No More Learning

It was that bitch Hermione
Slater, presumably. Ravelston had introduced Gordon to Hermione a couple of days ago,
and she had treated him like dirt. But a moment later there was a knock at the bedroom
door.


‘What is it? ’ said Gordon.


‘Somebody’s come to see you,’ said Ravelston.



‘To see ME? ’


‘Yes. Come on into the other room. ’

Gordon swore and rolled sluggishly off the bed. When he got to the other room he found
that the visitor was Rosemary. He had been half expecting her, of course, but it wearied
him to see her. He knew why she had come; to sympathize with him, to pity him, to
reproach him — it was all the same. In his despondent, bored mood he did not want to
make the effort of talking to her. All he wanted was to be left alone. But Ravelston was
glad to see her. He had taken a liking to her in their single meeting and thought she might
cheer Gordon up. He made a transparent pretext to go downstairs to the office, leaving
the two of them together.

They were alone, but Gordon made no move to embrace her. He was standing in front of
the fire, round-shouldered, his hands in his coat pockets, his feet thrust into a pair of
Ravelston’s slippers which were much too big for him. She came rather hesitantly
towards him, not yet taking off her hat or her coat with the lamb-skin collar. It hurt her to
see him. In less than a week his appearance had deteriorated strangely. Already he had
that unmistakable, seedy, lounging look of a man who is out of work. His face seemed to
have grown thinner, and there were rings round his eyes. Also it was obvious that he had
not shaved that day.

She laid her hand on his ann, rather awkwardly, as a woman does when it is she who has
to make the first embrace.

‘Gordon — ’

‘Well? ’

He said it almost sulkily. The next moment she was in his anns. But it was she who had
made the first movement, not he. Her head was on his breast, and behold! she was
struggling with all her might against the tears that almost overwhelmed her. It bored
Gordon dreadfully. He seemed so often to reduce her to tears! And he didn’t want to be
cried over; he only wanted to be left alone — alone to sulk and despair. As he held her
there, one hand mechanically caressing her shoulder, his main feeling was boredom. She



had made things more difficult for him by coming here. Ahead of him were dirt, cold,
hunger, the streets, the workhouse, and the jail. It was against THAT that he had got to
steel himself. And he could steel himself, if only she would leave him alone and not come
plaguing him with these irrelevant emotions.

He pushed her a little way from him. She had recovered herself quickly, as she always
did.

‘Gordon, my dear one! Oh, I’m so sorry, so sorry! ’

‘Sorry about what? ’

‘You losing your job and everything. You look so unhappy. ’

‘I’m not unhappy. Don’t pity me, for God’s sake. ’

He disengaged himself from her arms. She pulled her hat off and threw it into a chair.
She had come here with something definite to say. It was something she had refrained
from saying all these years — something that it had seemed to her a point of chivalry not
to say. But now it had got to be said, and she would come straight out with it. It was not
in her nature to beat about the bush.

‘Gordon, will you do something to please me? ’

‘What? ’

‘Will you go back to the New Albion? ’

So that was it! Of course he had foreseen it. She was going to start nagging at him like all
the others. She was going to add herself to the band of people who worried him and
badgered him to ‘get on’. But what else could you expect? It was what any woman would
say. The marvel was that she had never said it before. Go back to the New Albion! It had
been the sole significant action of his life, leaving the New Albion. It was his religion,
you might say, to keep out of that filthy money- world. Yet at this moment he could not
remember with any clarity the motives for which he had left the New Albion. All he



knew was that he would never go back, not if the skies fell, and that the argument he
foresaw bored him in advance.


He shrugged his shoulders and looked away. ‘The New Albion wouldn’t take me back,’
he said shortly.

‘Yes, they would. You remember what Mr Erskine said. It’s not so long ago — only two
years. And they’re always on the look-out for good copywriters. Everyone at the office
says so. I’m sure they’d give you a job if you went and asked them. And they’d pay you
at least four pounds a week. ’

‘Four pounds a week! Splendid! I could afford to keep an aspidistra on that, couldn’t I? ’
‘No, Gordon, don’t joke about it now. ’

‘I’m not joking. I’m serious. ’

‘You mean you won’t go back to them — not even if they offered you a job? ’

‘Not in a thousand years. Not if they paid me fifty pounds a week. ’

‘But why? Why? ’

‘I’ve told you why,’ he said wearily.

