No More Learning

’

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



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

The beds were not more than two feet apart. About midnight I woke up to find that the
man next to me was trying to steal the money from beneath my pillow. He was
pretending to be asleep while he did it, sliding his hand under the pillow as gently as a
rat. In the morning I saw that he was a hunchback, with long, apelike arms. I told Paddy
about the attempted theft. He laughed and said:

‘Christ! You got to get used to dat. Desc lodgin’ houses is full o’ thieves. In some houses
dere’s nothin’ safe but to sleep wid all yer clo’es on. I seen ‘em steal a wooden leg off a
cripple before now. Once I see a man — fourteen-stone man he was — come into a lodgin’-
house wid four pound ten. He puts it under his mattress. “Now,” he says, “any — dat
touches dat money does it over my body,” he says. But dey done him all de same. In de
mornin’ he woke up on de floor. Four fellers had took his mattress by de corners an’
lifted him off as light as a feather. He never saw his four pound ten again. ’


CHAPTER XXX

The next morning we began looking once more for Paddy’s friend, who was called Bozo,
and was a screever — that is, a pavement artist. Addresses did not exist in Paddy’s world,
but he had a vague idea that Bozo might be found in Lambeth, and in the end we ran
across him on the Embankment, where he had established himself not far from Waterloo
Bridge. He was kneeling on the pavement with a box of chalks, copying a sketch of
Winston Churchill from a penny note -book. The likeness was not at all bad. Bozo was a
small, dark, hook-nosed man, with curly hair growing low on his head. His right leg was
dreadfully deformed, the foot being twisted heel forward in a way horrible to see. From
his appearance one could have taken him for a Jew, but he used to deny this vigorously.
He spoke of his hooknose as ‘Roman’, and was proud of his resemblance to some Roman
Emperor — it was Vespasian, I think.



Bozo had a strange way of talking, Cockneyfied and yet very lucid and expressive. It was
as though he had read good books but had never troubled to correct Us grammar. For a
while Paddy and I stayed on the Embankment, talking, and Bozo gave us an account of
the screeving trade. I repeat what he said more or less in his own words.

‘I’m what they call a serious screever. I don’t draw in blackboard chalks like these others,
I use proper colours the same as what painters use; bloody expensive they are, especially
the reds. I use five bobs’ worth of colours in a long day, and never less than two bobs’
worth. Cartoons is my line — you know, politics and cricket and that. Look here’ — he
showed me his notebook — ‘here’s likenesses of all the political blokes, what I’ve copied
from the papers. I have a different cartoon every day. For instance, when the Budget was
on I had one of Winston trying to push an elephant marked “Debt”, and underneath I
wrote, “Will he budge it? ” See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you
mustn’t put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won’t stand it. Once I did
a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The
copper came along and saw it, and he says, “You rub that out, and look sharp about it,”
he says. I had to rub it out. The copper’s got the right to move you on for loitering, and
it’s no good giving them a back answer. ’

[* Pavement artists buy their colours in the form of powder, and work them into cakes in
condensed milk]

I asked Bozo what one could earn at screeving. He said:

‘This time of year, when it don’t rain, I take about three quid between Friday and
Sunday — people get their wages Fridays, you see. I can’t work when it rains; the colours
get washed off straight away. Take the year round, I make about a pound a week, because
you can’t do much in the winter. Boat Race day, and Cup Final day, I’ve took as much as
four pounds. But you have to CUT it out of them, you know; you don’t take a bob if you
just sit and look at them. A halfpenny’s the usual drop [gift], and you don’t get even that
unless you give them a bit of backchat. Once they’ve answered you they feel ashamed not
to give you a drop. The best thing’s to keep changing your picture, because when they see
you drawing they’ll stop and watch you. The trouble is, the beggars scatter as soon as you
turn round with the hat. You really want a nobber [assistant] at this game. You keep at



work and get a crowd watching you, and the nobber comes casual-like round the back of
them. They don’t know he’s the nobber. Then suddenly he pulls his cap off, and you got
them between two fires like. You’ll never get a drop off real toffs. It’s shabby sort of
blokes you get most off, and foreigners. I’ve had even sixpences off Japs, and blackies,
and that. They’re not so bloody mean as what an Englishman is. Another thing to
remember is to keep your money covered up, except perhaps a penny in the hat. People
won’t give you anything if they see you got a bob or two already. ’

Bozo had the deepest contempt for the other screevers on the Embankment. He called
them ‘the salmon platers’. At that time there was a screever almost every twenty-five
yards along the Embankment — twenty-five yards being the recognized minimum
between pitches. Bozo contemptuously pointed out an old white-bearded screever fifty
yards away.

