George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

to' bury their money. If they intend to smuggle at ah 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.

XXXV

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 any-

one sat down near her she sniffed and moved farther off.

"Where you bound for, missis?" one of the tramps

called to her.

The woman sniffed and looked into the distance.

"Come on, missis," he said, "cheer up. Be chummy.

We're all in the same boat 'ere."

"Thank you," said the woman bitterly, "when I want to

get mixed up with a set of

tramps , I'll let you know."

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.

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:

"Which of you is Blank?" (I forget what name I had

given.)

"Me, sir."

"So you are a journalist?"

"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:

"Then you are a gentleman?" "I suppose so."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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