a pail of winkles they had bought cheap, and share them
out. There was a general sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who
were out of work. A little pale, wizened creature, obviously dying, referred to as ‘pore
Brown, bin under the doctor and cut open three times,’ was regularly fed by the others.

Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Till meeting them I had never
realized that there are people in England who live on nothing but the old-age pension
often shillings a week. None of these old men had any other resource whatever. One of
them was talkative, and I asked him how he managed to exist. He said:

‘Well, there’s ninepence a night for yer kip — that’s five an’ threepence a week. Then
there’s threepence on Saturday for a shave — that’s five an’ six. Then say you ‘as a
‘aircut once a month for sixpence — that’s another three’apence a week. So you ‘as about
four an’ four-pence for food an’ bacca. ’

He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread and margarine and tea —
towards the end of the week dry bread and tea without milk — and perhaps he got his
clothes from charity. He seemed contented, valuing his bed and fire more than food. But,
with an income of ten shillings a week, to spend money on a shave — it is awe-inspiring.

All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as Whitechapel. It was
queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed
the scream of the trams, and the noisy, festering life of the back streets, and the armed
men clattering through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces
comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality and malice of the



French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling, and more idling.
Knots of men stood at all the corners, slightly underfed, but kept going by the tea-and-
two-slices which the Londoner swallows every two hours. One seemed to breathe a less
feverish air than in Paris. It was the land of the tea urn and the Labour Exchange, as Paris
is the land of the BISTRO and the sweatshop.

It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East London women are pretty (it is the
mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals — Chinamen,
Ghittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness
knows how. Here and there were street meetings. In Whitechapel somebody called The
Singing Evangel undertook to save you from hell for the charge of sixpence. In the East
India Dock Road the Salvation Army were holding a service. They were singing
‘Anybody here like sneaking Judas? ’ to the tune of ‘What’s to be done with a drunken
sailor? ’ On Tower Hill two Monnons were trying to address a meeting. Round their
platform struggled a mob of men, shouting and interrupting. Someone was denouncing
them for polygamists. A lame, bearded man, evidently an atheist, had heard the word God
and was heckling angrily. There was a confused uproar of voices.

‘My dear friends, if you would only let us finish what we were saying — ! — That’s right,
give ‘em a say. Don’t get on the argue! — No, no, you answer me. Can you SHOW me
God? You SHOW ‘im me, then I’ll believe in ‘im. — Oh, shut up, don’t keep interrupting
of ‘em! — Interrupt yourself! — polygamists! — Well, there’s a lot to be said for polygamy.
Take the — women out of industry, anyway. — My dear friends, if you would just — No,
no, don’t you slip out of it. ‘Ave you SEEN God? ‘Ave you TOUCHED ‘im? ‘Ave you
shook ‘ANDS with ‘im?
— Oh, don’t get on the argue, for Christ’s sake don’t get on the
ARGUE! ’ etc. etc. I listened for twenty minutes, anxious to learn something about
Mormonism, but the meeting never got beyond shouts. It is the general fate of street
meetings.

In Middlesex Street, among the crowds at the market, a draggled, down-at-heel woman
was hauling a brat of five by the arm. She brandished a tin trumpet in its face. The brat
was squalling.



‘Enjoy yourself! ’ yelled the mother. ‘What yer think I brought yer out ‘ere for an’ bought
y’ a trumpet an’ all? D’ya want to go across my knee? You little bastard, you SHALL
enjoy yerself! ’

Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The mother and the child disappeared, both
bawling. It was all very queer after Paris.

The last night that I was in the Pcnnyficlds lodging-house there was a quarrel between
two of the lodgers, a vile scene. One of the old-age pensioners, a man of about seventy,
naked to the waist (he had been laundering), was violently abusing a short, thickset
stevedore, who stood with his back to the fire. I could see the old man’s face in the light
of the fire, and he was almost crying with grief and rage. Evidently something very
serious had happened.

