No More Learning

Shorty’s procedure was to stop outside a pub and play
one tune, after which his mate, who had a wooden leg and could excite compassion, went
in and passed round the hat. It was a point of honour with Shorty always to play another
tune after receiving the ‘drop’ — an encore, as it were; the idea being that he was a
genuine entertainer and not merely paid to go away. He and his mate took two or three
pounds a week between them, but, as they had to pay fifteen shillings a week for the hire
of the organ, they only averaged a pound a week each. They were on the streets from
eight in the morning till ten at night, and later on Saturdays.



Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes not. Bozo introduced me to one
who was a ‘real’ artist — that is, he had studied art in Paris and submitted pictures to the
Salon in his day. His line was copies of Old Masters, which he did marvellously,
considering that he was drawing on stone. He told me how he began as a screever:

‘My wife and kids Were starving. I was walking home late at night, with a lot of
drawings I’d been taking round the dealers, and wondering how the devil to raise a bob or
two. Then, in the Strand, I saw a fellow kneeling on the pavement drawing, and people
giving him pennies. As I came past he got up and went into a pub. “Damn it,” I thought,
“if he can make money at that, so can I. ” So on the impulse I knelt down and began
drawing with his chalks. Heaven knows how I came to do it; I must have been
lightheaded with hunger. The curious thing was that I’d never used pastels before; I had
to learn the technique as I went along. Well, people began to stop and say that my
drawing wasn’t bad, arid they gave me ninepence between them. At this moment the
other fellow came out of the pub. “What in — are you doing on my pitch? ” he said. I
explained that I was hungry and had to earn something. “Oh,” said he, “come and have a
pint with me. ” So I had a pint, and since that day I’ve been a screever. I make a pound a
week. You can’t keep six kids on a pound a week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking
in sewing.

‘The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next worst is the interference you have to
put up with. At first, not knowing any better, I used sometimes to copy a nude on the
pavement. The first I did was outside St Martin’s-in-the-Fields church. A fellow in
black — I suppose he was a churchwarden or something — came out in a tearing rage. “Do
you think we can have that obscenity outside God’s holy house? ” he cried. So I had to
wash it out. It was a copy of Botticelli’s Venus. Another time I copied the same picture
on the Embankment. A policeman passing looked at it, and then, without a word, walked
on to it and rubbed it out with his great flat feet. ’

Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the time when I was with him there had
been a case of ‘immoral conduct’ in Hyde Park, in which the police had behaved rather
badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde Park with policemen concealed in the trees, and
the legend, ‘Puzzle, find the policemen. ’ I pointed out to him how much more telling it
would be to put, ‘Puzzle, find the immoral conduct,’ but Bozo would not hear of it. He



said that any policeman who saw it would move him on, and he would lose his pitch for
good.

Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or sell matches, or bootlaces, or
envelopes containing a few grains of lavender — called, euphemistically, perfume. All
these people are frankly beggars, exploiting an appearance of misery, and none of them
takes on an average more than half a crown a day. The reason why they have to pretend
to sell matches and so forth instead of begging outright is that this is demanded by the
absurd English laws about begging. As the law now stands, if you approach a stranger
and ask him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you seven days for begging.
But if you make the air hideous by droning ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee,’ or scrawl some
chalk daubs on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches — in short, if you
make a nuisance of yourself — you are held to be following a legitimate trade and not
begging. Match-selling and street-singing are simply legalized crimes. Not profitable
crimes, however; there is not a singer or match-seller in London who can be sure of 50
pounds a year — a poor return for standing eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the
cars grazing your backside.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has
consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help
being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel
that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men.
They are a race apart — outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men ‘work’,
beggars do not ‘work’; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for
granted that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic ‘earns’
his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but
essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a
beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is
said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works
by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting
varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of
course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar



compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most
patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable
compared with a hire-purchase tout — in short, a parasite, but a fairly hannless parasite.
He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify
him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think
there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or
gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? — for they are despised, universally.
I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice
nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing
demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency,
social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally,
and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail,
and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it
would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is
simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to
hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made
the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.


