---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 33 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/33/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 33. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/33/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

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> 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]

## 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.