THE OLD-AGE PENSIONER: ‘You—! ’

THE STEVEDORE: ‘Shut yer mouth, you ole — , afore I set about yer! ’

THE OLD-AGE PENSIONER: ‘Jest you try it on, you — ! I’m thirty year older’n you, but
it wouldn’t take much to make me give you one as’d knock you into a bucketful of piss! ’

THE STEVEDORE: ‘Ah, an’ then p’raps I wouldn’t smash you up after, you ole — ! ’

Thus for five minutes. The lodgers sat round, unhappy, trying to disregard the quarrel.
The stevedore looked, sullen, but the old man was growing more and more furious. He
kept making little rushes at the other, sticking out his face and screaming from a few
inches distant like a cat on a wall, and spitting. He was trying to nerve himself to strike a
blow, and not quite succeeding. Finally he burst out:

‘A — , that’s what you are, a ! Take that in your dirty gob and suck it, you — ! By — ,

I’ll smash you afore I’ve done with you. A — , that’s what you are, a son of a — whore.
Lick that, you — ! That’s what I think of you, you — , you — , you — you BLACK
BASTARD! ’

Whereat he suddenly collapsed on a bench, took his face in his hands, and began crying.
The other man seeing that public feeling was against him, went out.



Afterwards I heard Steve explaining the cause of the quarrel. It appeared that it was all
about a shilling’s worth of food. In some way the old man had lost his store of bread and
margarine, and so would have nothing to eat for the next three days, except what the
others gave him in charity. The stevedore, who was in work and well fed, had taunted
him; hence the quarrel.

When my money was down to one and fourpence I went for a night to a lodging-house in
Bow, where the charge was only eightpence. One went down an area and through an
alley-way into a deep, stifling cellar, ten feet square. Ten men, navvies mostly, were
sitting in the fierce glare of the fire. It was midnight, but the deputy’s son, a pale, sticky
child of five, was there playing on the navvies’ knees. An old Irishman was whistling to a
blind bullfinch in a tiny cage. There were other songbirds there — tiny, faded things, that
had lived all their lives underground. The lodgers habitually made water in the fire, to
save going across a yard to the lavatory. As I sat at the table I felt something stir near my
feet, and, looking down, saw a wave of black things moving slowly across the floor; they
were black-beetles.

There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets, marked in huge letters ‘Stolen from
No. — Road’, smelt loathsome. In the next bed to me lay a very old man, a pavement
artist, with some extraordinary curvature of the spine that made him stick right out of
bed, with his back a foot or two from my face. It was bare, and marked with curious
swirls of dirt, like a marble table-top. During the night a man came in drunk and was sick
on the floor, close to my bed. There were bugs too — not so bad as in Paris, but enough to
keep one awake. It was a filthy place. Yet the deputy and his wife were friendly people,
and ready to make one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night.


CHAPTER XXVI

In the morning after paying for the usual tea-and-two-slices and buying half an ounce of
tobacco, I had a halfpenny left. I did not care to ask B. for more money yet, so there was
nothing for it but to go to a casual ward. I had very little idea how to set about this, but I
knew that there was a casual ward at Romton, so I walked out there, arriving at three or
four in the afternoon. Leaning against the pigpens in Romton market-place was a wizened



old Irishman, obviously a tramp. I went and leaned beside him, and presently offered him
my tobacco-box. He opened the box and looked at the tobacco in astonishment:


‘By God,’ he said, ‘dere’s sixpennorth o’ good baccy here! Where de hell d’you get hold
o’ dat? YOU ain’t been on de road long. ’

‘What, don’t you have tobacco on the road? ’ I said.

‘Oh, we HAS it. Look. ’

He produced a rusty tin which had once held Oxo Cubes. In it were twenty or thirty
cigarette ends, picked up from the pavement. The Irishman said that he rarely got any
other tobacco; he added that, with care, one could collect two ounces of tobacco a day on
the London pavements.

‘D’you come out o’ one o’ de London spikes [casual wards], eh? ’ he asked me.

I said yes, thinking this would make him accept me as a fellow tramp, and asked him
what the spike at Romton was like. He said:

‘Well, ‘tis a cocoa spike. Dere’s tay spikes, and cocoa spikes, and skilly spikes. Dey
don’t give you skilly in Romton, t’ank God — leastways, dey didn’t de last time I was
here. I been up to York and round Wales since. ’

‘What is skilly? ’ I said.

‘Skilly? A can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom; dat’s skilly. De skilly
spikes is always de worst. ’

We stayed talking for an hour or two. The Irishman was a friendly old man, but he smelt
very unpleasant, which was not surprising when one learned how many diseases he
suffered from. It appeared (he described his symptoms fully) that taking him from top to
bottom he had the following things wrong with him: on his crown, which was bald, he
had eczema; he was shortsighted, and had no glasses; he had chronic bronchitis; he had
some undiagnosed pain in the back; he had dyspepsia; he had urethritis; he had varicose



veins, bunions and flat feet. With this assemblage of diseases he had tramped the roads
for fifteen years.