She looked at him helplessly. After all, it was no use. There was this money-business
standing in the way — these meaningless scruples which she had never understood but
which she had accepted merely because they were his. She felt all the impotence, the
resentment of a woman who sees an abstract idea triumphing over common sense. How
maddening it was, that he should let himself be pushed into the gutter by a thing like that!
She said almost angrily:

‘I don’t understand you, Gordon, I really don’t. Here you are out of work, you may be
starving in a little while for all you know; and yet when there’s a good job which you can
have almost for the asking, you won’t take it. ’


‘No, you’re quite right. I won’t. ’



‘But you must have SOME kind of job, mustn’t you? ’


‘A job, but not a GOOD job. I’ve explained that God knows how often. I dare say I’ll get
a job of sorts sooner or later. The same kind of job as I had before. ’

‘But I don’t believe you’re even TRYING to get a job, are you? ’

‘Yes, I am. I’ve been out all today seeing booksellers. ’

‘And you didn’t even shave this morning! ’ she said, changing her ground with feminine
swiftness.

He felt his chin. ‘I don’t believe I did, as a matter of fact. ’

‘And then you expect people to give you a job! Oh, Gordon! ’

‘Oh, well, what does it matter? It’s too much fag to shave every day. ’

‘You’re letting yourself go to pieces,’ she said bitterly. ‘You don’t seem to WANT to
make any effort. You want to sink — just SINK! ’

‘I don’t know — perhaps. I’d sooner sink than rise. ’

There were further arguments. It was the first time she had ever spoken to him like this.
Once again the tears came into her eyes, and once again she fought them back. She had
come here swearing to herself that she would not cry. The dreadful thing was that her
tears, instead of distressing him, merely bored him. It was as though he COULD not care,
and yet at his very centre there was an inner heart that cared because he could not care. If
only she would leave him alone! Alone, alone! Free from the nagging consciousness of
his failure; free to sink, as she had said, down, down into quiet worlds where money and
effort and moral obligation did not exist. Finally he got away from her and went back to
the spare bedroom, it was definitely a quarrel — the first really deadly quarrel they had
ever had. Whether it was to be final he did not know. Nor did he care, at this moment. He
locked the door behind him and lay on the bed smoking a cigarette. He must get out of
this place, and quickly! Tomorrow morning he would clear out. No more sponging on
Ravelston! No more blackmail to the gods of decency! Down, down, into the mud —



down to the streets, the workhouse, and the jail. It was only there that he could be at
peace.


Ravelston came upstairs to find Rosemary alone and on the point of departure. She said
good-bye and then suddenly turned to him and laid her hand on his arm. She felt that she
knew him well enough now to take him into her confidence.

‘Mr Ravelston, please — WILL you try and persuade Gordon to get a job? ’

‘I’ll do what I can. Of course it’s always difficult. But I expect we’ll find him a job of
sorts before long. ’

‘It’s so dreadful to see him like this! He goes absolutely to pieces. And all the time, you
see, there’s a job he could quite easily get if he wanted it — a really GOOD job. It’s not
that he can’t, it’s simply that he won’t. ’

She explained about the New Albion. Ravelston rubbed his nose.

‘Yes. As a matter of fact I’ve heard all about that. We talked it over when he left the New
Albion. ’

‘But you don’t think he was right to leave them? ’ she said, promptly divining that
Ravelston DID think Gordon right.

‘Well — I grant you it wasn’t very wise. But there’s a certain amount of truth in what he
says. Capitalism’s corrupt and we ought to keep outside it — that’s his idea. It’s not
practicable, but in a way it’s sound. ’

‘Oh, I dare say it’s all right as a theory! But when he’s out of work and when he could get
this job if he chose to ask for it — SURELY you don’t think he’s right to refuse? ’

‘Not from a common-sense point of view. But in principle — well, yes. ’

‘Oh, in principle! We can’t afford principles, people like us. THAT’S what Gordon
doesn’t seem to understand. ’



