Meanwhile the tramp who had advised him had seen
his chance, and that night he privately asked the Tramp Major for pennission to leave the
spike early in the morning, as he had to see about a job.
his chance, and that night he privately asked the Tramp Major for pennission to leave the
spike early in the morning, as he had to see about a job.
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
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-and-two-slices, which
we shared — an appetizer 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 boiling-
fowls. 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 restrain 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 prayers — but 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 come back for
another free tea next week.
The scene had interested me. It was so different from the ordinary demeanour of
tramps — from the abject worm-like gratitude with which they normally accept charity.
The explanation, of course, was that we outnumbered the congregation and so were not
afraid of them. A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor — it is a
fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back
him, he will show it.
In the evening, after the free tea, Paddy unexpectedly earned another eighteenpence at
‘glimming’. It was exactly enough for another night’s lodging, and we put it aside and
went hungry till nine the next evening. Bozo, who might have given us some food, was
away all day. The pavements were wet, and he had gone to the Elephant and Castle,
where he knew of a pitch under shelter. Luckily I still had some tobacco, so that the day
might have been worse.
At half past eight Paddy took me to the Embankment, where a clergyman was known to
distribute meal tickets once a week. Under Charing Cross Bridge fifty men were waiting,
mirrored in the shivering puddles. Some of them were truly appalling specimens — they
were Embankment sleepers, and the Embankment dredges up worse types than the spike.
One of them, I remember, was dressed in an overcoat without buttons, laced up with
rope, a pair of ragged trousers, and boots exposing his toes — not a rag else. He was
bearded like a fakir, and he had managed to streak his chest and shoulders with some
horrible black filth resembling train oil. What one could see of his face under the dirt and
hair was bleached white as paper by some malignant disease. I heard him speak, and he
had a goodish accent, as of a clerk or shopwalker.
Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselves in a queue in the order
in which they had arrived. The clergyman was a nice, chubby, youngish man, and,
curiously enough, very like Charlie, my friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and
did not speak except for a brief good evening; he simply hurried down the line of men,
thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting to be thanked. The consequence was that,
for once, there was genuine gratitude, and everyone said that the clergyman was a — good
feller. Someone (in his hearing, I believe) called out: ‘Well, HE’LL never be a —
bishop! ’ — this, of course, intended as a warm compliment.
The tickets were worth sixpence each, and were directed to an eating-house not far away.
When we got there we found that the proprietor, knowing that the tramps could not go
elsewhere, was cheating by only giving four pennyworth of food for each ticket. Paddy
and I pooled our tickets, and received food which we could have got for sevenpence or
eightpence at most coffee-shops. The clergyman had distributed well over a pound in
tickets, so that the proprietor was evidently swindling the tramps to the tune of seven
shillings or more a week. This kind of victimization is a regular part of a tramp’s life, and
it will go on as long as people continue to give meal tickets instead of money.
Paddy and I went back to the lodging-house and, still hungry, loafed in the kitchen,
making the warmth of the fire a substitute for food. At half-past ten Bozo arrived, tired
out and haggard, for his mangled leg made walking an agony. He had not earned a penny
at screeving, all the pitches under shelter being taken, and for several hours he had
begged outright, with one eye on the policemen. He had amassed eightpence — a penny
short of his kip. It was long past the hour for paying, and he had only managed to slip
indoors when the deputy was not looking; at any moment he might be caught and turned
out, to sleep on the Embankment. Bozo took the things out of his pockets and looked
them over, debating what to sell. He decided on his razor, took it round the kitchen, and
in a few minutes he had sold it for threepence — enough to pay his kip, buy a basin of tea,
and leave a half-penny over.
Bozo got his basin of tea and sat down by the fire to dry his clothes. As he drank the tea I
saw that he was laughing to himself, as though at some good joke. Surprised, I asked him
what he had to laugh at.
‘It’s bloody funny! ’ he said. ‘It’s funny enough for PUNCH. What do you think I been
and done? ’
‘What? ’
‘Sold my razor without having a shave first: Of all the — fools! ’
He had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a twisted leg, his
clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between himself and starvation. With all
this, he could laugh over the loss of his razor. One could not help admiring him.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The next morning, our money being at an end, Paddy and I set out for the spike. We went
southward by the Old Kent Road, making for Cromley; we could not go to a London
spike, for Paddy had been in one recently and did not care to risk going again. It was a
sixteen-mile walk over asphalt, blistering to the heels, and we were acutely hungry.
Paddy browsed the pavement, laying up a store of cigarette ends against his time in the
spike. In the end his perseverance was rewarded, for he picked up a penny. We bought a
large piece of stale bread, and devoured it as we walked.
When we got to Cromley, it was too early to go to the spike, and we walked several miles
farther, to a plantation beside a meadow, where one could sit down. It was a regular
caravanserai of tramps — one could tell it by the worn grass and the sodden newspaper
and rusty cans that they had left behind. Other tramps were arriving by ones and twos. It
was jolly autumn weather. Near by, a deep bed of tansies was growing; it seems to me
that even now I can smell the sharp reek of those tansies, warring with the reek of tramps.
In the meadow two carthorse colts, raw sienna colour with white manes and tails, were
nibbling at a gate. We. sprawled about on the ground, sweaty and exhausted. Someone
managed to find dry sticks and get a fire going, and we all had milkless tea out of a tin
‘drum’ which was passed round.
Some of the tramps began telling stories. One of them, Bill, was an interesting type, a
genuine sturdy beggar of the old breed, strong as Hercules and a frank foe of work. He
boasted that with his great strength he could get a nawying job any time he liked, but as
soon as he drew his first week’s wages he went on a terrific drunk and was sacked.