At about five the Irishman said, ‘Could you do wid a cup o’ tay? De spike don’t open till
six. ’

‘I should think I could. ’

‘Well, dere’s a place here where dey gives you a free cup o’ tay and a bun. GOOD tay it
is. Dey makes you say a lot o’ bloody prayers after; but hell! It all passes de time away.
You come wid me. ’

He led the way to a small tin-roofed shed in a side-street, rather like a village cricket
pavilion. About twenty-five other tramps were waiting. A few of them were dirty old
habitual vagabonds, the majority decent-looking lads from the north, probably miners or
cotton operatives out of work. Presently the door opened and a lady in a blue silk dress,
wearing gold spectacles and a crucifix, welcomed us in. Inside were thirty or forty hard
chairs, a harmonium, and a very gory lithograph of the Crucifixion.

Uncomfortably we took off our caps and sat down. The lady handed out the tea, and
while we ate and drank she moved to and fro, talking benignly. She talked upon religious
subjects — about Jesus Christ always having a soft spot for poor rough men like us, and
about how quickly the time passed when you were in church, and what a difference it
made to a man on the road if he said his prayers regularly. We hated it. We sat against the
wall fingering our caps (a tramp feels indecently exposed with his cap off), and turning
pink and trying to mumble something when the lady addressed us. There was no doubt
that she meant it all kindly. As she came up to one of the north country lads with the plate
of buns, she said to him:

‘And you, my boy, how long is it since you knelt down and spoke with your Father in
Heaven? ’

Poor lad, not a word could he utter; but his belly answered for him, with a disgraceful
rumbling which it set up at sight of the food. Thereafter he was so overcome with shame
that he could scarcely swallow his bun. Only one man managed to answer the lady in her



own style, and he was a spry, red-nosed fellow looking like a corporal who had lost his
stripe for drunkenness. He could pronounce the words ‘the dear Lord Jesus’ with less
shame than anyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned the knack in prison.

Tea ended, and I saw the tramps looking furtively at one another. An unspoken thought
was running from man to man — could we possibly make off before the prayers started?
Someone stirred in his chair — not getting up actually, but with just a glance at the door,
as though half suggesting the idea of departure. The lady quelled him with one look. She
said in a more benign tone than ever:

‘I don’t think you need go QUITE yet. The casual ward doesn’t open till six, and we have
time to kneel down and say a few words to our Father first. I think we should all feel
better after that, shouldn’t we? ’

The red-nosed man was very helpful, pulling the harmonium into place and handing out
the prayerbooks. His back was to the lady as he did this, and it was his idea of a joke to
deal the books like a pack of cards, whispering to each man as he did so, ‘There y’are,
mate, there’s a — nap ‘and for yer! Four aces and a king! ’ etc.

Bareheaded, we knelt down among the dirty teacups and began to mumble that we had
left undone those things that we ought to have done, and done those things that we ought
not to have done, and there was no health in us. The lady prayed very fervently, but her
eyes roved over us all the time, making sure that we were attending. When she was not
looking we grinned and winked at one another, and whispered bawdy jokes, just to show
that we did not care; but it stuck in our throats a little. No one except the red-nosed man
was self-possessed enough to speak the responses above a whisper. We got on better with
the singing, except that one old tramp knew no tune but ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, and
reverted to it sometimes, spoiling the hannony.

The prayers lasted half an hour, and then, after a handshake at the door, we made off.
‘Well,’ said somebody as soon as we were out of hearing, ‘the trouble’s over. I thought
them — prayers was never goin’ to end. ’


‘You ‘ad your bun,’ said another; ‘you got to pay for it. ’



‘Pray for it, you mean. Ah, you don’t get much for nothing. They can’t even give you a
twopenny cup of tea without you go down on you — knees for it. ’


There were murmurs of agreement. Evidently the tramps were not grateful for their tea.
And yet it was excellent tea, as different from coffee-shop tea as good Bordeaux is from
the muck called colonial claret, and we were all glad of it. I am sure too that it was given
in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we ought to have
been grateful — still, we were not.