‘You see that silly old fool? He’s bin doing the same picture every day for ten years. “A
faithful friend” he calls it. It’s of a dog pulling a child out of the water. The silly old
bastard can’t draw any better than a child of ten. He’s learned just that one picture by rule
of thumb, like you learn to put a puzzle together. There’s a lot of that sort about here.
They come pinching my ideas sometimes; but I don’t care; the silly — s can’t think of
anything for themselves, so I’m always ahead of them. The whole thing with cartoons is
being up to date. Once a child got its head stuck in the railings of Chelsea Bridge. Well, I
heard about it, and my cartoon was on the pavement before they’d got the child’s head
out of the railings. Prompt, I am. ’

Bozo seemed an interesting man, and I was anxious to see more of him. That evening I
went down to the Embankment to meet him, as he had arranged to take Paddy and myself
to a lodging-house south of the river. Bozo washed his pictures off the pavement and
counted his takings — it was about sixteen shillings, of which he said twelve or thirteen
would be profit. We walked down into Lambeth. Bozo limped slowly, with a queer
crablike gait, half sideways, dragging his smashed foot behind him. He carried a stick in
each hand and slung his box of colours over his shoulder. As we were crossing the bridge
he stopped in one of the alcoves to rest. He fell silent for a minute or two, and to my
surprise I saw that he was looking at the stars. He touched my ann and pointed to the sky
with his stick.



‘Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like a — great blood orange! ’


From the way he spoke he might have been an art critic in a picture gallery. I was
astonished. I confessed that I did not know which Aldebaran was — indeed, I had never
even noticed that the stars were of different colours. Bozo began to give me some
elementary hints on astronomy, pointing out-the chief constellations. He seemed
concerned at my ignorance. I said to him, surprised:

‘You seem to know a lot about stars. ’

‘Not a great lot. I know a bit, though. I got two letters from the Astronomer Royal
thanking me for writing about meteors. Now and again I go out at night and watch for
meteors. The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes. ’

‘What a good idea! I should never have thought of it. ’

‘Well, you got to take an interest in something. It don’t follow that because a man’s on
the road he can’t think of anything but tea-and- two-slices. ’

‘But isn’t it very hard to take an interest in things — things like stars — living this life? ’

‘Screeving, you mean? Not necessarily. It don’t need turn you into a bloody rabbit — that
is, not if you set your mind to it. ’

‘It seems to have that effect on most people. ’

‘Of course. Look at Paddy — a tea-swilling old moocher, only fit to scrounge for fag-ends.
That’s the way most of them go. I despise them. But you don’t NEED to get like that. If
you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if you’re on the road for the rest of your
life. ’

‘Well, I’ve found just the contrary,’ I said. ‘It seems to me that when you take a man’s
money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment. ’



‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You
can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a
free man in HERE’” — he tapped his forehead — ‘and you’re all right. ’

Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened with attention. He seemed a very
unusual screever, and he was, moreover, the first person I had heard maintain that
poverty did not matter. I saw a good deal of him during the next few days, for several
times it rained and he could not work. He told me the history of his life, and it was a
curious one.

The son of a bankrupt bookseller, he had gone to work as a house-painter at eighteen, and
then served three years in France and India during the war. After the war he had found a
house-painting job in Paris, and had stayed there several years. France suited him better
than England (he despised the English), and he had been doing well in Paris, saving
money, and engaged to a French girl. One day the girl was crushed to death under the
wheels of an omnibus. Bozo went on the drink for a week, and then returned to work,
rather shaky; the same morning he fell from a stage on which he was working, forty feet
on to the pavement, and smashed his right foot to pulp. For some reason he received only
sixty pounds compensation. He returned to England, spent his money in looking for jobs,
tried hawking books in Middlesex Street market, then tried selling toys from a tray, and
finally settled down as a screever. He had lived hand to mouth ever since, half starved
throughout the winter, and often sleeping in the spike or on the Embankment.

When I knew him he owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in, and his drawing
materials and a few books. The clothes were the usual beggar’s rags, but he wore a collar
and tie, of which he was rather proud. The collar, a year or more old, was constantly
‘going’ round the neck, and Bozo used to patch it with bits cut from the tail of his shirt so
that the shirt had scarcely any tail left. His damaged leg was getting worse and would
probably have to be amputated, and his knees, from kneeling on the stones, had pads of
skin on them as thick as boot-soles. There was, clearly, no future for him but beggary and
a death in the workhouse.