Gordon did not leave the flat next morning. One resolves to do these things, one WANTS
to do them; but when the time comes, in the cold morning light, they somehow don’t get
done. He would stay just one day more he told himself; and then again it was ‘just one
day more’, until five whole days had passed since Rosemary’s visit, and he was still
lurking there, living on Ravelston, with not even a flicker of a job in sight. He still made
some pretence of searching for work, but he only did it to save his face. He would go out
and loaf for hours in public libraries, and then come home to lie on the bed in the spare
bedroom, dressed except for his shoes, smoking endless cigarettes. And for all that inertia
and the fear of the streets still held him there, those five days were awful, damnable,
unspeakable. There is nothing more dreadful in the world than to live in somebody else’s
house, eating his bread and doing nothing in return for it. And perhaps it is worst of all
when your benefactor won’t for a moment admit that he is your benefactor. Nothing
could have exceeded Ravelston’s delicacy. He would have perished rather than admit that
Gordon was sponging on him. He had paid Gordon’s fine, he had paid his arrears of rent,
he had kept him for a week, and he had Tent’ him two pounds on top of that; but it was
nothing, it was a mere arrangement between friends, Gordon would do the same for him
another time. From time to time Gordon made feeble efforts to escape, which always
ended in the same way.

‘Look here, Ravelston, I can’t stay here any longer. You’ve kept me long enough. I’m
going to clear out tomorrow morning. ’

‘But my dear old chap! Do be sensible. You haven’t — ’ But no! Not even now, when
Gordon was openly on the rocks, could Ravelston say, ‘You haven’t got any money. ’
One can’t say things like that. He compromised: ‘Where are you going to live, anyway? ’

‘God knows — I don’t care. There are common lodging-houses and places. I’ve got a few
bob left. ’

‘Don’t be such an ass. You’d much better stay here till you’ve found a job. ’

‘But it might be months, I tell you. I can’t live on you like this. ’


‘Rot, my dear chap! I like having you here.
’



But of course, in his inmost heart, he didn’t really like having Gordon there. How should
he? It was an impossible situation. There was a tension between them all the time. It is
always so when one person is living on another. However delicately disguised, charity is
still horrible; there is a malaise, almost a secret hatred, between the giver and the
receiver. Gordon knew that his friendship with Ravelston would never be the same again.
Whatever happened afterwards, the memory of this evil time would be between them.
The feeling of his dependent position, of being in the way, unwanted, a nuisance, was
with him night and day. At meals he would scarcely eat, he would not smoke Ravelston’s
cigarettes, but bought himself cigarettes out of his few remaining shillings. He would not
even light the gas-fire in his bedroom. He would have made himself invisible if he could.
Every day, of course, people were coming and going at the flat and at the office. All of
them saw Gordon and grasped his status. Another of Ravelston’s pet scroungers, they all
said. He even detected a gleam of professional jealousy in one or two of the hangers-on
of Antichrist. Three times during that week Hennione Slater came. After his first
encounter with her he fled from the flat as soon as she appeared; on one occasion, when
she came at night, he had to stay out of doors till after midnight. Mrs Beaver, the
charwoman, had also ‘seen through’ Gordon. She knew his type. He was another of those
good-for-nothing young ‘writing gentlemen’ who sponged on poor Mr Ravelston. So in
none too subtle ways she made things uncomfortable for Gordon. Her favourite trick was
to rout him out with broom and pan — ‘Now, Mr Comstock, I’ve got to do this room out,
IF you please’ — from whichever room he had settled down in.

But in the end, unexpectedly and through no effort of his own, Gordon did get a job. One
morning a letter came for Ravelston from Mr McKechnie. Mr McKechnie had relented —
not to the extent of taking Gordon back, of course, but to the extent of helping him find
another job. He said that a Mr Cheeseman, a bookseller in Lambeth, was looking for an
assistant. From what he said it was evident that Gordon could get the job if he applied for
it; it was equally evident that there was some snag about the job. Gordon had vaguely
heard of Mr Cheeseman — in the book trade everybody knows everybody else. In his heart
the news bored him. He didn’t really want this job. He didn’t want ever to work again; all
he wanted was to sink, sink, effortless, down into the mud. But he couldn’t disappoint
Ravelston after all Ravelston had done for him. So the same morning he went down to
Lambeth to inquire about the job.



The shop was in the desolate stretch of road south of Waterloo Bridge. It was a poky,
mean-looking shop, and the name over it, in faded gilt, was not Cheeseman but Eldridge.
In the window, however, there were some valuable calf folios, and some sixteenth-
century maps which Gordon thought must be worth money. Evidently Mr Cheeseman
specialized in ‘rare’ books. Gordon plucked up his courage and went in.

