---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

> * A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

> This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please
contact an FP administrator before proceeding.

> This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under
copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your
country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT
IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

> Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Date of first publication: 1933
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Mar. 14, 2018
Date last updated: Mar. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180314

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Down and Out_
    _in Paris and London_

> O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!
       CHAUCER

> PENGUIN BOOKS

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1933

> Copyright 1933 by Eric Blair

> [The end of _Down and Out in Paris and London_ by George Orwell]

## Contents

1. [Chapter I](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/1.md)
2. [Chapter II](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/2.md)
3. [Chapter III](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3.md)
4. [Chapter IV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/4.md)
5. [Chapter V](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/5.md)
6. [Chapter VI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/6.md)
7. [Chapter VII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/7.md)
8. [Chapter VIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/8.md)
9. [Chapter IX](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/9.md)
10. [Chapter X](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/10.md)
11. [Chapter XI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11.md)
12. [Chapter XII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/12.md)
13. [Chapter XIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/13.md)
14. [Chapter XIV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14.md)
15. [Chapter XV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/15.md)
16. [Chapter XVI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/16.md)
17. [Chapter XVII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/17.md)
18. [Chapter XVIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/18.md)
19. [Chapter XIX](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/19.md)
20. [Chapter XX](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/20.md)
21. [Chapter XXI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/21.md)
22. [Chapter XXII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22.md)
23. [Chapter XXIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/23.md)
24. [Chapter XXIV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24.md)
25. [Chapter XXV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25.md)
26. [Chapter XXVI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/26.md)
27. [Chapter XXVII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/27.md)
28. [Chapter XXVIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/28.md)
29. [Chapter XXIX](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/29.md)
30. [Chapter XXX](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/30.md)
31. [Chapter XXXI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31.md)
32. [Chapter XXXII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/32.md)
33. [Chapter XXXIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/33.md)
34. [Chapter XXXIV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/34.md)
35. [Chapter XXXV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/35.md)
36. [Chapter XXXVI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/36.md)
37. [Chapter XXXVII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/37.md)
38. [Chapter XXXVIII](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/38.md)

## 1. Chapter I

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/1/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/1/#p-N

[¶0] The Rue Du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of
furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the
little hotel opposite mine, had come out onto the pavement to address a
lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her
grey hair was streaming down.

[¶1] _Madame Monce: 'Sacrée salope!_ How many times have I told you not to
squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh?
Why can't you throw them out of the window like everyone else? _Espèce
de traînée!_'

[¶2] _The woman on the third floor: 'Va donc, eh! vieille vache!'_

[¶3] Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open
on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up
abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and
people stopped shouting to look at them.

[¶4] I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the Rue
du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened
there—but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one
outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street
hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the
cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the
refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street.

[¶5] It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching
towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been
frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to
the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of
the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the
equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male
population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and
the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct
mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally
revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two
together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt
lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses
and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up
small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

[¶6] My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety
warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms.
The rooms were small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and
Madame F., the _patronne_, had no time to do any sweeping. The walls
were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered
with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed
innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day
like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so
that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs.
Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive
them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by
having _his_ room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty
place, but homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The
rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week.

[¶7] The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to
turn up without luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were
of every trade—cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students,
prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were fantastically poor. In one
of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the
American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen
pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he
attended lectures at the Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and
books of theology lay face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In another
room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself an artist.
The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five
centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the
Montparnasse cafés. One room was let to two different lodgers, one a day
worker and the other a night worker. In another room a widower shared
the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both consumptive.

[¶8] There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a
gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into
solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or
decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as
money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.

[¶9] There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old ragged, dwarfish couple
who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the
Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold
in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of
châteaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late,
and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred
francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved
and half drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it
on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had
taken off their clothes for four years.

[¶10] Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy
man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in his long sewer-man's
boots. Henri's peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the
purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before he had
been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in
love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her.
On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a
fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri's
money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper
arm and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been
stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two
made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he
should buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But a fortnight
later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was
with child. Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings
and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month's imprisonment;
after that he went to work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to
talk. If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered,
but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and jerked his head
southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him
half-witted in a single day.

[¶11] Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in
Putney with his parents and six months in France. During his time in
France he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays;
he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the wine there is
cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature,
never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till
midday, and from then till midnight he was in his corner of the
_bistro_, quietly and methodically soaking. While he soaked he talked,
in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except myself, R.
was the only Englishman in the quarter.

[¶12] There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as
these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not
admit it, Fureux the Limousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser—he died
before my time, though—old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used to copy
his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It would be
fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to
describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but
because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing
about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum,
with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in
poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that
reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

## 2. Chapter II

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/2/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/2/#p-N

[¶0] Life in the quarter. Our _bistro_, for instance, at the foot of the
Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground,
with wine-sodden tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed
'_Crédit est mort_'; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage with big
jack-knives; and Madame F., a splendid Auvergnat peasant woman with the
face of a strong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day 'for her stomach';
and games of dice for _apéritifs_; and songs about 'Les Fraises et Les
Framboises', and about Madelon, who said, '_Comment épouser un soldat,
moi qui aime tout le régiment?_'; and extraordinarily public
love-making. Half the hotel used to meet in the _bistro_ in the
evenings. I wish one could find a pub in London a quarter as cheery.

[¶1] One heard queer conversations in the _bistro_. As a sample I give you
Charlie, one of the local curiosities, talking.

[¶2] Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home
and lived on occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young,
with the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips
excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are tiny, his arms
abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby's. He has a way of
dancing and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too
full of life to keep still for an instant. It is three in the afternoon,
and there is no one in the _bistro_ except Madame F. and one or two men
who are out of work; but it is all the same to Charlie whom he talks to,
so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a
barricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his
short arms. His small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is,
somehow, profoundly disgusting to see.

[¶3] He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

[¶4] '_Ah, l'amour, l'amour! Ah, que les femmes m'ont tué!_ Alas, _messieurs
et dames_, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At
twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have
learned, what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it
is to have acquired the true wisdom, to have become in the highest sense
of the word a civilized man, to have become _raffiné_, _vicieux_,' etc.
etc.

[¶5] '_Messieurs et dames_, I perceive that you are sad. _Ah, mais la vie est
belle_—you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!

[¶6] Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
    Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!

[¶7] '_Ah, que la vie est belle!_ Listen, _messieurs et dames_, out of the
fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will
explain to you what is the true meaning of love—what is the true
sensibility, the higher, more refined pleasure which is known to
civilized men alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life.
Alas, but I am past the time when I could know such happiness as that.
It is gone for ever—the very possibility, even the desire for it, are
gone.

[¶8] 'Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris—he is a
lawyer—and my parents had told him to find me and take me out to
dinner. We hate each other, my brother and I, but he preferred not to
disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk upon
three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the way
I bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother
drink a tumblerful of it—I told him it was something to make him sober.
He drank it, and immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead
drunk. I lifted him up and propped his back against the bed; then I went
through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with that I
hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did
not know my address—I was safe.

[¶9] 'Where does a man go when he has money? To the _bordels_, naturally. But
you do not suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar
debauchery fit only for navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I
was fastidious, _exigeant_, you understand, with a thousand francs in my
pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was looking for. I had
fallen in with a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed _en smoking_ and
with his hair cut _à l'américaine_, and we were talking in a quiet
_bistro_ away from the boulevards. We understood one another well, that
youth and I. We talked of this and that, and discussed ways of diverting
oneself. Presently we took a taxi together and were driven away.

[¶10] 'The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp
flaring at the end. There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one
side ran the high blank wall of a convent. My guide led me to a tall,
ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked several times at the
door. Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts,
and the door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a
large, crooked hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses,
demanding money.

[¶11] 'My guide put his foot between the door and the step. "How much do you
want?" he said.

[¶12] '"A thousand francs," said a woman's voice. "Pay up at once or you don't
come in."

[¶13] 'I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred to
my guide; he said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside
counting the notes, and then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress
put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously before letting me in. It
was very dark inside; I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet that
illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into
deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the
old woman lighted a candle at the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me
down a stone passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.

[¶14] '"_Voilà!_" she said; "go down into the cellar there and do what you
like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you
understand—perfectly free."

[¶15] 'Ah, _messieurs_, need I describe to you—_forcément_, you know it
yourselves—that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes
through one at these moments? I crept down, feeling my way; I could hear
my breathing and the scraping of my feet on the stones, otherwise all
was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric switch.
I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the
cellar with a red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a
bedroom, a great rich garish bedroom, coloured blood red from top to
bottom. Figure it to yourselves, _messieurs et dames_! Red carpet on the
floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs, even the ceiling
red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling
red, as though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far
end stood a huge square bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a
girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red velvet. At the sight of me she
shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short dress.

[¶16] 'I had halted by the door. "Come here, my chicken," I called to her.

[¶17] 'She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she
tried to elude me, but I seized her by the throat—like this, do you
see?—tight! She struggled, she began to cry out for mercy, but I held
her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her face. She was
twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid
eyes, shining in the red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that
one sees nowhere save in the eyes of these women. She was some peasant
girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into slavery.

[¶18] 'Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her onto the
floor. And then I fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the
incomparable rapture of that time! There, _messieurs et dames_, here is
what I would expound to you; _voilà l'amour_! There is the true love,
there is the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the
thing beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philosophies and
creeds, all your fine words and high attitudes, are as pale and
profitless as ashes. When one has experienced love—the true love—what
is there in the world that seems more than a mere ghost of joy?

[¶19] 'More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl
tried to escape; she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.

[¶20] '"Mercy!" I said, "do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do you
suppose I have paid a thousand francs for that?" I swear to you,
_messieurs et dames_, that if it were not for that accursed law that
robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at that moment.

[¶21] 'Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was no
one to hear them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as
secure as at the heart of a pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl's
face, washing away the powder in long dirty smears. Ah, that
irrecoverable time! You, _messieurs et dames_, you who have not
cultivated the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is
almost beyond conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone—ah,
youth!—shall never again see life so beautiful as that. It is finished.

[¶22] 'Ah yes, it is gone—gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness, the
disappointment of human joy! For in reality—_car en réalité_, what is
the duration of the supreme moment of love? It is nothing, an instant, a
second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that—dust, ashes,
nothingness.

[¶23] 'And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the
highest and most refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And
in the same moment it was finished, and I was left—to what? All my
savagery, my passion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was
left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt
a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous,
that we should be the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the
girl again; my sole thought was to get away. I hastened up the steps of
the vault and out into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the
streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow,
lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi
fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room.

[¶24] 'But there, _messieurs et dames_, that is what I promised to expound to
you. That is Love. That was the happiest day of my life.'

[¶25] He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what
diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d'Or quarter.

## 3. Chapter III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3/#p-N

[¶0] I lived in the Coq d'Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day, in
summer, I found that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and
beyond this nothing but thirty-six francs a week, which I earned by
giving English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about the future, but
I now realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start
looking for a job, and—very luckily as it turned out—I took the
precaution of paying two hundred francs for a month's rent in advance.
With the other two hundred and fifty francs, besides the English
lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should probably find
work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or
perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.

[¶1] One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself
a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side
whiskers, which are the mark either of an apache or an intellectual, and
nobody was quite certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not
like the look of him, and made him pay a week's rent in advance. The
Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this
time he managed to prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he
robbed a dozen rooms, including mine. Luckily he did not find the money
that was in my pockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with
just forty-seven francs—that is, seven and tenpence.

[¶2] This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live
at the rate of about six francs a day, and from the start it was too
difficult to leave much thought for anything else. It was now that my
experiences of poverty began—for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can
live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a
complicated business.

[¶3] It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have
thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is
all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite
simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be
terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar _lowness_
of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the
complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

[¶4] You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a
sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day.
But of course you dare not admit it—you have got to pretend that you
are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of
lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending
clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and
asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending
the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps
asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to
answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are
your meals—meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at
mealtimes you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in
the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle
your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or
bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You
have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye
loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets.
This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you
have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of
food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades.
Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such
fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend
the equivalent of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, and
expensive lies.

[¶5] You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean
disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty
centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit
lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a
flick with your nail, and it falls plop! straight into the milk. There
is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

[¶6] You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the
girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more
than a pound. '_Pardon, monsieur_,' she says, 'I suppose you don't mind
paying two sous extra?' Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a
franc. When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra,
and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is
hours before you dare venture into a baker's shop again.

[¶7] You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes.
But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the
shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go there
again.

[¶8] You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous
friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearest café. Once in the
café you must buy something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a
glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One could multiply these
disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.

[¶9] You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in
your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there
is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets
of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages,
mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones. A
snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You
plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and
you refrain, from pure funk.

[¶10] You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times
when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself
in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like
the _jeune squelette_ in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you.
You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine
is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

[¶11] This—one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style—is
life on six francs a day. Thousands of people in Paris live
it—struggling artists and students, prostitutes when their luck is out,
out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of
poverty.

[¶12] I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven francs
were soon gone, and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a week
from the English lessons. Being inexperienced, I handled the money
badly, and sometimes I was a day without food. When this happened I used
to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in small
packets and taking them to a second-hand shop in the Rue de la Montagne
St Geneviève. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinarily
disagreeable man, who used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a
client. From his manner one would have supposed that we had done him
some injury by coming to him. '_Merde!_' he used to shout, '_you_ here
again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen?' And he paid
incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-five
shillings and scarcely worn he gave five francs, for a good pair of
shoes five francs, for shirts a franc each. He always preferred to
exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless
article into one's hand and then pretending that one had accepted it.
Once I saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white
billiard-balls into her hand, and then push her rapidly out of the shop
before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to flatten the
Jew's nose, if only one could have afforded it.

[¶13] These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there
was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless,
things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are
approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the
others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings
of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is
actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you
have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven
panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for
three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further
than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I
shall be starving in a day or two—shocking, isn't it?' And then the
mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some
extent, provide its own anodyne.

[¶14] And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I
believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a
feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last
genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the
dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you
can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

## 4. Chapter IV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/4/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/4/#p-N

[¶0] One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather was getting hot
and one of my pupils, feeling too lazy to go on with his lessons,
dismissed me. The other disappeared from his lodgings without notice,
owing me twelve francs. I was left with only thirty centimes and no
tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to eat or smoke, and then,
too hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into
my suitcase and took them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all
pretence of being in funds, for I could not take my clothes out of the
hotel without asking Madame F.'s leave. I remember, however, how
surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on
the sly, shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.

[¶1] It was the first time that I had been into a French pawnshop. One went
through grandiose stone portals (marked, of course, '_Liberté, Égalité,
Fraternité_'—they write that even over the police stations in France)
into a large bare room like a school classroom, with a counter and rows
of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one's pledge
over the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed
its value, he would call out, '_Numéro_ such and such, will you take
fifty francs?' Sometimes it was only fifteen francs, or ten, or
five—whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I came in the clerk
called with an air of offence, '_Numéro 83_—here!' and gave a little
whistle and a beckon, as though calling a dog. _Numéro 83_ stepped to
the counter; he was an old bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at
the neck and frayed trouser-ends. Without a word the clerk shot the
bundle across the counter—evidently it was worth nothing. It fell to
the ground and came open, displaying four pairs of men's woollen pants.
No one could help laughing. Poor _Numéro 83_ gathered up his pants and
shambled out, muttering to himself.

[¶2] The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had cost over
twenty pounds, and were in good condition. I thought they must be worth
ten pounds, and a quarter of this (one expects quarter value at a
pawnshop) was two hundred and fifty or three hundred francs. I waited
without anxiety, expecting two hundred francs at the worst.

[¶3] At last the clerk called my number: '_Numéro 97!_'

[¶4] 'Yes,' I said, standing up.

[¶5] 'Seventy francs?'

[¶6] Seventy francs for ten pounds' worth of clothes! But it was no use
arguing; I had seen someone else attempt to argue, and the clerk had
instantly refused the pledge. I took the money and the pawnticket and
walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stood up in—the coat
badly out at elbow—an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one spare
shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it is wiser to
go to a pawnshop in the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most
French people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch.

[¶7] When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the _bistro_ floor. She came up
the steps to meet me. I could see in her eye that she was uneasy about
my rent.

[¶8] 'Well,' she said, 'what did you get for your clothes? Not much, eh?'

[¶9] 'Two hundred francs,' I said promptly.

[¶10] '_Tiens!_' she said, surprised; 'well, _that_'s not bad. How expensive
those English clothes must be!'

[¶11] The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it came true. A
few days later I did receive exactly two hundred francs due to me for a
newspaper article, and, though it hurt to do it, I at once paid every
penny of it in rent. So, though I came near to starving in the following
weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.

[¶12] It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend
of mine, a Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I
had first met him in the public ward of a hospital, where he was being
treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had told me to come to him if
I were ever in difficulties.

[¶13] I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and my
close friend for a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about
thirty-five, and had been good-looking, but since his illness he had
grown immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian refugees, he
had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had
been rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second
Siberian Rifles, which, according to him, was the best regiment in the
Russian Army. After the war he had first worked in a brush factory, then
as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher, and had finally
worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hôtel
Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to
become a _maître d'hôtel_, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a
small, select restaurant on the Right Bank.

[¶14] Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War and
soldiering were his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy
and military history, and could tell you all about the theories of
Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch. Anything to do with
soldiers pleased him. His favourite café was the Closerie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside
it. Later on, Boris and I sometimes went to the Rue du Commerce
together. If we went by Metro, Boris always got out at Cambronne station
instead of Commerce, though Commerce was nearer; he liked the
association with General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender at
Waterloo, and answered simply, '_Merde!_'

[¶15] The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some
photographs of his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else
went to the pawnshop. Almost every day he would spread the photographs
out on the bed and talk about them:

[¶16] '_Voilà, mon ami!_ There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big
men, eh? Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at
twenty—not bad, eh? Yes, a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and
my father was a colonel.

[¶17] '_Ah, mais, mon ami_, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the
Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revolution—every penny gone. In 1916
I stayed a week at the Hôtel Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a
job as night watchman there. I have been night watchman, cellarman,
floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped
waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.

[¶18] 'Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, _mon ami_. I
do not say it to boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how
many mistresses I have had in my life, and I made it out to be over two
hundred. Yes, at least two hundred . . . Ah, well, _ça reviendra_.
Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage!' etc. etc.

[¶19] Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in
the army, but he had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the
waiter's outlook. Though he had never saved more than a few thousand
francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be able to set
up his own restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found,
talk and think of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters.
Boris used to talk interestingly about hotel life:

[¶20] 'Waiting is a gamble,' he used to say; 'you may die poor, you may make
your fortune in a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips—ten
per cent of the bill, and a commission from the wine companies on
champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous. The barman at Maxim's,
for instance, makes five hundred francs a day. More than five hundred,
in the season . . . I have made two hundred francs a day myself. It was
at a hotel in Biarritz, in the season. The whole staff, from the manager
down to the _plongeurs_, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one
hours' work and two and a half hours in bed, for a month on end. Still,
it was worth it, at two hundred francs a day.

[¶21] 'You never know when a stroke of luck is coming. Once when I was at the
Hôtel Royal an American customer sent for me before dinner and ordered
twenty-four brandy cocktails. I brought them all together on a tray, in
twenty-four glasses. "Now, _garçon_," said the customer (he was drunk),
"I'll drink twelve and you'll drink twelve, and if you can walk to the
door afterwards you get a hundred francs." I walked to the door, and he
gave me a hundred francs. And every night for six days he did the same
thing; twelve brandy cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months
later I heard he had been extradited by the American
Government—embezzlement. There is something fine, do you not think,
about these Americans?'

[¶22] I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together, playing chess and
talking about war and hotels. Boris used often to suggest that I should
become a waiter. 'The life would suit you,' he used to say; 'when you
are in work, with a hundred francs a day and a nice mistress, it's not
bad. You say you go in for writing. Writing is bosh. There is only one
way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's
daughter. But you would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache
off. You are tall and you speak English—those are the chief things a
waiter needs. Wait till I can bend this accursed leg, _mon ami_. And
then, if you are ever out of a job, come to me.'

[¶23] Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry, I remembered
Boris's promise, and decided to look him up at once. I did not hope to
become a waiter so easily as he had promised, but of course I knew how
to scrub dishes, and no doubt he could get me a job in the kitchen. He
had said that dishwashing jobs were to be had for the asking during the
summer. It was a great relief to remember that I had after all one
influential friend to fall back on.

## 5. Chapter V

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/5/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/5/#p-N

[¶0] A short time before, Boris had given me an address in the Rue du Marché
des Blancs Manteaux. All he had said in his letter was that 'things were
not marching too badly', and I assumed that he was back at the Hôtel
Scribe, touching his hundred francs a day. I was full of hope, and
wondered why I had been fool enough not to go to Boris before. I saw
myself in a cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as they
broke eggs into the pan, and five solid meals a day. I even squandered
two francs fifty on a packet of Gauloises Bleu, in anticipation of my
wages.

[¶1] In the morning I walked down to the Rue du Marché des Blancs Manteaux;
with a shock, I found it a slummy back street as bad as my own. Boris's
hotel was the dirtiest hotel in the street. From its dark doorway there
came out a vile sour odour, a mixture of slops and synthetic soup—it
was Bouillon Zip, twenty-five centimes a packet. A misgiving came over
me. People who drink Bouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could Boris
possibly be earning a hundred francs a day? A surly _patron_, sitting in
the office, said to me, Yes, the Russian was at home—in the attic. I
went up six flights of narrow, winding stairs, the Bouillon Zip growing
stronger as one got higher. Boris did not answer when I knocked at his
door, so I opened it and went in.

[¶2] The room was an attic ten feet square, lighted only by a skylight, its
sole furniture a narrow iron bedstead, a chair, and a washhandstand with
one game leg. A long S-shaped chain of bugs marched slowly across the
wall above the bed. Boris was lying asleep, naked, his large belly
making a mound under the grimy sheet. His chest was spotted with insect
bites. As I came in he woke up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.

[¶3] 'Name of Jesus Christ!' he exclaimed, 'oh, name of Jesus Christ, my
back! Curse it, I believe my back is broken!'

[¶4] 'What's the matter?' I exclaimed.

[¶5] 'My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night on the floor.
Oh, name of Jesus Christ! If you knew what my back feels like!'

[¶6] 'My dear Boris, are you ill?'

[¶7] 'Not ill, only starving—yes, starving to death if this goes on much
longer. Besides sleeping on the floor, I have lived on two francs a day
for weeks past. It is fearful. You have come at a bad moment, _mon
ami_.'

[¶8] It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still had his job at the
Hôtel Scribe. I hurried downstairs and bought a loaf of bread. Boris
threw himself on the bread and ate half of it, after which he felt
better, sat up in bed, and told me what was the matter with him. He had
failed to get a job after leaving the hospital, because he was still
very lame, and he had spent all his money and pawned everything, and
finally starved for several days. He had slept a week on the quay under
the Pont d'Austerlitz, among some empty wine barrels. For the past
fortnight he had been living in this room, together with a Jew, a
mechanic. It appeared (there was some complicated explanation) that the
Jew owed Boris three hundred francs, and was repaying this by letting
him sleep on the floor and allowing him two francs a day for food. Two
francs would buy a bowl of coffee and three rolls. The Jew went to work
at seven in the mornings, and after that Boris would leave his
sleeping-place (it was beneath the skylight, which let in the rain) and
get into the bed. He could not sleep much even there, owing to the bugs,
but it rested his back after the floor.

[¶9] It was a great disappointment, when I had come to Boris for help, to
find him even worse off than myself. I explained that I had only about
sixty francs left and must get a job immediately. By this time, however,
Boris had eaten the rest of the bread and was feeling cheerful and
talkative. He said carelessly:

[¶10] 'Good heavens, what are you worrying about? Sixty francs—why, it's a
fortune! Please hand me that shoe, _mon ami_. I'm going to smash some of
those bugs if they come within reach.'

[¶11] 'But do you think there's any chance of getting a job?'

[¶12] 'Chance? It's a certainty. In fact, I have got something already. There
is a new Russian restaurant which is to open in a few days in the Rue du
Commerce. It is _une chose entendue_ that I am to be _maître d'hôtel_. I
can easily get you a job in the kitchen. Five hundred francs a month and
your food—tips, too, if you are lucky.'

[¶13] 'But in the meantime? I've got to pay my rent before long.'

[¶14] 'Oh, we shall find something. I have got a few cards up my sleeve. There
are people who owe me money, for instance—Paris is full of them. One of
them is bound to pay up before long. Then, think of all the women who
have been my mistress! A woman never forgets, you know—I have only to
ask and they will help me. Besides, the Jew tells me he is going to
steal some magnetos from the garage where he works, and he will pay us
five francs a day to clean them before he sells them. That alone would
keep us. Never worry, _mon ami_. Nothing is easier to get than money.'

[¶15] 'Well, let's go out now and look for a job.'

[¶16] 'Presently, _mon ami_. We shan't starve, don't you fear. This is only
the fortune of war—I've been in a worse hole scores of times. It's only
a question of persisting. Remember Foch's maxim: "_Attaquez! Attaquez!
Attaquez!_"'

[¶17] It was midday before Boris decided to get up. All the clothes he now had
left were one suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pair of shoes
almost worn out, and a pair of socks all holes. He had also an overcoat
which was to be pawned in the last extremity. He had a suitcase, a
wretched twenty-franc cardboard thing, but very important, because the
_patron_ of the hotel believed that it was full of clothes—without
that, he would probably have turned Boris out of doors. What it actually
contained were the medals and photographs, various odds and ends, and
huge bundles of love-letters. In spite of all this Boris managed to keep
a fairly smart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a razor-blade
two months old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and
carefully stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when
he was dressed, he produced an ink-bottle and inked the skin of his
ankles where it showed through his socks. You would never have thought,
when it was finished, that he had recently been sleeping under the Seine
bridges.

[¶18] We went to a small café off the Rue de Rivoli, a well-known rendezvous
of hotel managers and employees. At the back was a dark, cave-like room
where all kinds of hotel workers were sitting—smart young waiters,
others not so smart and clearly hungry, fat pink cooks, greasy
dishwashers, battered old scrubbing-women. Everyone had an untouched
glass of black coffee in front of him. The place was, in effect, an
employment bureau, and the money spent on drinks was the _patron_'s
commission. Sometimes a stout, important-looking man, obviously a
restaurateur, would come in and speak to the barman, and the barman
would call to one of the people at the back of the café. But he never
called to Boris or me, and we left after two hours, as the etiquette was
that you could only stay two hours for one drink. We learned afterwards,
when it was too late, that the dodge was to bribe the barman; if you
could afford twenty francs he would generally get you a job.

[¶19] We went to the Hôtel Scribe and waited an hour on the pavement, hoping
that the manager would come out, but he never did. Then we dragged
ourselves down to the Rue du Commerce, only to find that the new
restaurant, which was being redecorated, was shut up and the _patron_
away. It was now night. We had walked fourteen kilometres over pavement,
and we were so tired that we had to waste one franc fifty on going home
by Metro. Walking was agony to Boris with his game leg, and his optimism
wore thinner and thinner as the day went on. When we got out of the
Metro at the Place d'Italie he was in despair. He began to say that it
was no use looking for work—there was nothing for it but to try crime.

[¶20] 'Sooner rob than starve, _mon ami_. I have often planned it. A fat, rich
American—some dark corner down Montparnasse way—a cobblestone in a
stocking—bang! And then go through his pockets and bolt. It is
feasible, do you not think? I would not flinch—I have been a soldier,
remember.'

[¶21] He decided against the plan in the end, because we were both foreigners
and easily recognized.

[¶22] When we had got back to my room we spent another one franc fifty on
bread and chocolate. Boris devoured his share, and at once cheered up
like magic; food seemed to act on his system as rapidly as a cocktail.
He took out a pencil and began making a list of the people who would
probably give us jobs. There were dozens of them, he said.