Between whiles he ‘mooched’, chiefly from shopkeepers. He talked like this:
‘I ain’t goin’ far in — Kent. Kent’s a tight county, Kent is. There’s too many bin’
moochin’ about ‘ere. The — bakers get so as they’ll throw their bread away sooner’n give
it you. Now Oxford, that’s the place for moochin’, Oxford is. When I was in Oxford I
mooched bread, and I mooched bacon, and I mooched beef, and every night I mooched
tanners for my kip off of the students. The last night I was twopence short of my kip, so I
goes up to a parson and mooches ‘im for threepence. He give me threepence, and the next
moment he turns round and gives me in charge for beggin’. “You bin beggin’,” the
copper says. “No I ain’t,” I says, “I was askin’ the gentleman the time,” I says. The
copper starts feelin’ inside my coat, and he pulls out a pound of meat and two loaves of
bread. “Well, what’s all this, then? ” he says. “You better come Tong to the station,” he
says. The beak give me seven days. I don’t mooch from no more — parsons. But Christ!
what do I care for a lay-up of seven days? ’ etc. etc.
It seemed that his whole life was this — a round of mooching, drunks, and lay-ups. He
laughed as he talked of it, taking it all for a tremendous joke. He looked as though he
made a poor thing out of begging, for he wore only a corduroy suit, scarf, and cap — no
socks or linen. Still, he was fat and jolly, and he even smelt of beer, a most unusual smell
in a tramp nowadays.
Two of the tramps had been in Cromley spike recently, and they told a ghost story
connected with it. Years earlier, they said, there had been a suicide there. A tramp had
managed to smuggle a razor into his cell, and there cut his throat. In the morning, when
the Tramp Major came round, the body was jammed against the door, and to open it they
had to break the dead man’s ann. In revenge for this, the dead man haunted his cell, and
anyone who slept there was certain to die within the year; there were copious instances,
of course. If a cell door stuck when you tried to open it, you should avoid that cell like
the plague, for it was the haunted one.
Two tramps, ex-sailors, told another grisly story. A man (they swore they had known
him) had planned to stow away on a boat bound for Chile. It was laden with
manufactured goods packed in big wooden crates, and with the help of a docker the
stowaway had managed to hide himself in one of these. But the docker had made a
mistake about the order in which the crates were to be loaded. The crane gripped the
stowaway, swung him aloft, and deposited him — at the very bottom of the hold, beneath
hundreds of crates. No one discovered what had happened until the end of the voyage,
when they found the stowaway rotting, dead of suffocation.
Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy was the man who
was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge who had sentenced him, and
(splendid fellow! ) hanged him. The tramps liked the story, of course, but the interesting
thing was to see that they had got it all wrong. Their version was that Gilderoy escaped to
America, whereas in reality he was recaptured and put to death. The story had been
amended, no doubt deliberately; just as children amend the stories of Samson and Robin
Hood, giving them happy endings which are quite imaginary.
This set the tramps talking about history, and a very old man declared that the ‘one bite
law’ was a survival from days when the nobles hunted men instead of deer. Some of the
others laughed at him, but he had the idea firm in his head. He had heard, too, of the Corn
Laws, and the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS (he believed it had really existed); also of the
Great Rebellion, which he thought was a rebellion of poor against rich — perhaps he had
got it mixed up with the peasant rebellions. I doubt whether the old man could read, and
certainly he was not repeating newspaper articles. His scraps of history had been passed
from generation to generation of tramps, perhaps for centuries in some cases. It was oral
tradition lingering on, like a faint echo from the Middle Ages.
Paddy and I went to the spike at six in the evening, getting out at ten in the morning. It
was much like Romton and Edbury, and we saw nothing of the ghost. Among the casuals
were two young men named William and Fred, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, a lively pair
and fond of singing. They had a song called ‘Unhappy Bella’ that is worth writing down.
I heard them sing it half a dozen times during the next two days, and I managed to get it
by heart, except a line or two which I have guessed. It ran:
Bella was young and Bella was fair With bright blue eyes and golden hair, O unhappy
Bella! Her step was light and her heart was gay, But she had no sense, and one fine day
She got herself put in the family way By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
Poor Bella was young, she didn’t believe That the world is hard and men deceive, O
unhappy Bella! She said, ‘My man will do what’s just, He’ll marry me now, because he
must’; Her heart was full of loving trust In a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
She went to his house; that dirty skunk Had packed his bags and done a bunk, O unhappy
Bella! Her landlady said, ‘Get out, you whore, I won’t have your sort a-darkening my
door. ’ Poor Bella was put to affliction sore By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
All night she tramped the cruel snows, What she must have suffered nobody knows, O
unhappy Bella! And when the morning dawned so red, Alas, alas, poor Bella was dead,
Sent so young to her lonely bed By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
So thus, you see, do what you will. The fruits of sin are suffering still, O unhappy Bella!
As into the grave they laid her low, The men said, ‘Alas, but life is so,’ But the women
chanted, sweet and low, ‘It’s all the men, the dirty bastards! ’
Written by a woman, perhaps.
William and Fred, the singers of this song, were thorough scallywags, the sort of men
who get tramps a bad name. They happened to know that the Tramp Major at Cromley
had a stock of old clothes, which were to be given at need to casuals. Before going in
William and Fred took off their boots, ripped the seams and cut pieces off the soles, more
or less ruining them. Then they applied for two pairs of boots, and the Tramp Major,
seeing how bad their boots were, gave them almost new pairs. William and Fred were
scarcely outside the spike in the morning before they had sold these boots for one and
ninepence. It seemed to them quite worth while, for one and ninepence, to make their
own boots practically unwearable.
Leaving the spike, we all started southward, a long slouching procession, for Lower
Binfield and Ide Hill. On the way there was a fight between two of the tramps. They had
quarrelled overnight (there was some silly CASUS BELLI about one saying to the other,
‘Bull shit’, which was taken for Bolshevik — a deadly insult), and they fought it out in a
field. A dozen of us stayed to watch them. The scene sticks in my mind for one thing —
the man who was beaten going down, and his cap falling off and showing that his hair
was quite white. After that some of us intervened and stopped the fight. Paddy had
meanwhile been making inquiries, and found that the real cause of the quarrel was, as
usual, a few pennyworth of food.
We got to Lower Binfield quite early, and Paddy filled in the time by asking for work at
back doors. At one house he was given some boxes to chop up for firewood, and, saying
he had a mate outside, he brought me in and we did the work together. When it was done
the householder told the maid to take us out a cup of tea. I remember the terrified way in
which she brought it out, and then, losing her courage, set the cups down on the path and
bolted back to the house, shutting herself in the kitchen. So dreadful is the name of
‘tramp’. They paid us sixpence each, and we bought a threepenny loaf and half an ounce
of tobacco, leaving fivepence.