As the door-bell ping’d, a tiny, evil-looking creature, with a sharp nose and heavy black
eyebrows, emerged from the office behind the shop. He looked up at Gordon with a kind
of nosy malice. When he spoke it was in an extraordinary clipped manner, as though he
were biting each word in half before it escaped from him. ‘Ot c’n I do fyer! ’ — that
approximately was what it sounded like. Gordon explained why he had come. Mr
Cheeseman shot a meaning glance at him and answered in the same clipped manner as
before:

‘Oh, eh? Comstock, eh? Come ‘is way. Got mi office back here. Bin ‘specting you. ’

Gordon followed him. Mr Cheeseman was a rather sinister little man, almost small
enough to be called a dwarf, with very black hair, and slightly deformed. As a rule a
dwarf, when malformed, has a full-sized torso and practically no legs. With Mr
Cheeseman it was the other way about. His legs were nonnal length, but the top half of
his body was so short that his buttocks seemed to sprout almost immediately below his
shoulder blades. This gave him, in walking, a resemblance to a pair of scissors. He had
the powerful bony shoulders of the dwarf, the large ugly hands, and the sharp nosing
movements of the head. His clothes had that peculiar hardened, shiny texture of clothes
that are very old and very dirty. They were just going into the office when the door-bell
ping’d again, and a customer came in, holding out a book from the sixpenny box outside
and half a crown. Mr Cheeseman did not take the change out of the till — apparently there
was no till — but produced a very greasy wash-leather purse from some secret place under
his waistcoat. He handled the purse, which was almost lost in his big hands, in a
peculiarly secretive way, as though to hide it from sight.

‘I like keep mi money i’ mi pocket,’ he explained, with an upward glance, as they went
into the office.



It was apparent that Mr Cheeseman clipped his words from a notion that words cost
money and ought not to be wasted. In the office they had a talk, and Mr Cheeseman
extorted from Gordon the confession that he had been sacked for drunkenness. As a
matter of fact he knew all about this already. He had heard about Gordon from Mr
McKechnie, whom he had met at an auction a few days earlier. He had pricked up his
ears when he heard the story, for he was on the look-out for an assistant, and clearly an
assistant who had been sacked for drunkenness would come at reduced wages. Gordon
saw that his drunkenness was going to be used as a weapon against him. Yet Mr
Cheeseman did not seem absolutely unfriendly. He seemed to be the kind of person who
will cheat you if he can, and bully you if you give him the chance, but who will also
regard you with a contemptuous good-humour. He took Gordon into his confidence,
talked of conditions in the trade, and boasted with much chuckling of his own astuteness.
He had a peculiar chuckle, his mouth curving upwards at the corners and his large nose
seeming about to disappear into it.

Recently, he told Gordon, he had had an idea for a profitable side-line. He was going to
start a twopenny library; but it would have to be quite separate from the shop, because
anything so low-class would frighten away the book-lovers who came to the shop in
search of ‘rare’ books. He had taken premises a little distance away, and in the lunch-
hour he took Gordon to see them. They were farther down the dreary street, between a
flyblown ham-and-beef shop and a smartish undertaker. The ads in the undertaker’s
window caught Gordon’s eye. It seems you can get underground for as little as two
pounds ten nowadays. You can even get buried on the hire-purchase. There was also an
ad for cremations — ‘Reverent, Sanitary, and Inexpensive. ’

The premises consisted of a single narrow room — a mere pipe of a room with a window
as wide as itself, furnished with a cheap desk, one chair, and a card index. The new-
painted shelves were ready and empty. This was not, Gordon saw at a glance, going to be
the kind of library that he had presided over at McKechnie’ s. McKechnie ’s library had
been comparatively highbrow. It had dredged no deeper than Dell, and it even had books
by Lawrence and Huxley. But this was one of those cheap arid evil little libraries
(‘mushroom libraries’, they are called) which are springing up all over London and are
deliberately aimed at the uneducated. In libraries like these there is not a single book that
is ever mentioned in the reviews or that any civilized person has ever heard of. The books



are published by special low-class firms and turned out by wretched hacks at the rate of
four a year, as mechanically as sausages and with much less skill. In effect they are
merely fourpenny novelettes disguised as novels, and they only cost the library-proprietor
one and eightpence a volume. Mr Cheeseman explained that he had not ordered the books
yet. He spoke of ‘ordering the books’ as one might speak of ordering a ton of coals. He
was going to start with five hundred assorted titles, he said. The shelves were already
marked off into sections — ‘Sex’, ‘Crime’, ‘Wild West’, and so forth.