[¶23] 'Tomorrow we shall find something, _mon ami_, I know it in my bones. The
luck always changes. Besides, we both have brains—a man with brains
can't starve.

[¶24] 'What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make money out of
anything. I had a friend once, a Pole, a real man of genius; and what do
you think he used to do? He would buy a gold ring and pawn it for
fifteen francs. Then—you know how carelessly the clerks fill up the
tickets—where the clerk had written "_en or_" he would add "_et
diamants_" and he would change "fifteen francs" to "fifteen thousand".
Neat, eh? Then, you see, he could borrow a thousand francs on the
security of the ticket. That is what I mean by brains . . .'

[¶25] For the rest of the evening Boris was in a hopeful mood, talking of the
times we should have together when we were waiters together at Nice or
Biarritz, with smart rooms and enough money to set up mistresses. He was
too tired to walk the three kilometres back to his hotel, and slept the
night on the floor of my room, with his coat rolled round his shoes for
a pillow.

## 6. Chapter VI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/6/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/6/#p-N

[¶0] We again failed to find work the next day, and it was three weeks before
the luck changed. My two hundred francs saved me from trouble about the
rent, but everything else went as badly as possible. Day after day Boris
and I went up and down Paris, drifting at two miles an hour through the
crowds, bored and hungry, and finding nothing. One day, I remember, we
crossed the Seine eleven times. We loitered for hours outside service
doorways, and when the manager came out we would go up to him
ingratiatingly, cap in hand. We always got the same answer: they did not
want a lame man, nor a man without experience. Once we were very nearly
engaged. While he spoke to the manager Boris stood straight upright, not
supporting himself with his stick, and the manager did not see that he
was lame. 'Yes,' he said, 'we want two men in the cellars. Perhaps you
would do. Come inside.' Then Boris moved, and the game was up. 'Ah,'
said the manager, 'you limp. _Malheureusement_—'

[¶1] We enrolled our names at agencies and answered advertisements, but
walking everywhere made us slow, and we seemed to miss every job by half
an hour. Once we very nearly got a job swabbing out railway trucks, but
at the last moment they rejected us in favour of Frenchmen. Once we
answered an advertisement calling for hands at a circus. You had to
shift benches and clean up litter, and, during the performance, stand on
two tubs and let a lion jump through your legs. When we got to the
place, an hour before the time named, we found a queue of fifty men
already waiting. There is some attraction in lions, evidently.

[¶2] Once an agency to which I had applied months earlier sent me a _petit
bleu_, telling me of an Italian gentleman who wanted English lessons.
The _petit bleu_ said 'Come at once' and promised twenty francs an hour.
Boris and I were in despair. Here was a splendid chance, and I could not
take it, for it was impossible to go to the agency with my coat out at
elbow. Then it occurred to us that I could wear Boris's coat—it did not
match my trousers, but the trousers were grey and might pass for flannel
at a short distance. The coat was so much too big for me that I had to
wear it unbuttoned and keep one hand in my pocket. I hurried out, and
wasted seventy-five centimes on a bus fare to get to the agency. When I
got there I found that the Italian had changed his mind and left Paris.

[¶3] Once Boris suggested that I should go to Les Halles and try for a job as
a porter. I arrived at half-past four in the morning, when the work was
getting into its swing. Seeing a short fat man in a bowler hat directing
some porters, I went up to him and asked for work. Before answering he
seized my right hand and felt the palm.

[¶4] 'You are strong, eh?' he said.

[¶5] 'Very strong,' I said untruly.

[¶6] '_Bien._ Let me see you lift that crate.'

[¶7] It was a huge wicker basket full of potatoes. I took hold of it, and
found that, so far from lifting it, I could not even move it. The man in
the bowler hat watched me, then shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
I made off. When I had gone some distance I looked back and saw _four_
men lifting the basket onto a cart. It weighed three hundredweight,
possibly. The man had seen that I was no use, and taken this way of
getting rid of me.

[¶8] Sometimes in his hopeful moments Boris spent fifty centimes on a stamp
and wrote to one of his ex-mistresses, asking for money. Only one of
them ever replied. It was a woman who, besides having been his mistress,
owed him two hundred francs. When Boris saw the letter waiting and
recognized the handwriting, he was wild with hope. We seized the letter
and rushed up to Boris's room to read it, like a child with stolen
sweets. Boris read the letter, then handed it silently to me. It ran:

[¶9] My Little Cherished Wolf,

[¶10] With what delight did I open thy charming letter, reminding me
    of the days of our perfect love, and of the so dear kisses which
    I have received from thy lips. Such memories linger for ever in
    the heart, like the perfume of a flower that is dead.

[¶11] As to thy request for two hundred francs, alas! it is
    impossible. Thou dost not know, my dear one, how I am desolated
    to hear of thy embarrassments. But what wouldst thou? In this
    life which is so sad, trouble comes to everyone. I too have had
    my share. My little sister has been ill (ah, the poor little
    one, how she suffered!) and we are obliged to pay I know not
    what to the doctor. All our money is gone and we are passing, I
    assure thee, very difficult days.

[¶12] Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that the
    bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so
    terrible will disappear at last.

[¶13] Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee always. And
    receive the most sincere embraces of her who has never ceased to
    love thee, thy

[¶14] Yvonne.

[¶15] This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went straight to bed and
would not look for work again that day.

[¶16] My sixty francs lasted about a fortnight. I had given up the pretence of
going out to restaurants, and we used to eat in my room, one of us
sitting on the bed and the other on the chair. Boris would contribute
his two francs and I three or four francs, and we would buy bread,
potatoes, milk and cheese, and make soup over my spirit lamp. We had a
saucepan and a coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day there was a polite
squabble as to who should eat out of the saucepan and who out of the
coffee-bowl (the saucepan held more), and every day, to my secret anger,
Boris gave in first and had the saucepan. Sometimes we had more bread in
the evening, sometimes not. Our linen was getting filthy, and it was
three weeks since I had had a bath; Boris, so he said, had not had a
bath for months. It was tobacco that made everything tolerable. We had
plenty of tobacco, for some time before Boris had met a soldier (the
soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought twenty or thirty
packets at fifty centimes each.

[¶17] All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The walking and sleeping
on the floor kept his leg and back in constant pain, and with his vast
Russian appetite he suffered torments of hunger, though he never seemed
to grow thinner. On the whole he was surprisingly gay, and he had vast
capacities for hope. He used to say seriously that he had a patron saint
who watched over him, and when things were very bad he would search the
gutter for money, saying that the saint often dropped a two-franc piece
there. One day we were waiting in the Rue Royale; there was a Russian
restaurant near by, and we were going to ask for a job there. Suddenly
Boris made up his mind to go into the Madeleine and burn a fifty-centime
candle to his patron saint. Then, coming out, he said that he would be
on the safe side, and solemnly put a match to a fifty-centime stamp, as
a sacrifice to the immortal gods. Perhaps the gods and the saints did
not get on together; at any rate, we missed the job.

[¶18] On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter despair. He would lie
in bed almost weeping, cursing the Jew with whom he lived. Of late the
Jew had become restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was
worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of patronage. Boris said
that I, as an Englishman, could not conceive what torture it was to a
Russian of family to be at the mercy of a Jew.

[¶19] 'A Jew, _mon ami_, a veritable Jew! And he hasn't even the decency to be
ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain in the Russian Army—have I
ever told you, _mon ami_, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian
Rifles? Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am,
eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew . . .

[¶20] 'I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early months of the
war, we were on the march, and we had halted at a village for the night.
A horrible old Jew, with a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking
up to my billet. I asked him what he wanted. "Your honour," he said, "I
have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen. It
will only be fifty francs." "Thank you," I said, "you can take her away
again. I don't want to catch any diseases." "Diseases!" cried the Jew,
"_mais, monsieur le capitaine_, there's no fear of that. It's my own
daughter!" That is the Jewish national character for you.

[¶21] 'Have I ever told you, _mon ami_, that in the old Russian Army it was
considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes, we thought a Russian
officer's spittle was too precious to be wasted on Jews . . .' etc. etc.

[¶22] On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to go out and look
for work. He would lie till evening in the greyish, verminous sheets,
smoking and reading old newspapers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no
board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and afterwards
we made a board from the side of a packing-case, and a set of men from
buttons, Belgian coins and the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a
passion for chess. It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are
the same as the rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one
you can win at the others. But he also said that if you have a
chessboard you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in
my case.

## 7. Chapter VII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/7/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/7/#p-N

[¶0] My money oozed away—to eight francs, to four francs, to one franc, to
twenty-five centimes; and twenty-five centimes is useless, for it will
buy nothing except a newspaper. We went several days on dry bread, and
then I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever. This was an
ugly experience. There are people who do fasting cures of three weeks or
more, and they say that fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day;
I do not know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems
different when one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at the
start.

[¶1] The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a rod and went
fishing in the Seine, baiting with bluebottles. I hoped to catch enough
for a meal, but of course I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they
grew cunning during the siege of Paris, and none of them has been caught
since, except in nets. On the second day I thought of pawning my
overcoat, but it seemed too far to walk to the pawnshop, and I spent the
day in bed, reading the _Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes_. It was all that I
felt equal to, without food. Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless,
brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than
anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or
as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water
substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and
being obliged to spit very frequently, and the spittle being curiously
white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I do not know the reason for
this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has noticed it.

[¶2] On the third morning I felt very much better. I realized that I must do
something at once, and I decided to go and ask Boris to let me share his
two francs, at any rate for a day or two. When I arrived I found Boris
in bed, and furiously angry. As soon as I came in he burst out, almost
choking:

[¶3] 'He has taken it back, the dirty thief! He has taken it back!'

[¶4] 'Who's taken what?' I said.

[¶5] 'The Jew! Taken my two francs, the dog, the thief! He robbed me in my
sleep!'

[¶6] It appeared that on the previous night the Jew had flatly refused to pay
the daily two francs. They had argued and argued, and at last the Jew
had consented to hand over the money; he had done it, Boris said, in the
most offensive manner, making a little speech about how kind he was, and
extorting abject gratitude. And then in the morning he had stolen the
money back before Boris was awake.

[¶7] This was a blow. I was horribly disappointed, for I had allowed my belly
to expect food, a great mistake when one is hungry. However, rather to
my surprise, Boris was far from despairing. He sat up in bed, lighted
his pipe and reviewed the situation.

[¶8] 'Now listen, _mon ami_, this is a tight corner. We have only twenty-five
centimes between us, and I don't suppose the Jew will ever pay my two
francs again. In any case his behaviour is becoming intolerable. Will
you believe it, the other night he had the indecency to bring a woman in
here, while I was there on the floor. The low animal! And I have a worse
thing to tell you. The Jew intends clearing out of here. He owes a
week's rent, and his idea is to avoid paying that and give me the slip
at the same time. If the Jew shoots the moon I shall be left without a
roof, and the _patron_ will take my suitcase in lieu of rent, curse him!
We have got to make a vigorous move.'

[¶9] 'All right. But what can we do? It seems to me that the only thing is to
pawn our overcoats and get some food.'

[¶10] 'We'll do that, of course, but I must get my possessions out of this
house first. To think of my photographs being seized! Well, my plan is
ready. I'm going to forestall the Jew and shoot the moon myself. _Foutre
le camp_—retreat, you understand. I think that is the correct move,
eh?'

[¶11] 'But my dear Boris, how can you, in daytime? You're bound to be caught.'

[¶12] 'Ah well, it will need strategy, of course. Our _patron_ is on the watch
for people slipping out without paying their rent; he's been had that
way before. He and his wife take it in turns all day to sit in the
office—what misers, these Frenchmen! But I have thought of a way to do
it, if you will help.'

[¶13] I did not feel in a very helpful mood, but I asked Boris what his plan
was. He explained it carefully.

[¶14] 'Now listen. We must start by pawning our overcoats. First go back to
your room and fetch your overcoat, then come back here and fetch mine,
and smuggle it out under cover of yours. Take them to the pawnshop in
the Rue des Francs Bourgeois. You ought to get twenty francs for the
two, with luck. Then go down to the Seine bank and fill your pockets
with stones, and bring them back and put them in my suitcase. You see
the idea? I shall wrap as many of my things as I can carry in a
newspaper, and go down and ask the _patron_ the way to the nearest
laundry. I shall be very brazen and casual, you understand, and of
course the _patron_ will think the bundle is nothing but dirty linen. Or
if he does suspect anything, he will do what he always does, the mean
sneak; he will go up to my room and feel the weight of my suitcase. And
when he feels the weight of stones he will think it is still full.
Strategy, eh? Then afterwards I can come back and carry my other things
out in my pockets.'

[¶15] 'But what about the suitcase?'

[¶16] 'Oh, that? We shall have to abandon it. The miserable thing only cost
twenty francs. Besides, one always abandons something in a retreat. Look
at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.'

[¶17] Boris was so pleased with this scheme (he called it _une ruse de
guerre_) that he almost forgot being hungry. Its main weakness—that he
would have nowhere to sleep after shooting the moon—he ignored.

[¶18] At first the _ruse de guerre_ worked well. I went home and fetched my
overcoat (that made already nine kilometres, on an empty belly) and
smuggled Boris's coat out successfully. Then a hitch occurred. The
receiver at the pawnshop, a nasty sour-faced interfering little man—a
typical French official—refused the coats on the ground that they were
not wrapped up in anything. He said that they must be put either in a
valise or a cardboard box. This spoiled everything, for we had no box of
any kind, and with only twenty-five centimes between us we could not buy
one.

[¶19] I went back and told Boris the bad news. '_Merde!_' he said, 'that makes
it awkward. Well, no matter, there is always a way. We'll put the
overcoats in my suitcase.'

[¶20] 'But how are we to get the suitcase past the _patron_? He's sitting
almost in the door of the office. It's impossible!'

[¶21] 'How easily you despair, _mon ami_! Where is that English obstinacy that
I have read of? Courage! We'll manage it.'

[¶22] Boris thought for a little while, and then produced another cunning
plan. The essential difficulty was to hold the _patron_'s attention for
perhaps five seconds, while we could slip past with the suitcase. But,
as it happened, the _patron_ had just one weak spot—that he was
interested in _Le Sport_, and was ready to talk if you approached him on
this subject. Boris read an article about bicycle races in an old copy
of the _Petit Parisien_, and then, when we had reconnoitred the stairs,
went down and managed to set the _patron_ talking. Meanwhile I waited at
the foot of the stairs, with the overcoats under one arm and the
suitcase under the other. Boris was to give a cough when he thought the
moment favourable. I waited trembling, for at any moment the _patron_'s
wife might come out of the door opposite the office, and then the game
was up. However, presently Boris coughed. I sneaked rapidly past the
office and out into the street, rejoicing that my shoes did not creak.
The plan might have failed if Boris had been thinner, for his big
shoulders blocked the doorway of the office. His nerve was splendid,
too; he went on laughing and talking in the most casual way, and so loud
that he quite covered any noise I made. When I was well away he came and
joined me round the corner, and we bolted.

[¶23] And then, after all our trouble, the receiver at the pawnshop again
refused the overcoats. He told me (one could see his French soul
revelling in the pedantry of it) that I had not sufficient papers of
identification; my _carte d'identité_ was not enough, and I must show a
passport or addressed envelopes. Boris had addressed envelopes by the
score, but his _carte d'identité_ was out of order (he never renewed it,
so as to avoid the tax), so we could not pawn the overcoats in his name.
All we could do was to trudge up to my room, get the necessary papers,
and take the coats to the pawnshop in the Boulevard Port Royal.

[¶24] I left Boris at my room and went down to the pawnshop. When I got there
I found that it was shut and would not open till four in the afternoon.
It was now about half-past one, and I had walked twelve kilometres and
had had no food for sixty hours. Fate seemed to be playing a series of
extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

[¶25] Then the luck changed as though by a miracle. I was walking home through
the Rue Broca, when suddenly, glittering on the cobbles, I saw a
five-sou piece. I pounced on it, hurried home, got our other five-sou
piece, and bought a pound of potatoes. There was only enough alcohol in
the stove to parboil them, and we had no salt, but we wolfed them skins
and all. After that we felt like new men, and sat playing chess till the
pawnshop opened.

[¶26] At four o'clock I went back to the pawnshop. I was not hopeful, for if I
had only got seventy francs before, what could I expect for two shabby
overcoats in a cardboard suitcase? Boris had said twenty francs, but I
thought it would be ten francs, or even five. Worse yet, I might be
refused altogether, like poor _Numéro 83_ on the previous occasion. I
sat on the front bench, so as not to see people laughing when the clerk
said five francs.

[¶27] At last the clerk called my number: '_Numéro 117_!'

[¶28] 'Yes,' I said, standing up.

[¶29] 'Fifty francs?'

[¶30] It was almost as great a shock as the seventy francs had been the time
before. I believe now that the clerk had mixed my number up with someone
else's, for one could not have sold the coats outright for fifty francs.
I hurried home and walked into my room with my hands behind my back,
saying nothing. Boris was playing with the chessboard. He looked up
eagerly.

[¶31] 'What did you get?' he exclaimed. 'What, not twenty francs? Surely you
got ten francs, anyway? _Nom de Dieu_, five francs—that is a bit too
thick. _Mon ami_, _don't_ say it was five francs. If you say it was five
francs I shall really begin to think of suicide.'

[¶32] I threw the fifty-franc note onto the table. Boris turned white as
chalk, and then, springing up, seized my hand and gave it a grip that
almost broke the bones. We ran out, bought bread and wine, a piece of
meat and alcohol for the stove, and gorged.

[¶33] After eating, Boris became more optimistic than I had ever known him.
'What did I tell you?' he said. 'The fortune of war! This morning with
five sous, and now look at us. I have always said it, there is nothing
easier to get than money. And that reminds me, I have a friend in the
Rue Fondary whom we might go and see. He has cheated me of four thousand
francs, the thief. He is the greatest thief alive when he is sober, but
it is a curious thing, he is quite honest when he is drunk. I should
think he would be drunk by six in the evening. Let's go and find him.
Very likely he will pay up a hundred on account. _Merde!_ He might pay
two hundred. _Allons-y!_'

[¶34] We went to the Rue Fondary and found the man, and he was drunk, but we
did not get our hundred francs. As soon as he and Boris met there was a
terrible altercation on the pavement. The other man declared that he did
not owe Boris a penny, but that on the contrary Boris owed _him_ four
thousand francs, and both of them kept appealing to me for my opinion. I
never understood the rights of the matter. The two argued and argued,
first in the street, then in a _bistro_, then in a _prix fixe_
restaurant where we went for dinner, then in another _bistro_. Finally,
having called one another thieves for two hours, they went off together
on a drinking bout that finished up the last sou of Boris's money.

[¶35] Boris slept the night at the house of a cobbler, another Russian
refugee, in the Commerce quarter. Meanwhile I had eight francs left, and
plenty of cigarettes, and was stuffed to the eyes with food and drink.
It was a marvellous change for the better after two bad days.

## 8. Chapter VIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/8/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/8/#p-N

[¶0] We had now twenty-eight francs in hand, and could start looking for work
once more. Boris was still sleeping, on some mysterious terms, at the
house of the cobbler, and he had managed to borrow another twenty francs
from a Russian friend. He had friends, mostly ex-officers like himself,
here and there all over Paris. Some were waiters or dishwashers, some
drove taxis, a few lived on women, some had managed to bring money away
from Russia and owned garages or dancing-halls. In general, the Russian
refugees in Paris are hard-working people, and have put up with their
bad luck far better than one can imagine Englishmen of the same class
doing. There are exceptions, of course. Boris told me of an exiled
Russian duke whom he had once met, who frequented expensive restaurants.
The duke would find out if there was a Russian officer among the
waiters, and, after he had dined, call him in a friendly way to his
table.

[¶1] 'Ah,' the duke would say, 'so you are an old soldier, like myself? These
are bad days, eh? Well, well, the Russian soldier fears nothing. And
what was your regiment?'

[¶2] 'The so-and-so, sir,' the waiter would answer.

[¶3] 'A very gallant regiment! I inspected them in 1912. By the way, I have
unfortunately left my notecase at home. A Russian officer will, I know,
oblige me with three hundred francs.'

[¶4] If the waiter had three hundred francs he would hand it over, and, of
course, never see it again. The duke made quite a lot in this way.
Probably the waiters did not mind being swindled. A duke is a duke, even
in exile.

[¶5] It was through one of these Russian refugees that Boris heard of
something which seemed to promise money. Two days after we had pawned
the overcoats, Boris said to me rather mysteriously:

[¶6] 'Tell me, _mon ami_, have you any political opinions?'

[¶7] 'No,' I said.

[¶8] 'Neither have I. Of course, one is always a patriot; but still—Did not
Moses say something about spoiling the Egyptians? As an Englishman you
will have read the Bible. What I mean is, would you object to earning
money from Communists?'

[¶9] 'No, of course not.'

[¶10] 'Well, it appears that there is a Russian secret society in Paris who
might do something for us. They are Communists; in fact they are agents
for the Bolsheviks. They act as a friendly society, get in touch with
exiled Russians, and try to get them to turn Bolshevik. My friend has
joined their society, and he thinks they would help us if we went to
them.'

[¶11] 'But what can they do for us? In any case they won't help me, as I'm not
a Russian.'

[¶12] 'That is just the point. It seems that they are correspondents for a
Moscow paper, and they want some articles on English politics. If we go
to them at once they may commission you to write the articles.'

[¶13] 'Me? But I don't know anything about politics.'

[¶14] '_Merde!_ Neither do they. Who _does_ know anything about politics? It's
easy. All you have to do is to copy it out of the English papers. Isn't
there a Paris _Daily Mail_? Copy it from that.'

[¶15] 'But the _Daily Mail_ is a Conservative paper. They loathe the
Communists.'

[¶16] 'Well, say the opposite of what the _Daily Mail_ says, then you _can't_
be wrong. We mustn't throw this chance away, _mon ami_. It might mean
hundreds of francs.'

[¶17] I did not at all like the idea, for the Paris police are very hard on
Communists, especially if they are foreigners, and I was already under
suspicion. Some months before, a detective had seen me come out of the
office of a Communist weekly paper, and I had had a great deal of
trouble with the police. If they caught me going to this secret society,
it might mean deportation. However, the chance seemed too good to be
missed. That afternoon Boris's friend, another waiter, came to take us
to the rendezvous. I cannot remember the name of the street—it was a
shabby street running south from the Seine bank, somewhere near the
Chamber of Deputies. Boris's friend insisted on great caution. We
loitered casually down the street, marked the doorway we were to
enter—it was a laundry—and then strolled back again, keeping an eye on
all the windows and cafés. If the place were known as a haunt of
Communists it was probably watched, and we intended to go home if we saw
anyone at all like a detective. I was frightened, but Boris enjoyed
these conspiratorial proceedings, and quite forgot that he was about to
trade with the slayers of his parents.

[¶18] When we were certain that the coast was clear we dived quickly into the
doorway. In the laundry was a Frenchwoman ironing clothes, who told us
that 'the Russian gentlemen' lived up a staircase across the courtyard.
We went up several flights of dark stairs and emerged onto a landing. A
strong, surly-looking young man, with hair growing low on his head, was
standing at the top of the stairs. As I came up he looked at me
suspiciously, barred the way with his arm and said something in Russian.

[¶19] '_Mot d'ordre!_' he said sharply when I did not answer.

[¶20] I stopped, startled. I had not expected passwords.

[¶21] '_Mot d'ordre!_' repeated the Russian.

[¶22] Boris's friend, who was walking behind, now came forward and said
something in Russian, either the password or an explanation. At this the
surly young man seemed satisfied, and led us into a small shabby room
with frosted windows. It was like a very poverty-stricken office, with
propaganda posters in Russian lettering and a huge, crude picture of
Lenin tacked on the walls. At the table sat an unshaven Russian in shirt
sleeves, addressing newspaper wrappers from a pile in front of him. As I
came in he spoke to me in French, with a bad accent.

[¶23] 'This is very careless!' he exclaimed fussily. 'Why have you come here
without a parcel of washing?'

[¶24] 'Washing?'

[¶25] 'Everybody who comes here brings washing. It looks as though they were
going to the laundry downstairs. Bring a good large bundle next time. We
don't want the police on our tracks.'

[¶26] This was even more conspiratorial than I had expected. Boris sat down in
the only vacant chair, and there was a great deal of talking in Russian.
Only the unshaven man talked; the surly one leaned against the wall with
his eyes on me, as though he still suspected me. It was queer, standing
in the little secret room with its revolutionary posters, listening to a
conversation of which I did not understand a word. The Russians talked
quickly and eagerly, with smiles and shrugs of the shoulders. I wondered
what it was all about. They would be calling each other 'little father',
I thought, and 'little dove', and 'Ivan Alexandrovitch', like the
characters in Russian novels. And the talk would be of revolutions. The
unshaven man would be saying firmly, 'We never argue. Controversy is a
bourgeois pastime. Deeds are our arguments.' Then I gathered that it was
not this exactly. Twenty francs was being demanded, for an entrance fee
apparently, and Boris was promising to pay it (we had just seventeen
francs in the world). Finally Boris produced our precious store of money
and paid five francs on account.

[¶27] At this the surly man looked less suspicious, and sat down on the edge
of the table. The unshaven one began to question me in French, making
notes on a slip of paper. Was I a Communist? he asked. By sympathy, I
answered; I had never joined any organization. Did I understand the
political situation in England? Oh, of course, of course. I mentioned
the names of various Ministers, and made some contemptuous remarks about
the Labour Party. And what about _Le Sport_? Could I do articles on _Le
Sport_? (Football and Socialism have some mysterious connection on the
Continent.) Oh, of course, again. Both men nodded gravely. The unshaven
one said:

[¶28] '_Évidemment_, you have a thorough knowledge of conditions in England.
Could you undertake to write a series of articles for a Moscow weekly
paper? We will give you the particulars.'

[¶29] 'Certainly.'

[¶30] 'Then, comrade, you will hear from us by the first post tomorrow. Or
possibly the second post. Our rate of pay is a hundred and fifty francs
an article. Remember to bring a parcel of washing next time you come.
_Au revoir_, comrade.'

[¶31] We went downstairs, looked carefully out of the laundry to see that
there was no one in the street, and slipped out. Boris was wild with
joy. In a sort of sacrificial ecstasy he rushed into the nearest
tobacconist's and spent fifty centimes on a cigar. He came out thumping
his stick on the pavement and beaming.

[¶32] 'At last! At last! Now, _mon ami_, our fortune really _is_ made. You
took them in finely. Did you hear him call you comrade? A hundred and
fifty francs an article—_Nom de Dieu_, what luck!'

[¶33] Next morning when I heard the postman I rushed down to the _bistro_ for
my letter; to my disappointment, it had not come. I stayed at home for
the second post; still no letter. When three days had gone by and I had
not heard from the secret society, we gave up hope, deciding that they
must have found somebody else to do their articles.

[¶34] Ten days later we made another visit to the office of the secret
society, taking care to bring a parcel that looked like washing. And the
secret society had vanished! The woman in the laundry knew nothing—she
simply said that '_ces messieurs_' had left some days ago, after trouble
about the rent. What fools we looked, standing there with our parcel!
But it was a consolation that we had paid only five francs instead of
twenty.

[¶35] And that was the last we ever heard of the secret society. Who or what
they really were, nobody knew. Personally I do not think they had
anything to do with the Communist Party; I think they were simply
swindlers, who preyed upon Russian refugees by extracting entrance fees
to an imaginary society. It was quite safe, and no doubt they are still
doing it in some other city. They were clever fellows, and played their
part admirably. Their office looked exactly as a secret Communist office
should look, and as for that touch about bringing a parcel of washing,
it was genius.