Paddy thought it wiser to bury our fivepence, for the Tramp Major at Lower Binfield was
renowned as a tyrant and might refuse to admit us if we had any money at all. It is quite a
common practice of tramps to bury their money. If they intend to smuggle at all a large
sum into the spike they generally sew it into their clothes, which may mean prison if they
are caught, of course. Paddy and Bozo used to tell a good story about this. An Irishman
(Bozo said it was an Irishman; Paddy said an Englishman), not a tramp, and in possession
of thirty pounds, was stranded in a small village where he could not get a bed. He
consulted a tramp, who advised him to go to the workhouse. It is quite a regular
proceeding, if one cannot get a bed elsewhere, to get one at the workhouse, paying a
reasonable sum for it. The Irishman, however, thought he would be clever and get a bed
for nothing, so he presented himself at the workhouse as an ordinary casual. He had sewn
the thirty pounds into his clothes.
Meanwhile the tramp who had advised him had seen
his chance, and that night he privately asked the Tramp Major for pennission to leave the
spike early in the morning, as he had to see about a job. At six in the morning he was
released and went out — in the Irishman’s clothes. The Irishman complained of the theft,
and was given thirty days for going into a casual ward under false pretences.
CHAPTER XXXV
Arrived at Lower Bin field, we sprawled for a long time on the green, watched by
cottagers from their front gates. A clergyman and his daughter came and stared silently at
us for a while, as though we had been aquarium fishes, and then went away again. There
were several dozen of us waiting. William and Fred were there, still singing, and the men
who had fought, and Bill the moocher. He had been mooching from bakers, and had
quantities of stale bread tucked away between his coat and his bare body. He shared it
out, and we were all glad of it. There was a woman among us, the first woman tramp I
had ever seen. She was a fattish, battered, very dirty woman of sixty, in a long, trailing
black skirt. She put on great airs of dignity, and if anyone sat down near her she sniffed
and moved farther off.
‘Where you bound for, missis? ’ one of the tramps called to her.
The woman sniffed and looked into the distance.
‘Come on, missis,’ he said, ‘cheer up. Be chummy. We’re all in the same boat ‘ere. ’
‘Thank you,’ said the woman bitterly, ‘when I want to get mixed up with a set of
TRAMPS, I’ll let you know. ’
I enjoyed the way she said TRAMPS. It seemed to show you in a flash the whole other
soul; a small, blinkered, feminine soul, that had learned absolutely nothing from years on
the road. She was, no doubt, a respectable widow woman, become a tramp through some
grotesque accident.
The spike opened at six. This was Saturday, and we were to be confined over the week-
end, which is the usual practice; why, I do not know, unless it is from a vague feeling that
Sunday merits something disagreeable. When we registered I gave my trade as
‘journalist’. It was truer than ‘painter’, for I had sometimes earned money from
newspaper articles, but it was a silly thing to say, being bound to lead to questions. As
soon as we were inside the spike and had been lined up for the search, the Tramp Major
called my name. He was a stiff, soldierly man of forty, not looking the bully he had been
represented, but with an old soldier’s gruffness. He said sharply:
‘Which of you is Blank? ’ (I forget what name I had given. )
‘Me, sir. ’
‘So you are a journalist? ’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, quaking. A few questions would betray the fact that I had been lying,
which might mean prison. But the Tramp Major only looked me up and down and said:
‘Then you are a gentleman? ’
‘I suppose so. ’
He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor,’ he said; ‘bloody
bad luck that is. ’ And thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a
kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the bathroom he actually gave me a clean
towel to myself — an unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word ‘gentleman’ in an old
soldier’s ear.
By seven we had wolfed our bread and tea and were in our cells. We slept one in a cell,
and there were bedsteads and straw palliasses, so that one ought to have had a good
night’s sleep. But no spike is perfect, and the peculiar shortcoming at Lower Binficld was
the cold. The hot pipes were not working, and the two blankets we had been given were
thin cotton things and almost useless. It was only autumn, but the cold was bitter. One
spent the long twelve-hour night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for a few
minutes and waking up shivering. We could not smoke, for our tobacco, which we had
managed to smuggle in, was in our clothes and we should not get these back till the
morning. All down the passage one could hear groaning noises, and sometimes a shouted
oath. No one, I imagine, got more than an hour or two of sleep.
In the morning, after breakfast and the doctor’s inspection, the Tramp Major herded us all
into the dining-room and locked the door upon us. It was a limewashed, stone-floored
room, unutterably dreary, with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison
smell. The barred windows were too high to look out of, and there were no ornaments
save a clock and a copy of the workhouse rules. Packed elbow to elbow on the benches,
we were bored already, though it was barely eight in the morning. There was nothing to
do, nothing to talk about, not even room to move. The sole consolation was that one
could smoke, for smoking was connived at so long as one was not caught in the act.
Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by Cockney out of Glasgow, was
tobaccoless, his tin of cigarette ends having fallen out of his boot during the search and
been impounded. I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, thrusting
our cigarettes into our pockets, like schoolboys, when we heard the Tramp Major coming.
Most of the tramps spent ten continuous hours in this comfortless, soulless room. Heaven
knows how they put up with it. I was luckier than the others, for at ten o’clock the Tramp
Major told off a few men for odd jobs, and he picked me out to help in the workhouse
kitchen, the most coveted job of all. This, like the clean towel, was a charm worked by
the word ‘gentleman’.
There was no work to do in the kitchen, and I sneaked off into a small shed used for
storing potatoes, where some workhouse paupers were skulking to avoid the Sunday
morning service. There were comfortable packing-cases to sit on, and some back
numbers of the FAMILY HERALD, and even a copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse
library. The paupers talked interestingly about workhouse life. They told me, among
other things, that the thing really hated in the workhouse, as a stigma of charity, is the
uniform; if the men could wear their own clothes, or even their own caps and scarves,
they would not mind being paupers. I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it
was a meal fit for a boa-constrictor — the largest meal I had eaten since my first day at the
Hotel X. The paupers said that they habitually gorged to the bursting-point on Sunday
and were underfed the rest of the week. After dinner the cook set me to do the washing
up, and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing and,
in the circumstances, appalling. Half-eateh joints of meat, and bucketfuls of broken bread
and vegetables, were pitched away like so much rubbish and then defiled with tea-leaves.
