No More Learning

Such, such were the joys (1947)

50. Writers and Leviathan (1948)

51. Reflections on Gandhi (1949)


THE SPIKE (1931)

It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the green
waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk much. We just sprawled about
exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the
chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds
floated almost motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban
riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil, everyone
agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn’t call
your soul your own when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the
middle of the night for giving a back answer. When you came to be searched, he fair held
you upside down and shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was hell to pay,
and if you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. ‘For the love of Christ, mate,’ the old hands advised me, ‘don’t
you take it in. You’d get seven days for going into the spike with eightpence! ’

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a lump of flint.
Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these
into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in
our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the
tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband
until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But it is an
unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search below the knee, and in
the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard
accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at
the wrong moment, and was impounded.


At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate entered our names
and other particulars in the register and took our bundles away from us. The woman was
sent off to the workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly,
limewashed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred
narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the
bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty who gave
the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them this way and
that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself he looked hard at me,
and said:

‘You are a gentleman? ’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor,’ he said, ‘that’s
bloody bad luck, that is. ’ And thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with
compassion, even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were
exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the
layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held
together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the
tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men
refused the bath, and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, the horrid, greasy little clouts which
tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six
greasy, slippery roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were dressed in
the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reaching to the middle of the
thigh. Then we were sent into the diningroom, where supper was set out on the deal
tables. It was the invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or
supper — half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us
five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us with
three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were



locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for the
next twelve hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except a tiny barred
window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There were no bugs, and we had
bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden
shelf, and in some on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to
myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night’s rest. But I did not get it, for there is
always something wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered
immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season — a little sacrifice
to the gods of spring, perhaps — the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot pipes.
The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent the night in turning from side to side,
falling asleep for ten minutes and waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.

As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall comfortably asleep when it
was time to get up. The Tramp Major came marching down the passage with his heavy
tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full
of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was Only One tub full of
water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived
twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top
of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.

We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the diningroom to bolt our breakfast. The
bread was much worse than usual, because the military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major
had cut it into slices overnight, so that it was as hard as ship’s bisciut. But we were glad
of our tea after the cold, restless night. I do not know what tramps would do without tea,
or rather the stuff they miscall tea. It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all
evils. Without the half goon or so of it that they suck down a day, I truly believe they
could not face their existence.

After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is a precaution
against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the doctor arrived, and one had
time now to look about him and see what manner of men we were. It, was an instructive
sight. We stood shivering naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered



light, bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless
he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads,
hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles — every kind of
malformation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all
tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen there stay
ineradicably in my mind. Old ‘Daddy’, aged seventy-four, with his truss, and his red,
watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard and su nk en cheeks, looking
like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and
thither with vague giggles, coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down
and left him nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten
decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.

This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon as the
doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door shut upon us. It
was a lime -washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary with its furniture of deal
boards and benches, and its prison smell. The windows were so high up that one could
not look outside, and the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to
any casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not
move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight o’clock in the morning, we
were bored with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of
the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities
of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these subjects;
they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing worthy to be called
conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no speculation in their souls. The world
is too much with them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of
anything except the next meal.

Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back bent like a bow
and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor. George, a dirty old tramp notorious
for the queer habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled about a parcel of tommy that he had
lost on the toad. Bill the moocher, the best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar
who smelt of beer even after twelve hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints
stood him in the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got him
seven days. William and, Fred, two young ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song



about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled,
about an imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden
sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities. Everyone was
smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and he was so miserable in his
smokeless state that I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding
our cigarettes like schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major’s step, for smoking
though connived at, was officially forbidden.

Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is hard to imagine
how they put up with 1 1. I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp’s
evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being
socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with
nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has
consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly
all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on
a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all
it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to
endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing
nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.

I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o’clock the Tramp Major picked me
out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the job of helping in the workhouse
kitchen. There was not really any work to be done there, and I was able to make off and
hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some workhouse paupers who were
skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There was a stove burning there, and
comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back numbers of the FAMILY HERALD, and
even a copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse library. It was paradise after the spike.

Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the biggest meals I
have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice in the year, in the spike or out of
it. The paupers told me that they always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and
went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over the cook set me to do the
washing-up, and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was
astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of broad and vegetables, were pitched



away like rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing
with good food. And while I did so my follow tramps were sitting two hundred yards
away in the spike, their bellies half filled with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread
and tea, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It appeared that
the food was thrown away from deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to
the tramps.

At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The, boredom in that
crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp’s
only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is
long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior
tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack
of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a
free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott’s novels on all
his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger,
sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had
begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend
fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He
spoke of his own case — six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth
of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought
of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-
renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with
the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than
given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.

‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the
scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum
away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t
want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum. ’


I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:



‘You don’t want to have any pity on these tramps — scum, they are. You don’t want to
judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum. ’

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He
has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not
a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether
of the middle classes.

The clock’s hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even to
talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force his eyes
away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to see that the
hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our
bones ached because of it. The clock’s hands stood at four, and supper was not till six,
and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

At last six o’clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with supper.
The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal
disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it
was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older
men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion, hungry though most
of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out immediately, and we
were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble over
the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in the spike was
up, but we could riot go until the doctor had examined us again, for the authorities have a
terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours
this time, and it was ten o’clock before we finally escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything
looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The Tramp
Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hu nk of bread and
cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the
spike and its discipline. This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights of
wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour the roads for



cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it
might be twenty miles to the next spike, where the game would begin anew.


I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downhearted
tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges. Our late
companions were scattering north, south, cast and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only
the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing, the
blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so quiet and
smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we had been packed
with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all
disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my ann. It was little Scotty, who
had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly
smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.

‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke
yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this
morning. One good turn deserves another — here y’are. ’

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.


A HANGING (1931)

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was
slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned
cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell
measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot
of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars,
with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged
within the next week or two.



One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man,
with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly
too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall
Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them
stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain
through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his anns tight to his sides.
They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful,
caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like
men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water.
But he stood
quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what
was happening.

Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the
distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of
us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an
anny doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry
up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you
ready yet? ”

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his
black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman
iss waiting. We shall proceed. ”

“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over. ”

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with
their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and
shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and
the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped
short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come
goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a
loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at
finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half
pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had



made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood
aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

“Who let that bloody brute in here? ” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it,
someone! ”

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian
jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the
stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the
grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of
the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we
put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still
straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,
with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his
muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet
printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by
each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the
mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This
man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were
working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming —
all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the
drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw
the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned —
reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing,
hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap,
one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.



The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and
overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with
planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The
hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his
machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the
two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to
the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and
fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the
gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It
was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! ”, not urgent and fearful like a
prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the
sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram! ”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass.
The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram! ” never
faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the
ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had
gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at
the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of
life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that
abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift
motion with his stick. “Chalo! ” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the
rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of
the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a comer



of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed
straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated,
slightly. “HE’S all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows,
and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He
glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,
thank God. ”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of
having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the
condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The
convicts, under the command of warders anned with lathis, were already receiving their
breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two
warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly
scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was
done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone
began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a
knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard
his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly
take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the
boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style. ”

Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed
off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always
so — oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the
gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable! ”


“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.



“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars
of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six
warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear
fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us! ” But no, he
would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome! ”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent
grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite
genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it. ”

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs! ”
exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began
laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all
had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a
hundred yards away.


BOOKSHOP MEMORIES (1936)

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one,
as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop
had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers
knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers
of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still,
and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were
commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere
but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants
a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who
read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy.
Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was
about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two
well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the



decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several
times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders
large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our
shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary,
for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered
books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They
would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over
and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of
them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner
about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to
come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they
themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite
certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops,
because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time
without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a
glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very
often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he
asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them,
I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order
them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real
money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand
typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a
strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently,
fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also
sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the
Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them
myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their
horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are
highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity. ) We did a good
deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are
rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would
sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems



manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we
spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are
tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to
see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the
Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.

But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library
of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those
libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence,
remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers
generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used
to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we
were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library
subscribers were a fair cross-section of London’s reading public. It is therefore worth
noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was —
Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick
Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell’s novels, of course,
are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might
expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that
men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they
avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel — the ordinary,
good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the nonn of the English novel — seems to
exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective
stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my
knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the
same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read
every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever
in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author’s names, but he could tell by merely
glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.



In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing
that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of
favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the
ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-
century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s OLD! ’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is
always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens
is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he
is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar
and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was
found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is
very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books.