He offered Gordon the job. It was very simple. Ah you had to do was to remain there ten
hours a day, hand out the book, take the money, and choke off the more obvious book-
pinchers. The pay, he added with a measuring, sidelong glance, was thirty shillings a
week.

Gordon accepted promptly. Mr Cheeseman was perhaps faintly disappointed. He had
expected an argument, and would have enjoyed crushing Gordon by reminding him that
beggars can’t be choosers. But Gordon was satisfied. The job would do. There was no
TROUBLE about a job like this; no room for ambition, no effort, no hope. Ten bob
less — ten bob nearer the mud. It was what he wanted.

He ‘borrowed’ another two pounds from Ravelston and took a furnished bed-sitting
room, eight bob a week, in a filthy alley parallel to Lambeth Cut. Mr Cheeseman ordered
the five hundred assorted titles, and Gordon started work on the twentieth of December.
This, as it happened, was his thirtieth birthday.


Chapter 10

Under ground, under ground! Down in the safe soft womb of earth, where there is no
getting of jobs or losing of jobs, no relatives or friends to plague you, no hope, fear,
ambition, honour, duty — no DUNS of any kind. That was where he wished to be.



Yet it was not death, actual physical death, that he wished for. It was a queer feeling that
he had. It had been with him ever since that morning when he had woken up in the police
cell. The evil, mutinous mood that comes after dru nk enness seemed to have set into a
habit. That drunken night had marked a period in his life. It had dragged him downward
with strange suddenness. Before, he had fought against the money-code, and yet he had
clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he
wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no
longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself — to SINK, as
Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being UNDER
GROUND. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps,
beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their
frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that
great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom
of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-
kingdom, BELOW ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums
of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose
yourself for ever.

And in a way this job was what he wanted; at any rate, it was something near what he
wanted. Down there in Lambeth, in winter, in the murky streets where the sepia-
shadowed faces of tea-drunkards drifted through the mist, you had a SUBMERGED
feeling. Down here you had no contact with money or with culture. No highbrow
customers to whom you had to act the highbrow; no one who was capable of asking you,
in that prying way that prosperous people have, ‘What are you, with your brains and
education, doing in a job like this? ’ You were just part of the slum, and, like all slum-
dwellers, taken for granted. The youths and girls and draggled middle-aged women who
came to the library scarcely even spotted the fact that Gordon was an educated man. He
was just ‘the bloke at the library’, and practically one of themselves.

The job itself, of course, was of inconceivable futility. You just sat there, ten hours a day,
six hours on Thursdays, handing out books, registering them, and receiving twopences.
Between whiles there was nothing to do except read. There was nothing worth watching
in the desolate street outside. The principal event of the day was when the hearse drove
up to the undertaker’s establishment next door. This had a faint interest for Gordon,



because the dye was wearing off one of the horses and it was assuming by degrees a
curious purplish-brown shade. Much of the time, when no customers came, he spent
reading the yellow-jacketed trash that the library contained. Books of that type you could
read at the rate of one an hour. And they were the kind of books that suited him
nowadays. It is real ‘escape literature’, that stuff in the twopenny libraries. Nothing has
ever been devised that puts less strain on the intelligence; even a film, by comparison,
demands a certain effort. And so when a customer demanded a book of this category or
that, whether it was ‘Sex’ or ‘Crime’ or ‘Wild West’ or ‘ROmance’ (always with the
accent on the O). Gordon was ready with expert advice.

Mr Cheeseman was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood that if you
worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise of wages. Needless to say,
he suspected Gordon of pinching the till-money. After a week or two he devised a new
system of booking, by which he could tell how many books had been taken out and check
this with the day’s takings. But it was still (he reflected) in Gordon’s power to issue
books and make no record of them; and so the possibility that Gordon might be cheating
him of sixpence or even a shilling a day continued to trouble him, like the pea under the
princess’s mattress. Yet he was not absolutely unlikeable, in his sinister, dwarfish way. In
the evenings, after he had shut the shop, when he came along to the library to collect the
day’s takings, he would stay talking to Gordon for a while and recounting with nosy
chuckles any particularly astute swindles that he had worked lately. From these
conversations Gordon pieced together Mr Cheeseman’ s history. He had been brought up
in the old-clothes trade, which was his spiritual vocation, so to speak, and had inherited
the bookshop from an uncle three years ago. At that time it was one of those dreadful
bookshops in which there are not even any shelves, in which the books lie about in
monstrous dusty piles with no attempt at classification. It was frequented to some extent
by book-collectors, because there was occasionally a valuable book among the piles of
rubbish, but mainly it kept going by selling secondhand paper-covered thrillers at
twopence each. Over this dustheap Mr Cheeseman had presided, at first, with intense
disgust. He loathed books and had not yet grasped that there was money to be made out
of them. He was still keeping his old-clothes shop going by means of a deputy, and
intended to return to it as soon as he could get a good offer for the bookshop. But
presently it was borne in upon him that books, properly handled, are worth money. As
soon as he had made this discovery he developed as astonishing flair for bookdealing.