I filled five dustbins to overflowing with quite eatable food. And while I did so fifty
tramps were sitting in the spike with their bellies half filled by the spike dinner of bread
and cheese, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. According to
the paupers, the food was thrown away from deliberate policy, rather than that it should
be given to the tramps.
At three I went back to the spike. The tramps had been sitting there since eight, with
hardly room to move an elbow, and they were now half mad with boredom. Even
smoking was at an end, for a tramp’s tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and he starves
if he is more than a few hours away from the pavement. Most of the men were too bored
even to talk; they just sat packed on the benches, staring at nothing, their scrubby faces
split in two by enormous yawns. The room stank of ENNUI.
Paddy, his backside aching from the hard bench, was in a whimpering mood, and to pass
the time away I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar
and tie and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from
the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary
tastes, too, and carried a copy of QUENTIN DURWARD in his pocket. He told me that
he never went into a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and
behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in
bathing-huts for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system that makes a tramp spend fourteen
hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of
his own case — six months at the public charge for want of a few pounds’ worth of tools.
It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought
of it. And at that he changed his tone instantly. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter
who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the
others, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather that
given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too comfortable, you’d have all
the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum
away. These here tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You
don’t want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum. ’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don’t want to have any pity on these here tramps — scum, they are. You don’t want
to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum. ’
It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from ‘these here
tramps’. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply,
he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not
tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers.
Three hours dragged by. At six supper arrived, and turned out to be quite uneatable; the
bread, tough enough in the morning (it had been cut into slices on Saturday night), was
now as hard as ship’s biscuit. Luckily it was spread with dripping, and we scraped the
dripping off and ate that alone, which was better than nothing. At a quarter past six we
were sent to bed. New tramps were arriving, and in order not to mix the tramps of
different days (for fear of infectious diseases) the new men were put in the cells and we
in dormitories. Our dormitory was a barn-like room with thirty beds close together, and a
tub to serve as a common chamber-pot. It stank abominably, and the older men coughed
and got up all night. But being so many together kept the room warm, and we had some
sleep.
We dispersed at ten in the morning, after a fresh medical inspection, with a hu nk of bread
and cheese for our midday dinner. William and Fred, strong in the possession of a
shilling, impaled their bread on the spike railings — as a protest, they said. This was the
second spike in Kent that they had made too hot to hold them, and they thought it a great
joke. They were cheerful souls, for tramps. The imbecile (there is an imbecile in every
collection of tramps) said that he was too tired to walk and clung to the railings, until the
Tramp Major had to dislodge him and start him with a kick. Paddy and I turned north, for
London. Most of the others were going on to Ide Hill, said to be about the worst spike in
England.
[* I have been in it since, and it is not so bad]
Once again it was jolly autumn weather, and the road was quiet, with few cars passing.
The air was like sweet-briar after the spike’s mingled stenches of sweat, soap, and drains.
We two seemed the only tramps on the road. Then I heard a hurried step behind us, and
someone calling. It was little Scotty, the Glasgow tramp, who had run after us panting.
He produced a rusty tin from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like someone repaying
an obligation.
‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke
yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this
morning. One good turn deserves another — here y’are. ’
And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.
CHAPTER XXXVI
I want to set down some general remarks about tramps. When one comes to think of it,
tramps are a queer product and worth thinking over. It is queer that a tribe of men, tens of
thousands in number, should be marching up and down England like so many Wandering
Jews. But though the case obviously wants considering, one cannot even start to consider
it until one has got rid of certain prejudices. These prejudices are rooted in the idea that
every tramp, IPSO FACTO, is a blackguard. In childhood we have been taught that
tramps are blackguards, and consequently there exists in our minds a sort of ideal or
typical tramp — a repulsive, rather dangerous creature, who would die rather than work or
wash, and wants nothing but to beg, drink, and rob hen-houses. This tramp-monster is no
truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the magazine stories, but he is very hard to get
rid of. The very word ‘tramp’ evokes his image. And the belief in him obscures the real
questions of vagrancy.
To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at all? It is a
curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And,
because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested. It is
said, for instance, that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to seek
opportunities for crime, even — least probable of reasons — because they like tramping. I
have even read in a book of criminology that the tramp is an atavism, a throw-back to the
nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite obvious cause of vagrancy is
staring one in the face. Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism — one might as well
say that a commercial traveller is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but
for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law
compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only
get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night,
he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that
or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they
prefer to think that there must be some more or less villainous motive for tramping.
As a matter of fact, very little of the tramp-monster will survive inquiry. Take the
generally accepted idea that tramps are dangerous characters. Quite apart from
experience, one can say A PRIORI that very few tramps are dangerous, because if they
were dangerous they would be treated accordingly. A casual ward will often admit a
hundred tramps in one night, and these are handled by a staff of at most three porters. A
hundred ruffians could not be controlled by three unanned men. Indeed, when one sees
how tramps let themselves be bullied by the workhouse officials, it is obvious that they
are the most docile, broken-spirited creatures imaginable. Or take the idea that all tramps
are drunkards — an idea ridiculous on the face of it. No doubt many tramps would drink if
they got the chance, but in the nature of things they cannot get the chance. At this
moment a pale watery stuff called beer is sevenpence a pint in England. To be drunk on it
would cost at least half a crown, and a man who can command half a crown at all often is
not a tramp. The idea that tramps are impudent social parasites (‘sturdy beggars’) is not
absolutely unfounded, but it is only true in a few per cent of the cases. Deliberate, cynical
parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London’s books on American tramping, is not in
the English character. The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of
the sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately
turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change because a man is
thrown out of work. Indeed, if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of
work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes. I am not
saying, of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they are
ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it is the result and not
the cause of their way of life.
It follows that the ‘Serve them damned well right’ attitude that is normally taken towards
tramps is no fairer than it would be towards cripples or invalids. When one has realized
that, one begins to put oneself in a tramp’s place and understand what his life is like. It is
an 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, 60 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.
