No More Learning

It
was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.


CHAPTER XXIX



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

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

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



‘You men sleep ‘ere last night? ’


‘No. ’

‘Then— off. ’

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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

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

Jolly boating weather,

And a hay harvest —

‘Stop that — noise! ’ shouted several lodgers.

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

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

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

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



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

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