## 9. Chapter IX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/9/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/9/#p-N

[¶0] For three more days we continued traipsing about looking for work,
coming home for diminishing meals of soup and bread in my bedroom. There
were now two gleams of hope. In the first place, Boris had heard of a
possible job at the Hôtel X., near the Place de la Concorde, and in the
second, the _patron_ of the new restaurant in the Rue du Commerce had at
last come back. We went down in the afternoon and saw him. On the way
Boris talked of the vast fortunes we should make if we got this job, and
of the importance of making a good impression on the _patron_.

[¶1] 'Appearance—appearance is everything, _mon ami_. Give me a new suit and
I will borrow a thousand francs by dinner-time. What a pity I did not
buy a collar when we had money. I turned my collar inside out this
morning; but what is the use, one side is as dirty as the other. Do you
think I look hungry, _mon ami_?'

[¶2] 'You look pale.'

[¶3] 'Curse it, what can one do on bread and potatoes? It is fatal to look
hungry. It makes people want to kick you. Wait.'

[¶4] He stopped at a jeweller's window and smacked his cheeks sharply to
bring the blood into them. Then, before the flush had faded, we hurried
into the restaurant and introduced ourselves to the _patron_.

[¶5] The _patron_ was a short, fattish, very dignified man with wavy grey
hair, dressed in a smart double-breasted flannel suit and smelling of
scent. Boris told me that he was an ex-colonel of the Russian Army. His
wife was there too, a horrid fat Frenchwoman with a dead-white face and
scarlet lips, reminding me of cold veal and tomatoes. The _patron_
greeted Boris genially, and they talked together in Russian for a few
minutes. I stood in the background, preparing to tell some big lies
about my experience as a dishwasher.

[¶6] Then the _patron_ came over towards me. I shuffled uneasily, trying to
look servile. Boris had rubbed it into me that a _plongeur_ is a slave's
slave, and I expected the _patron_ to treat me like dirt. To my
astonishment, he seized me warmly by the hand.

[¶7] 'So you are an Englishman!' he exclaimed. 'But how charming! I need not
ask, then, whether you are a golfer?'

[¶8] '_Mais certainement_,' I said, seeing that this was expected of me.

[¶9] 'All my life I have wanted to play golf. Will you, my dear _monsieur_,
be so kind as to show me a few of the principal strokes?'

[¶10] Apparently this was the Russian way of doing business. The _patron_
listened attentively while I explained the difference between a driver
and an iron, and then suddenly informed me that it was all _entendu_;
Boris was to be _maître d'hôtel_ when the restaurant opened, and I
_plongeur_, with a chance of rising to lavatory attendant if trade was
good. When would the restaurant open? I asked. 'Exactly a fortnight from
today,' the _patron_ answered grandly (he had a manner of waving his
hand and flicking off his cigarette ash at the same time, which looked
very grand), 'exactly a fortnight from today, in time for lunch.' Then,
with obvious pride, he showed us over the restaurant.

[¶11] It was a smallish place, consisting of a bar, a dining-room, and a
kitchen no bigger than the average bathroom. The _patron_ was decorating
it in a trumpery 'picturesque' style (he called it '_normand_'; it was a
matter of sham beams stuck on the plaster, and the like) and proposed to
call it the Auberge de Jehan Cottard, to give a medieval effect. He had
had a leaflet printed, full of lies about the historical associations of
the quarter, and this leaflet actually claimed, among other things, that
there had once been an inn on the site of the restaurant which was
frequented by Charlemagne. The _patron_ was very pleased with this
touch. He was also having the bar decorated with indecent pictures by an
artist from the Salon. Finally he gave us each an expensive cigarette,
and after some more talk we went home.

[¶12] I felt strongly that we should never get any good from this restaurant.
The _patron_ had looked to me like a cheat, and, what was worse, an
incompetent cheat, and I had seen two unmistakable duns hanging about
the back door. But Boris, seeing himself a _maître d'hôtel_ once more,
would not be discouraged.

[¶13] 'We've brought it off—only a fortnight to hold out. What is a
fortnight? Food? _Je m'en fous._ To think that in only three weeks I
shall have my mistress! Will she be dark or fair, I wonder? I don't
mind, so long as she is not too thin.'

[¶14] Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left, and we spent it
on half a pound of bread, with a piece of garlic to rub it with. The
point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the taste lingers and gives one
the illusion of having fed recently. We sat most of that day in the
Jardin des Plantes. Boris had shots with stones at the tame pigeons, but
always missed them, and after that we wrote dinner menus on the backs of
envelopes. We were too hungry even to try and think of anything except
food. I remember the dinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was:
a dozen oysters, borscht soup (the red, sweet, beetroot soup with cream
on top), crayfishes, a young chicken _en casserole_, beef with stewed
plums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and Roquefort cheese, with a
litre of Burgundy and some old brandy. Boris had international tastes in
food. Later on, when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat
meals almost as large without difficulty.

[¶15] When our money came to an end I stopped looking for work, and was
another day without food. I did not believe that the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was really going to open, and I could see no other prospect, but
I was too lazy to do anything but lie in bed. Then the luck changed
abruptly. At night, at about ten o'clock, I heard an eager shout from
the street. I got up and went to the window. Boris was there, waving his
stick and beaming. Before speaking he dragged a bent loaf from his
pocket and threw it up to me.

[¶16] '_Mon ami, mon cher ami_, we're saved! What do you think?'

[¶17] 'Surely you haven't got a job!'

[¶18] 'At the Hôtel X., near the Place de la Concorde—five hundred francs a
month, and food. I have been working there today. Name of Jesus Christ,
how I have eaten!'

[¶19] After ten or twelve hours' work, and with his game leg, his first
thought had been to walk three kilometres to my hotel and tell me the
good news! What was more, he told me to meet him in the Tuileries the
next day during his afternoon interval, in case he should be able to
steal some food for me. At the appointed time I met Boris on a public
bench. He undid his waistcoat and produced a large, crushed newspaper
packet; in it were some minced veal, a wedge of Camembert cheese, bread
and an éclair, all jumbled together.

[¶20] '_Voilà!_' said Boris, 'that's all I could smuggle out for you. The
doorkeeper is a cunning swine.'

[¶21] It is disagreeable to eat out of a newspaper on a public seat,
especially in the Tuileries, which are generally full of pretty girls,
but I was too hungry to care. While I ate, Boris explained that he was
working in the _cafeterie_ of the hotel—that is, in English, the
stillroom. It appeared that the _cafeterie_ was the very lowest post in
the hotel, and a dreadful come-down for a waiter, but it would do until
the Auberge de Jehan Cottard opened. Meanwhile I was to meet Boris every
day in the Tuileries, and he would smuggle out as much food as he dared.
For three days we continued with this arrangement, and I lived entirely
on the stolen food. Then all our troubles came to an end, for one of the
_plongeurs_ left the Hôtel X., and on Boris's recommendation I was given
a job there myself.

## 10. Chapter X

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/10/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/10/#p-N

[¶0] The Hôtel X. was a vast grandiose place with a classical façade, and at
one side a little dark doorway like a rat-hole, which was the service
entrance. I arrived at a quarter to seven in the morning. A stream of
men with greasy trousers were hurrying in and being checked by a
doorkeeper who sat in a tiny office. I waited, and presently the _chef
du personnel_, a sort of assistant manager, arrived and began to
question me. He was an Italian, with a round, pale face, haggard from
overwork. He asked whether I was an experienced dishwasher, and I said
that I was; he glanced at my hands and saw that I was lying, but on
hearing that I was an Englishman he changed his tone and engaged me.

[¶1] 'We have been looking for someone to practise our English on,' he said.
'Our clients are all Americans, and the only English we know is —' He
repeated something that little boys write on the walls in London. 'You
may be useful. Come downstairs.'

[¶2] He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep
underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly
hot and very dark, with only dim yellow bulbs several yards apart. There
seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages—actually, I suppose, a
few hundred yards in all—that reminded one queerly of the lower decks
of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of
food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces)
just like the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out
sometimes a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a
shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went along, something
struck me violently in the back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice,
carried by a blue-aproned porter. After him came a boy with a great slab
of veal on his shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh.
They shoved me aside with a cry of '_Range-toi, idiot!_' and rushed on.
On the wall, under one of the lights, someone had written in a very neat
hand: 'Sooner will you find a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at
the Hôtel X. who has her maidenhead.' It seemed a queer sort of place.

[¶3] One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where an old skull-face
woman gave me a blue apron and a pile of dishcloths. Then the _chef du
personnel_ took me to a tiny underground den—a cellar below a cellar,
as it were—where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It was too low
for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110
degrees Fahrenheit. The _chef du personnel_ explained that my job was to
fetch meals for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a small
dining-room above, clean their room and wash their crockery. When he had
gone, a waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce fuzzy head into the
doorway and looked down at me.

[¶4] 'English, eh?' he said. 'Well, I'm in charge here. If you work well'—he
made the motion of up-ending a bottle and sucked noisily. 'If you
don't'—he gave the doorpost several vigorous kicks. 'To me, twisting
your neck would be no more than spitting on the floor. And if there's
any trouble, they'll believe me, not you. So be careful.'

[¶5] After this I set to work rather hurriedly. Except for about an hour, I
was at work from seven in the morning till a quarter-past nine at night;
first at washing crockery, then at scrubbing the tables and floors of
the employees' dining-room, then at polishing glasses and knives, then
at fetching meals, then at washing crockery again, then at fetching more
meals and washing more crockery. It was easy work, and I got on well
with it except when I went to the kitchen to fetch meals. The kitchen
was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged
inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths
and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work
except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were
furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping
sweat in spite of their white caps. Round that were counters where a mob
of waiters and _plongeurs_ clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the
waist, were stoking the fires and scouring huge copper saucepans with
sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine
scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in the middle booming
continuously, '_Ça marche, deux œufs brouillés! Ça marche, un
Chateaubriand pommes sautées!_' except when he broke off to curse at a
_plongeur_. There were three counters, and the first time I went to the
kitchen I took my tray unknowingly to the wrong one. The head cook
walked up to me, twisted his moustaches, and looked me up and down. Then
he beckoned to the breakfast cook and pointed at me.

[¶6] 'Do you see _that_? That is the type of _plongeur_ they send us
nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot? From Charenton, I suppose?'
(There is a large lunatic asylum at Charenton.)

[¶7] 'From England,' I said.

[¶8] 'I might have known it. Well, _mon cher monsieur l'Anglais_, may I
inform you that you are the son of a whore? And now, _fous-moi le camp_
to the other counter, where you belong.'

[¶9] I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitchen, for I
always made some mistake; I was expected to know the work, and was
cursed accordingly. From curiosity I counted the number of times I was
called _maquereau_ during the day, and it was thirty-nine.

[¶10] At half-past four the Italian told me that I could stop working, but
that it was not worth going out, as we began again at five. I went to
the lavatory for a smoke; smoking was strictly forbidden, and Boris had
warned me that the lavatory was the only safe place. After that I worked
again till a quarter-past nine, when the waiter put his head into the
doorway and told me to leave the rest of the crockery. To my
astonishment, after calling me pig, mackerel, etc., all day, he had
suddenly grown quite friendly. I realized that the curses I had met with
were only a kind of probation.

[¶11] 'That'll do, _mon p'tit_,' said the waiter. '_Tu n'es pas débrouillard_,
but you work all right. Come up and have your dinner. The hotel allows
us two litres of wine each, and I've stolen another bottle. We'll have a
fine booze.'

[¶12] We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the higher employees.
The waiter, grown mellow, told me stories about his love-affairs, and
about two men whom he had stabbed in Italy, and about how he had dodged
his military service. He was a good fellow when one got to know him; he
reminded me of Benvenuto Cellini, somehow. I was tired and drenched with
sweat, but I felt a new man after a day's solid food. The work did not
seem difficult, and I felt that this job would suit me. It was not
certain, however, that it would continue, for I had been engaged as an
'extra' for the day only, at twenty-five francs. The sour-faced
doorkeeper counted out the money, less fifty centimes which he said was
for insurance (a lie, I discovered afterwards). Then he stepped out into
the passage, made me take off my coat, and carefully prodded me all
over, searching for stolen food. After this the _chef du personnel_
appeared and spoke to me. Like the waiter, he had grown more genial on
seeing that I was willing to work.

[¶13] 'We will give you a permanent job if you like,' he said. 'The head
waiter says he would enjoy calling an Englishman names. Will you sign on
for a month?'

[¶14] Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it. Then I remembered
the Russian restaurant, due to open in a fortnight. It seemed hardly
fair to promise working a month, and then leave in the middle. I said
that I had other work in prospect—could I be engaged for a fortnight?
But at that the _chef du personnel_ shrugged his shoulders and said that
the hotel only engaged men by the month. Evidently I had lost my chance
of a job.

[¶15] Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the Arcade of the Rue de
Rivoli. When I told him what had happened, he was furious. For the first
time since I had known him he forgot his manners and called me a fool.

[¶16] 'Idiot! Species of idiot! What's the good of my finding you a job when
you go and chuck it up the next moment? How could you be such a fool as
to mention the other restaurant? You'd only to promise you would work
for a month.'

[¶17] 'It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,' I objected.

[¶18] 'Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a _plongeur_ being honest? _Mon
ami_'—suddenly he seized my lapel and spoke very earnestly—'_mon ami_,
you have worked here all day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you
think a _plongeur_ can afford a sense of honour?'

[¶19] 'No, perhaps not.'

[¶20] 'Well, then, go back quickly and tell the _chef du personnel_ you are
quite ready to work for a month. Say you will throw the other job over.
Then, when our restaurant opens, we have only to walk out.'

[¶21] 'But what about my wages if I break my contract?'

[¶22] Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out at such stupidity.
'Ask to be paid by the day, then you won't lose a sou. Do you suppose
they would prosecute a _plongeur_ for breaking his contract? A
_plongeur_ is too low to be prosecuted.'

[¶23] I hurried back, found the _chef du personnel_, and told him that I would
work for a month, whereat he signed me on. This was my first lesson in
_plongeur_ morality. Later I realized how foolish it had been to have
any scruples, for the big hotels are quite merciless towards their
employees. They engage or discharge men as the work demands, and they
all sack ten per cent or more of their staff when the season is over.
Nor have they any difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short
notice, for Paris is thronged by hotel employees out of work.

## 11. Chapter XI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11/#p-N

[¶0] As it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was six weeks
before the Auberge de Jehan Cottard even showed signs of opening. In the
meantime I worked at the Hôtel X., four days a week in the _cafeterie_,
one day helping the waiter on the fourth floor, and one day replacing
the woman who washed up for the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was
Sunday, but sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that day as
well. The hours were from seven in the morning till two in the
afternoon, and from five in the evening till nine—eleven hours; but it
was a fourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-room. By the
ordinary standards of a Paris _plongeur_, these are exceptionally short
hours. The only hardship of the life was the fearful heat and stuffiness
of those labyrinthine cellars. Apart from this the hotel, which was
large and well organized, was considered a comfortable one.

[¶1] Our _cafeterie_ was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by
eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns, bread-cutters and the like
that one could hardly move without banging against something. It was
lighted by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-fires that sent
out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the
temperature never fell below 110 degrees Fahrenheit—it neared 130 at
some times of the day. At one end were five service lifts, and at the
other an ice cupboard where we stored milk and butter. When you went
into the ice cupboard you dropped a hundred degrees of temperature at a
single step; it used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland's icy
mountains and India's coral strand. Two men worked in the _cafeterie_
besides Boris and myself. One was Mario, a huge, excitable Italian—he
was like a city policeman with operatic gestures—and the other, a
hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I think he was a
Transylvanian, or something even more remote. Except the Magyar we were
all big men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.

[¶2] The work in the _cafeterie_ was spasmodic. We were never idle, but the
real work only came in bursts of two hours at a time—we called each
burst '_un coup de feu_'. The first _coup de feu_ came at eight, when
the guests upstairs began to wake up and demand breakfast. At eight a
sudden banging and yelling would break out all through the basement;
bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed through the passages,
our service lifts came down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters
on all five floors began shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don't
remember all our duties, but they included making tea, coffee and
chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from the cellar, and
fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread, making toast,
rolling pats of butter, measuring jam, opening milk-cans, counting lumps
of sugar, boiling eggs, cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding
coffee—all this for from a hundred to two hundred customers. The
kitchen was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or seventy
yards. Everything we sent up in the service lifts had to be covered by a
voucher, and the vouchers had to be carefully filed, and there was
trouble if even a lump of sugar was lost. Besides this, we had to supply
the staff with bread and coffee, and fetch the meals for the waiters
upstairs. All in all, it was a complicated job.

[¶3] I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the
day, and yet the strain of the work was more mental than physical.
Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion
work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to
leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack
of cards against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when
bang! down comes a service lift with an order for tea, rolls and three
different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang! down comes another
demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen
for the eggs and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning
so as to be back before your toast burns, and having to remember about
the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen other orders that are still
pending; and at the same time some waiter is following you and making
trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing with him.
It needs more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt truly,
that it took a year to make a reliable _cafetier_.

[¶4] The time between eight and half-past ten was a sort of delirium.
Sometimes we were going as though we had only five minutes to live;
sometimes there were sudden lulls when the orders stopped and everything
seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up the litter from the floor,
threw down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or coffee or
water—anything, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to break off
chunks of ice and suck them while we worked. The heat among the
gas-fires was nauseating; we swallowed quarts of drink during the day,
and after a few hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat. At times
we were hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the customers would
have gone without their breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through.
He had worked fourteen years in the _cafeterie_, and he had the skill
that never wastes a second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid, and
I was inexperienced, and Boris was inclined to shirk, partly because of
his lame leg, partly because he was ashamed of working in the
_cafeterie_ after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful. The way he
would stretch his great arms right across the _cafeterie_ to fill a
coffee-pot with one hand and boil an egg with the other, at the same
time watching toast and shouting directions to the Magyar, and between
whiles singing snatches from _Rigoletto_, was beyond all praise. The
_patron_ knew his value, and he was paid a thousand francs a month,
instead of five hundred like the rest of us.

[¶5] The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half-past ten. Then we scrubbed the
_cafeterie_ tables, swept the floor and polished the brasswork, and, on
good mornings, went one at a time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was
our slack time—only relatively slack, however, for we had only ten
minutes for lunch, and we never got through it uninterrupted. The
customers' luncheon hour, between twelve and two, was another period of
turmoil like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching meals
from the kitchen, which meant constant _engueulades_ from the cooks. By
this time the cooks had sweated in front of their furnaces for four or
five hours, and their tempers were all warmed up.

[¶6] At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our aprons and put on our
coats, hurried out of doors, and, when we had money, dived into the
nearest _bistro_. It was strange, coming up into the street from those
firelit cellars. The air seemed blindingly clear and cold, like arctic
summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after the stenches of sweat
and food! Sometimes we met some of our cooks and waiters in the
_bistros_, and they were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were
their slaves, but it is an etiquette in hotel life that between hours
everyone is equal, and the _engueulades_ do not count.

[¶7] At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-past six there
were no orders, and we used this time to polish silver, clean out the
coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day
started—the dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while,
just to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was that
a hundred or two hundred people were demanding individually different
meals of five or six courses, and that fifty or sixty people had to cook
and serve them and clean up the mess afterwards; anyone with experience
of catering will know what that means. And at this time when the work
was doubled, the whole staff were tired out, and a number of them were
drunk. I could write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of
it. The chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the
yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat,
the darkness, the furious festering quarrels which there was no time to
fight out—they pass description. Anyone coming into the basement for
the first time would have thought himself in a den of maniacs. It was
only later, when I understood the working of the hotel, that I saw order
in all this chaos.

[¶8] At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till
nine, but we used to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie
there resting our legs, too lazy even to go to the ice cupboard for a
drink. Sometimes the _chef du personnel_ would come in with bottles of
beer, for the hotel stood us extra beer when we had had a hard day. The
food we were given was no more than eatable, but the _patron_ was not
mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing
that if a _plongeur_ is not given two litres he will steal three. We had
the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we often drank too much—a good
thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.

[¶9] Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two working days,
one was better and one worse. After a week of this life I felt in need
of a holiday. It was Saturday night, so the people in our _bistro_ were
busy getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I was ready to join
them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in the morning, meaning to sleep
till noon. At half-past five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman,
sent from the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He stripped the clothes
back and shook me roughly.

[¶10] 'Get up!' he said. '_Tu t'es bien saoulé la gueule, pas vrai?_ Well,
never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've got to work today.'

[¶11] 'Why should I work?' I protested. 'This is my day off.'

[¶12] 'Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get up!'

[¶13] I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken and my
skull filled with hot cinders. I did not think that I could possibly do
a day's work. And yet, after only an hour in the basement, I found that
I was perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those cellars, as in
a Turkish bath, one could sweat out almost any quantity of drink.
_Plongeurs_ know this, and count on it. The power of swallowing quarts
of wine, and then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one
of the compensations of their life.

## 12. Chapter XII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/12/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/12/#p-N

[¶0] By far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help the waiter on
the fourth floor. We worked in a small pantry which communicated with
the _cafeterie_ by service lifts. It was delightfully cool after the
cellars, and the work was chiefly polishing silver and glasses, which is
a humane job. Valenti, the waiter, was a decent sort, and treated me
almost as an equal when we were alone, though he had to speak roughly
when there was anyone else present, for it does not do for a waiter to
be friendly with _plongeurs_. He used sometimes to tip me five francs
when he had had a good day. He was a comely youth, aged twenty-four but
looking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself well and
knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tailcoat and white tie,
fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he
had earned his living since he was twelve, and worked his way up
literally from the gutter. Crossing the Italian frontier without a
passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern
boulevards, and being given fifty days' imprisonment in London for
working without a permit, and being made love to by a rich old woman in
a hotel, who gave him a diamond ring and afterwards accused him of
stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to enjoy talking to him,
at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift shaft.

[¶1] My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had not to wash
the plates, which were done in the kitchen, but only the other crockery,
silver, knives and glasses; yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours' work,
and I used between thirty and forty dishcloths during the day. The
antiquated methods used in France double the work of washing up.
Plate-racks are unheard-of, and there are no soap-flakes, only the
treacly soft soap, which refuses to lather in the hard Paris water. I
worked in a dirty, crowded little den, a pantry and scullery combined,
which gave straight on the dining-room. Besides washing up, I had to
fetch the waiters' food and serve them at table; most of them were
intolerably insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get
common civility. The person who normally washed up was a woman, and they
made her life a misery.

[¶2] It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that
only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the
customers in all their splendour—spotless table-cloths, bowls of
flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just
a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was
disgusting filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and
we slithered about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn
paper and trampled food. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing
their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their
thumbs into the cream pots. The room had a dirty mixed smell of food and
sweat. Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were
squalid stores of food that the waiters had stolen. There were only two
sinks, and no washing basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to
wash his face in the water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the
customers saw nothing of this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mirror
outside the dining-room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves
up and go in looking the picture of cleanliness.

[¶3] It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel
dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The
set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have
dropped off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn
priest-like air. I remember our assistant _maître d'hôtel_, a fiery
Italian, pausing at the dining-room door to address an apprentice who
had broken a bottle of wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled
(luckily the door was more or less soundproof):

[¶4] '_Tu me fais chier._ Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard?
You a waiter! You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother
came from. _Maquereau!_'

[¶5] Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he farted
loudly, a favourite Italian insult.

[¶6] Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand,
graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a
customer. And you could not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile,
with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer was put
to shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.

[¶7] This washing up was a thoroughly odious job—not hard, but boring and
silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend whole
decades at such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was quite sixty
years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen hours a day, six days a
week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly bullied by the
waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress—actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange
to see that in spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright
blonde wig, and darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girl of
twenty. So apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave one with
some vitality.

## 13. Chapter XIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/13/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/13/#p-N

[¶0] On my third day at the hotel the _chef du personnel_, who had generally
spoken to me in quite a pleasant tone, called me up and said sharply:

[¶1] 'Here, you, shave that moustache off at once! _Nom de Dieu_, who ever
heard of a _plongeur_ with a moustache?'

[¶2] I began to protest, but he cut me short. 'A _plongeur_ with a
moustache—nonsense! Take care I don't see you with it tomorrow.'

[¶3] On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged his
shoulders. 'You must do what he says, _mon ami_. No one in a hotel wears
a moustache, except the cooks. I should have thought you would have
noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the custom.'

[¶4] I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white tie with a
dinner-jacket, and shaved off my moustache. Afterwards I found out the
explanation of the custom, which is this: waiters in good hotels do not
wear moustaches, and to show their superiority they decree that
_plongeurs_ shall not wear them either; and the cooks wear their
moustaches to show their contempt for the waiters.

[¶5] This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in a hotel.
Our staff, amounting to about a hundred and ten, had their prestige
graded as accurately as that of soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as
much above a _plongeur_ as a captain above a private. Highest of all
came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the cooks. We never saw
the _patron_, and all we knew of him was that his meals had to be
prepared more carefully than those of the customers; all the discipline
of the hotel depended on the manager. He was a conscientious man, and
always on the lookout for slackness, but we were too clever for him. A
system of service bells ran through the hotel, and the whole staff used
these for signalling to one another. A long ring and a short ring,
followed by two more long rings, meant that the manager was coming, and
when we heard it we took care to look busy.

[¶6] Below the manager came the _maître d'hôtel_. He did not serve at table,
unless to a lord or someone of that kind, but directed the other waiters
and helped with the catering. His tips, and his bonus from the champagne
companies (it was two francs for each cork he returned to them), came to
two hundred francs a day. He was in a position quite apart from the rest
of the staff, and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the
table and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve him. A little
below the head waiter came the head cook, drawing about five thousand
francs a month; he dined in the kitchen, but at a separate table, and
one of the apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the _chef du
personnel_; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month, but he wore a
black coat and did no manual work, and he could sack _plongeurs_ and
fine waiters. Then came the other cooks, drawing anything between three
thousand and seven hundred and fifty francs a month; then the waiters,
making about seventy francs a day in tips, besides a small retaining
fee; then the laundresses and sewing-women; then the apprentice waiters,
who received no tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a
month; then the _plongeurs_, also at seven hundred and fifty francs;
then the chambermaids, at five or six hundred francs a month; and lastly
the _cafetiers_, at five hundred a month. We of the _cafeterie_ were the
very dregs of the hotel, despised and _tutoied_ by everyone.

[¶7] There were various others—the office employees, called generally
couriers, the storekeeper, the cellarman, some porters and pages, the
ice man, the bakers, the nightwatchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs
were done by different races. The office employees and the cooks and
sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and Germans (there is
hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the _plongeurs_ of
every race in Europe, besides Arabs and negroes. French was the lingua
franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.

[¶8] All the departments had their special perquisites. In all Paris hotels
it is the custom to sell the broken bread to bakers for eight sous a
pound, and the kitchen scraps to pigkeepers for a trifle, and to divide
the proceeds of this among the _plongeurs_. There was much pilfering,
too. The waiters all stole food—in fact, I seldom saw a waiter trouble
to eat the rations provided for him by the hotel—and the cooks did it
on a larger scale in the kitchen, and we in the _cafeterie_ swilled
illicit tea and coffee. The cellarman stole brandy. By a rule of the
hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep stores of spirits, but had to
go to the cellarman for each drink as it was ordered. As the cellarman
poured out the drinks he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from each
glass, and he amassed quantities in this way. He would sell you the
stolen brandy for five sous a swig if he thought he could trust you.

[¶9] There were thieves among the staff, and if you left money in your coat
pockets it was generally taken. The doorkeeper, who paid our wages and
searched us for stolen food, was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of
my five hundred francs a month, this man actually managed to cheat me of
a hundred and fourteen francs in six weeks. I had asked to be paid
daily, so the doorkeeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by
not paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was due), pocketed
sixty-four francs. Also, I sometimes worked on a Sunday, for which,
though I did not know it, I was entitled to an extra twenty-five francs.
The doorkeeper never paid this either, and so made away with another
seventy-five francs. I only realized during my last week that I was
being cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-five francs
were refunded. The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee who
was fool enough to be taken in. He called himself a Greek, but in
reality he was an Armenian. After knowing him I saw the force of the
proverb 'Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't
trust an Armenian.'