[* This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportions probably hold good. ]
It will be seen from these figures that at the charity 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.
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-and-two-slices, which
we shared — an appetizer 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 boiling-
fowls. 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 restrain 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 prayers — but 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 come back for
another free tea next week.
The scene had interested me. It was so different from the ordinary demeanour of
tramps — from the abject worm-like gratitude with which they normally accept charity.
The explanation, of course, was that we outnumbered the congregation and so were not
afraid of them. A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor — it is a
fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back
him, he will show it.
In the evening, after the free tea, Paddy unexpectedly earned another eighteenpence at
‘glimming’. It was exactly enough for another night’s lodging, and we put it aside and
went hungry till nine the next evening. Bozo, who might have given us some food, was
away all day. The pavements were wet, and he had gone to the Elephant and Castle,
where he knew of a pitch under shelter. Luckily I still had some tobacco, so that the day
might have been worse.
At half past eight Paddy took me to the Embankment, where a clergyman was known to
distribute meal tickets once a week. Under Charing Cross Bridge fifty men were waiting,
mirrored in the shivering puddles. Some of them were truly appalling specimens — they
were Embankment sleepers, and the Embankment dredges up worse types than the spike.
One of them, I remember, was dressed in an overcoat without buttons, laced up with
rope, a pair of ragged trousers, and boots exposing his toes — not a rag else. He was
bearded like a fakir, and he had managed to streak his chest and shoulders with some
horrible black filth resembling train oil. What one could see of his face under the dirt and
hair was bleached white as paper by some malignant disease. I heard him speak, and he
had a goodish accent, as of a clerk or shopwalker.
Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselves in a queue in the order
in which they had arrived. The clergyman was a nice, chubby, youngish man, and,
curiously enough, very like Charlie, my friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and
did not speak except for a brief good evening; he simply hurried down the line of men,
thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting to be thanked. The consequence was that,
for once, there was genuine gratitude, and everyone said that the clergyman was a — good
feller. Someone (in his hearing, I believe) called out: ‘Well, HE’LL never be a —
bishop! ’ — this, of course, intended as a warm compliment.
The tickets were worth sixpence each, and were directed to an eating-house not far away.
When we got there we found that the proprietor, knowing that the tramps could not go
elsewhere, was cheating by only giving four pennyworth of food for each ticket. Paddy
and I pooled our tickets, and received food which we could have got for sevenpence or
eightpence at most coffee-shops. The clergyman had distributed well over a pound in
tickets, so that the proprietor was evidently swindling the tramps to the tune of seven
shillings or more a week. This kind of victimization is a regular part of a tramp’s life, and
it will go on as long as people continue to give meal tickets instead of money.
Paddy and I went back to the lodging-house and, still hungry, loafed in the kitchen,
making the warmth of the fire a substitute for food. At half-past ten Bozo arrived, tired
out and haggard, for his mangled leg made walking an agony. He had not earned a penny
at screeving, all the pitches under shelter being taken, and for several hours he had
begged outright, with one eye on the policemen. He had amassed eightpence — a penny
short of his kip. It was long past the hour for paying, and he had only managed to slip
indoors when the deputy was not looking; at any moment he might be caught and turned
out, to sleep on the Embankment. Bozo took the things out of his pockets and looked
them over, debating what to sell. He decided on his razor, took it round the kitchen, and
in a few minutes he had sold it for threepence — enough to pay his kip, buy a basin of tea,
and leave a half-penny over.
Bozo got his basin of tea and sat down by the fire to dry his clothes. As he drank the tea I
saw that he was laughing to himself, as though at some good joke. Surprised, I asked him
what he had to laugh at.
‘It’s bloody funny! ’ he said. ‘It’s funny enough for PUNCH. What do you think I been
and done? ’
‘What? ’
‘Sold my razor without having a shave first: Of all the — fools! ’
He had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a twisted leg, his
clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between himself and starvation. With all
this, he could laugh over the loss of his razor. One could not help admiring him.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The next morning, our money being at an end, Paddy and I set out for the spike. We went
southward by the Old Kent Road, making for Cromley; we could not go to a London
spike, for Paddy had been in one recently and did not care to risk going again. It was a
sixteen-mile walk over asphalt, blistering to the heels, and we were acutely hungry.
Paddy browsed the pavement, laying up a store of cigarette ends against his time in the
spike. In the end his perseverance was rewarded, for he picked up a penny. We bought a
large piece of stale bread, and devoured it as we walked.
When we got to Cromley, it was too early to go to the spike, and we walked several miles
farther, to a plantation beside a meadow, where one could sit down. It was a regular
caravanserai of tramps — one could tell it by the worn grass and the sodden newspaper
and rusty cans that they had left behind. Other tramps were arriving by ones and twos. It
was jolly autumn weather. Near by, a deep bed of tansies was growing; it seems to me
that even now I can smell the sharp reek of those tansies, warring with the reek of tramps.
In the meadow two carthorse colts, raw sienna colour with white manes and tails, were
nibbling at a gate. We. sprawled about on the ground, sweaty and exhausted. Someone
managed to find dry sticks and get a fire going, and we all had milkless tea out of a tin
‘drum’ which was passed round.
Some of the tramps began telling stories. One of them, Bill, was an interesting type, a
genuine sturdy beggar of the old breed, strong as Hercules and a frank foe of work. He
boasted that with his great strength he could get a nawying job any time he liked, but as
soon as he drew his first week’s wages he went on a terrific drunk and was sacked.
Between whiles he ‘mooched’, chiefly from shopkeepers. He talked like this:
‘I ain’t goin’ far in — Kent. Kent’s a tight county, Kent is. There’s too many bin’
moochin’ about ‘ere. The — bakers get so as they’ll throw their bread away sooner’n give
it you. Now Oxford, that’s the place for moochin’, Oxford is. When I was in Oxford I
mooched bread, and I mooched bacon, and I mooched beef, and every night I mooched
tanners for my kip off of the students. The last night I was twopence short of my kip, so I
goes up to a parson and mooches ‘im for threepence. He give me threepence, and the next
moment he turns round and gives me in charge for beggin’. “You bin beggin’,” the
copper says. “No I ain’t,” I says, “I was askin’ the gentleman the time,” I says. The
copper starts feelin’ inside my coat, and he pulls out a pound of meat and two loaves of
bread. “Well, what’s all this, then? ” he says. “You better come Tong to the station,” he
says. The beak give me seven days. I don’t mooch from no more — parsons. But Christ!
what do I care for a lay-up of seven days? ’ etc. etc.
