George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

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.

"Want a kip? That'll be a 'og, guv'nor."

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.

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 a 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:

"Shut up! Oh, for Christ's ------

sake shut up!"

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.

I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward,

finally going into a coffeeshop on Tower Hill. Anfinally

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.

"Could I have some tea and bread and butter?" I said to

the girl.

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!"

On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying

"Pocketing the sugar not allowed," and beneath it some

poetic customer had written:

He that takes away the sugar,

Shall be called a dirty---

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.

XXV

THE eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After

my bad experience in the Waterloo Road'. I moved

eastward, and spent the next night in a lodginghouse in

Pennyfields. This was a typical lodging-house, like scores

of others in London. It had accommo-

1 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

.

dation 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.

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 chuckerout.

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.

Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners.

Till meeting them I had never realised that there are

people in England who live on nothing but the oldage

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:

"Well, there's ninepence a night for yer kip-that's five

an' threepence a week. Then there's threepence on

Saturday for a shave-that's five an' six. Then say you 'as