[¶10] There were queer characters among the waiters. One was a gentleman—a
youth who had been educated at a university, and had had a well-paid job
in a business office. He had caught a venereal disease, lost his job,
drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a waiter. Many of the
waiters had slipped into France without passports, and one or two of
them were spies—it is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day
there was a fearful row in the waiters' dining-room between Morandi, a
dangerous-looking man with eyes set too far apart, and another Italian.
It appeared that Morandi had taken the other man's mistress. The other
man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi, was threatening
vaguely.

[¶11] Morandi jeered at him. 'Well, what are you going to do about it? I've
slept with your girl, slept with her three times. It was fine. What can
you do, eh?'

[¶12] 'I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an Italian spy.'

[¶13] Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor from his tail pocket
and made two swift strokes in the air, as though slashing a man's cheeks
open. Whereat the other waiter took it back.

[¶14] The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an 'extra'. He had been
engaged at twenty-five francs for the day to replace the Magyar, who was
ill. He was a Serbian, a thick-set nimble fellow of about twenty-five,
speaking six languages, including English. He seemed to know all about
hotel work, and up till midday he worked like a slave. Then, as soon as
it had struck twelve, he turned sulky, shirked his work, stole wine, and
finally crowned all by loafing about openly with a pipe in his mouth.
Smoking, of course, was forbidden under severe penalties. The manager
himself heard of it and came down to interview the Serbian, fuming with
rage.

[¶15] 'What the devil do you mean by smoking here?' he cried.

[¶16] 'What the devil do you mean by having a face like that?' answered the
Serbian, calmly.

[¶17] I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The head cook, if a
_plongeur_ had spoken to him like that, would have thrown a saucepan of
hot soup in his face. The manager said instantly, 'You're sacked!' and
at two o'clock the Serbian was given his twenty-five francs and duly
sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in Russian what game he was
playing. He said the Serbian answered:

[¶18] 'Look here, _mon vieux_, they've got to pay me a day's wages if I work
up to midday, haven't they? That's the law. And where's the sense of
working after I get my wages? So I'll tell you what I do. I go to a
hotel and get a job as an extra, and up to midday I work hard. Then, the
moment it's struck twelve, I start raising such hell that they've no
choice but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most days I'm sacked by half-past
twelve; today it was two o'clock; but I don't care, I've saved four
hours' work. The only trouble is, one can't do it at the same hotel
twice.'

[¶19] It appeared that he had played this game at half the hotels and
restaurants in Paris. It is probably quite an easy game to play during
the summer, though the hotels protect themselves against it as well as
they can by means of a black list.

## 14. Chapter XIV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/14/#p-N

[¶0] In a few days I had grasped the main principles on which the hotel was
run. The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into
the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder
during the rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work
in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad
management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason
Hotel work is not particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in
rushes and cannot be economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak
two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by
which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it all
together, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimes everyone is
doing two men's work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling.
Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace
would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of
idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole
staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a
verb in the hotel except _foutre_. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen,
used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say
'cursing like a scullion'? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at
work.) But we were not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just
stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours' work into
two hours.

[¶1] What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine
pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the
others soon find him out, and conspire against him to get him sacked.
Cooks, waiters and _plongeurs_ differ greatly in outlook, but they are
all alike in being proud of their efficiency.

[¶2] Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the
cooks. They do not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is
higher and their employment steadier. The cook does not look upon
himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called
'_un ouvrier_', which a waiter never is. He knows his power—knows that
he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late
everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and
makes it a point of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And
he takes a genuine artistic pride in his work, which demands very great
skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the doing
everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the
Hôtel X. would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be
served at different times; he cooked few of them himself, but he gave
instructions about all of them and inspected them before they were sent
up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned on a board, but
the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind,
and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out,
'_Faites marcher une côtelette de veau_' (or whatever it was)
unfailingly. He was an insufferable bully, but he was also an artist. It
is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in technique, that
men cooks are preferred to women.

[¶3] The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of his
skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the
mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in
sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He
has the pleasure of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always
the chance that he may become rich himself, for, though most waiters die
poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafes on the
Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the waiters
actually pay the _patron_ for their employment. The result is that
between constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes
to identify himself to some extent with his employers. He will take
pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he is
participating in the meal himself.

[¶4] I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at which he had
once served, and of how it cost two hundred thousand francs and was
talked of for months afterwards. 'It was splendid, _mon p'tit, mais
magnifique_! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the silver, the orchids—I
have never seen anything like them, and I have seen some things. Ah, it
was glorious!'

[¶5] 'But,' I said, 'you were only there to wait?'

[¶6] 'Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid.'

[¶7] The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a
restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you
feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you.
But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, 'What an overfed
lout'; he is thinking, 'One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall
be able to imitate that man.' He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he
thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom
Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a
day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafés. They are
snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.

[¶8] The _plongeurs_, again, have a different outlook. Theirs is a job which
offers no prospects, is intensely exhausting, and at the same time has
not a trace of skill or interest; the sort of job that would always be
done by women if women were strong enough. All that is required of them
is to be constantly on the run, and to put up with long hours and a
stuffy atmosphere. They have no way of escaping from this life, for they
cannot save a penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a
hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for anything else. The
best they can hope is to find a slightly softer job as night-watchman or
lavatory attendant.

[¶9] And yet the _plongeurs_, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It
is the pride of the drudge—the man who is equal to no matter what
quantity of work. At that level, the mere power to go on working like an
ox is about the only virtue attainable. _Débrouillard_ is what every
_plongeur_ wants to be called. A _débrouillard_ is a man who, even when
he is told to do the impossible, will _se débrouiller_—get it done
somehow. One of the kitchen _plongeurs_ at the Hôtel X., a German, was
well known as a _débrouillard_. One night an English lord came to the
hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for
peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late at night, and the
shops would be shut. 'Leave it to me,' said the German. He went out, and
in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a
neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a
_débrouillard_. The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs
each.

[¶10] Mario, who was in charge of the _cafeterie_, had the typical drudge
mentality. All he thought of was getting through the '_boulot_', and he
defied you to give him too much of it. Fourteen years underground had
left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston rod. '_Faut
être un dur_,' he used to say when anyone complained. You will often
hear _plongeurs_ boast, '_Je suis un dur_'—as though they were
soldiers, not male charwomen.

[¶11] Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and when the press
of work came we were all ready for a grand concerted effort to get
through it. The constant war between the different departments also made
for efficiency, for everyone clung to his own privileges and tried to
stop the others idling and pilfering.

[¶12] This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and complicated
machine is kept running by an inadequate staff, because every man has a
well-defined job and does it scrupulously. But there is a weak point,
and it is this—that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily what
the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good
service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the _boulot_—meaning,
as a rule, an imitation of good service. The result is that, though
hotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse than the worst
private houses in the things that matter.

[¶13] Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel X., as soon as one
penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting. Our _cafeterie_ had
year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested
with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario. 'Why
kill the poor animals?' he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean
where we recognized cleanliness as part of the _boulot_. We scrubbed the
tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do
that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had
no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and as our first
duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.

[¶14] In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a
mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the
soup—that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist,
but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty
because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.
When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook's
inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his
fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to
taste the gravy, runs it round and licks it again, then steps back and
contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then
presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of
which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied,
he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it
to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips _his_ fingers into the
gravy—his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through
his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for
a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in
this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same
trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan
and flung onto a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one
pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

[¶15] Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is
sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy
getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is
simply '_une commande_' to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply
'a case' to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of
toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to
prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, 'This toast is to be
eaten—I must make it eatable'? All he knows is that it must look right
and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from
his forehead onto the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast
falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new
piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs
the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs.
And so with everything. The only food at the Hôtel X. which was ever
prepared cleanly was the staff's, and the _patron_'s. The maxim,
repeated by everyone, was: 'Look out for the _patron_, and as for the
clients, _s'en fout pas mal_!' Everywhere in the service quarters dirt
festered—a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel
like the intestines through a man's body.

[¶16] Apart from the dirt, the _patron_ swindled the customers wholeheartedly.
For the most part the materials of the food were very bad, though the
cooks knew how to serve it up in style. The meat was at best ordinary,
and as to the vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at them
in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted with milk.
The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic
stuff out of vast unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to
Boris, were corked _vin ordinaire_. There was a rule that employees must
pay for anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things were
seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third floor dropped a roast
chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter
of broken bread, torn paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped
it with a cloth and sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of
once-used sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put
back on the beds. The _patron_ was as mean to us as to the customers.
Throughout that vast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as
a brush and pan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of
cardboard. And the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there
was no place to wash one's hands, except the sinks used for washing
crockery.

[¶17] In spite of all this the Hôtel X. was one of the dozen most expensive
hotels in Paris, and the customers paid startling prices. The ordinary
charge for a night's lodging, not including breakfast, was two hundred
francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly double shop prices,
though of course the _patron_ bought at the wholesale price. If a
customer had a title, or was reputed to be a millionaire, all his
charges went up automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an
American who was on diet wanted only salt and hot water for his
breakfast. Valenti was furious. 'Jesus Christ!' he said, 'what about my
ten per cent? Ten per cent of salt and water!' And he charged
twenty-five francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a
murmur.

[¶18] According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels,
or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the
customers at the Hôtel X. were especially easy to swindle, for they were
mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English—no French—and seemed to
know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with
disgusting American 'cereals', and eat marmalade at tea, and drink
vermouth after dinner, and order a _poulet à la reine_ at a hundred
francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from
Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled
eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are
swindled or not.

## 15. Chapter XV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/15/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/15/#p-N

[¶0] I heard queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of dope fiends, of
old debauchees who frequented hotels in search of pretty page-boys, of
thefts and blackmail. Mario told me of a hotel in which he had been,
where a chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from an American
lady. For days the staff were searched as they left work, and two
detectives searched the hotel from top to bottom, but the ring was never
found. The chambermaid had a lover in the bakery, and he had baked the
ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected until the search was over.

[¶1] Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about himself.

[¶2] 'You know, _mon p'tit_, this hotel life is all very well, but it's the
devil when you're out of work. I expect you know what it is to go
without eating, eh? _Forcément_, otherwise you wouldn't be scrubbing
dishes. Well, I'm not a poor devil of a _plongeur_; I'm a waiter, and
_I_ went five days without eating, once. Five days without even a crust
of bread—Jesus Christ!

[¶3] 'I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only good thing was, I
had my rent paid in advance. I was living in a dirty, cheap little hotel
in the Rue Sainte Éloïse up in the Latin quarter. It was called the
Hôtel —, after some famous prostitute who was born in that quarter, I
expect. I was starving, and there was nothing I could do; I couldn't
even go to the cafés where the hotel proprietors come to engage waiters,
because I hadn't the price of a drink. All I could do was to lie in bed
getting weaker and weaker, and watching the bugs running about the
ceiling. I don't want to go through that again, I can tell you.

[¶4] 'In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at least, that's how
it seems to me now. There was an old faded print of a woman's head
hanging on the wall of my room, and I took to wondering who it could be;
and after about an hour I realized that it must be Sainte Éloïse, who
was the patron saint of the quarter. I had never taken any notice of the
thing before, but now, as I lay staring at it, a most extraordinary idea
came into my head.

[¶5] '"_Écoute, mon cher_," I said to myself, "you'll be starving to death if
this goes on much longer. You've got to do something. Why not try a
prayer to Sainte Éloïse? Go down on your knees and ask her to send you
some money. After all, it can't do any harm. Try it!"

[¶6] 'Mad, eh? Still, a man will do anything when he's hungry. Besides, as I
said, it couldn't do any harm. I got out of bed and began praying. I
said:

[¶7] '"Dear Sainte Éloïse, if you exist, please send me some money. I don't
ask for much—just enough to buy some bread and a bottle of wine and get
my strength back. Three or four francs would do. You don't know how
grateful I'll be, Sainte Éloïse, if you help me this once. And be sure,
if you send me anything, the first thing I'll do will be to go and burn
a candle for you, at your church down the street. Amen."

[¶8] 'I put in that about the candle, because I had heard that saints like
having candles burnt in their honour. I meant to keep my promise, of
course. But I am an atheist and I didn't really believe that anything
would come of it.

[¶9] 'Well, I got into bed again, and five minutes later there came a bang at
the door. It was a girl called Maria, a big fat peasant girl who lived
at our hotel. She was a very stupid girl, but a good sort, and I didn't
much care for her to see me in the state I was in.

[¶10] 'She cried out at the sight of me. "_Nom de Dieu!_" she said, "what's
the matter with you? What are you doing in bed at this time of day?
_T'en as une mine!_ You look more like a corpse than a man."

[¶11] 'Probably I did look a sight. I had been five days without food, most of
the time in bed, and it was three days since I had had a wash or a
shave. The room was a regular pigsty, too.

[¶12] '"What's the matter?" said Maria again.

[¶13] '"The matter!" I said; "Jesus Christ! I'm starving. I haven't eaten for
five days. That's what's the matter."

[¶14] 'Maria was horrified. "Not eaten for five days?" she said. "But why?
Haven't you any money, then?"

[¶15] '"Money!" I said. "Do you suppose I should be starving if I had money?
I've got just five sous in the world, and I've pawned everything. Look
round the room and see if there's anything more I can sell or pawn. If
you can find anything that will fetch fifty centimes, you're cleverer
than I am."

[¶16] 'Maria began looking round the room. She poked here and there among a
lot of rubbish that was lying about, and then suddenly she got quite
excited. Her great thick mouth fell open with astonishment.

[¶17] '"You idiot!" she cried out. "Imbecile! What's _this_, then?"

[¶18] 'I saw that she had picked up an empty oil _bidon_ that had been lying
in the corner. I had bought it weeks before, for an oil lamp I had
before I sold my things.

[¶19] '"That?" I said. "That's an oil _bidon_. What about it?"

[¶20] '"Imbecile! Didn't you pay three francs fifty deposit on it?"

[¶21] 'Now, of course I had paid the three francs fifty. They always make you
pay a deposit on the _bidon_, and you get it back when the _bidon_ is
returned. But I'd forgotten all about it.

[¶22] '"Yes—" I began.

[¶23] '"Idiot!" shouted Maria again. She got so excited that she began to
dance about until I thought her sabots would go through the floor.
"Idiot! _T'es louf! T'es louf!_ What have you got to do but take it back
to the shop and get your deposit back? Starving, with three francs fifty
staring you in the face! Imbecile!"

[¶24] 'I can hardly believe now that in all those five days I had never once
thought of taking the _bidon_ back to the shop. As good as three francs
fifty in hard cash, and it had never occurred to me! I sat up in bed.
"Quick!" I shouted to Maria, "you take it for me. Take it to the
grocer's at the corner—run like the devil. And bring back food!"

[¶25] 'Maria didn't need to be told. She grabbed the _bidon_ and went
clattering down the stairs like a herd of elephants, and in three
minutes she was back with two pounds of bread under one arm and a
half-litre bottle of wine under the other. I didn't stop to thank her; I
just seized the bread and sank my teeth in it. Have you noticed how
bread tastes when you have been hungry for a long time? Cold, wet,
doughy—like putty almost. But, Jesus Christ, how good it was! As for
the wine, I sucked it all down in one draught, and it seemed to go
straight into my veins and flow round my body like new blood. Ah, that
made a difference!

[¶26] 'I wolfed the whole two pounds of bread without stopping to take breath.
Maria stood with her hands on her hips, watching me eat. "Well, you feel
better, eh?" she said when I had finished.

[¶27] '"Better!" I said. "I feel perfect! I'm not the same man as I was five
minutes ago. There's only one thing in the world I need now—a
cigarette."

[¶28] 'Maria put her hand in her apron pocket. "You can't have it," she said.
"I've no money. This is all I had left out of your three francs
fifty—seven sous. It's no good; the cheapest cigarettes are twelve sous
a packet."

[¶29] '"Then I can have them!" I said. "Jesus Christ, what a piece of luck!
I've got five sous—it's just enough."

[¶30] 'Maria took the twelve sous and was starting out to the tobacconist's.
And then something I had forgotten all this time came into my head.
There was that cursed Sainte Éloïse! I had promised her a candle if she
sent me money; and really, who could say that the prayer hadn't come
true? "Three or four francs," I had said; and the next moment along came
three francs fifty. There was no getting away from it. I should have to
spend my twelve sous on a candle.

[¶31] 'I called Maria back. "It's no use," I said; "there is Sainte Éloïse—I
have promised her a candle. The twelve sous will have to go on that.
Silly, isn't it? I can't have my cigarettes after all."

[¶32] '"Sainte Éloïse?" said Maria. "What about Sainte Éloïse?"

[¶33] '"I prayed to her for money and promised her a candle," I said. "She
answered the prayer—at any rate, the money turned up. I shall have to
buy that candle. It's a nuisance, but it seems to me I must keep my
promise."

[¶34] '"But what put Sainte Éloïse into your head?" said Maria.

[¶35] "It was her picture," I said, and I explained the whole thing. "There
she is, you see," I said, and I pointed to the picture on the wall.

[¶36] 'Maria looked at the picture, and then to my surprise she burst into
shouts of laughter. She laughed more and more, stamping about the room
and holding her fat sides as though they would burst. I thought she had
gone mad. It was two minutes before she could speak.

[¶37] '"Idiot!" she cried at last. "_T'es louf! T'es louf!_ Do you mean to
tell me you really knelt down and prayed to that picture? Who told you
it was Sainte Éloïse?"

[¶38] '"But I made sure it was Sainte Éloïse!" I said.

[¶39] '"Imbecile! It isn't Sainte Éloïse at all. Who do you think it is?"

[¶40] '"Who?" I said.

[¶41] '"It is —, the woman this hotel is called after."

[¶42] 'I had been praying to —, the famous prostitute of the Empire . . .

[¶43] 'But, after all, I wasn't sorry. Maria and I had a good laugh, and then
we talked it over, and we made out that I didn't owe Sainte Éloïse
anything. Clearly it wasn't she who had answered the prayer, and there
was no need to buy her a candle. So I had my packet of cigarettes after
all.'

## 16. Chapter XVI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/16/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/16/#p-N

[¶0] Time went on and the Auberge de Jehan Cottart showed no signs of
opening. Boris and I went down there one day during our afternoon
interval and found that none of the alterations had been done, except
the indecent pictures, and there were three duns instead of two. The
_patron_ greeted us with his usual blandness, and the next instant
turned to me (his prospective dishwasher) and borrowed five francs.
After that I felt certain that the restaurant would never get beyond
talk. The _patron_, however, again named the opening for 'exactly a
fortnight from today', and introduced us to the woman who was to do the
cooking, a Baltic Russian five feet tall and a yard across the hips. She
told us that she had been a singer before she came down to cooking, and
that she was very artistic and adored English literature, especially _La
Case de l'Oncle Tom_.

[¶1] In a fortnight I had got so used to the routine of a _plongeur_'s life
that I could hardly imagine anything different. It was a life without
much variation. At a quarter to six one woke with a sudden start,
tumbled into grease-stiffened clothes, and hurried out with dirty face
and protesting muscles. It was dawn, and the windows were dark except
for the workmen's cafés. The sky was like a vast flat wall of cobalt,
with roofs and spires of black paper pasted upon it. Drowsy men were
sweeping the pavements with ten-foot besoms, and ragged families picking
over the dustbins. Workmen, and girls with a piece of chocolate in one
hand and a _croissant_ in the other, were pouring into the Metro
stations. Trams, filled with more workmen, boomed gloomily past. One
hastened down to the station, fought for a place—one does literally
have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in the morning—and stood jammed
in the swaying mass of passengers, nose to nose with some hideous French
face, breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended into the
labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot daylight till two o'clock,
when the sun was hot and the town black with people and cars.

[¶2] After my first week at the hotel I always spent the afternoon interval
in sleeping, or, when I had money, in a _bistro_. Except for a few
ambitious waiters who went to English classes, the whole staff wasted
their leisure in this way; one seemed too lazy after the morning's work
to do anything better. Sometimes half a dozen _plongeurs_ would make up
a party and go to an abominable brothel in the Rue de Sieyès, where the
charge was only five francs twenty-five centimes—tenpence halfpenny. It
was nick-named '_le prix fixe_', and they used to describe their
experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite rendezvous of
hotel workers. The _plongeurs_' wages did not allow them to marry, and
no doubt work in the basement does not encourage fastidious feelings.

[¶3] For another four hours one was in the cellars, and then one emerged,
sweating, into the cool street. It was lamplight—that strange purplish
gleam of the Paris lamps—and beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed
from top to bottom with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of fire.
Streams of cars glided silently to and fro, and women, exquisite-looking
in the dim light, strolled up and down the arcade. Sometimes a woman
would glance at Boris or me, and then, noticing our greasy clothes, look
hastily away again. One fought another battle in the Metro and was home
by ten. Generally from ten to midnight I went to a little _bistro_ in
our street, an underground place frequented by Arab navvies. It was a
bad place for fights, and I sometimes saw bottles thrown, once with
fearful effect, but as a rule the Arabs fought among themselves and let
Christians alone. _Raki_, the Arab drink, was very cheap, and the
_bistro_ was open at all hours, for the Arabs—lucky men—had the power
of working all day and drinking all night.

[¶4] It was the typical life of a _plongeur_, and it did not seem a bad life
at the time. I had no sensation of poverty, for even after paying my
rent and setting aside enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on
Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four francs was
wealth. There was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy
contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life
which had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life
of a _plongeur_. He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without
time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his Paris has
shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few _bistros_ and his bed. If he goes
afield, it is only a few streets away, on a trip with some servant-girl
who sits on his knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he
lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for drinks,
and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing is quite real to him but
the _boulot_, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most
important.

[¶5] One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just beneath my
window. I was woken by a fearful uproar, and, going to the window, saw a
man lying flat on the stones below; I could see the murderers, three of
them, flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went down and
found that the man was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of
lead piping. I remember the colour of his blood, curiously purple, like
wine; it was still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, and
they said the schoolchildren had come from miles round to see it. But
the thing that strikes me in looking back is that I was in bed and
asleep within three minutes of the murder. So were most of the people in
the street; we just made sure that the man was done for, and went
straight back to bed. We were working people, and where was the sense of
wasting sleep over a murder?

[¶6] Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just as being
hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep had ceased to be a
mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, a debauch more
than a relief. I had no more trouble with the bugs. Mario had told me of
a sure remedy for them, namely pepper, strewed thick over the
bedclothes. It made me sneeze, but the bugs all hated it, and emigrated
to other rooms.

## 17. Chapter XVII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/17/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/17/#p-N

[¶0] With thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could take part in the
social life of the quarter. We had some jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in
the little _bistro_ at the foot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux.

[¶1] The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was packed with twenty
people, and the air dim with smoke. The noise was deafening, for
everyone was either talking at the top of his voice or singing.
Sometimes it was just a confused din of voices; sometimes everyone would
burst out together in the same song—the 'Marseillaise', or the
'Internationale', or 'Madelon', or 'Les Fraises et les Framboises'.
Azaya, a great clumping peasant girl who worked fourteen hours a day in
a glass factory, sang a song about, '_Elle a per_du _son pantalon, tout
en dan_sant _le Charleston_.' Her friend Marinette, a thin, dark
Corsican girl of obstinate virtue, tied her knees together and danced
the _danse du ventre_. The old Rougiers wandered in and out, cadging
drinks and trying to tell a long, involved story about someone who had
once cheated them over a bedstead. R., cadaverous and silent, sat in his
corner quietly boozing. Charlie, drunk, half danced, half staggered to
and fro with a glass of sham absinthe balanced in one fat hand, pinching
the women's breasts and declaiming poetry. People played darts and diced
for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the girls to the bar and shook
the dice-box against their bellies, for luck. Madame F. stood at the bar
rapidly pouring _chopines_ of wine through the pewter funnel, with a wet
dishcloth always handy, because every man in the room tried to make love
to her. Two children, bastards of big Louis the bricklayer, sat in a
corner sharing a glass of _sirop_. Everyone was very happy,
overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable
set of people.

[¶2] For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about midnight there was
a piercing shout of '_Citoyens!_' and the sound of a chair falling over.
A blond, red-faced workman had risen to his feet and was banging a
bottle on the table. Everyone stopped singing; the word went round, 'Sh!
Fureux is starting!' Fureux was a strange creature, a Limousin
stonemason who worked steadily all the week and drank himself into a
kind of paroxysm on Saturdays. He had lost his memory and could not
remember anything before the war, and he would have gone to pieces
through drink if Madame F. had not taken care of him. On Saturday
evenings at about five o'clock she would say to someone, 'Catch Fureux
before he spends his wages,' and when he had been caught she would take
away his money, leaving him enough for one good drunk. One week he
escaped, and, rolling blind drunk in the Place Monge, was run over by a
car and badly hurt.

[¶3] The queer thing about Fureux was that, though he was a Communist when
sober, he turned violently patriotic when drunk. He started the evening
with good Communist principles, but after four or five litres he was a
rampant Chauvinist, denouncing spies, challenging all foreigners to
fight, and, if he was not prevented, throwing bottles. It was at this
stage that he made his speech—for he made a patriotic speech every
Saturday night. The speech was always the same, word for word. It ran:

[¶4] 'Citizens of the Republic, are there any Frenchmen here? If there are
any Frenchmen here, I rise to remind them—to remind them in effect, of
the glorious days of the war. When one looks back upon that time of
comradeship and heroism—one looks back, in effect, upon that time of
comradeship and heroism. When one remembers the heroes who are dead—one
remembers, in effect, the heroes who are dead. Citizens of the Republic,
I was wounded at Verdun—'

[¶5] Here he partially undressed and showed the wound he had received at
Verdun. There were shouts of applause. We thought nothing in the world
could be funnier than this speech of Fureux's. He was a well-known
spectacle in the quarter; people used to come in from other _bistros_ to
watch him when his fit started.

[¶6] The word was passed round to bait Fureux. With a wink to the others
someone called for silence, and asked him to sing the 'Marseillaise'. He
sang it well, in a fine bass voice, with patriotic gurgling noises deep
down in his chest when he came to '_Aux arrmes, citoyens! Forrmez vos
bataillons!_' Veritable tears rolled down his cheeks; he was too drunk
to see that everyone was laughing at him. Then, before he had finished,
two strong workmen seized him by either arm and held him down, while
Azaya shouted, '_Vive l'Allemagne!_' just out of his reach. Fureux's
face went purple at such infamy. Everyone in the _bistro_ began shouting
together, '_Vive l'Allemagne! À bas la France!_' while Fureux struggled
to get at them. But suddenly he spoiled the fun. His face turned pale
and doleful, his limbs went limp, and before anyone could stop him he
was sick on the table. Then Madame F. hoisted him like a sack and
carried him up to bed. In the morning he reappeared, quiet and civil,
and bought a copy of _L'Humanité_.

[¶7] The table was wiped with a cloth, Madame F. brought more litre bottles
and loaves of bread, and we settled down to serious drinking. There were
more songs. An itinerant singer came in with his banjo and performed for
five-sou pieces. An Arab and a girl from the _bistro_ down the street
did a dance, the man wielding a painted wooden phallus the size of a
rolling-pin. There were gaps in the noise now. People had begun to talk
about their love-affairs, and the war, and the barbel fishing in the
Seine, and the best way to _faire la révolution_, and to tell stories.
Charlie, grown sober again, captured the conversation and talked about
his soul for five minutes. The doors and windows were opened to cool the
room. The street was emptying, and in the distance one could hear the
lonely milk train thundering down the Boulevard St Michel. The air blew
cold on our foreheads, and the coarse African wine still tasted good; we
were still happy, but meditatively, with the shouting and hilarious mood
finished.

