No More Learning

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. We rolled up our coats
and put them against the hot-water pipe, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could.
It grew foully stufiy, but it was not warm enough to allow of our putting all the blankets
underneath, so that we could only use one to soften the floor. We lay a foot apart,
breathing into one another’s face, with our naked limbs constantly touching, and rolling
against one another whenever we fell asleep. One fidgeted from side to side, but it did not
do much good; whichever way one turned there would be first a dull numb feeling, then a
sharp ache as the hardness of the floor wore through the blanket. One could sleep, but not
for more than ten minutes on end.

About midnight the other man began making homosexual attempts upon me — a nasty
experience in a locked, pitch-dark cell. He was a feeble creature and I could manage him
easily, but of course it was impossible to go to sleep again. For the rest of the night we
stayed awake, smoking and talking. The man told me the story of his life — he was a
fitter, out of work for three years. He said that his wife had promptly deserted him when
he lost his job, and he had been so long away from women that he had almost forgotten
what they were like. Homosexuality is general among tramps of long standing, he said.

At eight the porter came along the passage unlocking the doors and shouting ‘All out! ’
The doors opened, letting out a stale, fetid stink. At once the passage was full of squallid,
grey-shirted figures, each chamber-pot in hand, scrambling for the bathroom. It appeared
that in the morning only one tub of water was allowed for the lot of us, and when I
arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces; I took one glance at the black scum
floating on the water, and went unwashed. After this we were given a breakfast identical
with the previous night’s supper, our clothes were returned to us, and we were ordered
out into the yard to work. The work was peeling potatoes for the pauper’s dinner, but it
was a mere fonnality, to keep us occupied until the doctor came to inspect us. Most of the
tramps frankly idled. The doctor turned up at about ten o’clock and we were told to go
back to our cells, strip and wait in the passage for the inspection.

Naked, and shivering, we lined up in the passage. You cannot conceive what ruinous,
degenerate curs we looked, standing there in the merciless morning light. A tramp’s
clothes are bad, but they conceal far worse things; to see him as he really is, unmitigated,
you must see him naked. Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chests, sagging muscles — every



kind of physical rottenness was there. Nearly everyone was under-nourished, and some
clearly diseased; two men were wearing trusses, and as for the old mummy-like creature
of seventy-five, one wondered how he could possibly make his daily march. Looking at
our faces, unshaven and creased from the sleepless night, you would have thought that all
of us were recovering from a week on the drink.

The inspection was designed merely to detect smallpox, and took no notice of our general
condition. A young medical student, smoking a cigarette, walked rapidly along the line
glancing us up and down, and not inquiring whether any man was well or ill. When my
cell companion stripped I saw that his chest was covered with a red rash, and, having
spent the night a few inches away from him, I fell into a panic about smallpox. The
doctor, however, examined the rash and said that it was due merely to under-
nourishment.

After the inspection we dressed and were sent into the yard, where the porter called our
names over, gave us back any possessions we had left at the office, and distributed meal
tickets. These were worth sixpence each, and were directed to coffee-shops on the route
we had named the night before. It was interesting to see that quite a number of the tramps
could not read, and had to apply to myself and other ‘scholards’ to decipher their tickets.

The gates were opened, and we dispersed immediately. How sweet the air does smell —
even the air of a back street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the
spike! I had a mate now, for while we were peeling potatoes I had made friends with an
Irish tramp named Paddy Jaques, a melancholy pale man who seemed clean and decent.
He was going to Edbury spike, and suggested that we should go together. We set out,
getting there at three in the afternoon. It was a twelve-mile walk, but we made it fourteen
by getting lost among the desolate north London slums. Our meal tickets were directed to
a coffee-shop in Ilford. When we got there, the little chit of a serving-maid, having seen
our tickets and grasped that we were tramps, tossed her head in contempt and for a long
time would not serve us. Finally she slapped on the table two Targe teas’ and four slices
of bread and dripping — that is, eightpenny-worth of food. It appeared that the shop
habitually cheated the tramps of twopence or so on each ticket; having tickets instead of
money, the tramps could not protest or go elsewhere.



