George Orwell - The Complete Works

Youths’ voices from the rear: “Why can’t he —— open before five? We’re starving for our —— tea! Ram the —— door in!” etc., etc.

Mr. Wilkins: “Get out! Get out, the lot of you! Or by God not one of you comes in this morning!”

Girls’ voices from the rear: “Mis-ter Wil-kins! Mis-ter Wil-kins! Be a sport and let us in! I’ll give y’a kiss all free for nothing. Be a sport now!” etc., etc.

Mr. Wilkins: “Get on out of it! We don’t open before five, and you know it.” (Slams the door.)

Mrs. McElligot: “Oh, holy Jesus, if dis ain’t de longest ten minutes o’ de whole bloody night! Well, I’ll give me poor ole legs a rest, anyway.” (Squats on her heels coal-miner-fashion. Many others do the same.)

Ginger: “ ’Oo’s got a ’alfpenny? I’m ripe to go fifty-fifty on a doughnut.”

Youths’ voices (imitating military music, then singing):

“ ‘——!’ was all the band could play;

‘——! ——!’ And the same to you!”

Dorothy (to Mrs. McElligot): “Look at us all! Just look at us! What clothes! What faces!”

Mrs. Bendigo: “You’re no Greta Garbo yourself, if you don’t mind my mentioning it.”

Mrs. Wayne: “Well, now, the time do seem to pass slowly when you’re waiting for a nice cup of tea, don’t it now?”

Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “For our soul is brought low, even unto the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the ground!’

Charlie: “Kippers! Perishing piles of ’em! I can smell ’em through the perishing glass.”

Ginger (singing):

“But I’m dan-cing with tears—in my eyes—

Cos the girl—in my arms—isn’t you-o-ou!”

(Much time passes. Five strikes. Intolerable ages seem to pass. Then the door is suddenly wrenched open and the people stampede in to fight for the corner seats. Almost swooning in the hot air, they fling themselves down and sprawl across the tables, drinking in the heat and the smell of food through all their pores.)

Mr. Wilkins: “Now then, all! You know the rules, I s’pose. No hokey-pokey this morning! Sleep till seven if you like, but if I see any man asleep after that, out he goes on his neck. Get busy with that tea, girls!”

A deafening chorus of yells: “Two teas ’ere! Large tea and a doughnut between us four! Kippers! Mis-ter Wil-kins! ’Ow much them sausages? Two slices! Mis-ter Wil-kins! Got any fag papers? Kipp-ers!” etc., etc.

Mr. Wilkins: “Shut up, shut up! Stop that hollering or I don’t serve any of you.”

Mrs. McElligot: “D’you feel de blood runnin’ back into your toes, dearie?”

Mrs. Wayne: “He do speak rough to you, don’t he? Not what I’d call a reely gentlemanly kind of man.”

Snouter: “This is —— Starvation Corner, this is. Cripes! Couldn’t I do a couple of them sausages!”

The tarts (in chorus): “Kippers ’ere! ’Urry up with them kippers! Mis-ter Wil-kins! Kippers all round! And a doughnut!”

Charlie: “Not ’alf! Got to fill up on the smell of ’em this morning. Sooner be ’ere than on the perishing Square, all the same.”

Ginger: “ ’Ere, Deafie! You’ve ’ad your ’alf! Gimme me that bleeding cup.”

Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with joy! . . .”

Mrs. McElligot: “Begod I’m half asleep already. It’s de heat o’ de room as does it.”

Mr. Wilkins: “Stop that singing there! You know the rules.”

The tarts (in chorus): “Kipp-ers!”

Snouter: “—— doughnuts! Cold prog! It turns my belly sick.”

Daddy: “Even the tea they give you ain’t no more than water with a bit of dust in it.” (Belches.)

Charlie: “Bes’ thing—’ave a bit of shut-eye and forget about it. Dream about perishing cut off the joint and two veg. Less get our ’eads on the table and pack up comfortable.”

Mrs. McElligot: “Lean up agen me shoulder, dearie. I’ve got more flesh on me bones’n what you have.”

Ginger: “I’d give a tanner for a bleeding fag, if ’ad a bleeding tanner.”

Charlie: “Pack up. Get your ’ead agenst mine, Snouter. That’s right. Jesus, won’t I perishing sleep!”

(A dish of smoking kippers is borne past to the tarts’ table.)

Snouter (drowsily): “More —— kippers. Wonder ’ow many times she’s bin on ’er back to pay for that lot.”

Mrs. McElligot (half asleep): “ ’Twas a pity, ’twas a real pity, when Michael went off on his jack an’ left me wid de bloody baby an’ all. . . .”

Mrs. Bendigo (furiously, following the dish of kippers with accusing finger): “Look at that, girls! Look at that! Kippers! Don’t it make you bloody wild? We don’t get kippers for breakfast, do we, girls? Bloody tarts swallering down kippers as fast as they can turn ’em out of the pan, and us ’ere with a cup of tea between four of us and lucky to get that! Kippers!”

Mr. Tallboys (stage curate-wise): “The wages of sin is kippers.”

Ginger: “Don’t breathe in my face, Deafie. I can’t bleeding stand it.”

Charlie (in his sleep): “Charles-Wisdom-drunk-and-incapable-drunk?-yes-six-shillings-move-on-next!

Dorothy (on Mrs. McElligot’s bosom): “Oh, joy, joy!” (They are asleep.)

II

And so it goes on.

Dorothy endured this life for ten days—to be exact, nine days and ten nights. It was hard to see what else she could do. Her father, seemingly, had abandoned her altogether, and though she had friends in London who would readily have helped her, she did not feel that she could face them after what had happened, or what was supposed to have happened. And she dared not apply to organised charity because it would almost certainly lead to the discovery of her name, and hence, perhaps, to a fresh hullabaloo about the “Rector’s Daughter.”

So she stayed in London, and became one of that curious tribe, rare but never quite extinct—the tribe of women who are penniless and homeless, but who make such desperate efforts to hide it that they very nearly succeed; women who wash their faces at drinking fountains in the cold of the dawn, and carefully uncrumple their clothes after sleepless nights, and carry themselves with an air of reserve and decency, so that only their faces, pale beneath sunburn, tell you for certain that they are destitute. It was not in her to become a hardened beggar like most of the people about her. Her first twenty-four hours on the Square she spent without any food whatever, except for the cup of tea that she had had overnight and a third of a cup more that she had had at Wilkins’s café in the morning. But in the evening, made desperate by hunger and the others’ example, she walked up to a strange woman, mastered her voice with an effort, and said: “Please, Madam, could you give me twopence? I have had nothing to eat since yesterday.” The woman stared, but she opened her purse and gave Dorothy threepence. Dorothy did not know it, but her educated accent, which had made it impossible to get work as a servant, was an invaluable asset to her as a beggar.

After that she found that it was really very easy to beg the daily shilling or so that was needed to keep her alive. And yet she never begged—it seemed to her that actually she could not do it—except when hunger was past bearing or when she had got to lay in the precious penny that was the passport to Wilkins’s café in the morning. With Nobby, on the way to the hopfields, she had begged without fear or scruple. But it had been different then; she had not known what she was doing. Now, it was only under the spur of actual hunger that she could screw her courage to the point, and ask for a few coppers from some women whose face looked friendly. It was always women that she begged from, of course. She did once try begging from a man—but only once.