[¶8] By one o'clock we were not happy any longer. We felt the joy of the
evening wearing thin, and called hastily for more bottles, but Madame F.
was watering the wine now, and it did not taste the same. Men grew
quarrelsome. The girls were violently kissed and hands thrust into their
bosoms and they made off lest worse should happen. Big Louis, the
bricklayer, was drunk, and crawled about the floor barking and
pretending to be a dog. The others grew tired of him and kicked at him
as he went past. People seized each other by the arm and began long
rambling confessions, and were angry when these were not listened to.
The crowd thinned. Manuel and another man, both gamblers, went across to
the Arab _bistro_, where card-playing went on till daylight. Charlie
suddenly borrowed thirty francs from Madame F. and disappeared, probably
to a brothel. Men began to empty their glasses, call briefly, '_'sieurs,
dames!_' and go off to bed.

[¶9] By half-past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving
nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid
inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown
squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was
only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating. One's head
had swollen up like a balloon, the floor rocked, one's tongue and lips
were stained purple. At last it was no use keeping it up any longer.
Several men went out into the yard behind the _bistro_ and were sick. We
crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten
hours.

[¶10] Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours
when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent
headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to
think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life
worth living.

## 18. Chapter XVIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/18/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/18/#p-N

[¶0] Charlie told us a good story one Saturday night in the _bistro_. Try and
picture him—drunk, but sober enough to talk consecutively. He bangs on
the zinc bar and yells for silence:

[¶1] 'Silence, _messieurs et dames_—silence, I implore you! Listen to this
story that I am about to tell you. A memorable story, an instructive
story, one of the souvenirs of a refined and civilized life. Silence,
_messieurs et dames_!

[¶2] 'It happened at a time when I was hard up. You know what that is
like—how damnable, that a man of refinement should ever be in such a
condition. My money had not come from home; I had pawned everything, and
there was nothing open to me except to work, which is a thing I will not
do. I was living with a girl at the time—Yvonne her name was—a great
half-witted peasant girl like Azaya there, with yellow hair and fat
legs. The two of us had eaten nothing in three days. _Mon Dieu_, what
sufferings! The girl used to walk up and down the room with her hands on
her belly, howling like a dog that she was dying of starvation. It was
terrible.

[¶3] 'But to a man of intelligence nothing is impossible. I propounded to
myself the question, "What is the easiest way to get money without
working?" And immediately the answer came: "To get money easily one must
be a woman. Has not every woman something to sell?" And then, as I lay
reflecting upon the things I should do if I were a woman, an idea came
into my head. I remembered the Government maternity hospitals—you know
the Government maternity hospitals? They are places where women who are
_enceinte_ are given meals free and no questions are asked. It is done
to encourage childbearing. Any woman can go there and demand a meal, and
she is given it immediately.

[¶4] '"_Mon Dieu!_" I thought, "if only I were a woman! I would eat at one of
those places every day. Who can tell whether a woman is _enceinte_ or
not, without an examination?"

[¶5] 'I turned to Yvonne. "Stop that insufferable bawling," I said; "I have
thought of a way to get food."

[¶6] '"How?" said she.

[¶7] '"It is simple," I said. "Go to the Government maternity hospital. Tell
them you are _enceinte_ and ask for food. They will give you a good meal
and ask no questions."

[¶8] 'Yvonne was appalled. "_Mais, mon Dieu_," she cried, "I am not
_enceinte_!"

[¶9] '"Who cares?" I said. "That is easily remedied. What do you need except
a cushion—two cushions if necessary? It is an inspiration from heaven,
_ma chère_. Don't waste it."

[¶10] 'Well, in the end I persuaded her, and then we borrowed a cushion and I
got her ready and took her to the maternity hospital. They received her
with open arms. They gave her cabbage soup, a ragoût of beef, a purée of
potatoes, bread and cheese and beer, and all kinds of advice about her
baby. Yvonne gorged till she almost burst her skin, and managed to slip
some of the bread and cheese into her pocket for me. I took her there
every day until I had money again. My intelligence had saved us.

[¶11] 'Everything went well until a year later. I was with Yvonne again, and
one day we were walking down the Boulevard Port Royal, near the
barracks. Suddenly Yvonne's mouth fell open, and she began turning red
and white, and red again.

[¶12] '"_Mon Dieu!_" she cried, "look at that who is coming! It is the nurse
who was in charge at the maternity hospital, I am ruined!"

[¶13] '"Quick!" I said, "run!" But it was too late. The nurse had recognized
Yvonne, and she came straight up to us, smiling. She was a big fat woman
with a gold pince-nez and red cheeks like the cheeks of an apple. A
motherly, interfering kind of woman.

[¶14] '"I hope you are well, _ma petite_?" she said kindly. "And your baby, is
he well too? Was it a boy, as you were hoping?"

[¶15] 'Yvonne had begun trembling so hard that I had to grip her arm. "No,"
she said at last.

[¶16] '"Ah, then, _évidemment_, it was a girl?"

[¶17] 'Thereupon Yvonne, the idiot, lost her head completely. "No," she
actually said again!

[¶18] 'The nurse was taken aback. "_Comment!_" she exclaimed, "neither a boy
nor a girl! But how can that be?"

[¶19] 'Figure to yourselves, _messieurs et dames_, it was a dangerous moment.
Yvonne had turned the colour of a beetroot and looked ready to burst
into tears; another second and she would have confessed everything.
Heaven knows what might have happened. But as for me, I had kept my
head; I stepped in and saved the situation.

[¶20] '"It was twins," I said calmly.

[¶21] '"Twins!" exclaimed the nurse. And she was so pleased that she took
Yvonne by the shoulders and embraced her on both cheeks, publicly.

[¶22] 'Yes, twins . . .'

## 19. Chapter XIX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/19/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/19/#p-N

[¶0] One day, when we had been at the Hôtel X. five or six weeks, Boris
disappeared without notice. In the evening I found him waiting for me in
the Rue de Rivoli. He slapped me gaily on the shoulder.

[¶1] 'Free at last, _mon ami_! You can give notice in the morning. The
Auberge opens tomorrow.'

[¶2] 'Tomorrow?'

[¶3] 'Well, possibly we shall need a day or two to arrange things. But, at
any rate, no more _cafeterie! Nous voilà lancés, mon ami!_ My tail coat
is out of pawn already.'

[¶4] His manner was so hearty that I felt sure there was something wrong, and
I did not at all want to leave my safe and comfortable job at the hotel.
However, I had promised Boris, so I gave notice, and the next morning at
seven went down to the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. It was locked, and I
went in search of Boris, who had once more bolted from his lodgings and
taken a room in the Rue de la Croix Nivert. I found him asleep, together
with a girl whom he had picked up the night before, and who he told me
was 'of a very sympathetic temperament'. As to the restaurant, he said
that it was all arranged; there were only a few little things to be seen
to before we opened.

[¶5] At ten I managed to get Boris out of bed, and we unlocked the
restaurant. At a glance I saw what the 'few little things' amounted to;
it was briefly this: that the alterations had not been touched since our
last visit. The stoves for the kitchen had not arrived, the water and
electricity had not been laid on, and there was all manner of painting,
polishing and carpentering to be done. Nothing short of a miracle could
open the restaurant within ten days, and by the look of things it might
collapse without even opening. It was obvious what had happened. The
_patron_ was short of money, and he had engaged the staff (there were
four of us) in order to use us instead of workmen. He would be getting
our services almost free, for waiters are paid no wages, and, though he
would have to pay me, he would not be feeding me till the restaurant
opened. In effect, he had swindled us of several hundred francs by
sending for us before the restaurant was open. We had thrown up a good
job for nothing.

[¶6] Boris, however, was full of hope. He had only one idea in his head,
namely, that here at last was a chance of being a waiter and wearing a
tail coat once more. For this he was quite willing to do ten days' work
unpaid, with the chance of being left jobless in the end. 'Patience!' he
kept saying. 'That will arrange itself. Wait till the restaurant opens,
and we'll get it all back. Patience, _mon ami_!'

[¶7] We needed patience, for days passed and the restaurant did not even
progress towards opening. We cleaned out the cellars, fixed the shelves,
distempered the walls, polished the woodwork, whitewashed the ceiling,
stained the floor; but the main work, the plumbing and gasfitting and
electricity, was still not done, because the _patron_ could not pay the
bills. Evidently he was almost penniless, for he refused the smallest
charges, and he had a trick of swiftly disappearing when asked for
money. His blend of shiftiness and aristocratic manners made him very
hard to deal with. Melancholy duns came looking for him at all hours,
and by instruction we always told them that he was at Fontainebleau, or
Saint Cloud, or some other place that was safely distant. Meanwhile I
was getting hungrier and hungrier. I had left the hotel with thirty
francs, and I had to go back immediately to a diet of dry bread. Boris
had managed in the beginning to extract an advance of sixty francs from
the _patron_, but he had spent half of it in redeeming his waiter's
clothes, and half on the girl of sympathetic temperament. He borrowed
three francs a day from Jules, the second waiter, and spent it on bread.
Some days we had not even money for tobacco.

[¶8] Sometimes the cook came to see how things were getting on, and when she
saw that the kitchen was still bare of pots and pans she usually wept.
Jules, the second waiter, refused steadily to help with the work. He was
a Magyar, a little dark, sharp-featured fellow in spectacles, and very
talkative; he had been a medical student, but had abandoned his training
for lack of money. He had a taste for talking while other people were
working, and he told me all about himself and his ideas. It appeared
that he was a Communist, and had various strange theories (he could
prove to you by figures that it was wrong to work), and he was also,
like most Magyars, passionately proud. Proud and lazy men do not make
good waiters. It was Jules's dearest boast that once when a customer in
a restaurant had insulted him, he had poured a plate of hot soup down
the customer's neck, and then walked straight out without even waiting
to be sacked.

[¶9] As each day went by Jules grew more and more enraged at the trick the
_patron_ had played on us. He had a spluttering, oratorical way of
talking. He used to walk up and down shaking his fist, and trying to
incite me not to work:

[¶10] 'Put that brush down, you fool! You and I belong to proud races; we
don't work for nothing, like these damned Russian serfs. I tell you, to
be cheated like this is torture to me. There have been times in my life,
when someone has cheated me even of five sous, when I have vomited—yes,
vomited with rage.

[¶11] 'Besides, _mon vieux_, don't forget that I'm a Communist. _À bas les
bourgeois!_ Did any man alive ever see me working when I could avoid it?
No. And not only I don't wear myself out working, like you other fools,
but I steal, just to show my independence. Once I was in a restaurant
where the _patron_ thought he could treat me like a dog. Well, in
revenge I found out a way to steal milk from the milk-cans and seal them
up again so that no one should know. I tell you, I just swilled that
milk down night and morning. Every day I drank four litres of milk,
besides half a litre of cream. The _patron_ was at his wits' end to know
where the milk was going. It wasn't that I wanted milk, you understand,
because I hate the stuff; it was principle, just principle.

[¶12] 'Well, after three days I began to get dreadful pains in my belly, and I
went to the doctor. "What have you been eating?" he said. I said: "I
drink four litres of milk a day, and half a litre of cream." "Four
litres!" he said. "Then stop it at once. You'll burst if you go on."
"What do I care?" I said. "With me principle is everything. I shall go
on drinking that milk, even if I do burst."

[¶13] 'Well, the next day the _patron_ caught me stealing milk. "You're
sacked," he said; "you leave at the end of the week." "_Pardon,
monsieur_," I said, "I shall leave this morning." "No, you won't," he
said, "I can't spare you till Saturday." "Very well, _mon patron_," I
thought to myself, "we'll see who gets tired of it first." And then I
set to work to smash the crockery. I broke nine plates the first day and
thirteen the second; after that the _patron_ was glad to see the last of
me.

[¶14] 'Ah, I'm not one of your Russian _moujiks_ . . .'

[¶15] Ten days passed. It was a bad time. I was absolutely at the end of my
money, and my rent was several days overdue. We loafed about the dismal
empty restaurant, too hungry even to get on with the work that remained.
Only Boris now believed that the restaurant would open. He had set his
heart on being _maître d'hôtel_, and he invented a theory that the
_patron_'s money was tied up in shares and he was waiting a favourable
moment for selling. On the tenth day I had nothing to eat or smoke, and
I told the _patron_ that I could not continue working without an advance
on my wages. As blandly as usual, the _patron_ promised the advance, and
then, according to his custom, vanished. I walked part of the way home,
but I did not feel equal to a scene with Madame F. over the rent, so I
passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very
uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder
than I had expected. There was plenty of time, in the long boring hours
between dawn and work, to think what a fool I had been to deliver myself
into the hands of these Russians.

[¶16] Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently the _patron_ had come
to an understanding with his creditors, for he arrived with money in his
pockets, set the alterations going, and gave me my advance. Boris and I
bought macaroni and a piece of horse's liver, and had our first hot meal
in ten days.

[¶17] The workmen were brought in and the alterations made, hastily and with
incredible shoddiness. The tables, for instance, were to be covered with
baize, but when the _patron_ found that baize was expensive he bought
instead disused army blankets, smelling incorrigibly of sweat. The
table-cloths (they were check, to go with the 'Norman' decorations)
would cover them, of course. On the last night we were at work till two
in the morning, getting things ready. The crockery did not arrive till
eight, and, being new, had all to be washed. The cutlery did not arrive
till the next morning, nor the linen either, so that we had to dry the
crockery with a shirt of the _patron_'s and an old pillowslip belonging
to the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was skulking, and
the _patron_ and his wife sat in the bar with a dun and some Russian
friends, drinking success to the restaurant. The cook was in the kitchen
with her head on the table, crying, because she was expected to cook for
fifty people, and there were not pots and pans enough for ten. About
midnight there was a fearful interview with some duns, who came
intending to seize eight copper saucepans which the _patron_ had
obtained on credit. They were bought off with half a bottle of brandy.

[¶18] Jules and I missed the last Metro home and had to sleep on the floor of
the restaurant. The first thing we saw in the morning were two large
rats sitting on the kitchen table, eating from a ham that stood there.
It seemed a bad omen, and I was surer than ever that the Auberge de
Jehan Cottard would turn out a failure.

## 20. Chapter XX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/20/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/20/#p-N

[¶0] The patron had engaged me as kitchen _plongeur_; that is, my job was to
wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee
and sandwiches, do the simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were,
as usual, five hundred francs a month and food, but I had no free day
and no fixed working hours. At the Hôtel X. I had seen catering at its
best, with unlimited money and good organization. Now, at the Auberge, I
learned how things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is worth
describing, for there are hundreds of similar restaurants in Paris, and
every visitor feeds in one of them occasionally.

[¶1] I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not the ordinary cheap
eating-house frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an
adequate meal at less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque
and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There were the indecent
pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations—sham beams on the
walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks, 'peasant' pottery, even
a mounting-block at the door—and the _patron_ and the head waiter were
Russian officers, and many of the customers titled Russian refugees. In
short, we were decidedly chic.

[¶2] Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a
pigsty. For this is what our service arrangements were like:

[¶3] The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and half this
space was taken up by the stoves and tables. All the pots had to be kept
on shelves out of reach, and there was only room for one dustbin. This
dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the floor was normally an
inch deep in a compost of trampled food.

[¶4] For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without ovens, and all
joints had to be sent out to the bakery.

[¶5] There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roofed shed in
the yard, with a tree growing in the middle of it. The meat, vegetables
and so forth lay there on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats.

[¶6] There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up had to be heated in
pans, and, as there was no room for these on the stoves when meals were
cooking, most of the plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with
soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant scraping the grease off with
bits of newspaper.

[¶7] We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each one as soon as it
was done with, instead of leaving them till the evening. This alone
wasted probably an hour a day.

[¶8] Owing to some scamping of expense in the installation, the electric
light usually fused at eight in the evening. The _patron_ would only
allow us three candles in the kitchen, and the cook said three were
unlucky, so we had only two.

[¶9] Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a _bistro_ near by, and our dustbin
and brooms from the concierge. After the first week a quantity of linen
did not come back from the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in
trouble with the inspector of labour, who had discovered that the staff
included no Frenchmen; he had several private interviews with the
_patron_, who, I believe, was obliged to bribe him. The electric company
was still dunning us, and when the duns found that we would buy them off
with _apéritifs_, they came every morning. We were in debt at the
grocery, and credit would have been stopped, only the grocer's wife (a
moustachio'd woman of sixty) had taken a fancy to Jules, who was sent
every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour every day
haggling over vegetables in the Rue du Commerce, to save a few centimes.

[¶10] These are the results of starting a restaurant on insufficient capital.
And in these conditions the cook and I were expected to serve thirty or
forty meals a day, and would later on be serving a hundred. From the
first day it was too much for us. The cook's working hours were from
eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the morning
till half-past twelve the next morning—seventeen and a half hours,
almost without a break. We never had time to sit down till five in the
afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the top of the
dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not to catch the last Metro
home, worked from eight in the morning till two the next
morning—eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not
usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.

[¶11] Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hôtel X. seem like a
holiday. Every morning at six I drove myself out of bed, did not shave,
sometimes washed, hurried up to the Place d'Italie and fought for a
place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of the cold, filthy
kitchen, with the potato skins and bones and fishtails littered on the
floor, and a pile of plates, stuck together in their grease, waiting
from overnight. I could not start on the plates yet, because the water
was cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the others
arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready. Also, there were
always several copper saucepans to clean. Those copper saucepans are the
bane of a _plongeur_'s life. They have to be scoured with sand and
bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then polished on the
outside with Brasso. Fortunately the art of making them has been lost
and they are gradually vanishing from French kitchens, though one can
still buy them second-hand.

[¶12] When I had begun on the plates the cook would take me away from the
plates to begin skinning onions, and when I had begun on the onions the
_patron_ would arrive and send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back
with the cabbages the _patron_'s wife would tell me to go to some shop
half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by the time I came back there
would be more vegetables waiting, and the plates were still not done. In
this way our incompetence piled one job on another throughout the day,
everything in arrears.

[¶13] Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we were working fast,
and no one lost his temper. The cook would find time to talk about her
artistic nature, and say did I not think Tolstoi was _épatant_, and sing
in a fine soprano voice as she minced beef on the board. But at ten the
waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which they had early, and at
eleven the first customers would be arriving. Suddenly everything became
hurry and bad temper. There was not the same furious rushing and yelling
as at the Hôtel X., but an atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and
exasperation. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It was unbearably
cramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one
had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on them. The cook's
vast buttocks banged against me as she moved to and fro. A ceaseless,
nagging chorus of orders streamed from her:

[¶14] 'Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you not to bleed the
beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink! Put those knives away; get on
with the potatoes. What have you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those
potatoes alone. Didn't I tell you to skim the _bouillon_? Take that can
of water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this celery. No,
not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those
peas boil over! Now get to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you
call this plate clean? Wipe it on your apron. Put that salad on the
floor. That's right, put it where I'm bound to step in it! Look out,
that pot's boiling over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one.
Put this on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don't waste time,
throw them on the floor. Tread them in. Now throw down some sawdust;
this floor's like a skating-rink. Look, you fool, that steak's burning!
_Mon Dieu_, why did they send me an idiot for a _plongeur_? Who are you
talking to? Do you realize that my aunt was a Russian countess?' etc.
etc. etc.

[¶15] This went on till three o'clock without much variation, except that
about eleven the cook usually had a _crise de nerfs_ and a flood of
tears. From three to five was a fairly slack time for the waiters, but
the cook was still busy, and I was working my fastest, for there was a
pile of dirty plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or
partly done, before dinner began. The washing up was doubled by the
primitive conditions—a cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden
cloths, and a sink that got blocked once in an hour. By five the cook
and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having eaten or sat down
since seven. We used to collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor,
drink a bottle of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said
in the morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to have a pot
always stewing, and drank pints during the day.

[¶16] At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again, and now worse
than before, because everyone was tired out. The cook had a _crise de
nerfs_ at six and another at nine; they came on so regularly that one
could have told the time by them. She would flop down on the dustbin,
begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that never, no, never had she
thought to come to such a life as this; her nerves would not stand it;
she had studied music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to support,
etc. etc. At another time one would have been sorry for her, but, tired
as we all were, her whimpering voice merely infuriated us. Jules used to
stand in the doorway and mimic her weeping. The _patron_'s wife nagged,
and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules shirked his work,
and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the larger share of the tips. Only
the second day after the restaurant opened, they came to blows in the
kitchen over a two-franc tip, and the cook and I had to separate them.
The only person who never forgot his manners was the _patron_. He kept
the same hours as the rest of us, but he had no work to do, for it was
his wife who really managed things. His sole job, besides ordering the
supplies, was to stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking
gentlemanly, and he did that to perfection.

[¶17] The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner between ten and
eleven o'clock. At midnight the cook would steal a packet of food for
her husband, stow it under her clothes, and make off, whimpering that
these hours would kill her and she would give notice in the morning.
Jules also left at midnight, usually after a dispute with Boris, who had
to look after the bar till two. Between twelve and half-past I did what
I could to finish the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the
work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off the plates with
table-napkins. As for the dirt on the floor, I let it lie, or swept the
worst of it out of sight under the stoves.

[¶18] At half-past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. The _patron_,
bland as ever, would stop me as I went down the alley-way past the bar.
'_Mais, mon cher monsieur_, how tired you look! Please do me the favour
of accepting this glass of brandy.'

[¶19] He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though I had been
a Russian duke instead of a _plongeur_. He treated all of us like this.
It was our compensation for working seventeen hours a day.

[¶20] As a rule the last Metro was almost empty—a great advantage, for one
could sit down and sleep for a quarter of an hour. Generally I was in
bed by half-past one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on
the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I could have
slept on cobblestones at that time.

## 21. Chapter XXI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/21/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/21/#p-N

[¶0] This life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight increase of work
as more customers came to the restaurant. I could have saved an hour a
day by taking a room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to
find time to change lodgings—or, for that matter, to get my hair cut,
look at a newspaper, or even undress completely. After ten days I
managed to find a free quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in
London asking him if he could get me a job of some sort—anything, so
long as it allowed more than five hours' sleep. I was simply not equal
to going on with a seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people
who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a good cure for
self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who
work such hours, and will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for
years. There was a girl in a _bistro_ near my hotel who worked from
seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only sitting down
to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she
laughed and said that she had not been further than the street corner
for several months. She was consumptive, and died about the time I left
Paris.

[¶1] After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Jules,
who skulked persistently. The quarrels, intermittent at first, had now
become continuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of useless
nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few minutes. 'Get me down
that saucepan, idiot!' the cook would cry (she was not tall enough to
reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). 'Get it down yourself,
you old whore,' I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated
spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.

[¶2] We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for
instance, was an unending source of quarrels—whether it should be put
where I wanted it, which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,
which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged and nagged until at
last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the
middle of the floor, where she was bound to trip over it.

[¶3] 'Now, you cow,' I said, 'move it yourself.'

[¶4] Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she sat down, put
her head on the table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is
the kind of effect that fatigue has upon one's manners.

[¶5] After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoi and her
artistic nature, and she and I were not on speaking terms, except for
the purposes of work, and Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms,
and neither of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even Boris and
I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that the
_engueulades_ of working hours did not count between times; but we had
called each other things too bad to be forgotten—and besides, there
were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food
constantly—from a sense of duty, he said. He called the rest of us
_jaune_—blackleg—when we would not join with him in stealing. He had a
curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had
sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer's soup before taking
it in, just to be revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.

[¶6] The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of
them. Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the
refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere,
and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether
there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a
positive pleasure in seeing things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had
not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen doorway jeering at us
for working too hard:

[¶7] 'Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares
about the customers? _They_ don't know what's going on. What is
restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor.
You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you come back by
another door—with the same chicken. That is restaurant work,' etc.

[¶8] And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the
Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually a success. For the first few days
all our customers were Russians, friends of the _patron_, and these were
followed by Americans and other foreigners—no Frenchmen. Then one night
there was tremendous excitement, because our first Frenchman had
arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in
the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen,
jerked his thumb over his shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:

[¶9] '_Sh! Attention, un Français!_'

[¶10] A moment later the _patron_'s wife came and whispered:

[¶11] '_Attention, un Français!_ See that he gets a double portion of all
vegetables.'

[¶12] While the Frenchman ate, the _patron_'s wife stood behind the grille of
the kitchen door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the
Frenchman came back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were
earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be
frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our
success was that the _patron_, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown
in fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp
knives, of course, are _the_ secret of a successful restaurant. I am
glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely,
the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps we
_were_ a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the
bad ones must be past imagining.

[¶13] In a very few days after I had written to B. he replied to say that
there was a job he could get for me. It was to look after a congenital
imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure after the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking
thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart,
and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B. sent
me a fiver to pay my passage and get my clothes out of pawn, and as soon
as the money arrived I gave one day's notice and left the restaurant. My
leaving so suddenly embarrassed the _patron_, for as usual he was
penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However, he
stood me a glass of Courvoisier '48 brandy, and I think he felt that
this made up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly
competent _plongeur_, in my place, and the poor old cook was sacked a
few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two first-rate people in
the kitchen, the _plongeur_'s work had been cut down to fifteen hours a
day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the
kitchen.

## 22. Chapter XXII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/22/#p-N

[¶0] For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a
Paris _plongeur_. When one comes to think of it, it is strange that
thousands of people in a great modern city should spend their waking
hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising
is why this life goes on—what purpose it serves, and who wants it to
continue, and why. I am not taking the merely rebellious, _fainéant_
attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a
_plongeur_'s life.

[¶1] I think one should start by saying that a _plongeur_ is one of the
slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over
him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no
freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without
art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the
sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work
too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save
into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees
scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say
that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a
_plongeur_; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes
thought impossible. If _plongeurs_ thought at all, they would long ago
have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do
not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made
slaves of them.

[¶2] The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of
taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They
see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have
solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for
example, is hard work, but it is necessary—we must have coal. Working
in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a _plongeur_'s work. Some people must feed in
restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a
week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This
point is worth considering.

[¶3] Is a _plongeur_'s work really necessary to civilization? We have a vague
feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and
disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a
man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social
need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he
may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous
statue. I believe it is the same with a _plongeur_. He earns his bread
in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing
anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is
not a luxury.

[¶4] As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an
extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw
puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw
pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in
loincloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old.
For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at
the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When
they go too slowly the passenger calls them _bahinchut_.[1] They earn
thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few
years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on
the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort
of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty
per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are
encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It
is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of
thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front.
After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to
the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no
real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals
consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of
convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and
animals.

[¶5] [1] See footnote p. 191.

[¶6] -----

[¶7] Similarly with the _plongeur_. He is a king compared with a rickshaw
puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a
hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For,
after all, where is the _real_ need of big hotels and smart restaurants?
They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a
cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some
restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good
a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a
private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is
no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work
in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to
represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely
that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits
except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at
Deauville. Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the
nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of
hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency,
_plongeurs_ might work six or eight hours a day instead of ten or
fifteen.

[¶8] Suppose it is granted that a _plongeur_'s work is more or less useless.
Then the question follows, why does anyone want him to go on working? I
am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider
what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for
life. For there is no doubt that people—comfortably situated people—do
find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be
working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is
needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good—for slaves,
at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains
of useless drudgery.

[¶9] I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom,
simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals
that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep
them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually
honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:

[¶10] 'We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we
rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness.
But don't expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower
classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will
fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel
that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits
us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by
an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat
to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.'

[¶11] This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one
can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated
people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally
they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded
to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep
things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much,
but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his
pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had
better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that
makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

[¶12] Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that
there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor,
as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But
in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the
poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the
average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new
suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the
thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this
quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the
very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix
with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about
poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it
necessary to explain the line '_Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres_' by
a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite
naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a
day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work
minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks,
'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that
since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is
no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now,
and—in the shape of rich men—is using its power to set up enormous
treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

[¶13] To sum up. A _plongeur_ is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and
largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a
vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated
people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because
they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say
this of the _plongeur_ because it is his case I have been considering;
it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are
only my own ideas about the basic facts of a _plongeur_'s life, made
without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely
platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into
one's head by working in a hotel.