It seemed that his whole life was this — a round of mooching, drunks, and lay-ups. He
laughed as he talked of it, taking it all for a tremendous joke. He looked as though he
made a poor thing out of begging, for he wore only a corduroy suit, scarf, and cap — no
socks or linen. Still, he was fat and jolly, and he even smelt of beer, a most unusual smell
in a tramp nowadays.
Two of the tramps had been in Cromley spike recently, and they told a ghost story
connected with it. Years earlier, they said, there had been a suicide there. A tramp had
managed to smuggle a razor into his cell, and there cut his throat. In the morning, when
the Tramp Major came round, the body was jammed against the door, and to open it they
had to break the dead man’s ann. In revenge for this, the dead man haunted his cell, and
anyone who slept there was certain to die within the year; there were copious instances,
of course. If a cell door stuck when you tried to open it, you should avoid that cell like
the plague, for it was the haunted one.
Two tramps, ex-sailors, told another grisly story. A man (they swore they had known
him) had planned to stow away on a boat bound for Chile. It was laden with
manufactured goods packed in big wooden crates, and with the help of a docker the
stowaway had managed to hide himself in one of these. But the docker had made a
mistake about the order in which the crates were to be loaded. The crane gripped the
stowaway, swung him aloft, and deposited him — at the very bottom of the hold, beneath
hundreds of crates. No one discovered what had happened until the end of the voyage,
when they found the stowaway rotting, dead of suffocation.
Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy was the man who
was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge who had sentenced him, and
(splendid fellow! ) hanged him. The tramps liked the story, of course, but the interesting
thing was to see that they had got it all wrong. Their version was that Gilderoy escaped to
America, whereas in reality he was recaptured and put to death. The story had been
amended, no doubt deliberately; just as children amend the stories of Samson and Robin
Hood, giving them happy endings which are quite imaginary.
This set the tramps talking about history, and a very old man declared that the ‘one bite
law’ was a survival from days when the nobles hunted men instead of deer. Some of the
others laughed at him, but he had the idea firm in his head. He had heard, too, of the Corn
Laws, and the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS (he believed it had really existed); also of the
Great Rebellion, which he thought was a rebellion of poor against rich — perhaps he had
got it mixed up with the peasant rebellions. I doubt whether the old man could read, and
certainly he was not repeating newspaper articles. His scraps of history had been passed
from generation to generation of tramps, perhaps for centuries in some cases. It was oral
tradition lingering on, like a faint echo from the Middle Ages.
Paddy and I went to the spike at six in the evening, getting out at ten in the morning. It
was much like Romton and Edbury, and we saw nothing of the ghost. Among the casuals
were two young men named William and Fred, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, a lively pair
and fond of singing. They had a song called ‘Unhappy Bella’ that is worth writing down.
I heard them sing it half a dozen times during the next two days, and I managed to get it
by heart, except a line or two which I have guessed. It ran:
Bella was young and Bella was fair With bright blue eyes and golden hair, O unhappy
Bella! Her step was light and her heart was gay, But she had no sense, and one fine day
She got herself put in the family way By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
Poor Bella was young, she didn’t believe That the world is hard and men deceive, O
unhappy Bella! She said, ‘My man will do what’s just, He’ll marry me now, because he
must’; Her heart was full of loving trust In a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
She went to his house; that dirty skunk Had packed his bags and done a bunk, O unhappy
Bella! Her landlady said, ‘Get out, you whore, I won’t have your sort a-darkening my
door. ’ Poor Bella was put to affliction sore By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
All night she tramped the cruel snows, What she must have suffered nobody knows, O
unhappy Bella! And when the morning dawned so red, Alas, alas, poor Bella was dead,
Sent so young to her lonely bed By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
So thus, you see, do what you will. The fruits of sin are suffering still, O unhappy Bella!
As into the grave they laid her low, The men said, ‘Alas, but life is so,’ But the women
chanted, sweet and low, ‘It’s all the men, the dirty bastards! ’
Written by a woman, perhaps.
William and Fred, the singers of this song, were thorough scallywags, the sort of men
who get tramps a bad name. They happened to know that the Tramp Major at Cromley
had a stock of old clothes, which were to be given at need to casuals. Before going in
William and Fred took off their boots, ripped the seams and cut pieces off the soles, more
or less ruining them. Then they applied for two pairs of boots, and the Tramp Major,
seeing how bad their boots were, gave them almost new pairs. William and Fred were
scarcely outside the spike in the morning before they had sold these boots for one and
ninepence. It seemed to them quite worth while, for one and ninepence, to make their
own boots practically unwearable.
Leaving the spike, we all started southward, a long slouching procession, for Lower
Binfield and Ide Hill. On the way there was a fight between two of the tramps. They had
quarrelled overnight (there was some silly CASUS BELLI about one saying to the other,
‘Bull shit’, which was taken for Bolshevik — a deadly insult), and they fought it out in a
field. A dozen of us stayed to watch them. The scene sticks in my mind for one thing —
the man who was beaten going down, and his cap falling off and showing that his hair
was quite white. After that some of us intervened and stopped the fight. Paddy had
meanwhile been making inquiries, and found that the real cause of the quarrel was, as
usual, a few pennyworth of food.
We got to Lower Binfield quite early, and Paddy filled in the time by asking for work at
back doors. At one house he was given some boxes to chop up for firewood, and, saying
he had a mate outside, he brought me in and we did the work together. When it was done
the householder told the maid to take us out a cup of tea. I remember the terrified way in
which she brought it out, and then, losing her courage, set the cups down on the path and
bolted back to the house, shutting herself in the kitchen. So dreadful is the name of
‘tramp’. They paid us sixpence each, and we bought a threepenny loaf and half an ounce
of tobacco, leaving fivepence.