CHAPTER XXVIII


Paddy was my mate for about the next fortnight, and, as he was the first tramp I had
known at all well, I want to give an account of him. I believe that he was a typical tramp
and there are tens of thousands in England like him.

He was a tallish man, aged about thirty-five, with fair hair going grizzled and watery blue
eyes. His features were good, but his cheeks had lanked and had that greyish, dirty in the
grain look that comes of a bread and margarine diet. He was dressed, rather better than
most tramps, in a tweed shooting-jacket and a pair of old evening trousers with the braid
still on them. Evidently the braid figured in his mind as a lingering scrap of
respectability, and he took care to sew it on again when it came loose. He was careful of
his appearance altogether, and carried a razor and bootbrush that he would not sell,
though he had sold his ‘papers’ and even his pocket-knife long since. Nevertheless, one
would have known him for a tramp a hundred yards away. There was something in his
drifting style of walk, and the way he had of hunching his shoulders forward, essentially
abject. Seeing him walk, you felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give
one.

He had been brought up in Ireland, served two years in the war, and then worked in a
metal polish factory, where he had lost his job two years earlier. He was horribly
ashamed of being a tramp, but he had picked up all a tramp’s ways. He browsed the
pavements unceasingly, never missing a cigarette end, or even an empty cigarette packet,
as he used the tissue paper for rolling cigarettes. On our way into Edbury he saw a
newspaper parcel on the pavement, pounced on it, and found that it contained two mutton
sandwiches — rather frayed at the edges; these he insisted on my sharing. He never
passed an automatic machine without giving a tug at the handle, for he said that
sometimes they are out of order and will eject pennies if you tug at them. He had no
stomach for crime, however. When we were in the outskirts of Romton, Paddy noticed a
bottle of milk on a doorstep, evidently left there by mistake. He stopped, eyeing the bottle
hungrily.

‘Christ!
’ he said, ‘dere’s good food goin’ to waste. Somebody could knock dat bottle off,
eh? Knock it off easy. ’



I saw that he was thinking of ‘knocking it off himself. He looked up and down the street;
it was a quiet residential street and there was nobody in sight. Paddy’s sickly, chap-fallen
face yearned over the milk. Then he turned away, saying gloomily:

‘Best leave it. It don’t do a man no good to steal. T’ank God, I ain’t never stolen nothin’
yet. ’

It was funk, bred of hunger, that kept him virtuous. With only two or three sound meals
in his belly, he would have found courage to steal the milk.

He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the
best way of getting a free meal. As we drifted through the streets he would keep up a
monologue in this style, in a whimpering, self-pitying Irish voice:

‘It’s hell bein’ on de road, eh? It breaks yer heart goin’ into dem bloody spikes. But
what’s a man to do else, eh? I ain’t had a good meat meal for about two months, an’ me
boots is getting bad, an’ — Christ! How’d it be if we was to try for a cup o’ tay at one o’
dem convents on de way to Edbury? Most times dey’re good for a cup o’ tay. Ah, what’ d
a man do widout religion, eh? I’ve took cups o’ tay from de convents, an’ de Baptists, an’
de Church of England, an’ all sorts. I’m a Catholic meself. Dat’s to say, I ain’t been to
confession for about seventeen year, but still I got me religious feelin’s, y’understand.
An’ dem convents is always good for a cup o’ tay . . . ’ etc. etc. He would keep this up all
day, almost without stopping.

His ignorance was limitless and appalling. He once asked me, for instance, whether
Napoleon lived before Jesus Christ or after. Another time, when I was looking into a
bookshop window, he grew very perturbed because one of the books was called OF THE
IMITATION OF CHRIST. He took this for blasphemy. ‘What de hell do dey want to go
imitatin’ of HIM for? ’ he demanded angrily. He could read, but he had a kind of loathing
for books. On our way from Romton to Edbury I went into a public library, and, though
Paddy did not want to read, I suggested that he should come in and rest his legs. But he
preferred to wait on the pavement. ‘No,’ he said, ‘de sight of all dat bloody print makes
me sick. ’



Like most tramps, he was passionately mean about matches. He had a box of matches
when I met him, but I never saw him strike one, and he used to lecture me for
extravagance when I struck mine. His method was to cadge a light from strangers,
sometimes going without a smoke for half an hour rather than strike a match.