## 23. Chapter XXIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/23/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/23/#p-N

[¶0] As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to bed and slept
the clock round, all but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first
time in a fortnight, bathed and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out
of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best suit
to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five francs on a bottle
of English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you
have been a slave's slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the
restaurant just at the moment when we were _lancés_ and there was a
chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he tells me
that he is making a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is
_très serieuse_ and never smells of garlic.

[¶1] I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying goodbye to everyone.
It was on this day that Charlie told me about the death of old Roucolle
the miser, who had once lived in the quarter. Very likely Charlie was
lying as usual, but it was a good story.

[¶2] Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Paris,
but the people in the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He
never equalled Daniel Dancer[2] or anyone of that kind, but he was an
interesting character. He went to Les Halles every morning to pick up
damaged vegetables, and ate cat's meat, and wore newspaper instead of
underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and
made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack—all this with half a
million francs invested. I should like very much to have known him.

[¶3] [2] _The French translation has this note_ (_in French_): A famous
English miser.

[¶4] -----

[¶5] Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through putting his money
into a wildcat scheme. One day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert,
businesslike young chap who had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine
into England. It is easy enough, of course, to buy cocaine in Paris, and
the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is always some
spy who betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said that
this is often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the
smuggling trade is in the hands of a large combine, who do not want
competition. The Jew, however, swore that there was no danger. He knew a
way of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through the usual
channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch
with Roucolle through a young Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who was
going to put four thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle would put
six thousand. For this they could buy ten pounds of cocaine, which would
be worth a small fortune in England.

[¶6] The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to get the money from
between old Roucolle's claws. Six thousand francs was not much—he had
more than that sewn into the mattress in his room—but it was agony for
him to part with a sou. The Pole and the Jew were at him for weeks on
end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on their knees
and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic
between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting,
perhaps, fifty thousand francs' profit, and yet he could not bring
himself to risk the money. He used to sit in a corner with his head in
his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony, and often he
would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he
couldn't do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he
gave in quite suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was
concealed and handed over six thousand francs to the Jew.

[¶7] The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And
meanwhile, as was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the
affair had been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning the
hotel was raided and searched by the police.

[¶8] Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were downstairs,
working their way up and searching every room in turn, and there was the
great packet of cocaine on the table, with no place to hide it and no
chance of escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for throwing the stuff
out of the window, but Roucolle would not hear of it. Charlie told me
that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to
take the packet from Roucolle he clasped it to his breast and struggled
like a madman, although he was seventy-four years old. He was wild with
fright, but he would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

[¶9] At last, when the police were searching only one floor below, somebody
had an idea. A man on Roucolle's floor had a dozen tins of face-powder
which he was selling on commission; it was suggested that the cocaine
could be put into the tins and passed off as face-powder. The powder was
hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine substituted, and the
tins were put openly on Roucolle's table, as though there were nothing
to conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search Roucolle's
room. They tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the
drawers and examined the floorboards, and then, just as they were about
to give it up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins on
the table.

[¶10] '_Tiens_,' he said, 'have a look at those tins. I hadn't noticed them.
What's in them, eh?'

[¶11] 'Face-powder,' said the Pole as calmly as he could manage. But at the
same instant Roucolle let out a loud groaning noise, from alarm, and the
police became suspicious immediately. They opened one of the tins and
tipped out the contents, and after smelling it, the inspector said that
he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle and the Pole began swearing on the
names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the
more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men
were arrested and led off to the police station, followed by half the
quarter.

[¶12] At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated by the
Commissaire while a tin of the cocaine was sent away to be analysed.
Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made was beyond description. He
wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the Pole all
at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The
policemen almost burst with laughing at him.

[¶13] After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a note
from the analyst. He was laughing.

[¶14] 'This is not cocaine, _monsieur_,' he said.

[¶15] 'What, not cocaine?' said the Commissaire. '_Mais, alors_—what is it,
then?'

[¶16] 'It is face-powder.'

[¶17] Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely exonerated but
very angry. The Jew had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the
excitement was over, it turned out that he had played the same trick on
two other people in the quarter.

[¶18] The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four
thousand francs, but poor old Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took
to his bed at once, and all that day and half the night they could hear
him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes yelling out at the top of
his voice:

[¶19] 'Six thousand francs! _Nom de Jésus Christ!_ Six thousand francs!'

[¶20] Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was
dead—of a broken heart, Charlie said.

## 24. Chapter XXIV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24/#p-N

[¶0] I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the
cheapest and not the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay
extra for a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of the
third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for that day:

[¶1] 'Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women,
not a single one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went
to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the
dirt with powder. _Q_. A secondary sexual difference?'

[¶2] On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who
were going to England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable
questions about England, and I told them some startling lies. I was so
pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for months in a foreign
city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed,
many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms,
armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread,
marmalade, beer made with veritable hops—they are all splendid, if you
can pay for them. England is a very good country when you are not poor;
and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to
be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England: the climate,
the scenery, the art, the literature, the laws—everything in England
was perfect.

[¶3] Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked. 'Splendid!'
I said. 'And you should just see the London statues! Paris is
vulgar—half grandiosity and half slums. But London—'

[¶4] Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on
the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles,
which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum
wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything, cocking their
eyes at the hotel. 'Built by French architects,' I assured them; and
even later, when the train was crawling into London through the eastern
slums, I still kept it up about the beauties of English architecture.
Nothing seemed too good to say about England, now that I was coming home
and was not hard up any more.

[¶5] I went to B.'s office, and his first words knocked everything to ruins.
'I'm sorry,' he said; 'your employers have gone abroad, patient and all.
However, they'll be back in a month. I suppose you can hang on till
then?'

[¶6] I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me to borrow some
more money. There was a month to wait, and I had exactly nineteen and
sixpence in hand. The news had taken my breath away. For a long time I
could not make up my mind what to do. I loafed the day in the streets,
and at night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed
in London, I went to a 'family' hotel, where the charge was seven and
sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.

[¶7] By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go
to B. for more money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in
the meantime I must exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience
set me against pawning my best suit. I would leave all my things at the
station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could exchange
for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a
month on thirty shillings I must have bad clothes—indeed the worse the
better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a month I had no
idea, not knowing London as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell
bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers
about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It
was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there
was nothing to be anxious about.

[¶8] To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor
and there are a lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the
proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the
third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth shopman was a
large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He
looked at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between
thumb and finger.

[¶9] 'Poor stuff,' he said, 'very poor stuff, that is.' (It was quite a good
suit.) 'What yer want for 'em?'

[¶10] I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he
could spare. He thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking
rags and threw them onto the counter. 'What about the money?' I said,
hoping for a pound. He pursed his lips, then produced _a shilling_ and
laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue—I was going to argue, but
as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling
again; I saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room
behind the shop.

[¶11] The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree
trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and
boots, and I had a comb and razor in my pocket. It gives one a very
strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad enough things
before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and
shapeless, they had—how is one to express it?—a gracelessness, a
patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness. They were
the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace seller, or a tramp. An hour
later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming
towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop
window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great
respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but
as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.

[¶12] I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the
time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the police might arrest
me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they
must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I
discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me
instantly into a new world. Everyone's demeanour seemed to have changed
abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. 'Thanks,
mate,' he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my
life—it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed,
too, how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly
dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank
movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful
things. Dressed in a tramp's clothes it is very difficult, at any rate
for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You
might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in
prison.

[¶13] At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read about doss-houses
(they are never called doss-houses, by the way), and I supposed that one
could get a bed for fourpence or thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or
something of the kind, standing on the kerb in the Waterloo Road, I
stopped and questioned him. I said that I was stony broke and wanted the
cheapest bed I could get.

[¶14] 'Oh,' said he, 'you go to that 'ouse across the street there, with the
sign "Good Beds for Single Men". That's a good kip [sleeping place],
that is. I bin there myself on and off. You'll find it cheap _and_
clean.'

[¶15] It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in all the
windows, some of which were patched with brown paper. I entered a stone
passage-way, and a little etiolated boy with sleepy eyes appeared from a
door leading to a cellar. Murmurous sounds came from the cellar, and a
wave of hot air and cheese. The boy yawned and held out his hand.

[¶16] 'Want a kip? That'll be a 'og, guv'nor.'

[¶17] I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety unlighted staircase
to a bedroom. It had a sweetish reek of paregoric and foul linen; the
windows seemed to be tight shut, and the air was almost suffocating at
first. There was a candle burning, and I saw that the room measured
fifteen feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it. Already six
lodgers were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with all their own clothes, even
their boots, piled on top of them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome
manner in one corner.

[¶18] When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a board, and as
for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder like a block of wood. It was
rather worse than sleeping on a table, because the bed was not six feet
long, and very narrow, and the mattress was convex, so that one had to
hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that
I could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes only consisted
of the sheets and a cotton counterpane, so that though stuffy it was
none too warm. Several noises recurred throughout the night. About once
in an hour the man on my left—a sailor, I think—woke up, swore vilely,
and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of bladder disease, got up
and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during the night.
The man in the corner had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes,
so regularly that one came to listen for it as one listens for the next
yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an unspeakably repellent
sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man's bowels were
being churned up within him. Once when he struck a match I saw that he
was a very old man, with a grey, sunken face like that of a corpse, and
he was wearing his trousers wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a
thing which for some reason disgusted me very much. Every time he
coughed or the other man swore, a sleepy voice from one of the other
beds cried out:

[¶19] 'Shut up! Oh, for Christ's—_sake_ shut up!'

[¶20] I had about an hour's sleep in all. In the morning I was woken by a dim
impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened my eyes
and saw that it was one of the sailor's feet, sticking out of bed close
to my face. It was dark brown, quite dark brown like an Indian's, with
dirt. The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the wash,
were almost raw umber colour. I got up, dressed and went downstairs. In
the cellar were a row of basins and two slippery roller towels. I had a
piece of soap in my pocket, and I was going to wash, when I noticed that
every basin was streaked with grime—solid, sticky filth as black as
boot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-house had
not come up to its description as cheap _and_ clean. It was however, as
I found later, a fairly representative lodging-house.

[¶21] I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward, finally going into a
coffee-shop on Tower Hill. An ordinary London coffee-shop, like a
thousand others, it seemed queer and foreign after Paris. It was a
little stuffy room with the high-backed pews that were fashionable in
the 'forties, the day's menu written on a mirror with a piece of soap,
and a girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating out of
newspaper parcels, and drinking tea in vast saucerless mugs like china
tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was
guiltily wolfing bacon.

[¶22] 'Could I have some tea and bread and butter?' I said to the girl.

[¶23] She stared. 'No butter, only marg.,' she said, surprised. And she
repeated the order in the phrase that is to London what the eternal
_coup de rouge_ is to Paris: 'Large tea and two slices!'

[¶24] On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying 'Pocketing the sugar
not allowed', and beneath it some poetic customer had written:

[¶25] He that takes away the sugar,
    Shall be called a dirty —

[¶26] but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last word. This
was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost threepence halfpenny, leaving
me with eight and twopence.

## 25. Chapter XXV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25/#p-N

[¶0] The eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After my bad
experience in the Waterloo Road[3] I moved eastward, and spent the next
night in a lodging-house in Pennyfields. This was a typical
lodging-house, like scores of others in London. It had accommodation for
between fifty and a hundred men, and was managed by a 'deputy'—a deputy
for the owner, that is, for these lodging-houses are profitable concerns
and are owned by rich men. We slept fifteen or twenty in a dormitory;
the beds were again cold and hard, but the sheets were not more than a
week from the wash, which was an improvement. The charge was ninepence
or a shilling (in the shilling dormitory the beds were six feet apart
instead of four) and the terms were cash down by seven in the evening or
out you went.

[¶1] [3] It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are much commoner in
south than north London. For some reason they have not yet crossed the
river in any great numbers.

[¶2] -----

[¶3] Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers, with free firing
and a supply of cooking-pots, tea-basins and toasting-forks. There were
two great clinker fires, which were kept burning day and night the year
through. The work of tending the fires, sweeping the kitchen and making
the beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One senior lodger, a fine
Norman-looking stevedore named Steve, was known as 'head of the house',
and was arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out.

[¶4] I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep underground, very
hot and drowsy with coke fumes, and lighted only by the fires, which
cast black velvet shadows in the corners. Ragged washing hung on strings
from the ceiling. Red-lit men, stevedores mostly, moved about the fires
with cooking-pots; some of them were quite naked, for they had been
laundering and were waiting for their clothes to dry. At night there
were games of nap and draughts, and songs—'I'm a chap what's done wrong
by my parents' was a favourite, and so was another popular song about a
shipwreck. Sometimes late at night men would come in with a pail of
winkles they had bought cheap, and share them out. There was a general
sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who were out
of work. A little pale, wizened creature, obviously dying, referred to
as 'pore Brown, bin under the doctor and cut open three times', was
regularly fed by the others.

[¶5] Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Till meeting them I
had never realized that there are people in England who live on nothing
but the old-age pension of ten shillings a week. None of these old men
had any other resource whatever. One of them was talkative, and I asked
him how he managed to exist. He said:

[¶6] 'Well, there's ninepence a night for yer kip—that's five an' threepence
a week. Then there's threepence on Saturdays for a shave—that's five
an' six. Then say you 'as a 'aircut once a month for sixpence—that's
another three-'apence a week. So you 'as about four an' fourpence for
food an' bacca.'

[¶7] He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread and margarine and
tea—towards the end of the week dry bread and tea without milk—and
perhaps he got his clothes from charity. He seemed contented, valuing
his bed and the fire more than food. But, with an income of ten
shillings a week, to spend money on a shave—it is awe-inspiring.

[¶8] All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as
Whitechapel. It was queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner
and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of the trams, and the
noisy, festering life of the back streets, and the armed men clattering
through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces
comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality
and malice of the French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and
less quarrelling, and more idling. Knots of men stood at all the
corners, slightly underfed, but kept going by the tea-and-two-slices
which the Londoner swallows every two hours. One seemed to breathe a
less feverish air than in Paris. It was the land of the tea urn and the
Labour Exchange, as Paris is the land of the _bistro_ and the sweatshop.

[¶9] It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East London women are pretty
(it is the mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with
Orientals—Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk
scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness knows how. Here and there were
street meetings. In Whitechapel somebody called The Singing Evangel
undertook to save you from hell for the charge of sixpence. In the East
India Dock Road the Salvation Army were holding a service. They were
singing 'Anybody here like sneaking Judas?' to the tune of 'What's to be
done with a drunken sailor?' On Tower Hill two Mormons were trying to
address a meeting. Round their platform struggled a mob of men, shouting
and interrupting. Someone was denouncing them for polygamists. A lame,
bearded man, evidently an atheist, had heard the word God and was
heckling angrily. There was a confused uproar of voices.

[¶10] 'My dear friends, if you would only let us finish what we were
saying—!—That's right, give 'em a say. Don't get on the argue!—No,
no, you answer me. Can you _show_ me God? You _show_ 'im me, then I'll
believe in 'im.—Oh, shut up, don't keep interrupting of 'em!—Interrupt
yourself! F— polygamists!—Well, there's a lot to be said for polygamy.
Take the f— 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.

[¶11] 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.

[¶12] '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!'

[¶13] Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The mother and the child
disappeared, both bawling. It was all very queer after Paris.

[¶14] 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, thick-set 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.

[¶15] _The old-age pensioner_: 'You —!'

[¶16] _The stevedore_: 'Shut yer mouth, you ole —, afore I set about yer!'

[¶17] _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!'

[¶18] _The stevedore_: 'Ah, an' then p'raps I wouldn't smash you up after, you
ole c—!'

[¶19] 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:

[¶20] '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 c—,
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!'

[¶21] 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.

[¶22] 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.

[¶23] 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.

[¶24] There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets, marked in huge
letters 'Stolen from No. — Bow 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.

## 26. Chapter XXVI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/26/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/26/#p-N

[¶0] 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:

[¶1] '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.'

[¶2] 'What, don't you have tobacco on the road?' I said.

[¶3] 'Oh, we _has_ it. Look.'

[¶4] 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.

[¶5] 'D'you come out o' one o' de London spikes [casual wards], eh?' he asked
me.

[¶6] 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:

[¶7] '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.'

[¶8] 'What is skilly?' I said.

[¶9] 'Skilly? A can o' hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at de bottom; dat's
skilly. De skilly spikes is always de worst.'

[¶10] 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 short-sighted, 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.

[¶11] At about five the Irishman said, 'Could you do wid a cup o' tay? De
spike don't open till six.'

[¶12] 'I should think I could.'

[¶13] '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.'

[¶14] 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.

[¶15] 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:

[¶16] 'And you, my boy, how long is it since you knelt down and spoke with
your Father in Heaven?'

[¶17] Poor lad, not a word could he utter; but his belly answered for him,
with a disgraceful rumbling which it set up at sight of the food.
Thereafter he was so overcome with shame that he could scarcely swallow
his bun. Only one man managed to answer the lady in her style, and he
was a spry, red-nosed fellow looking like a corporal who had lost his
stripe for drunkenness. He could pronounce the words 'the dear Lord
Jesus' with less shame than anyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned
the knack in prison.

[¶18] Tea ended, and I saw the tramps looking furtively at one another. An
unspoken thought was running from man to man—could we possibly make off
before the prayers started? Someone stirred in his chair—not getting up
actually, but with just a glance at the door, as though half suggesting
the idea of departure. The lady quelled him with one look. She said in a
more benign tone than ever:

[¶19] 'I don't think you need go _quite_ yet. The casual ward doesn't open
till six, and we have time to kneel down and say a few words to our
Father first. I think we should all feel better after that, shouldn't
we?'

[¶20] The red-nosed man was very helpful, pulling the harmonium into place and
handing out the prayer-books. His back was to the lady as he did this,
and it was his idea of a joke to deal the books like a pack of cards,
whispering to each man as he did so, 'There y'are, mate, there's a f—
nap 'and for yer! Four aces and a king!' etc.

[¶21] Bareheaded, we knelt down among the dirty teacups and began to mumble
that we had left undone those things that we ought to have done, and
done those things that we ought not to have done, and there was no
health in us. The lady prayed very fervently, but her eyes roved over us
all the time, making sure that we were attending. When she was not
looking we grinned and winked at one another, and whispered bawdy jokes,
just to show that we did not care; but it stuck in our throats a little.
No one except the red-nosed man was self-possessed enough to speak the
responses above a whisper. We got on better with the singing, except
that one old tramp knew no tune but 'Onward, Christian soldiers', and
reverted to it sometimes, spoiling the harmony.

[¶22] The prayers lasted half an hour, and then, after a handshake at the
door, we made off. 'Well,' said somebody as soon as we were out of
hearing, 'the trouble's over. I thought them f— prayers was never goin'
to end.'

[¶23] 'You 'ad your bun,' said another; 'you got to pay for it.'

[¶24] 'Pray for it, you mean. Ah, you don't get give much for nothing. They
can't even give you a twopenny cup of tea without you go down on your
f— knees for it.'

[¶25] There were murmurs of agreement. Evidently the tramps were not grateful
for their free tea. And yet it was excellent tea, as different from
coffee-shop tea as good Bordeaux is from the muck called colonial
claret, and we were all glad of it. I am sure too that it was given in a
good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we
ought to have been grateful—still, we were not.

## 27. Chapter XXVII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/27/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/27/#p-N

[¶0] At about a quarter to six the Irishman led me to the spike. It was a
grim, smoky yellow cube of brick, standing in a corner of the workhouse
grounds. With its rows of tiny, barred windows, and a high wall and iron
gates separating it from the road, it looked much like a prison. Already
a long queue of ragged men had formed up, waiting for the gates to open.
They were of all kinds and ages, the youngest a fresh-faced boy of
sixteen, the oldest a doubled-up, toothless mummy of seventy-five. Some
were hardened tramps, recognizable by their sticks and billies and
dust-darkened faces; some were factory hands out of work, some
agricultural labourers, one a clerk in collar and tie, two certainly
imbeciles. Seen in the mass, lounging there, they were a disgusting
sight; nothing villainous or dangerous, but a graceless, mangy crew,
nearly all ragged and palpably underfed. They were friendly, however,
and asked no questions. Many offered me tobacco—cigarette-ends, that
is.

[¶1] We leaned against the wall, smoking, and the tramps began to talk about
the spikes they had been in recently. It appeared from what they said
that all spikes are different, each with its peculiar merits and
demerits, and it is important to know these when you are on the road. An
old hand will tell you the peculiarities of every spike in England, as:
at A you are allowed to smoke but there are bugs in the cells; at B the
beds are comfortable but the porter is a bully; at C they let you out
early in the morning but the tea is undrinkable; at D the officials
steal your money if you have any—and so on interminably. There are
regular beaten tracks where the spikes are within a day's march of one
another. I was told that the Barnet-St Albans route is the best, and
they warned me to steer clear of Billericay and Chelmsford, also Ide
Hill in Kent. Chelsea was said to be the most luxurious spike in
England; someone, praising it, said that the blankets there were more
like prison than the spike. Tramps go far afield in summer, and in
winter they circle as much as possible round the large towns, where it
is warmer and there is more charity. But they have to keep moving, for
you may not enter any one spike, or any two London spikes, more than
once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week.

[¶2] Some time after six the gates opened and we began to file in one at a
time. In the yard was an office where an official entered in a ledger
our names and trades and ages, also the places we were coming from and
going to—this last is intended to keep a check on the movements of
tramps. I gave my trade as 'painter'; I had painted water-colours—who
has not? The official also asked us whether we had any money, and every
man said no. It is against the law to enter the spike with more than
eightpence, and any sum less than this one is supposed to hand over at
the gate. But as a rule the tramps prefer to smuggle their money in,
tying it tight in a piece of cloth so that it will not chink. Generally
they put it in the bag of tea and sugar that every tramp carries, or
among their 'papers'. The 'papers' are considered sacred and are never
searched.

[¶3] After registering at the office we were led into the spike by an
official known as the Tramp Major (his job is to supervise casuals, and
he is generally a workhouse pauper) and a great bawling ruffian of a
porter in a blue uniform, who treated us like cattle. The spike
consisted simply of a bathroom and lavatory, and, for the rest, long
double rows of stone cells, perhaps a hundred cells in all. It was a
bare, gloomy place of stone and whitewash, unwillingly clean, with a
smell which, somehow, I had foreseen from its appearance; a smell of
soft soap, Jeyes' fluid and latrines—a cold, discouraging, prisonish
smell.

[¶4] The porter herded us all into the passage, and then told us to come into
the bathroom six at a time, to be searched before bathing. The search
was for money and tobacco, Romton being one of those spikes where you
can smoke once you have smuggled your tobacco in, but it will be
confiscated if it is found on you. The old hands had told us that the
porter never searched below the knee, so before going in we had all
hidden our tobacco in the ankles of our boots. Afterwards, while
undressing, we slipped it into our coats, which we were allowed to keep,
to serve as pillows.

[¶5] The scene in the bathroom was extraordinarily repulsive. Fifty dirty,
stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with
only two bath-tubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. I shall
never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less than half the tramps actually
bathed (I heard them saying that hot water is 'weakening' to the
system), but they all washed their faces and feet, and the horrid greasy
little clouts known as toerags which they bind round their toes. Fresh
water was only allowed for men who were having a complete bath, so many
men had to bathe in water where others had washed their feet. The porter
shoved us to and fro, giving the rough side of his tongue when anyone
wasted time. When my turn came for the bath, I asked if I might swill
out the tub, which was streaked with dirt, before using it. He answered
simply, 'Shut yer f— mouth and get on with yer bath!' That set the
social tone of the place, and I did not speak again.

[¶6] When we had finished bathing, the porter tied our clothes in bundles and
gave us workhouse shirts—grey cotton things of doubtful cleanliness,
like abbreviated nightgowns. We were sent along to the cells at once,
and presently the porter and the Tramp Major brought our supper across
from the workhouse. Each man's ration was a half-pound wedge of bread
smeared with margarine, and a pint of bitter sugarless cocoa in a tin
billy. Sitting on the floor, we wolfed this in five minutes, and at
about seven o'clock the cell doors were locked on the outside, to remain
locked till eight in the morning.

[¶7] Each man was allowed to sleep with his mate, the cells being intended to
hold two men apiece. I had no mate, and was put in with another solitary
man, a thin scrubby-faced fellow with a slight squint. The cell measured
eight feet by five by eight high, was made of stone, and had a tiny
barred window high up in the wall and a spy-hole in the door, just like
a cell in a prison. In it were six blankets, a chamber-pot, a hot-water
pipe, and nothing else whatever. I looked round the cell with a vague
feeling that there was something missing. Then, with a shock of
surprise, I realized what it was, and exclaimed:

[¶8] 'But I say, damn it, where are the beds?'

[¶9] '_Beds?_' said the other man, surprised. 'There aren't no beds! What yer
expect? This is one of them spikes where you sleeps on the floor.
Christ! Ain't you got used to that yet?'

[¶10] It appeared that no beds was quite a normal condition in the spike. We
rolled up our coats and put them against the hot-water pipe, and made
ourselves as comfortable as we could. It grew foully stuffy, but it was
not warm enough to allow of our putting all the blankets underneath, so
that we could only use one to soften the floor. We lay a foot apart,
breathing into one another's face, with our naked limbs constantly
touching, and rolling against one another whenever we fell asleep. One
fidgeted from side to side, but it did not do much good; whichever way
one turned there would be first a dull numb feeling, then a sharp ache
as the hardness of the floor wore through the blanket. One could sleep,
but not for more than ten minutes on end.

[¶11] About midnight the other man began making homosexual attempts upon me—a
nasty experience in a locked, pitch-dark cell. He was a feeble creature
and I could manage him easily, but of course it was impossible to go to
sleep again. For the rest of the night we stayed awake, smoking and
talking. The man told me the story of his life—he was a fitter, out of
work for three years. He said that his wife had promptly deserted him
when he lost his job, and he had been so long away from women that he
had almost forgotten what they were like. Homosexuality is general among
tramps of long standing, he said.

[¶12] At eight the porter came along the passage unlocking the doors and
shouting 'All out!' The doors opened, letting out a stale, fetid stink.
At once the passage was full of squalid, grey-shirted figures, each
chamber-pot in hand, scrambling for the bathroom. It appeared that in
the morning only one tub of water was allowed for the lot of us, and
when I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces; I took one
glance at the black scum floating on the water, and went unwashed. After
this we were given a breakfast identical with the previous night's
supper, our clothes were returned to us, and we were ordered out into
the yard to work. The work was peeling potatoes for the paupers' dinner,
but it was a mere formality, to keep us occupied until the doctor came
to inspect us. Most of the tramps frankly idled. The doctor turned up at
about ten o'clock and we were told to go back to our cells, strip and
wait in the passage for the inspection.

[¶13] Naked and shivering, we lined up in the passage. You cannot conceive
what ruinous, degenerate curs we looked, standing there in the merciless
morning light. A tramp's clothes are bad, but they conceal far worse
things; to see him as he really is, unmitigated, you must see him naked.
Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chests, sagging muscles—every kind of
physical rottenness was there. Nearly everyone was under-nourished, and
some clearly diseased; two men were wearing trusses, and as for the old
mummy-like creature of seventy-five, one wondered how he could possibly
make his daily march. Looking at our faces, unshaven and creased from
the sleepless night, you would have thought that all of us were
recovering from a week on the drink.

[¶14] The inspection was designed merely to detect smallpox, and took no
notice of our general condition. A young medical student, smoking a
cigarette, walked rapidly along the line glancing us up and down, and
not inquiring whether any man was well or ill. When my cell companion
stripped I saw that his chest was covered with a red rash, and, having
spent the night a few inches away from him, I fell into a panic about
smallpox. The doctor, however, examined the rash and said that it was
due merely to under-nourishment.