CHAPTER XXVII

At about a quarter to six the Irishman led me to the spike. It was a grim, smoky yellow
cube of brick, standing in a comer of the workhouse grounds. With its rows of tiny,
barred windows, and a high wall and iron gates separating it from the road, it looked
much like a prison. Already a long queue of ragged men had formed up, waiting for the
gates to open. They were of all kinds and ages, the youngest a fresh-faced boy of sixteen,
the oldest a doubled-up, toothless mummy of seventy-five. Some were hardened tramps,
recognizable by their sticks and billies and dust-darkened faces; some were factory hands
out of work, some agricultural labourers, one a clerk in collar and tie, two certainly
imbeciles. Seen in the mass, lounging there, they were a disgusting sight; nothing
villainous or dangerous, but a graceless, mangy crew, nearly all ragged and palpably
underfed. They were friendly, however, and asked no questions. Many offered me
tobacco — cigarette ends, that is.

We leaned against the wall, smoking, and the tramps began to talk about the spikes they
had been in recently. It appeared from what they said that all spikes are different, each
with its peculiar merits and demerits, and it is important to know these when you are on
the road. An old hand will tell you the peculiarities of every spike in England, as: at A
you are allowed to smoke but there are bugs in the cells; at B the beds are comfortable
but the porter is a bully; at C they let you out early in the morning but the tea is
undrinkable; at D the officials steal your money if you have any — and so on
intenninably. There are regular beaten tracks where the spikes are within a day’s march
of one another. I was told that the Barnet-St Albans route is the best, and they warned me



to steer clear of Billericay and Chelmsford, also Ide Hill in Kent. Chelsea was said to be
the most luxurious spike in England; someone, praising it, said that the blankets there
were more like prison than the spike. Tramps go far afield in summer, and in winter they
circle as much as possible round the large towns, where it is warmer and there is more
charity. But they have to keep moving, for you may not enter any one spike, or any two
London spikes, more than once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week.

Some time after six the gates opened and we began to file in one at a time. In the yard
was an office where an official entered in a ledger our names and trades and ages, also
the places we were coming from and going to — this last is intended to keep a check on
the movements of tramps. I gave my trade as ‘painter’; I had painted water-colours — who
has not? The official also asked us whether we had any money, and every man said no. It
is against the law to enter the spike with more than eightpence, and any sum less than this
one is supposed to hand over at the gate. But as a rule the tramps prefer to smuggle their
money in, tying it tight in a piece of cloth so that it will not chink. Generally they put it in
the bag of tea and sugar that every tramp carries, or among their ‘papers’. The ‘papers’
are considered sacred and are never searched.

After registering at the office we were led into the spike by an official known as the
Tramp Major (his job is to supervise casuals, and he is generally a workhouse pauper)
and a great bawling ruffian of a porter in a blue unifonn, who treated us like cattle. The
spike consisted simply of a bathroom and lavatory, and, for the rest, long double rows of
stone cells, perhaps a hundred cells in all. It was a bare, gloomy place of stone and
whitewash, unwillingly clean, with a smell which, somehow, I had foreseen from its
appearance; a smell of soft soap, Jeyes’ fluid and latrines — a cold, discouraging,
prisonish smell.

The porter herded us all into the passage, and then told us to come into the bathroom six
at a time, to be searched before bathing. The search was for money and tobacco, Romton
being one of those spikes where you can smoke once you have smuggled your tobacco in,
but it will be confiscated if it is found on you. The old hands had told us that the porter
never searched below the knee, so before going in we had all hidden our tobacco in the
ankles of our boots. Afterwards, while undressing, we slipped it into our coats, which we
were allowed to keep, to serve as pillows.



The scene in the bathroom was extraordinarily repulsive. Fifty dirty, stark-naked men
elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bathtubs and two slimy
roller towels between them all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less than half
the tramps actually bathed (I heard them saying that hot water is ‘weakening’ to the
system), but they all washed their faces and feet, and the horrid greasy little clouts known
as toe-rags which they bind round their toes. Fresh water was only allowed for men who
were having a complete bath, so many men had to bathe in water where others had
washed their feet. The porter shoved us to and fro, giving the rough side of his tongue
when anyone wasted time. When my turn came for the bath, I asked if I might swill out
the tub, which was streaked with dirt, before using it. He answered simply, ‘Shut yer —
mouth and get on with yer bath! ’ That set the social tone of the place, and I did not speak
again.

When we had finished bathing, the porter tied our clothes in bundles and gave us
workhouse shirts — grey cotton things of doubtful cleanliness, like abbreviated
nightgowns. We were sent along to the cells at once, and 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. 1 looked round the cell with a vague feeling that there was
something missing. Then, with a shock of surprise, 1 realized 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 nonnal condition in the spike.