CHAPTER XXXII

I want to put in some notes, as short as possible, on London slang and swearing. These
(omitting the ones that everyone knows) are some of the cant words now used in London:

A gagger — beggar or street performer of any kind. A moocher — one who begs outright,
without pretence of doing a trade. A nobbier — one who collects pennies for a beggar. A
chanter — a street singer. A clodhopper — a street dancer. A mugfaker — a street
photographer. A glimmer — one who watches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee — it is
pronounced jee) — the accomplice of a cheapjack, who stimulates trade by pretending to
buy something. A split — a detective. A flattie — a policeman. A dideki — a gypsy. A
toby — a tramp.



A drop — money given to a beggar. Fuhkum — lavender or other perfume sold in
envelopes. A boozer — a public-house. A slang — a hawker’s licence. A kip — a place to
sleep in, or a night’s lodging. Smoke — London. A judy — a woman. The spike — the
casual ward. The lump — the casual ward. A tosheroon — a half-crown. A deaner — a
shilling. A hog — a shilling. A sprowsie — a sixpence. Clods — coppers. A drum — a billy
can. Shackles — soup. A chat — a louse. Hard-up — tobacco made from cigarette ends. A
stick or cane — a burglar’s jemmy. A peter — a safe. A bly — a burglar’s oxy-acetylene
blow-lamp.

To bawl — to suck or swallow. To knock off — to steal. To skipper — to sleep in the open.

About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries. It is interesting to guess at the
derivation of some of them, though one or two — for instance, ‘funkum’ and
‘tosheroon’ — are beyond guessing. ‘Deaner’ presumably comes from, ‘denier’.
‘Glimmer’ (with the verb ‘to glim’) may have something to do with the old word ‘glim’,
meaning a light, or another old word ‘glim’, meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of
the formation of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be older than motor-
cars. ‘Gee’ is a curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, meaning horse, in the
sense of stalking horse. The derivation of ‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come
ultimately from scribo, but there has been no similar word in English for the past hundred
and fifty years; nor can it have come directly from the French, for pavement artists are
unknown in France. ‘Judy’ and ‘bawl’ are East End words, not found west of Tower
Bridge. ‘Smoke’ is a word used only by tramps. ‘Kip’ is Danish. Till quite recently the
word ‘doss’ was used in this sense, but it is now quite obsolete.

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described
by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly.
The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ‘forties (it is first
mentioned in an American book, Hennan Melville’s WHITE JACKET), and Cockney is
already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’
and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with
the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the
rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming
with it — a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it



was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct. Perhaps all the words I have
mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.

[* It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your twopenny’ or ‘use your head. ’
‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like this: head — loaf of bread — twopenny loaf — twopenny]

The swear words also change — or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example,
twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now
they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born
Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless
he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and
ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London

adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is . No doubt in time , like ‘bloody’,

will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very
nature swearing is as irrational as magic — indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is
also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound,
which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret — usually something to
do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established
as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made
it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and,
because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example — . The
Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on
their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly
with — , which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar instances in
French — for example — , which is now a quite meaningless expletive.

The word — , also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most of
them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule seems to be that words accepted as
swear words have some magical character, which sets them apart and makes them useless
for ordinary conversation.

Words used as insults seem to be governed by the same paradox as swear words. A word
becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but m practice



its insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult
one can offer to a Londoner is ‘bastard’ — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an
insult at all. And the worst insult to a woman, either in London or Paris, is ‘cow’; a name
which might even be a compliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals.
Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as an insult, without reference to
its dictionary meaning; words, especially swear words, being what public opinion
chooses to make them. In this connexion it is interesting to see how a swear word can
change character by crossing a frontier. In England you can print ‘JE M’EN FOILS’
without protest from anybody. In France you have to print it ‘JE M’EN F — ’. Or, as
another example, take the word ‘barnshoot’ — a corruption of the Hindustani word
BAHINCHUT. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this word is a piece of gentle
badinage in England. I have even seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of
Aristophanes’ plays, and the annotator suggested it as a rendering of some gibberish
spoken by a Persian ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what BAHINCHUT
meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had lost its magical swear-word quality and
could be printed.