[¶15] After the inspection we dressed and were sent into the yard, where the
porter called our names over, gave us back any possessions we had left
at the office, and distributed meal tickets. These were worth sixpence
each, and were directed to coffee-shops on the route we had named the
night before. It was interesting to see that quite a number of the
tramps could not read, and had to apply to myself and other 'scholards'
to decipher their tickets.

[¶16] The gates were opened, and we dispersed immediately. How sweet the air
does smell—even the air of a back-street in the suburbs—after the
shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike! I had a mate now, for while we
were peeling potatoes I had made friends with an Irish tramp named Paddy
Jaques, a melancholy, pale man who seemed clean and decent. He was going
to Edbury spike, and suggested that we should go together. We set out,
getting there at three in the afternoon. It was a twelve-mile walk, but
we made it fourteen by getting lost among the desolate north London
slums. Our meal tickets were directed to a coffee-shop in Ilford. When
we got there, the little chit of a serving-maid, having seen our tickets
and grasped that we were tramps, tossed her head in contempt and for a
long time would not serve us. Finally she slapped on the table two
'large teas' and four slices of bread and dripping—that is,
eightpennyworth of food. It appeared that the shop habitually cheated
the tramps of twopence or so on each ticket; having tickets instead of
money, the tramps could not protest or go elsewhere.

## 28. Chapter XXVIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/28/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/28/#p-N

[¶0] Paddy was my mate for about the next fortnight, and, as he was the first
tramp I had known at all well, I want to give an account of him. I
believe that he was a typical tramp and there are tens of thousands in
England like him.

[¶1] He was a tallish man aged about thirty-five, with fair hair going
grizzled and watery blue eyes. His features were good, but his cheeks
had lanked and had that greyish, dirty-in-the-grain look that comes of a
bread and margarine diet. He was dressed, rather better than most
tramps, in a tweed shooting-jacket and a pair of very old evening
trousers with the braid still on them. Evidently the braid figured in
his mind as a lingering scrap of respectability, and he took care to sew
it on again when it came loose. He was careful of his appearance
altogether, and carried a razor and bootbrush that he would not sell,
though he had sold his 'papers' and even his pocket-knife long since.
Nevertheless, one would have known him for a tramp a hundred yards away.
There was something in his drifting style of walk, and the way he had of
hunching his shoulders forward, essentially abject. Seeing him walk, you
felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one.

[¶2] He had been brought up in Ireland, served two years in the war, and then
worked in a metal polish factory, where he had lost his job two years
earlier. He was horribly ashamed of being a tramp, but he had picked up
all a tramp's ways. He browsed the pavements unceasingly, never missing
a cigarette-end, or even an empty cigarette packet, as he used the
tissue paper for rolling cigarettes. On our way into Edbury he saw a
newspaper parcel on the pavement, pounced on it, and found that it
contained two mutton sandwiches, rather frayed at the edges; these he
insisted on my sharing. He never passed an automatic machine without
giving a tug at the handle, for he said that sometimes they are out of
order and will eject pennies if you tug at them. He had no stomach for
crime, however. When we were in the outskirts of Romton, Paddy noticed a
bottle of milk on a doorstep, evidently left there by mistake. He
stopped, eyeing the bottle hungrily.

[¶3] 'Christ!' he said, 'dere's good food goin' to waste. Somebody could
knock dat bottle off, eh? Knock it off easy.'

[¶4] I saw that he was thinking of 'knocking it off' himself. He looked up
and down the street; it was a quiet residential street and there was
nobody in sight. Paddy's sickly, chap-fallen face yearned over the milk.
Then he turned away, saying gloomily:

[¶5] 'Best leave it. It don't do a man no good to steal. T'ank God, I ain't
never stolen nothin' yet.'

[¶6] It was funk, bred of hunger, that kept him virtuous. With only two or
three sound meals in his belly, he would have found courage to steal the
milk.

[¶7] He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a
tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal. As we drifted through
the streets he would keep up a monologue in this style, in a whimpering,
self-pitying Irish voice:

[¶8] 'It's hell bein' on de road, eh? It breaks yer heart goin' into dem
bloody spikes. But what's a man to do else, eh? I ain't had a good meat
meal for above two months, an' me boots is getting bad, an'—Christ!
How'd it be if we was to try for a cup o' tay at one o' dem convents on
de way to Edbury? Most times dey're good for a cup o' tay. Ah, what'd a
man do widout religion, eh? I've took cups o' tay from de convents, an'
de Baptists, an' de Church of England, an' all sorts. I'm a Catholic
meself. Dat's to say, I ain't been to confession for above seventeen
year, but still I got me religious feelin's, y'understand. An' dem
convents is always good for a cup o' tay . . .' etc. etc. He would keep
this up all day, almost without stopping.

[¶9] His ignorance was limitless and appalling. He once asked me, for
instance, whether Napoleon lived before Jesus Christ or after. Another
time, when I was looking into a bookshop window, he grew very perturbed
because one of the books was called _Of the Imitation of Christ_. He
took this for blasphemy. 'What de hell do dey want to go imitatin' of
_Him_ for?' he demanded angrily. He could read, but he had a kind of
loathing for books. On our way from Romton to Edbury I went into a
public library, and, though Paddy did not want to read, I suggested that
he should come in and rest his legs. But he preferred to wait on the
pavement. 'No,' he said, 'de sight of all dat bloody print makes me
sick.'

[¶10] Like most tramps, he was passionately mean about matches. He had a box
of matches when I met him, but I never saw him strike one, and he used
to lecture me for extravagance when I struck mine. His method was to
cadge a light from strangers, sometimes going without a smoke for half
an hour rather than strike a match.

[¶11] Self-pity was the clue to his character. The thought of his bad luck
never seemed to leave him for an instant. He would break long silences
to exclaim, apropos of nothing, 'It's hell when yer clo'es begin to go
up de spout, eh?' or 'Dat tay in de spike ain't tay, it's piss', as
though there were nothing else in the world to think about. And he had a
low, worm-like envy of anyone who was better off—not of the rich, for
they were beyond his social horizon, but of men in work. He pined for
work as an artist pines to be famous. If he saw an old man working he
would say bitterly, 'Look at dat old — keepin' able-bodied men out o'
work'; or if it was a boy, 'It's dem young devils what's takin' de bread
out of our mouths.' And all foreigners to him were 'dem bloody
dagoes'—for, according to his theory, foreigners were responsible for
unemployment.

[¶12] He looked at women with a mixture of longing and hatred. Young, pretty
women were too much above him to enter into his ideas, but his mouth
watered at prostitutes. A couple of scarlet-lipped old creatures would
go past; Paddy's face would flush pale pink, and he would turn and stare
hungrily after the women. 'Tarts!' he would murmur, like a boy at a
sweet-shop window. He told me once that he had not had to do with a
woman for two years—since he had lost his job, that is—and he had
forgotten that one could aim higher than prostitutes. He had the regular
character of a tramp—abject, envious, a jackal's character.

[¶13] Nevertheless he was a good fellow, generous by nature and capable of
sharing his last crust with a friend; indeed he did literally share his
last crust with me more than once. He was probably capable of work too,
if he had been well fed for a few months. But two years of bread and
margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this
filthy imitation of food till his whole mind and body were compounded of
inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had
destroyed his manhood.

## 29. Chapter XXIX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/29/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/29/#p-N

[¶0] 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.

[¶1] 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 hunk of bread and cheese to
take away for our midday meal.

[¶2] 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.

[¶3] 'You men sleep 'ere last night?'

[¶4] 'No.'

[¶5] 'Then f— off.'

[¶6] 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.

[¶7] 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 condition that we paid
for two cups of tea. The main hall of the shelter was a great
whitewashed 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:

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

[¶9] A reward will be given for information leading to the discovery
    of such persons.

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

[¶11] 'Gambling or playing cards' is a delightful phrase.

[¶12] 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:

[¶13] 'I 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.

[¶14] 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.

[¶15] The charge for beds was eightpence each. 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 Army in charity,
though they sold it at three-halfpence a cup. It was foul stuff. At ten
o'clock an officer marched round the hall blowing a whistle. Immediately
everyone stood up.

[¶16] 'What's this for?' I said to Paddy, astonished.

[¶17] 'Dat means you has to go off to bed. An' you has to look sharp about it,
too.'

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

[¶19] 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,
shell-shock 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.

[¶20] 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.

[¶21] 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.'

[¶22] '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.'

[¶23] 'Take the 'ole lot for five and a tanner, chum.'

[¶24] 'Right y'are, off with 'em. I got to get out to sell my late edition.'

[¶25] 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_.

[¶26] 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:

[¶27] 'An old public school boy, 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:

[¶28] Jolly boating weather,
    And a hay harvest—

[¶29] 'Stop that — noise!' shouted several lodgers.

[¶30] '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?'

[¶31] 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.

[¶32] 'Get back to yer bed, you silly ole c—!'

[¶33] 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'.

[¶34] 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:

[¶35] 'Christ! You got to get used to dat. Dese 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 of 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.'

## 30. Chapter XXX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/30/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/30/#p-N

[¶0] 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 hook-nose as 'Roman', and was proud of his resemblance to
some Roman Emperor—it was Vespasian, I think.

[¶1] 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 his 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:

[¶2] '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.[4]
Cartoons is my line—you know, politics and cricket and that. Look
here'—he showed me his note-book—'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.'

[¶3] [4] Pavement artists buy their colours in the form of powder, and work
them into cakes with condensed milk.

[¶4] -----

[¶5] I asked Bozo what one could earn at screeving. He said:

[¶6] '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.'

[¶7] 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.

[¶8] '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.'

[¶9] 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
crab-like 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 arm and pointed to
the sky with his stick.

[¶10] 'Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like a—great
blood orange!'

[¶11] 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:

[¶12] 'You seem to know a lot about stars.'

[¶13] '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.'

[¶14] 'What a good idea! I should never have thought of it.'

[¶15] '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.'

[¶16] 'But isn't it very hard to take an interest in things—things like
stars—living this life?'

[¶17] '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.'

[¶18] 'It seems to have that effect on most people.'

[¶19] '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_ 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.'

[¶20] '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.'

[¶21] '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.'

[¶22] 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.

[¶23] 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 onto 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.

[¶24] 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 that 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.

[¶25] 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:

[¶26] '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.'

[¶27] Or, again, apropos of his accident:

[¶28] '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!"'

[¶29] 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.

[¶30] 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.

## 31. Chapter XXXI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31/#p-N

[¶0] 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 'tum'[5]—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[6] for types like these.

[¶1] [5] _The French translation has this note (in French)_: In Hindustani,
there are two pronouns for the second person singular. One, _ap_, is the
more respectful and corresponds to our [= _French_] polite use of
_vous_. The other, _tum_, is used only between very close friends or by
a superior to an inferior; it is the equivalent of our _tu_. An
Englishman in India would not tolerate being called 'tu' by a native.

[¶2] [6] _The French translation has this note (in French)_: A name once
given to the district of Whitefriars, which was, in the seventeenth
century, a regular refuge for all kinds of wrongdoers by virtue of a
right of sanctuary which was finally abolished in 1697.

[¶3] -----

[¶4] 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 fine 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:

[¶5] 'There y'are, sir, took yer photo lovely. That'll be a bob.'

[¶6] 'But I never asked you to take it,' protests the victim.

[¶7] '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.'

[¶8] 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.

[¶9] 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.

[¶10] 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.

[¶11] '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 light-headed 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, and 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.

[¶12] '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 onto it and rubbed it out with
his great flat feet.'

[¶13] 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.

[¶14] 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 law 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 a year—a poor return
for standing eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars grazing
your backside.

[¶15] 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.

[¶16] 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 harmless 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.

[¶17] 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 modern 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 modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of
choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

## 32. Chapter XXXII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/32/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/32/#p-N

[¶0] 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:

[¶1] A gagger—a beggar or street performer of any kind. A moocher—one who
begs outright, without pretence of doing a trade. A nobber—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 didecai—a gypsy. A toby—a tramp.

[¶2] A drop—money given to a beggar. Funkum—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 blowlamp.

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

[¶4] 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 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.

[¶5] 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, Herman 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.[7] Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have
vanished in another twenty years.

[¶6] [7] It survives in certain abbreviations, such as 'Use your twopenny'
for 'Use your head.' 'Twopenny' is arrived at like this: head—loaf of
bread—twopenny loaf—twopenny.

[¶7] -----

[¶8] 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 onto every
noun, is 'fucking'. No doubt in time 'fucking', like 'bloody', will find
its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

[¶9] 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, 'fuck'. 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
'bugger', which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of
similar instances in French—for example, '_foutre_', which is now a
quite meaningless expletive. The word '_bougre_', 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.

[¶10] 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 in 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 connection it is interesting to see how a
swear word can change character by crossing a frontier. In England you
can print '_Je m'en fous_' 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_.[8] A
vile and unforgiveable 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.

[¶11] [8] _The French translation has this note (in French)_: A word for which
there is no precise equivalent in French. In Hindustani, _bahin_ means
'sister' and _chut_ 'the sexual organ'. To call someone _bahinchut_ is
to remind him gratuitously that you are on the most intimate terms with
his sister. _Barnshoot_ is the same word corrupted by the English
soldiers who brought it back to England; it has completely lost its
original meaning.

[¶12] -----

[¶13] 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.

[¶14] 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.

## 33. Chapter XXXIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/33/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/33/#p-N

[¶0] 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.

[¶1] 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
beats. 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.

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

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

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

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

[¶6] After nine days B.'s two pounds was reduced to one and ninepence. Paddy
and I set aside eighteenpence for our beds, and spent threepence on the
usual tea-and-two-slices, which we shared—an appetizer rather than a
meal. By the afternoon we were damnably hungry and Paddy remembered a
church near King's Cross Station where a free tea was given once a week
to tramps. This was the day, and we decided to go there. Bozo, though it
was rainy weather and he was almost penniless, would not come, saying
that churches were not his style.

[¶7] Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting, dirty types who had
gathered from far and wide at the news of a free tea, like kites round a
dead buffalo. Presently the doors opened and a clergyman and some girls
shepherded us into a gallery at the top of the church. It was an
evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with texts about blood and
fire blazoned on the walls, and a hymn-book containing twelve hundred
and fifty-one hymns; reading some of the hymns, I concluded that the
book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse. There was to be
a service after the tea, and the regular congregation were sitting in
the well of the church below. It was a weekday, and there were only a
few dozen of them, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of
boiling-fowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and were given
our tea; it was a one-pound jam-jar of tea each, with six slices of
bread and margarine. As soon as tea was over, a dozen tramps who had
stationed themselves near the door bolted to avoid the service; the rest
stayed, less from gratitude than lacking the cheek to go.

[¶8] The organ let out a few preliminary hoots and the service began. And
instantly, as though at a signal, the tramps began to misbehave in the
most outrageous way. One would not have thought such scenes possible in
a church. All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed,
chattered, leaned over and flicked pellets of bread among the
congregation; I had to restrain the man next to me, more or less by
force, from lighting a cigarette. The tramps treated the service as a
purely comic spectacle. It was, indeed, a sufficiently ludicrous
service—the kind where there are sudden yells of 'Hallelujah!' and
endless extempore prayers—but their behaviour passed all bounds. There
was one old fellow in the congregation—Brother Bootle or some such
name—who was often called on to lead us in prayer, and whenever he
stood up the tramps would begin stamping as though in a theatre; they
said that on a previous occasion he had kept up an extempore prayer for
twenty-five minutes, until the minister had interrupted him. Once when
Brother Bootle stood up a tramp called out, 'Two to one 'e don't beat
seven minutes!' so loud that the whole church must hear. It was not long
before we were making far more noise than the minister. Sometimes
somebody below would send up an indignant 'Hush!' but it made no
impression. We had set ourselves to guy the service, and there was no
stopping us.

[¶9] It was a queer, rather disgusting scene. Below were the handful of
simple, well-meaning people, trying hard to worship; and above were the
hundred men whom they had fed, deliberately making worship impossible. A
ring of dirty, hairy faces grinned down from the gallery, openly
jeering. What could a few women and old men do against a hundred hostile
tramps? They were afraid of us, and we were frankly bullying them. It
was our revenge upon them for having humiliated us by feeding us.

[¶10] The minister was a brave man. He thundered steadily through a long
sermon on Joshua, and managed almost to ignore the sniggers and
chattering from above. But in the end, perhaps goaded beyond endurance,
he announced loudly:

[¶11] 'I shall address the last five minutes of my sermon to the _unsaved_
sinners!'

[¶12] Having said which, he turned his face to the gallery and kept it so for
five minutes, lest there should be any doubt about who were saved and
who unsaved. But much we cared! Even while the minister was threatening
hell fire, we were rolling cigarettes, and at the last amen we clattered
down the stairs with a yell, many agreeing to come back for another free
tea next week.

[¶13] The scene had interested me. It was so different from the ordinary
demeanour of tramps—from the abject worm-like gratitude with which they
normally accept charity. The explanation, of course, was that we
out-numbered the congregation and so were not afraid of them. A man
receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed
characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred
others to back him, he will show it.

[¶14] In the evening, after the free tea, Paddy unexpectedly earned another
eighteenpence at 'glimming'. It was exactly enough for another night's
lodging, and we put it aside and went hungry till nine the next evening.
Bozo, who might have given us some food, was away all day. The pavements
were wet, and he had gone to the Elephant and Castle, where he knew of a
pitch under shelter. Luckily I still had some tobacco, so that the day
might have been worse.

[¶15] At half-past eight Paddy took me to the Embankment, where a clergyman
was known to distribute meal tickets once a week. Under Charing Cross
Bridge fifty men were waiting, mirrored in the shivering puddles. Some
of them were truly appalling specimens—they were Embankment sleepers,
and the Embankment dredges up worse types than the spike. One of them, I
remember, was dressed in an overcoat without buttons, laced up with
rope, a pair of ragged trousers, and boots exposing his toes—not a rag
else. He was bearded like a fakir, and he had managed to streak his
chest and shoulders with some horrible black filth resembling train oil.
What one could see of his face under the dirt and hair was bleached
white as paper by some malignant disease. I heard him speak, and he had
a goodish accent, as of a clerk or shopwalker.

[¶16] Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselves in a
queue in the order in which they had arrived. The clergyman was a nice,
chubby, youngish man, and, curiously enough, very like Charlie, my
friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and did not speak except
for a brief good evening; he simply hurried down the line of men,
thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting to be thanked. The
consequence was that, for once, there was genuine gratitude, and
everyone said that the clergyman was a — good feller. Someone (in his
hearing, I believe) called out: 'Well, _he'll_ never be a f—
bishop!'—this, of course, intended as a warm compliment.

[¶17] The tickets were worth sixpence each, and were directed to an
eating-house not far away. When we got there we found that the
proprietor, knowing that the tramps could not go elsewhere, was cheating
by only giving four pennyworth of food for each ticket. Paddy and I
pooled our tickets, and received food which we could have got for
sevenpence or eightpence at most coffee-shops. The clergyman had
distributed well over a pound in tickets, so that the proprietor was
evidently swindling the tramps to the tune of seven shillings or more a
week. This kind of victimization is a regular part of a tramp's life,
and it will go on as long as people continue to give meal tickets
instead of money.

[¶18] Paddy and I went back to the lodging-house and, still hungry, loafed in
the kitchen, making the warmth of the fire a substitute for food. At
half-past ten Bozo arrived, tired out and haggard, for his mangled leg
made walking an agony. He had not earned a penny at screeving, all the
pitches under shelter being taken, and for several hours he had begged
outright, with one eye on the policemen. He had amassed eightpence—a
penny short of his kip. It was long past the hour for paying, and he had
only managed to slip indoors when the deputy was not looking; at any
moment he might be caught and turned out, to sleep on the Embankment.
Bozo took the things out of his pockets and looked them over, debating
what to sell. He decided on his razor, took it round the kitchen, and in
a few minutes he had sold it for threepence—enough to pay his kip, buy
a basin of tea, and leave a halfpenny over.

[¶19] Bozo got his basin of tea and sat down by the fire to dry his clothes.
As he drank the tea I saw that he was laughing to himself, as though at
some good joke. Surprised, I asked him what he had to laugh at.

[¶20] 'It's bloody funny!' he said. 'It's funny enough for _Punch_. What do
you think I been and done?'

[¶21] 'What?'

[¶22] 'Sold my razor without having a shave first! Of all the — fools!'

[¶23] He had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a
twisted leg, his clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between
himself and starvation. With all this, he could laugh over the loss of
his razor. One could not help admiring him.

## 34. Chapter XXXIV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/34/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/34/#p-N

[¶0] The next morning, our money being at an end, Paddy and I set out for the
spike. We went southward by the Old Kent Road, making for Cromley; we
could not go to a London spike, for Paddy had been in one recently and
did not care to risk going again. It was a sixteen-mile walk over
asphalt, blistering to the heels, and we were acutely hungry. Paddy
browsed the pavement, laying up a store of cigarette-ends against his
time in the spike. In the end his perseverance was rewarded, for he
picked up a penny. We bought a large piece of stale bread, and devoured
it as we walked.

[¶1] When we got to Cromley, it was too early to go to the spike, and we
walked several miles further, to a plantation beside a meadow, where one
could sit down. It was a regular caravanserai of tramps—one could tell
it by the worn grass and the sodden newspaper and rusty cans that they
had left behind. Other tramps were arriving by ones and twos. It was
jolly autumn weather. Near by, a deep bed of tansies was growing; it
seems to me that even now I can smell the sharp reek of those tansies,
warring with the reek of tramps. In the meadow two carthorse colts, raw
sienna colour with white manes and tails, were nibbling at a gate. We
sprawled about on the ground, sweaty and exhausted. Someone managed to
find dry sticks and get a fire going, and we all had milkless tea out of
a tin 'drum' which was passed round.

[¶2] Some of the tramps began telling stories. One of them, Bill, was an
interesting type, a genuine sturdy beggar of the old breed, strong as
Hercules and a frank foe of work. He boasted that with his great
strength he could get a navvying job any time he liked, but as soon as
he drew his first week's wages he went on a terrific drunk and was
sacked. Between whiles he 'mooched', chiefly from shopkeepers. He talked
like this:

[¶3] 'I ain't goin' far in — Kent. Kent's a tight county, Kent is. There's
too many bin moochin' about 'ere. The — bakers get so as they'll throw
their bread away sooner'n give it you. Now Oxford, that's the place for
moochin', Oxford is. When I was in Oxford I mooched bread, and I mooched
bacon, and I mooched beef, and every night I mooched tanners for my kip
off of the students. The last night I was twopence short of my kip, so I
goes up to a parson and mooches 'im for threepence. He give me
threepence, and the next moment he turns round and gives me in charge
for beggin'. "You bin beggin'," the copper says. "No I ain't," I says,
"I was askin' the gentlemen the time," I says. The copper starts feelin'
inside my coat, and he pulls out a pound of meat and two loaves of
bread. "Well, what's all this, then?" he says. "You better come 'long to
the station," he says. The beak give me seven days. I don't mooch from
no more — parsons. But Christ! what do I care for a lay-up of seven
days?' etc. etc.

[¶4] It seemed that his whole life was this—a round of mooching, drunks and
lay-ups. He laughed as he talked of it, taking it all for a tremendous
joke. He looked as though he made a poor thing out of begging, for he
wore only a corduroy suit, scarf and cap—no socks or linen. Still, he
was fat and jolly, and he even smelt of beer, a most unusual smell in a
tramp nowadays.

[¶5] Two of the tramps had been in Cromley spike recently, and they told a
ghost story connected with it. Years earlier, they said, there had been
a suicide there. A tramp had managed to smuggle a razor into his cell,
and there cut his throat. In the morning, when the Tramp Major came
round, the body was jammed against the door, and to open it they had to
break the dead man's arm. In revenge for this, the dead man haunted his
cell, and anyone who slept there was certain to die within the year;
there were copious instances, of course. If a cell door stuck when you
tried to open it, you should avoid that cell like the plague, for it was
the haunted one.

[¶6] Two tramps, ex-sailors, told another grisly story. A man (they swore
they had known him) had planned to stow away on a boat bound for Chile.
It was laden with manufactured goods packed in big wooden crates, and
with the help of a docker the stowaway had managed to hide himself in
one of these. But the docker had made a mistake about the order in which
the crates were to be loaded. The crane gripped the stowaway, swung him
aloft, and deposited him—at the very bottom of the hold, beneath
hundreds of crates. No one discovered what had happened until the end of
the voyage, when they found the stowaway rotting, dead of suffocation.

[¶7] Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy
was the man who was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge
who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!) hanged him. The tramps
liked the story, of course, but the interesting thing was to see that
they had got it all wrong. Their version was that Gilderoy escaped to
America, whereas in reality he was recaptured and put to death. The
story had been amended, no doubt deliberately; just as children amend
the stories of Samson and Robin Hood, giving them happy endings which
are quite imaginary.

[¶8] This set the tramps talking about history, and a very old man declared
that the 'one bite law' was a survival from days when the nobles hunted
men instead of deer. Some of the others laughed at him, but he had the
idea firm in his head. He had heard, too, of the Corn Laws, and the _jus
primae noctis_ (he believed it had really existed); also of the Great
Rebellion, which he thought was a rebellion of poor against
rich—perhaps he had got it mixed up with the peasant rebellions. I
doubt whether the old man could read, and certainly he was not repeating
newspaper articles. His scraps of history had been passed from
generation to generation of tramps, perhaps for centuries in some cases.
It was oral tradition lingering on, like a faint echo from the Middle
Ages.

[¶9] Paddy and I went to the spike at six in the evening, getting out at ten
in the morning. It was much like Romton and Edbury, and we saw nothing
of the ghost. Among the casuals were two young men named William and
Fred, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, a lively pair and fond of singing. They
had a song called 'Unhappy Bella' that is worth writing down. I heard
them sing it half a dozen times during the next two days, and I managed
to get it by heart, except a line or two which I have guessed. It ran:

[¶10] Bella was young and Bella was fair
    With bright blue eyes and golden hair,
    O unhappy Bella!
    Her step was light and her heart was gay,
    But she had no sense, and one fine day
    She got herself put in the family way
    By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

[¶11] Poor Bella was young, she didn't believe
    That the world is hard and men deceive,
    O unhappy Bella!
    She said, 'My man will do what's just,
    He'll marry me now, because he must';
    Her heart was full of loving trust
    In a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

[¶12] She went to his house; that dirty skunk
    Had packed his bags and done a bunk,
    O unhappy Bella!
    Her landlady said, 'Get out, you whore,
    I won't have your sort a-darkening my door.'
    Poor Bella was put to affliction sore
    By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

[¶13] All night she tramped the cruel snows,
    What she must have suffered nobody knows,
    O unhappy Bella!
    And when the morning dawned so red,
    Alas, alas, poor Bella was dead,
    Sent so young to her lonely bed
    By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

[¶14] So thus, you see, do what you will,
    The fruits of sin are suffering still,
    O unhappy Bella!
    As into the grave they laid her low,
    The men said, 'Alas, but life is so,'
    But the women chanted, sweet and low,
    'It's all the men, the dirty bastards!'

[¶15] Written by a woman, perhaps.

[¶16] William and Fred, the singers of this song, were thorough scallywags,
the sort of men who get tramps a bad name. They happened to know that
the Tramp Major at Cromley had a stock of old clothes, which were to be
given at need to casuals. Before going in William and Fred took off
their boots, ripped the seams and cut pieces off the soles, more or less
ruining them. Then they applied for two pairs of boots, and the Tramp
Major, seeing how bad their boots were, gave them two almost new pairs.
William and Fred were scarcely outside the spike in the morning before
they had sold these boots for one and ninepence. It seemed to them quite
worth while, for one and ninepence, to make their own boots practically
unwearable.