Paddy thought it wiser to bury our fivepence, for the Tramp Major at Lower Binfield was
renowned as a tyrant and might refuse to admit us if we had any money at all. It is quite a
common practice of tramps to bury their money. If they intend to smuggle at all a large
sum into the spike they generally sew it into their clothes, which may mean prison if they
are caught, of course. Paddy and Bozo used to tell a good story about this. An Irishman
(Bozo said it was an Irishman; Paddy said an Englishman), not a tramp, and in possession
of thirty pounds, was stranded in a small village where he could not get a bed. He
consulted a tramp, who advised him to go to the workhouse. It is quite a regular
proceeding, if one cannot get a bed elsewhere, to get one at the workhouse, paying a
reasonable sum for it. The Irishman, however, thought he would be clever and get a bed
for nothing, so he presented himself at the workhouse as an ordinary casual. He had sewn
the thirty pounds into his clothes.
Meanwhile the tramp who had advised him had seen
his chance, and that night he privately asked the Tramp Major for pennission to leave the
spike early in the morning, as he had to see about a job. At six in the morning he was
released and went out — in the Irishman’s clothes. The Irishman complained of the theft,
and was given thirty days for going into a casual ward under false pretences.
CHAPTER XXXV
Arrived at Lower Bin field, we sprawled for a long time on the green, watched by
cottagers from their front gates. A clergyman and his daughter came and stared silently at
us for a while, as though we had been aquarium fishes, and then went away again. There
were several dozen of us waiting. William and Fred were there, still singing, and the men
who had fought, and Bill the moocher. He had been mooching from bakers, and had
quantities of stale bread tucked away between his coat and his bare body. He shared it
out, and we were all glad of it. There was a woman among us, the first woman tramp I
had ever seen. She was a fattish, battered, very dirty woman of sixty, in a long, trailing
black skirt. She put on great airs of dignity, and if anyone sat down near her she sniffed
and moved farther off.
‘Where you bound for, missis? ’ one of the tramps called to her.
The woman sniffed and looked into the distance.
‘Come on, missis,’ he said, ‘cheer up. Be chummy. We’re all in the same boat ‘ere. ’
‘Thank you,’ said the woman bitterly, ‘when I want to get mixed up with a set of
TRAMPS, I’ll let you know. ’
I enjoyed the way she said TRAMPS. It seemed to show you in a flash the whole other
soul; a small, blinkered, feminine soul, that had learned absolutely nothing from years on
the road. She was, no doubt, a respectable widow woman, become a tramp through some
grotesque accident.
The spike opened at six. This was Saturday, and we were to be confined over the week-
end, which is the usual practice; why, I do not know, unless it is from a vague feeling that
Sunday merits something disagreeable. When we registered I gave my trade as
‘journalist’. It was truer than ‘painter’, for I had sometimes earned money from
newspaper articles, but it was a silly thing to say, being bound to lead to questions. As
soon as we were inside the spike and had been lined up for the search, the Tramp Major
called my name. He was a stiff, soldierly man of forty, not looking the bully he had been
represented, but with an old soldier’s gruffness. He said sharply:
‘Which of you is Blank? ’ (I forget what name I had given. )
‘Me, sir. ’
‘So you are a journalist? ’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, quaking. A few questions would betray the fact that I had been lying,
which might mean prison. But the Tramp Major only looked me up and down and said:
‘Then you are a gentleman? ’
‘I suppose so. ’
He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor,’ he said; ‘bloody
bad luck that is. ’ And thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a
kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the bathroom he actually gave me a clean
towel to myself — an unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word ‘gentleman’ in an old
soldier’s ear.
By seven we had wolfed our bread and tea and were in our cells. We slept one in a cell,
and there were bedsteads and straw palliasses, so that one ought to have had a good
night’s sleep. But no spike is perfect, and the peculiar shortcoming at Lower Binficld was
the cold. The hot pipes were not working, and the two blankets we had been given were
thin cotton things and almost useless. It was only autumn, but the cold was bitter. One
spent the long twelve-hour night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for a few
minutes and waking up shivering. We could not smoke, for our tobacco, which we had
managed to smuggle in, was in our clothes and we should not get these back till the
morning. All down the passage one could hear groaning noises, and sometimes a shouted
oath. No one, I imagine, got more than an hour or two of sleep.
In the morning, after breakfast and the doctor’s inspection, the Tramp Major herded us all
into the dining-room and locked the door upon us. It was a limewashed, stone-floored
room, unutterably dreary, with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison
smell. The barred windows were too high to look out of, and there were no ornaments
save a clock and a copy of the workhouse rules. Packed elbow to elbow on the benches,
we were bored already, though it was barely eight in the morning. There was nothing to
do, nothing to talk about, not even room to move. The sole consolation was that one
could smoke, for smoking was connived at so long as one was not caught in the act.
Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by Cockney out of Glasgow, was
tobaccoless, his tin of cigarette ends having fallen out of his boot during the search and
been impounded. I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, thrusting
our cigarettes into our pockets, like schoolboys, when we heard the Tramp Major coming.
Most of the tramps spent ten continuous hours in this comfortless, soulless room. Heaven
knows how they put up with it. I was luckier than the others, for at ten o’clock the Tramp
Major told off a few men for odd jobs, and he picked me out to help in the workhouse
kitchen, the most coveted job of all. This, like the clean towel, was a charm worked by
the word ‘gentleman’.
There was no work to do in the kitchen, and I sneaked off into a small shed used for
storing potatoes, where some workhouse paupers were skulking to avoid the Sunday
morning service. There were comfortable packing-cases to sit on, and some back
numbers of the FAMILY HERALD, and even a copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse
library. The paupers talked interestingly about workhouse life. They told me, among
other things, that the thing really hated in the workhouse, as a stigma of charity, is the
uniform; if the men could wear their own clothes, or even their own caps and scarves,
they would not mind being paupers. I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it
was a meal fit for a boa-constrictor — the largest meal I had eaten since my first day at the
Hotel X. The paupers said that they habitually gorged to the bursting-point on Sunday
and were underfed the rest of the week. After dinner the cook set me to do the washing
up, and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing and,
in the circumstances, appalling. Half-eateh joints of meat, and bucketfuls of broken bread
and vegetables, were pitched away like so much rubbish and then defiled with tea-leaves.