With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor shame, nor self-pity. He had faced his
position, and made a philosophy for himself. Being a beggar, he said, was not his fault,



and he refused either to have any compunction about it or to let it trouble him. He was the
enemy of society, and quite ready to take to crime if he saw a good opportunity. He
refused on principle to be thrifty. In the summer he saved nothing, spending his surplus
earnings on drink, as he did not care about women. If he was penniless when winter came
on, then society must look after him. He was ready to extract every penny he could from
charity, provided that he was not expected to say thank you for it. He avoided religious
charities, however, for he said it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns. He had
various other points of honour; for instance, it was his boast that never in his life, even
when starving, had he picked up a cigarette end. He considered himself in a class above
the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to
be ungrateful.

He spoke French passably, and had read some of Zola’s novels, all Shakespeare’s plays,
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, and a number of essays. He could describe his adventures in
words that one remembered. For instance, speaking of funerals, he said to me:

‘Have you-ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India. They put the old chap on the fire,
and the next moment I almost jumped out of my skin, because he’d started kicking. It was
only his muscles contracting in the heat — still, it give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about
for a bit like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with a bang
you could have heard fifty yards away. It fair put me against cremation. ’

Or, again, apropos of his accident:

‘The doctor says to me, “You fell on one foot, my man. And bloody lucky for you you
didn’t fall on both feet,” he says. “Because if you had of fallen on both feet you’d have
shut up like a bloody concertina, and your thigh bones’d be sticking out of your ears! ”’

Clearly the phrase was not the doctor’s but Bozo’s own. He had a gift for phrases. He had
managed to keep his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb to
poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read,
think, and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.


He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God
as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs



would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had
consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably
Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is
harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold
climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas
on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably
boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional
man.


CHAPTER XXXI

The charge at Bozo’s lodging-house was ninepence a night. It was a large, crowded
place, with accommodation for five hundred men, and a well-known rendezvous of
tramps, beggars, and petty criminals. All races, even black and white, mixed in it on
terms of equality. There were Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu
he addressed me as ‘turn’ — a thing to make one shudder, if it had been in India. We had
got below the range of colour prejudice. One had glimpses of curious lives. Old
‘Grandpa’, a tramp of seventy who made his living, or a great part of it, by collecting
cigarette ends and selling the tobacco at threepence an ounce. ‘The Doctor’ — he was a
real doctor, who had been struck off the register for some offence, and besides selling
newspapers gave medical advice at a few pence a time. A little Chittagonian lascar,
barefoot and starving, who had deserted his ship and wandered for days through London,
so vague and helpless that he did not even know the name of the city he was in — he
thought it was Liverpool, until I told him. A begging-letter writer, a friend of Bozo’s,
who wrote pathetic appeals for aid to pay for his wife’s funeral, and, when a letter had
taken effect, blew himself out with huge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He was
a nasty, hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that, like most swindlers, he
believed a great part of his own lies. The lodging-house was an Alsatia for types like
these.

While I was with Bozo he taught me something about the technique of London begging.
There is more in it than one might suppose. Beggars vary greatly, and there is a sharp
social line between those who merely cadge and those who attempt to give some value



for money. The amounts that one can earn by the different ‘gags’ also vary. The stories in
the Sunday papers about beggars who die with two thousand pounds sewn into their
trousers are, of course, lies; but the better-class beggars do have runs of luck, when they
earn a living wage for weeks at a time. The most prosperous beggars are street acrobats
and street photographers. On a good pitch — a theatre queue, for instance — a street
acrobat will often earn five pounds a week.
Street photographers can earn about the same,
but they are dependent on line weather. They have a cunning dodge to stimulate trade.
When they see a likely victim approaching one of them runs behind the camera and
pretends to take a photograph. Then as the victim reaches them, they exclaim:

‘There y’are, sir, took yer photo lovely. That’ll be a bob. ’

‘But I never asked you to take it,’ protests the victim.

‘What, you didn’t want it took? Why, we thought you signalled with your ‘and. Well,
there’s a plate wasted! That’s cost us sixpence, that ‘as. ’

At this the victim usually takes pity and says he will have the photo after all. The
photographers examine the plate and say that it is spoiled, and that they will take a fresh
one free of charge. Of course, they have not really taken the first photo; and so, if the
victim refuses, they waste nothing.

Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists rather than beggars. An organ-
grinder named Shorty, a friend of Bozo’s, told me all about his trade. He and his mate
‘worked’ the coffee-shops and public-houses round Whitechapel and the Commercial
Road. It is a mistake to think that organ-grinders earn their living in the street; nine-tenths
of their money is taken in coffee-shops and pubs — only the cheap pubs, for they are not
allowed into the good-class ones. 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.