[¶17] Leaving the spike, we all started southward, a long slouching
procession, for Lower Binfield and Ide Hill. On the way there was a
fight between two of the tramps. They had quarrelled overnight (there
was some silly _casus belli_ about one saying to the other, 'Bullshit',
which was taken for Bolshevik—a deadly insult), and they fought it out
in a field. A dozen of us stayed to watch them. The scene sticks in my
mind for one thing—the man who was beaten going down, and his cap
falling off and showing that his hair was quite white. After that some
of us intervened and stopped the fight. Paddy had meanwhile been making
inquiries, and found that the real cause of the quarrel was, as usual, a
few pennyworth of food.

[¶18] We got to Lower Binfield quite early, and Paddy filled in the time by
asking for work at back doors. At one house he was given some boxes to
chop up for firewood, and, saying he had a mate outside, he brought me
in and we did the work together. When it was done the householder told
the maid to take us out a cup of tea. I remember the terrified way in
which she brought it out, and then, losing her courage, set the cups
down on the path and bolted back to the house, shutting herself in the
kitchen. So dreadful is the name of 'tramp'. They paid us sixpence each,
and we bought a threepenny loaf and half an ounce of tobacco, leaving
fivepence.

[¶19] Paddy thought it wiser to bury our fivepence, for the Tramp Major at
Lower Binfield was renowned as a tyrant and might refuse to admit us if
we had any money at all. It is quite a common practice of tramps to bury
their money. If they intend to smuggle at all a large sum into the spike
they generally sew it into their clothes, which may mean prison if they
are caught, of course. Paddy and Bozo used to tell a good story about
this. An Irishman (Bozo said it was an Irishman; Paddy said an
Englishman), not a tramp, and in possession of thirty pounds, was
stranded in a small village where he could not get a bed. He consulted a
tramp, who advised him to go to the workhouse. It is quite a regular
proceeding, if one cannot get a bed elsewhere, to get one at the
workhouse, paying a reasonable sum for it. The Irishman, however,
thought he would be clever and get a bed for nothing, so he presented
himself at the workhouse as an ordinary casual. He had sewn the thirty
pounds into his clothes. Meanwhile the tramp who had advised him had
seen his chance, and that night he privately asked the Tramp Major for
permission to leave the spike early in the morning, as he had to see
about a job. At six in the morning he was released, and went out—in the
Irishman's clothes. The Irishman complained of the theft, and was given
thirty days for going into a casual ward under false pretences.

## 35. Chapter XXXV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/35/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/35/#p-N

[¶0] Arrived at Lower Binfield, we sprawled for a long time on the green,
watched by cottagers from their front gates. A clergyman and his
daughter came and stared silently at us for a while, as though we had
been aquarium fishes, and then went away again. There were several dozen
of us waiting. William and Fred were there, still singing, and the men
who had fought, and Bill the moocher. He had been mooching from bakers,
and had quantities of stale bread tucked away between his coat and his
bare body. He shared it out, and we were all glad of it. There was a
woman among us, the first woman tramp I had ever seen. She was a
fattish, battered, very dirty woman of sixty, in a long, trailing black
skirt. She put on great airs of dignity, and if anyone sat down near her
she sniffed and moved further off.

[¶1] 'Where you bound for, missis?' one of the tramps called to her.

[¶2] The woman sniffed and looked into the distance.

[¶3] 'Come on, missis,' he said, 'cheer up. Be chummy. We're all in the same
boat 'ere.'

[¶4] 'Thank you,' said the woman bitterly, 'when I want to get mixed up with
a set of _tramps_, I'll let you know.'

[¶5] I enjoyed the way she said _tramps_. It seemed to show you in a flash
the whole of her soul; a small, blinkered, feminine soul, that had
learned absolutely nothing from years on the road. She was, no doubt, a
respectable widow woman, become a tramp through some grotesque accident.

[¶6] The spike opened at six. This was Saturday, and we were to be confined
over the week-end, which is the usual practice; why, I do not know,
unless it is from a vague feeling that Sunday merits something
disagreeable. When we registered I gave my trade as 'journalist'. It was
truer than 'painter', for I had sometimes earned money from newspaper
articles, but it was a silly thing to say, being bound to lead to
questions. As soon as we were inside the spike and had been lined up for
the search, the Tramp Major called my name. He was a stiff, soldierly
man of forty, not looking the bully he had been represented, but with an
old soldier's gruffness. He said sharply:

[¶7] 'Which of you is Blank?' (I forget what name I had given.)

[¶8] 'Me, sir.'

[¶9] 'So you are a journalist?'

[¶10] 'Yes, sir,' I said, quaking. A few questions would betray the fact that
I had been lying, which might mean prison. But the Tramp Major only
looked me up and down and said:

[¶11] 'Then you are a gentleman?'

[¶12] 'I suppose so.'

[¶13] He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,'
he said; 'bloody bad luck that is.' And thereafter he treated me with
unfair favouritism, and even with a kind of deference. He did not search
me, and in the bathroom he actually gave me a clean towel to myself—an
unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word 'gentleman' in an old
soldier's ear.

[¶14] By seven we had wolfed our bread and tea and were in our cells. We slept
one in a cell, and there were bedsteads and straw palliasses, so that
one ought to have had a good night's sleep. But no spike is perfect, and
the peculiar shortcoming at Lower Binfield was the cold. The hot pipes
were not working, and the two blankets we had been given were thin
cotton things and almost useless. It was only autumn, but the cold was
bitter. One spent the long twelve-hour night in turning from side to
side, falling asleep for a few minutes and waking up shivering. We could
not smoke, for our tobacco, which we had managed to smuggle in, was in
our clothes and we should not get these back till the morning. All down
the passage one could hear groaning noises, and sometimes a shouted
oath. No one, I imagine, got more than an hour or two of sleep.

[¶15] In the morning, after breakfast and the doctor's inspection, the Tramp
Major herded us all into the dining-room and locked the door upon us. It
was a limewashed, stone-floored room, unutterably dreary, with its
furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The barred
windows were too high to look out of, and there were no ornaments save a
clock and a copy of the workhouse rules. Packed elbow to elbow on the
benches, we were bored already, though it was barely eight in the
morning. There was nothing to do, nothing to talk about, not even room
to move. The sole consolation was that one could smoke, for smoking was
connived at so long as one was not caught in the act. Scotty, a little
hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by Cockney out of Glasgow, was
tobaccoless, his tin of cigarette-ends having fallen out of his boot
during the search and been impounded. I stood him the makings of a
cigarette. We smoked furtively, thrusting our cigarettes into our
pockets, like schoolboys, when we heard the Tramp Major coming.

[¶16] Most of the tramps spent ten continuous hours in this comfortless,
soulless room. Heaven knows how they put up with it. I was luckier than
the others, for at ten o'clock the Tramp Major told off a few men for
odd jobs, and he picked me out to help in the workhouse kitchen, the
most coveted job of all. This, like the clean towel, was a charm worked
by the word 'gentleman'.

[¶17] There was no work to do in the kitchen, and I sneaked off into a small
shed used for storing potatoes, where some workhouse paupers were
skulking to avoid the Sunday morning service. There were comfortable
packing-cases to sit on, and some back numbers of the _Family Herald_,
and even a copy of _Raffles_ from the workhouse library. The paupers
talked interestingly about workhouse life. They told me, among other
things, that the thing really hated in the workhouse, as a stigma of
charity, is the uniform; if the men could wear their own clothes, or
even their own caps and scarves, they would not mind being paupers. I
had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was a meal fit for a
boa-constrictor—the largest meal I had eaten since my first day at the
Hôtel X. The paupers said that they habitually gorged to the
bursting-point on Sunday and were underfed the rest of the week. After
dinner the cook set me to do the washing up, and told me to throw away
the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing and, in the
circumstances, appalling. Half-eaten joints of meat, and bucketfuls of
broken bread and vegetables, were pitched away like so much rubbish and
then defiled with tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing with
quite eatable food. And while I did so fifty tramps were sitting in the
spike with their bellies half filled by the spike dinner of bread and
cheese, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday.
According to the paupers, the food was thrown away from deliberate
policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

[¶18] At three I went back to the spike. The tramps had been sitting there
since eight, with hardly room to move an elbow, and they were now half
mad with boredom. Even smoking was at an end, for a tramp's tobacco is
picked-up cigarette-ends, and he starves if he is more than a few hours
away from the pavement. Most of the men were too bored even to talk;
they just sat packed on the benches, staring at nothing, their scrubby
faces split in two by enormous yawns. The room stank of _ennui_.

[¶19] Paddy, his backside aching from the hard bench, was in a whimpering
mood, and to pass the time away 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 a copy of _Quentin Durward_ in his
pocket. He told me that he never went into 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-huts for weeks
at a time.

[¶20] We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system that 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 a few pounds' worth of tools. It was
idiotic, he said.

[¶21] 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 tone instantly. I saw
that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman.
Though he had been famished along with the others, he at once saw
reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to
the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.

[¶22] 'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places too
comfortable, 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 here 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.'

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

[¶24] 'You don't want to have any pity on these here 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.'

[¶25] It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated
himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on the road six months,
but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I
imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not
tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about
trippers.

[¶26] Three hours dragged by. At six supper arrived, and turned out to be
quite uneatable; the bread, tough enough in the morning (it had been cut
into slices on Saturday night), was now as hard as ship's biscuit.
Luckily it was spread with dripping, and we scraped the dripping off and
ate that alone, which was better than nothing. At a quarter-past six we
were sent to bed. New tramps were arriving, and in order not to mix the
tramps of different days (for fear of infectious diseases) the new men
were put in the cells and we in dormitories. Our dormitory was a
barn-like room with thirty beds close together, and a tub to serve as a
common chamber-pot. It stank abominably, and the older men coughed and
got up all night. But being so many together kept the room warm, and we
had some sleep.

[¶27] We dispersed at ten in the morning, after a fresh medical inspection,
with a hunk of bread and cheese for our midday dinner. William and Fred,
strong in the possession of a shilling, impaled their bread on the spike
railings—as a protest, they said. This was the second spike in Kent
that they had made too hot to hold them, and they thought it a great
joke. They were cheerful souls, for tramps. The imbecile (there is an
imbecile in every collection of tramps) said that he was too tired to
walk and clung to the railings, until the Tramp Major had to dislodge
him and start him with a kick. Paddy and I turned north, for London.
Most of the others were going on to Ide Hill, said to be about the worst
spike in England.[9]

[¶28] [9] I have been in it since, and it is not so bad.

[¶29] -----

[¶30] Once again it was jolly autumn weather, and the road was quiet, with few
cars passing. The air was like sweet-briar after the spike's mingled
stenches of sweat, soap and drains. We two seemed the only tramps on the
road. Then I heard a hurried step behind us, and someone calling. It was
little Scotty, the Glasgow tramp, who had run after us panting. He
produced a rusty tin from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like
someone repaying an obligation.

[¶31] '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.'

[¶32] And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette-ends into my hand.

## 36. Chapter XXXVI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/36/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/36/#p-N

[¶0] I want to set down some general remarks about tramps. When one comes to
think of it, tramps are a queer product and worth thinking over. It is
queer that a tribe of men, tens of thousands in number, should be
marching up and down England like so many Wandering Jews. But though the
case obviously wants considering, one cannot even start to consider it
until one has got rid of certain prejudices. These prejudices are rooted
in the idea that every tramp, _ipso facto_, is a blackguard. In
childhood we have been taught that tramps are blackguards, and
consequently there exists in our minds a sort of ideal or typical
tramp—a repulsive, rather dangerous creature, who would die rather than
work or wash, and wants nothing but to beg, drink and rob hen-houses.
This tramp-monster is no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the
magazine stories, but he is very hard to get rid of. The very word
'tramp' evokes his image. And the belief in him obscures the real
questions of vagrancy.

[¶1] To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at
all? It is a curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp
take to the road. And, because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the
most fantastic reasons are suggested. It is said, for instance, that
tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to seek opportunities
for crime, even—least probable of reasons—because they like tramping.
I have even read in a book of criminology that the tramp is an atavism,
a throw-back to the nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite
obvious cause of vagrancy is staring one in the face. Of course a tramp
is not a nomadic atavism—one might as well say that a commercial
traveller is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but
for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to
be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not
supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as
each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically
kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is
that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the
tramp-monster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more
or less villainous motive for tramping.

[¶2] As a matter of fact, very little of the tramp-monster will survive
inquiry. Take the generally accepted idea that tramps are dangerous
characters. Quite apart from experience, one can say _a priori_ that
very few tramps are dangerous, because if they were dangerous they would
be treated accordingly. A casual ward will often admit a hundred tramps
in one night, and these are handled by a staff of at most three porters.
A hundred ruffians could not be controlled by three unarmed men. Indeed,
when one sees how tramps let themselves be bullied by the workhouse
officials, it is obvious that they are the most docile, broken-spirited
creatures imaginable. Or take the idea that all tramps are drunkards—an
idea ridiculous on the face of it. No doubt many tramps would drink if
they got the chance, but in the nature of things they cannot get the
chance. At this moment a pale watery stuff called beer is sevenpence a
pint in England. To be drunk on it would cost at least half a crown, and
a man who can command half a crown at all often is not a tramp. The idea
that tramps are impudent social parasites ('sturdy beggars') is not
absolutely unfounded, but it is only true in a few per cent of the
cases. Deliberate, cynical parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack
London's books on American tramping, is not in the English character.
The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of the
sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman
deliberately turning parasite, and this national character does not
necessarily change because a man is thrown out of work. Indeed, if one
remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced by law
to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes. I am not saying,
of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am not saying that
they are ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other
people it is the result and not the cause of their way of life.

[¶3] It follows that the 'Serve them damned well right' attitude that is
normally taken towards tramps is no fairer than it would be towards
cripples or invalids. When one has realized that, one begins to put
oneself in a tramp's place and understand what his life is like. It is
an extraordinarily futile, acutely unpleasant life. I have described the
casual ward—the routine of a tramp's day—but there are three especial
evils that need insisting upon. The first is hunger, which is the almost
general fate of tramps. The casual ward gives them a ration which is
probably not even meant to be sufficient, and anything beyond this must
be got by begging—that is, by breaking the law. The result is that
nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition; for proof of which one
need only look at the men lining up outside any casual ward. The second
great evil of a tramp's life—it seems much smaller at first sight, but
it is a good second—is that he is entirely cut off from contact with
women. This point needs elaborating.

[¶4] Tramps are cut off from women, in the first place, because there are
very few women at their level of society. One might imagine that among
destitute people the sexes would be as equally balanced as elsewhere.
But it is not so; in fact, one can almost say that below a certain level
society is entirely male. The following figures, published by the LCC
from a night census taken on February 13th, 1931, will show the relative
numbers of destitute men and destitute women:

[¶5] Spending the night in the streets, 60 men, 18 women.[10]
In shelters and homes not licensed as common lodging-houses, 1,057 men,
  137 women.
In the crypt of St Martin's-in-the-Fields Church, 88 men, 12 women.
In LCC casual wards and hostels, 674 men, 15 women.

[¶6] [10] This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportions probably hold
good.

[¶7] -----

[¶8] It will be seen from these figures that at the charity-level men
outnumber women by something like ten to one. The cause is presumably
that unemployment affects women less than men; also that any presentable
woman can, in the last resort, attach herself to some man. The result,
for a tramp, is that he is condemned to perpetual celibacy. For of
course it goes without saying that if a tramp finds no women at his own
level, those above—even a very little above—are as far out of his
reach as the moon. The reasons are not worth discussing, but there is no
doubt that women never, or hardly ever, condescend to men who are much
poorer than themselves. A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the
moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of
getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except—very rarely,
when he can raise a few shillings—a prostitute.

[¶9] It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for
instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these there is the
degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit
for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a
fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralizing
as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a
man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can
be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process.
Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to
the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage
to a man's self-respect.

[¶10] The other great evil of a tramp's life is enforced idleness. By our
vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he is not walking the
road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the intervals, lying on the ground
waiting for the casual ward to open. It is obvious that this is a
dismal, demoralizing way of life, especially for an uneducated man.

[¶11] Besides these one could enumerate scores of minor evils—to name only
one, discomfort, which is inseparable from life on the road; it is worth
remembering that the average tramp has no clothes but what he stands up
in, wears boots that are ill-fitting, and does not sit in a chair for
months together. But the important point is that a tramp's sufferings
are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and
lives it to no purpose whatever. One could not, in fact, invent a more
futile routine than walking from prison to prison, spending perhaps
eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road. There must be at the
least several tens of thousands of tramps in England. Each day they
expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy—enough to plough thousands of
acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses—in mere, useless
walking. Each day they waste between them possibly ten years of time in
staring at cell walls. They cost the country at least a pound a week a
man, and give nothing in return for it. They go round and round, on an
endless boring game of general post, which is of no use, and is not even
meant to be of any use to any person whatever. The law keeps this
process going, and we have got so accustomed to it that we are not
surprised. But it is very silly.

[¶12] Granting the futility of a tramp's life, the question is whether
anything could be done to improve it. Obviously it would be possible,
for instance, to make the casual wards a little more habitable, and this
is actually being done in some cases. During the last year some of the
casual wards have been improved—beyond recognition, if the accounts are
true—and there is talk of doing the same to all of them. But this does
not go to the heart of the problem. The problem is how to turn the tramp
from a bored, half-alive vagrant into a self-respecting human being. A
mere increase of comfort cannot do this. Even if the casual wards became
positively luxurious (they never will),[11] a tramp's life would still
be wasted. He would still be a pauper, cut off from marriage and home
life, and a dead loss to the community. What is needed is to depauperize
him, and this can only be done by finding him work—not work for the
sake of working, but work of which he can enjoy the benefit. At present,
in the great majority of casual wards, tramps do no work whatever. At
one time they were made to break stones for their food, but this was
stopped when they had broken enough stone for years ahead and put the
stone-breakers out of work. Nowadays they are kept idle, because there
is seemingly nothing for them to do. Yet there is a fairly obvious way
of making them useful, namely this: Each workhouse could run a small
farm, or at least a kitchen garden, and every able-bodied tramp who
presented himself could be made to do a sound day's work. The produce of
the farm or garden could be used for feeding the tramps, and at the
worst it would be better than the filthy diet of bread and margarine and
tea. Of course, the casual wards could never be quite self-supporting,
but they could go a long way towards it, and the rates would probably
benefit in the long run. It must be remembered that under the present
system tramps are as dead a loss to the country as they could possibly
be, for they not only do no work, but they live on a diet that is bound
to undermine their health; the system, therefore, loses lives as well as
money. A scheme which fed them decently, and made them produce at least
a part of their own food, would be worth trying.

[¶13] [11] In fairness it must be added that a few of the casual wards have
been improved recently, at least from the point of view of sleeping
accommodation. But most of them are the same as ever, and there has been
no real improvement in the food.

[¶14] -----

[¶15] It may be objected that a farm or even a garden could not be run with
casual labour. But there is no real reason why tramps should only stay a
day at each casual ward; they might stay a month or even a year, if
there were work for them to do. The constant circulation of tramps is
something quite artificial. At present a tramp is an expense to the
rates, and the object of each workhouse is therefore to push him on to
the next; hence the rule that he can stay only one night. If he returns
within a month he is penalized by being confined for a week, and, as
this is much the same as being in prison, naturally he keeps moving. But
if he represented labour to the workhouse, and the workhouse represented
sound food to him, it would be another matter. The workhouses would
develop into partially self-supporting institutions, and the tramps,
settling down here or there according as they were needed, would cease
to be tramps. They would be doing something comparatively useful,
getting decent food, and living a settled life. By degrees, if the
scheme worked well, they might even cease to be regarded as paupers, and
be able to marry and take a respectable place in society.

[¶16] This is only a rough idea, and there are some obvious objections to it.
Nevertheless, it does suggest a way of improving the status of tramps
without piling new burdens on the rates. And the solution must, in any
case, be something of this kind. For the question is, what to do with
men who are underfed and idle; and the answer—to make them grow their
own food—imposes itself automatically.

## 37. Chapter XXXVII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/37/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/37/#p-N

[¶0] A word about the sleeping accommodation open to a homeless person in
London. At present it is impossible to get a _bed_ in any non-charitable
institution in London for less than sevenpence a night. If you cannot
afford sevenpence for a bed, you must put up with one of the following
substitutes:

[¶1] 1. The Embankment. Here is the account that Paddy gave me of sleeping on
the Embankment:

[¶2] 'De whole t'ing wid de Embankment is gettin' to sleep early. You got to
be on your bench by eight o'clock, because dere ain't too many benches
and sometimes dey're all taken. And you got to try to get to sleep at
once. 'Tis too cold to sleep much after twelve o'clock, an' de police
turns you off at four in de mornin'. It ain't easy to sleep, dough, wid
dem bloody trams flyin' past your head all de time, an' dem skysigns
across de river flickin' on an' off in your eyes. De cold's cruel. Dem
as sleeps dere generally wraps demselves up in newspaper, but it don't
do much good. You'd be bloody lucky if you got t'ree hours' sleep.'

[¶3] I have slept on the Embankment and found that it corresponded to Paddy's
description. It is, however, much better than not sleeping at all, which
is the alternative if you spend the night in the streets, elsewhere than
on the Embankment. According to the law in London, you may sit down for
the night, but the police must move you on if they see you asleep; the
Embankment and one or two odd corners (there is one behind the Lyceum
Theatre) are special exceptions. This law is evidently a piece of wilful
offensiveness. Its object, so it is said, is to prevent people from
dying of exposure; but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die
of exposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris there is no such
law. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine bridges, and in
doorways, and on benches in the squares, and round the ventilating
shafts of the Metro, and even inside the Metro stations. It does no
apparent harm. No one will spend a night in the street if he can
possibly help it, and if he is going to stay out of doors he might as
well be allowed to sleep, if he can.

[¶4] 2. The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher than the
Embankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a
bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though
leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope
at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had
been there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in
such an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable than it
sounded—at any rate, better than the bare floor. There are similar
shelters in Paris, but the charge there is only twenty-five centimes (a
halfpenny) instead of twopence.

[¶5] 3. The Coffin, at fourpence a night. At the Coffin you sleep in a wooden
box, with a tarpaulin for covering. It is cold, and the worst thing
about it are the bugs, which, being enclosed in a box, you cannot
escape.

[¶6] Above this come the common lodging-houses, with charges varying between
sevenpence and one and a penny a night. The best are the Rowton Houses,
where the charge is a shilling, for which you get a cubicle to yourself,
and the use of excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown for a
'special', which is practically hotel accommodation. The Rowton Houses
are splendid buildings, and the only objection to them is the strict
discipline, with rules against cooking, card-playing, etc. Perhaps the
best advertisement for the Rowton Houses is the fact that they are
always full to overflowing. The Bruce Houses, at one and a penny, are
also excellent.

[¶7] Next best, in point of cleanliness, are the Salvation Army hostels, at
sevenpence or eightpence. They vary (I have been in one or two that were
as dirty as ordinary common lodging-houses), but most of them are clean,
and they have good bathrooms; you have to pay extra for a bath, however.
You can get a cubicle for a shilling. In the eightpenny dormitories the
beds are comfortable, but there are so many of them (as a rule at least
forty to a room), and so close together, that it is impossible to get a
quiet night. The numerous restrictions stink of prison and charity. The
Salvation Army hostels would only appeal to people who put cleanliness
before anything else.

[¶8] Beyond this there are the ordinary common lodging-houses. Whether you
pay sevenpence or a shilling, they are all stuffy and noisy, and the
beds are uniformly dirty and uncomfortable. What redeems them are their
_laissez-faire_ atmosphere and the warm home-like kitchens where one can
lounge at all hours of the day or night. They are squalid dens, but some
kind of social life is possible in them. The women's lodging-houses are
said to be generally worse than the men's, and there are very few houses
with accommodation for married couples. In fact, it is nothing out of
the common for a homeless man to sleep in one lodging-house and his wife
in another.

[¶9] At this moment at least fifteen thousand people in London are living in
common lodging-houses. For an unattached man earning two pounds a week,
or less, a lodging-house is a great convenience. He could hardly get a
furnished room so cheaply, and the lodging-house gives him free firing,
a bathroom of sorts, and plenty of society. As for the dirt, it is a
minor evil. The really bad fault of lodging-houses is that they are
places in which one pays to sleep, and in which sound sleep is
impossible. All one gets for one's money is a bed measuring five feet
six by two feet six, with a hard convex mattress and a pillow like a
block of wood, covered by one cotton counterpane and two grey, stinking
sheets. In winter there are blankets, but never enough. And this bed is
in a room where there are never less than five, and sometimes fifty or
sixty beds, a yard or two apart. Of course, no one can sleep soundly in
such circumstances. The only other places where people are herded like
this are barracks and hospitals. In the public wards of a hospital no
one even hopes to sleep well. In barracks the soldiers are crowded, but
they have good beds, and they are healthy; in a common lodging-house
nearly all the lodgers have chronic coughs, and a large number have
bladder diseases which make them get up at all hours of the night. The
result is a perpetual racket, making sleep impossible. So far as my
observation goes, no one in a lodging-house sleeps more than five hours
a night—a damnable swindle when one has paid sevenpence or more.

[¶10] Here legislation could accomplish something. At present there is all
manner of legislation by the LCC about lodging-houses, but it is not
done in the interests of the lodgers. The LCC only exert themselves to
forbid drinking, gambling, fighting, etc. etc. There is no law to say
that the beds in a lodging-house must be comfortable. This would be
quite an easy thing to enforce—much easier, for instance, than
restrictions upon gambling. The lodging-house keepers should be
compelled to provide adequate bedclothes and better mattresses, and
above all to divide their dormitories into cubicles. It does not matter
how small a cubicle is, the important thing is that a man should be
alone when he sleeps. These few changes, strictly enforced, would make
an enormous difference. It is not impossible to make a lodging-house
reasonably comfortable at the usual rates of payment. In the Croydon
municipal lodging-house, where the charge is only ninepence, there are
cubicles, good beds, chairs (a very rare luxury in lodging-houses), and
kitchens above ground instead of in a cellar. There is no reason why
every ninepenny lodging-house should not come up to this standard.

[¶11] Of course, the owners of lodging-houses would be opposed _en bloc_ to
any improvement, for their present business is an immensely profitable
one. The average house takes five or ten pounds a night, with no bad
debts (credit being strictly forbidden), and except for rent the
expenses are small. Any improvement would mean less crowding, and hence
less profit. Still, the excellent municipal lodging-house at Croydon
shows how well one _can_ be served for ninepence. A few well-directed
laws could make these conditions general. If the authorities are going
to concern themselves with lodging-houses at all, they ought to start by
making them more comfortable, not by silly restrictions that would never
be tolerated in a hotel.

## 38. Chapter XXXVIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/38/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/38/#p-N

[¶0] After we left the spike at Lower Binfield, Paddy and I earned half a
crown at weeding and sweeping in somebody's garden, stayed the night at
Cromley, and walked back to London. I parted from Paddy a day or two
later. B. lent me a final two pounds, and, as I had only another eight
days to hold out, that was the end of my troubles. My tame imbecile
turned out worse than I had expected, but not bad enough to make me wish
myself back in the spike or the Auberge de Jehan Cottard.

[¶1] Paddy set out for Portsmouth, where he had a friend, who might
conceivably find work for him, and I have never seen him since. A short
time ago I was told that he had been run over and killed, but perhaps my
informant was mixing him up with someone else. I had news of Bozo only
three days ago. He is in Wandsworth—fourteen days, for begging. I do
not suppose prison worries him very much.

[¶2] My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope
that it has been interesting in the same way as a travel diary is
interesting. I can at least say, Here is the world that awaits you if
you are ever penniless. Some day I want to explore that world more
thoroughly. I should like to know people like Mario and Paddy and Bill
the moocher, not from casual encounters, but intimately; I should like
to understand what really goes on in the souls of _plongeurs_ and tramps
and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen more
than the fringe of poverty.

[¶3] Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by
being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken
scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny,
nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the
Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a
meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.

[¶4] THE END