I filled five dustbins to overflowing with quite eatable food. And while I did so fifty
tramps were sitting in the spike with their bellies half filled by the spike dinner of bread
and cheese, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. According to
the paupers, the food was thrown away from deliberate policy, rather than that it should
be given to the tramps.
At three I went back to the spike. The tramps had been sitting there since eight, with
hardly room to move an elbow, and they were now half mad with boredom. Even
smoking was at an end, for a tramp’s tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and he starves
if he is more than a few hours away from the pavement. Most of the men were too bored
even to talk; they just sat packed on the benches, staring at nothing, their scrubby faces
split in two by enormous yawns. The room stank of ENNUI.
Paddy, his backside aching from the hard bench, was in a whimpering mood, and to pass
the time away I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar
and tie and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from
the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary
tastes, too, and carried a copy of QUENTIN DURWARD in his pocket. He told me that
he never went into a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and
behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in
bathing-huts for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system that makes a tramp spend fourteen
hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of
his own case — six months at the public charge for want of a few pounds’ worth of tools.
It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought
of it. And at that he changed his tone instantly. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter
who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the
others, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather that
given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too comfortable, you’d have all
the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum
away. These here tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You
don’t want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum. ’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don’t want to have any pity on these here tramps — scum, they are. You don’t want
to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum. ’
It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from ‘these here
tramps’. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply,
he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not
tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers.
Three hours dragged by. At six supper arrived, and turned out to be quite uneatable; the
bread, tough enough in the morning (it had been cut into slices on Saturday night), was
now as hard as ship’s biscuit. Luckily it was spread with dripping, and we scraped the
dripping off and ate that alone, which was better than nothing. At a quarter past six we
were sent to bed. New tramps were arriving, and in order not to mix the tramps of
different days (for fear of infectious diseases) the new men were put in the cells and we
in dormitories. Our dormitory was a barn-like room with thirty beds close together, and a
tub to serve as a common chamber-pot. It stank abominably, and the older men coughed
and got up all night. But being so many together kept the room warm, and we had some
sleep.
We dispersed at ten in the morning, after a fresh medical inspection, with a hu nk of bread
and cheese for our midday dinner. William and Fred, strong in the possession of a
shilling, impaled their bread on the spike railings — as a protest, they said. This was the
second spike in Kent that they had made too hot to hold them, and they thought it a great
joke. They were cheerful souls, for tramps. The imbecile (there is an imbecile in every
collection of tramps) said that he was too tired to walk and clung to the railings, until the
Tramp Major had to dislodge him and start him with a kick. Paddy and I turned north, for
London. Most of the others were going on to Ide Hill, said to be about the worst spike in
England.
[* I have been in it since, and it is not so bad]
Once again it was jolly autumn weather, and the road was quiet, with few cars passing.
The air was like sweet-briar after the spike’s mingled stenches of sweat, soap, and drains.
We two seemed the only tramps on the road. Then I heard a hurried step behind us, and
someone calling. It was little Scotty, the Glasgow tramp, who had run after us panting.
He produced a rusty tin from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like someone repaying
an obligation.
‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke
yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this
morning. One good turn deserves another — here y’are. ’
And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.
CHAPTER XXXVI
I want to set down some general remarks about tramps. When one comes to think of it,
tramps are a queer product and worth thinking over. It is queer that a tribe of men, tens of
thousands in number, should be marching up and down England like so many Wandering
Jews. But though the case obviously wants considering, one cannot even start to consider
it until one has got rid of certain prejudices. These prejudices are rooted in the idea that
every tramp, IPSO FACTO, is a blackguard. In childhood we have been taught that
tramps are blackguards, and consequently there exists in our minds a sort of ideal or
typical tramp — a repulsive, rather dangerous creature, who would die rather than work or
wash, and wants nothing but to beg, drink, and rob hen-houses. This tramp-monster is no
truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the magazine stories, but he is very hard to get
rid of. The very word ‘tramp’ evokes his image. And the belief in him obscures the real
questions of vagrancy.
To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at all? It is a
curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And,
because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested. It is
said, for instance, that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to seek
opportunities for crime, even — least probable of reasons — because they like tramping. I
have even read in a book of criminology that the tramp is an atavism, a throw-back to the
nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite obvious cause of vagrancy is
staring one in the face. Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism — one might as well
say that a commercial traveller is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but
for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law
compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only
get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night,
he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that
or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they
prefer to think that there must be some more or less villainous motive for tramping.
As a matter of fact, very little of the tramp-monster will survive inquiry. Take the
generally accepted idea that tramps are dangerous characters. Quite apart from
experience, one can say A PRIORI that very few tramps are dangerous, because if they
were dangerous they would be treated accordingly. A casual ward will often admit a
hundred tramps in one night, and these are handled by a staff of at most three porters. A
hundred ruffians could not be controlled by three unanned men. Indeed, when one sees
how tramps let themselves be bullied by the workhouse officials, it is obvious that they
are the most docile, broken-spirited creatures imaginable. Or take the idea that all tramps
are drunkards — an idea ridiculous on the face of it. No doubt many tramps would drink if
they got the chance, but in the nature of things they cannot get the chance. At this
moment a pale watery stuff called beer is sevenpence a pint in England. To be drunk on it
would cost at least half a crown, and a man who can command half a crown at all often is
not a tramp. The idea that tramps are impudent social parasites (‘sturdy beggars’) is not
absolutely unfounded, but it is only true in a few per cent of the cases. Deliberate, cynical
parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London’s books on American tramping, is not in
the English character. The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of
the sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately
turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change because a man is
thrown out of work. Indeed, if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of
work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes. I am not
saying, of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they are
ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it is the result and not
the cause of their way of life.
It follows that the ‘Serve them damned well right’ attitude that is normally taken towards
tramps is no fairer than it would be towards cripples or invalids. When one has realized
that, one begins to put oneself in a tramp’s place and understand what his life is like. It is
an 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, 60 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.
[* This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportions probably hold good. ]
It will be seen from these figures that at the charity 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.