Self-pity was the clue to his character. The thought of his bad luck never seemed to leave
him for an instant. He would break long silences to exclaim, apropos of nothing, ‘It’s hell
when yer clo’es begin to go up de spout, eh? ’ or ‘Dat tay in de spike ain’t tay, it’s piss,’
as though there was nothing else in the world to think about. And he had a low, worm-
like envy of anyone who was better off — not of the rich, for they were beyond his social
horizon, but of men in work. He pined for work as an artist pines to be famous. If he saw
an old man working he would say bitterly, ‘Look at dat old — keepin’ able-bodied men
out o’ work’; or if it was a boy, ‘It’s dem young devils what’s takin’ de bread out of our
mouths. ’ And all foreigners to him were ‘dem bloody dagoes’ — for, according to his
theory, foreigners were responsible for unemployment.

He looked at women with a mixture of longing and hatred. Young, pretty women were
too much above him to enter into his ideas, but his mouth watered at prostitutes. A couple
of scarlet-lipped old creatures would go past; Paddy’s face would flush pale pink, and he
would turn and stare hungrily after the women. ‘Tarts! ’ he would murmur, like a boy at a
sweetshop window. He told me once that he had not had to do with a woman for two
years — since he had lost his job, that is — and he had forgotten that one could aim higher
than prostitutes. He had the regular character of a tramp — abject, envious, a jackal’s
character.

Nevertheless, he was a good fellow, generous by nature and capable of sharing his last
crust with a friend; indeed he did literally share his last crust with me more than once. He
was probably capable of work too, if he had been well fed for a few months. But two
years of bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this
filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It
was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.


CHAPTER XXIX



On the way to Edbury I told Paddy that I had a friend from whom I could be sure of
getting money, and suggested going straight into London rather than face another night in
the spike. But Paddy had not been in Edbury spike recently, and, tramp-like, he would
not waste a night’s free lodging. We arranged to go into London the next morning. I had
only a halfpenny, but Paddy had two shillings, which would get us a bed each and a few
cups of tea.

The Edbury spike did not differ much from the one at Romton. The worst feature was
that all tobacco was confiscated at the gate, and we were warned that any man caught
smoking would be turned out at once. Under the Vagrancy Act tramps can be prosecuted
for smoking in the spike — in fact, they can be prosecuted for almost anything; but the
authorities generally save the trouble of a prosecution by turning disobedient men out of
doors. There was no work to do, and the cells were fairly comfortable. We slept two in a
cell, ‘one up, one down’ — that is, one on a wooden shelf and one on the floor, with straw
palliasses and plenty of blankets, dirty but not verminous. The food was the same as at
Romton, except that we had tea instead of cocoa. One could get extra tea in the morning,
as the Tramp Major was selling it at a halfpenny a mug, illicitly no doubt. We were each
given a hu nk of bread and cheese to take away for our midday meal.

When we got into London we had eight hours to kill before the lodging-houses opened. It
is curious how one does not notice things. I had been in London innumerable times, and
yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London — the fact that it
costs money even to sit down. In Paris, if you had no money and could not find a public
bench, you would sit on the pavement. Heaven knows what sitting on the pavement
would lead to in London — prison, probably. By four we had stood five hours, and our
feet seemed red-hot from the hardness of the stones. We were hungry, having eaten our
ration as soon as we left the spike, and I was out of tobacco — it mattered less to Paddy,
who picked up cigarette ends. We tried two churches and found them locked. Then we
tried a public library, but there were no seats in it. As a last hope Paddy suggested trying
a Rowton House; by the rules they would not let us in before seven, but we might slip in
unnoticed. We walked up to the magnificent doorway (the Rowton Houses really are
magnificent) and very casually, trying to look like regular lodgers, began to stroll in.
Instantly a man lounging in the doorway, a sharp-faced fellow, evidently in some position
of authority, barred the way.