One other thing is noticeable about swearing in London, and that is that the men do not
usually swear in front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A Parisian workman
may prefer to suppress an oath in front of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about
it, and the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are more polite, or more
squeamish, in this matter.

These are a few notes that I have set down more or less at random. It is a pity that
someone capable of dealing with the subject does not keep a year-book of London slang
and swearing, registering the changes accurately. It might throw useful light upon the
formation, development, and obsolescence of words.


CHAPTER XXXIII


The two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten days. That it lasted so long was due
to Paddy, who had learned parsimony on the road and considered even one sound meal a
day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had come to mean simply bread and margarine —



the eternal tea-and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or two. He taught me
how to live, food, bed, tobacco, and all, at the rate of half a crown a day. And he
managed to earn a few extra shillings by ‘glimming’ in the evenings. It was a precarious
job, because illegal, but it brought in a little and eked out our money.

One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We went at five to an alley- way behind
some offices, but there was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and after two
hours we were told that there was no work for us. We had not missed much, for sandwich
men have an unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings a day for ten hours’
work — it is hard work, especially in windy weather, and there is no skulking, for an
inspector comes round frequently to see that the men are on their beat. To add to their
troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or sometimes for three days, never weekly, so
that they have to wait hours for their job every morning. The number of unemployed men
who are ready to do the work makes them powerless to fight for better treatment. The job
all sandwich men covet is distributing handbills, which is paid for at the same rate. When
you see a man distributing handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he
goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.

Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life — a squalid, eventless life of crushing
boredom. For days together there was nothing to do but sit in the underground kitchen,
reading yesterday’s newspaper, or, when one could get hold of it, a back number of the
UNION JACK. It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came in Steamed, so
that the kitchen stank horribly. One’s only excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-
slices. I do not know how many men are living this life in London — it must be thousands
at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the best life he had known for two years past. His
interludes from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid hands on a few shillings,
had all been like this; the tramping itself had been slightly worse. Listening to his
whimpering voice — he was always whimpering when he was not eating — one realized
what torture unemployment must be to him. People are wrong when they think that an
unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man,
with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An
educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of
poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of
work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who



have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really
merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank,
resourceless mind.

It was a dull rime, and little of it stays in my mind, except for talks with Bozo. Once the
lodging-house was invaded by a slumming-party. Paddy and I had been out, and, coming
back in the afternoon, we heard sounds of music downstairs. We went down to find three
gentle-people, sleekly dressed, holding a religious service in our kitchen. They Were a
grave and reverend seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable harmonium, and a
chinless youth toying with a crucifix.
It appeared that they had marched in and started to
hold the service, without any kind of invitation whatever.

It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this intrusion. They did not offer the smallest
rudeness to the shimmers; they just ignored them. By common consent everyone in the
kitchen — a hundred men, perhaps — behaved as though the slummers had not existed.
There they stood patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was taken of them
than if they had been earwigs. The gentleman in the frock coat preached a sermon, but
not a word of it was audible; it was drowned in the usual din of songs, oaths, and the
clattering of pans. Men sat at their meals and card games three feet away from the
harmonium, peaceably ignoring it. Presently the slummers gave it up and cleared out, not
insulted in any way, but merely disregarded. No doubt they consoled themselves by
thinking how brave they had been, ‘freely venturing into the lowest dens,’ etc. etc.

Bozo said that these people came to the lodging-house several times a month. They had
influence with the police, and the ‘deputy’ could not exclude them. It is curious how
people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as
soon as your income falls below a certain level.

After nine days B. ‘s two pounds was reduced to one and ninepence. Paddy and I set aside
eighteenpence for our beds, and spent threepence on the usual tea-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’.