Within two years he had worked his shop up till it was one of the best ‘rare’ bookshops of
its size in London. To him a book was as purely an article of merchandise as a pair of
second-hand trousers. He had never in his life READ a book himself, nor could he
conceive why anyone should want to do so. His attitude towards the collectors who pored
so lovingly over his rare editions was that of a sexually cold prostitute towards her
clientele. Yet he seemed to know by the mere feel of a book whether it was valuable or
not. His head was a perfect mine of auction-records and first-edition dates, and he had a
marvellous nose for a bargain. His favourite way of acquiring stock was to buy up the
libraries of people who had just died, especially clergymen. Whenever a clergyman died
Mr Cheeseman was on the spot with the promptness of a vulture. Clergymen, he
explained to Gordon, so often have good libraries and ignorant widows. He lived over the
shop, was unmarried, of course, and had no amusements and seemingly no friends.
Gordon used sometimes to wonder what Mr Cheeseman did with himself in the evenings,
when he was not out snooping after bargains. He had a mental picture of Mr Cheeseman
sitting in a double-locked room with the shutters over the windows, counting piles of
half-crowns and bundles of pound notes which he stowed carefully away in cigarette-tins.

Mr Cheeseman bullied Gordon and was on the look-out for an excuse to dock his wages;
yet he did not bear him any particular ill-will. Sometimes in the evening when he came to
the library he would produce a greasy packet of Smith’s Potato Crisps from his pocket,
and, holding it out, say in his clipped style:

‘Hassome chips? ’

The packet was always grasped so firmly in his large hand that it was impossible to
extract more than two or three chips. But he meant it as a friendly gesture.

As for the place where Gordon lived, in Brewer’s Yard, parallel to Lambeth Cut on the
south side, it was a filthy kip. His bed-sitting room was eight shillings a week and was
just under the roof. With its sloping ceiling — it was a room shaped like a wedge of
cheese — and its skylight window, it was the nearest thing to the proverbial poet’s garret
that he had ever lived in. There was a large, low, broken-backed bed with a ragged
patchwork quilt and sheets that were changed once fortnightly; a deal table ringed by
dynasties of teapots; a rickety kitchen chair; a tin basin for washing in; a gas-ring in the



fender. The bare floorboards had never been stained but were dark with dirt. In the cracks
in the pink wallpaper dwelt multitudes of bugs; however, this was winter and they were
torpid unless you over- warmed the room. You were expected to make your own bed. Mrs
Meakin, the landlady, theoretically ‘did out’ the rooms daily, but four days out of five she
found the stairs too much for her. Nearly all the lodgers cooked their own squalid meals
in their bedrooms. There was no gas-stove, of course; just the gas-ring in the fender, and,
down two flights of stairs, a large evil-smelling sink which was common to the whole
house.

In the garret adjoining Gordon’s there lived a tall handsome old woman who was not
quite right in the head and whose face was often as black as a Negro’s from dirt. Gordon
could never make out where the dirt came from. It looked like coal dust. The children of
the neighbourhood used to shout ‘Blackie! ’ after her as she stalked along the pavement
like a tragedy queen, talking to herself. On the floor below there was a woman with a
baby which cried, cried everlastingly; also a young couple who used to have frightful
quarrels and frightful reconciliations which you could hear all over the house. On the
ground floor a house-painter, his wife, and five children existed on the dole and an
occasional odd job. Mrs Meakin, the landlady, inhabited some burrow or other in the
basement. Gordon liked this house. It was all so different from Mrs Wisbeach’s. There
was no mingy lower-middle-class decency here, no feeling of being spied upon and
disapproved of. So long as you paid your rent you could do almost exactly as you liked;
come home drunk and crawl up the stairs, bring women in at all hours, lie in bed all day
if you wanted to. Mother Meakin was not the type to interfere. She was a dishevelled,
jelly-soft old creature with a figure like a cottage loaf.