‘You men sleep ‘ere last night? ’


‘No. ’

‘Then— off. ’

We obeyed, and stood two more hours on the street corner. It was unpleasant, but it
taught me not to use the expression ‘street corner loafer’, so I gained something from it.

At six we went to a Salvation Army shelter. We could not book beds till eight and it was
not certain that there would be any vacant, but an official, who called us ‘Brother’, let us
in on the condition that we paid for two cups of tea. The main hall of the shelter was a
great white-washed barn of a place, oppressively clean and bare, with no fires. Two
hundred decentish, rather subdued-looking people were sitting packed on long wooden
benches. One or two officers in uniform prowled up and down. On the wall were pictures
of General Booth, and notices prohibiting cooking, drinking, spitting, swearing,
quarrelling, and gambling. As a specimen of these notices, here is one that I copied word
for word:

Any man found gambling or playing cards will be expelled and will not be admitted
under any circumstances.

A reward will be given for information leading to the discovery of such persons.

The officers in charge appeal to all lodgers to assist them in keeping this hostel free from
the DETESTABLE EVIL OF GAMBLING.

‘Gambling or playing cards’ is a delightful phrase. To my eye these Salvation Army
shelters, though clean, are far drearier than the worst of the common lodging-houses.
There is such a hopelessness about some of the people there — decent, broken-down types
who have pawned their collars but are still trying for office jobs. Coming to a Salvation
Army shelter, where it is at least clean, is their last clutch at respectability. At the next
table to me were two foreigners, dressed in rags but manifestly gentlemen. They were
playing chess verbally, not even writing down the moves. One of them was blind, and I
heard them say that they had been saving up for a long time to buy a board, price half a
crown, but could never manage it. Here and there were clerks out of work, pallid and



moody. Among a group of them a tall, thin, deadly pale young man was talking excitedly.
He thumped his fist on the table and boasted in a strange, feverish style. When the
officers were out of hearing he broke out into startling blasphemies:

‘1 tell you what, boys, I’m going to get that job tomorrow. I’m not one of your bloody
down-on-the-knee brigade; I can look after myself. Look at that — notice there! “The Lord
will provide! ” A bloody lot He’s ever provided me with. You don’t catch me trusting to
the — Lord. You leave it to me, boys. I’M GOING TO GET THAT JOB,’ etc. etc.

I watched him, struck by the wild, agitated way in which he talked; he seemed hysterical,
or perhaps a little drunk. An hour later I went into a small room, apart from the main hall,
which was intended for reading. It had no books or papers in it, so few of the lodgers
went there. As I opened the door I saw the young clerk in there all alone; he was on his
knees, PRAYING. Before I shut the door again I had time to see his face, and it looked
agonized. Quite suddenly I realized, from the expression of his face, that he was starving.

The charge for beds was eightpence. Paddy and I had fivepence left, and we spent it at
the ‘bar’, where food was cheap, though not so cheap as in some common lodging-
houses. The tea appeared to be made with tea DUST, which I fancy had been given to the
Salvation Anny in charity, though they sold it at threehalfpence a cup. It was foul stuff.
At ten o’clock an officer marched round the hall blowing a whistle. Immediately
everyone stood up.

‘What’s this for? ’ I said to Paddy, astonished.

‘Dat means you has to go off to bed. An’ you has to look sharp about it, too. ’

Obediently as sheep, the whole two hundred men trooped off to bed, under the command
of the officers.

The dormitory was a great attic like a barrack room, with sixty or seventy beds in it. They
were clean and tolerably comfortable, but very narrow and very close together, so that
one breathed straight into one’s neighbour’s face. Two officers slept in the room, to see
that there was no smoking and no talking after lights-out. Paddy and I had scarcely a
wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shellshock



perhaps, which made him cry out ‘Pip! ’ at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling
noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was
coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep. It appeared that Pip, as the others called
him, slept regularly in the shelter, and he must have kept ten or twenty people awake
every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting
enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging-houses.

At seven another whistle blew, and the officers went round shaking those who did not get
up at once. Since then I have slept in a number of Salvation Army shelters, and found
that, though the different houses vary a little, this semi-military discipline is the same in
all of them. They are certainly cheap, but they are too like workhouses for my taste. In
some of them there is even a compulsory religious service once or twice a week, which
the lodgers must attend or leave the house. The fact is that the Salvation Army are so in
the habit of thinking themselves a charitable body that they cannot even run a lodging-
house without making it stink of charity.

At ten I went to B. ‘s office and asked him to lend me a pound. He gave me two pounds
and told me to come again when necessary, so that Paddy and I were free of money
troubles for a week at least. We loitered the day in Trafalgar Square, looking for a friend
of Paddy’s who never turned up, and at night went to a lodging-house in a back alley near
the Strand. The charge was elevenpence, but it was a dark, evil-smelling place, and a
notorious haunt of the ‘nancy boys’. Downstairs, in the murky kitchen, three ambiguous-
looking youths in smartish blue suits were sitting on a bench apart, ignored by the other
lodgers. I suppose they were ‘nancy boys’. They looked the same type as the apache boys
one sees in Paris, except that they wore no side-whiskers. In front of the fire a fully
dressed man and a stark-naked man were bargaining. They were newspaper sellers. The
dressed man was selling his clothes to the naked man. He said:

“Ere y’are, the best rig-out you ever ‘ad. A tosheroon [half a crown] for the coat, two
‘ogs for the trousers, one and a tanner for the boots, and a ‘og for the cap and scarf.
That’s seven bob. ’

‘You got a ‘ope! I’ll give yer one and a tanner for the coat, a ‘og for the trousers, and two
‘ogs for the rest. That’s four and a tanner. ’



‘Take the ‘ole lot for five and a tanner, chum. ’


‘Right y’are, off with ‘em. I got to get out to sell my late edition. ’

The clothed man stripped, and in three minutes their positions were reversed; the naked
man dressed, and the other kilted with a sheet of the Daily Mail.

The dormitory was dark and close, with fifteen beds in it. There was a horrible hot reek
of urine, so beastly that at first one tried to breathe in small, shallow puffs, not filling
one’s lungs to the bottom. As I lay down in bed a man loomed out of the darkness, leant
over me and began babbling in an educated, half-drunken voice:

‘An old public schoolboy, what? [He had heard me say something to Paddy. ] Don’t meet
many of the old school here. I am an old Etonian. You know — twenty years hence this
weather and all that. ’ He began to quaver out the Eton boating-song, not untunefully:

Jolly boating weather,

And a hay harvest —

‘Stop that — noise! ’ shouted several lodgers.

‘Low types,’ said the old Etonian, ‘very low types. Funny sort of place for you and me,
eh? Do you know what my friends say to me? They say, “M — , you are past redemption. ”
Quite true, I AM past redemption. I’ve come down in the world; not like these — s here,
who couldn’t come down if they tried. We chaps who have come down ought to hang
together a bit. Youth will be still in our faces — you know. May I offer you a drink? ’

He produced a bottle of cherry brandy, and at the same moment lost his balance and fell
heavily across my legs. Paddy, who was undressing, pulled him upright.

‘Get back to yer bed, you silly ole — ! ’

The old Etonian walked unsteadily to his bed and crawled under the sheets with all his
clothes on, even his boots. Several times in the night I heard him murmuring, ‘M — , you
are past redemption,’ as though the phrase appealed to him. In the morning he was lying
asleep fully dressed, with the bottle clasped in his arms. He was a man of about fifty, with



a refined, worn face, and, curiously enough, quite fashionably dressed. It was queer to see
his good patent-leather shoes sticking out of that filthy bed. It occurred to me, too, that
the cherry brandy must have cost the equivalent of a fortnight’s lodging, so he could not
have been seriously hard up. Perhaps he frequented common lodging-houses in search of
the ‘nancy boys’.

The beds were not more than two feet apart. About midnight I woke up to find that the
man next to me was trying to steal the money from beneath my pillow. He was
pretending to be asleep while he did it, sliding his hand under the pillow as gently as a
rat.