---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 35 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/35/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 35. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/35/"
---

# 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]

## 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.