You SHOW ‘im me, then I’ll believe in ‘im.—Oh, shut up, don’t keep interrupting of ‘em!—Interrupt yourself! —polygamists!—Well, there’s a lot to be said for polygamy. Take the— women out of industry, anyway.—My dear friends, if you would just—No, no, don’t you slip out of it. ‘Ave you SEEN God? ‘Ave you TOUCHED ‘im? ‘Ave you shook ‘ANDS with ‘im?—Oh, don’t get on the argue, for Christ’s sake don’t get on the ARGUE!’ etc. etc. I listened for twenty minutes, anxious to learn something about Mormonism, but the meeting never got beyond shouts. It is the general fate of street meetings.
In Middlesex Street, among the crowds at the market, a draggled, down-at-heel woman was hauling a brat of five by the arm. She brandished a tin trumpet in its face. The brat was squalling.
‘Enjoy yourself!’ yelled the mother. ‘What yer think I brought yer out ‘ere for an’ bought y’ a trumpet an’ all? D’ya
want to go across my knee? You little bastard, you SHALl enjoy yerself!’ Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The mother and the child disappeared, both bawling. It was all very queer after Paris.
The last night that I was in the Pennyfields lodging-house there was a quarrel between two of the lodgers, a vile scene.
One of the old-age pensioners, a man of about seventy, naked to the waist (he had been laundering), was violently abusing a short, thickset stevedore, who stood with his back to the fire. I could see the old man’s face in the light of the fire, and he was almost crying with grief and rage. Evidently something very serious had happened.
THE OLD-AGE PENSIONER:’You—!’ THE STEVEDORE: ‘Shut yer mouth, you ole—, afore I set about yer!’ THE OLD-AGE PENSIONER: ‘Jest you try it on, you—! I’m thirty year older’n you, but it wouldn’t take much to make me give you one as’d knock you into a bucketful of piss!’ THE STEVEDORE: ‘Ah, an’ then p’raps I wouldn’t smash you up after, you ole—!’ Thus for five minutes. The lodgers sat round, unhappy, trying to disregard the quarrel. The stevedore looked, sullen, but the old man was growing more and more furious.
He kept making little rushes at the other, sticking out his face and screaming from a few inches distant like a cat on a wall, and spitting. He was trying to nerve himself to strike a blow, and not quite succeeding. Finally he burst out:
‘A—, that’s what you are, a——! Take that in your dirty gob and suck it, you—! By—, I’ll smash you afore I’ve done with you. A—, that’s what you are, a son of a—whore. Lick that, you—! That’s what I think of you, you—, you—, you—you BLACK BASTARD!’ Whereat he suddenly collapsed on a bench, took his face in his hands, and began crying. The other man seeing that public feeling was against him, went out.
Afterwards I heard Steve explaining the cause of the quarrel. It appeared that it was all about a shilling’s worth of food. In some way the old man had lost his store of bread and margarine, and so would have nothing to eat for the next three days, except what the others gave him in charity.
The stevedore, who was in work and well fed, had taunted him; hence the quarrel.
When my money was down to one and fourpence I went for a night to a lodging-house in Bow, where the charge was only eightpence. One went down an area and through an alley-way into a deep, stifling cellar, ten feet square. Ten men, navvies mostly, were sitting in the fierce glare of the fire. It was midnight, but the deputy’s son, a pale, sticky child of five, was there playing on the navvies’ knees. An old Irishman was whistling to a blind bullfinch in a tiny cage. There were other songbirds there—tiny, faded things, that had lived all their lives underground. The lodgers habitually made water in the fire, to save going across a yard to the lavatory. As I sat at the table I felt something stir near my feet, and, looking down, saw a wave of black things moving slowly across the floor; they were black-beetles.
There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets, marked in huge letters ‘Stolen from No.—Road’, smelt loathsome. In the next bed to me lay a very old man, a pavement artist, with some extraordinary curvature of the spine that made him stick right out of bed, with his back a foot or two from my face. It was bare, and marked with curious swirls of dirt, like a marble table-top. During the night a man came in drunk and was sick on the floor, close to my bed. There were bugs too—not so bad as in Paris, but enough to keep one awake. It was a filthy place. Yet the deputy and his wife were friendly people, and ready to make one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night.
XXVI
In the morning after paying for the usual tea-and-two-slices and buying half an ounce of tobacco, I had a halfpenny left. I did not care to ask B. for more money yet, so there was nothing for it but to go to a casual ward. I had very little idea how to set about this, but I knew that there was a casual ward at Romton, so I walked out there, arriving at three or four in the afternoon. Leaning against the pigpens in Romton market-place was a wizened old Irishman, obviously a tramp. I went and leaned beside him, and presently offered him my tobacco-box. He opened the box and looked at the tobacco in astonishment:
‘By God,’ he said, ‘dere’s sixpennorth o’ good baccy here!
Where de hell d’you get hold o’ dat? YOU ain’t been on de road long.’ ‘What, don’t you have tobacco on the road?’ I said.
‘Oh, we HAS it. Look.’ He produced a rusty tin which had once held Oxo Cubes.
In it were twenty or thirty cigarette ends, picked up from the pavement. The Irishman said that he rarely got any other tobacco; he added that, with care, one could collect two ounces of tobacco a day on the London pavements.
‘D’you come out o’ one o’ de London spikes [casual wards], eh?’ he asked me.
I said yes, thinking this would make him accept me as a fellow tramp, and asked him what the spike at Romton was like. He said:
‘Well, ‘tis a cocoa spike. Dere’s tay spikes, and cocoa
spikes, and skilly spikes. Dey don’t give you skilly in Romton, t’ank God—leastways, dey didn’t de last time I was here. I been up to York and round Wales since.’ ‘What is skilly?’ I said.
‘Skilly? A can o’ hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom; dat’s skilly. De skilly spikes is always de worst.’ We stayed talking for an hour or two. The Irishman was a friendly old man, but he smelt very unpleasant, which was not surprising when one learned how many diseases he suffered from. It appeared (he described his symptoms fully)
that taking him from top to bottom he had the following things wrong with him: on his crown, which was bald, he had eczema; he was shortsighted, and had no glasses; he had chronic bronchitis; he had some undiagnosed pain in the back; he had dyspepsia; he had urethritis; he had varicose veins, bunions and flat feet. With this assemblage of diseases he had tramped the roads for fifteen years.
At about five the Irishman said, ‘Could you do wid a cup o’ tay? De spike don’t open till six.’ ‘I should think I could.’ ‘Well, dere’s a place here where dey gives you a free cup o’ tay and a bun. GOOD tay it is. Dey makes you say a lot o’ bloody prayers after; but hell! It all passes de time away. You come wid me.’ He led the way to a small tin-roofed shed in a side-street, rather like a village cricket pavilion. About twenty-five other tramps were waiting. A few of them were dirty old habitual vagabonds, the majority decent-looking lads from the north, probably miners or cotton operatives out of work.
Presently the door opened and a lady in a blue silk dress, wearing gold spectacles and a crucifix, welcomed us in. Inside were thirty or forty hard chairs, a harmonium, and a very gory lithograph of the Crucifixion.
Uncomfortably we took off our caps and sat down. The lady handed out the tea, and while we ate and drank she moved to and fro, talking benignly. She talked upon religious subjects—about Jesus Christ always having a soft spot for poor rough men like us, and about how quickly the time passed when you were in church, and what a difference it made to a man on the road if he said his prayers regularly.
We hated it. We sat against the wall fingering our caps (a
tramp feels indecently exposed with his cap off), and turning pink and trying to mumble something when the lady addressed us. There was no doubt that she meant it all kindly. As she came up to one of the north country lads with the plate of buns, she said to him: