Read Down and Out in Paris and London Online
Authors: George Orwell
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Poor Bel a was young, she didn’t believe
That the world is hard and men deceive,
O unhappy Bel a!
She said, ‘My man will do what’s just,
He’ll marry me now, because he must’;
Her heart was full of loving trust
In a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
She went to his house; that dirty skunk
Had packed his bags and done a bunk,
O unhappy Bel a!
Her landlady said, ‘Get out, you whore,
I won’t have your sort a-darkening my door.’
Poor Bel a was put to affliction sore
By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
All night she tramped the cruel snows,
Down and Out in Paris and London
What she must have suffered nobody knows,
O unhappy Bel a!
And when the morning dawned so red,
Alas, alas, poor Bel a was dead,
Sent so young to her lonely bed
By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
So thus, you see, do what you wil ,
The fruits of sin are suffering stil ,
O unhappy Bel a!
As into the grave they laid her low,
The men said, ‘Alas, but life is so,’
But the women chanted, sweet and low,
‘It’s all the men, the dirty bastards!’
Written by a woman, perhaps.
William and Fred, the singers of this song, were thor-
ough scallywags, the sort of men who get tramps a bad
name. They happened to know that the Tramp Major at
Cromley had a stock of old clothes, which were to be given
at need to casuals. Before going in William and Fred took
off their boots, ripped the seams and cut pieces off the soles,
more or less ruining them. Then they applied for two pairs
of boots, and the Tramp Major, seeing how bad their boots
were, gave them almost new pairs. William and Fred were
scarcely outside the spike in the morning before they had
sold these boots for one and ninepence. It seemed to them
quite worth while, for one and ninepence, to make their
own boots practically unwearable.
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Leaving the spike, we all started southward, a long
slouching procession, for Lower Binfield and Ide Hill. On
the way there was a fight between two of the tramps. They
had quarrelled overnight (there was some silly CASUS BEL-
LI about one saying to the other, ‘Bull shit’, which was taken
for Bolshevik—a deadly insult), and they fought it out in a
field. A dozen of us stayed to watch them. The scene sticks
in my mind for one thing—the man who was beaten going
down, and his cap falling off and showing that his hair was
quite white. After that some of us intervened and stopped
the fight. Paddy had meanwhile been making inquiries, and
found that the real cause of the quarrel was, as usual, a few
pennyworth of food.
We got to Lower Binfield quite early, and Paddy filled in
the time by asking for work at back doors. At one house he
was given some boxes to chop up for firewood, and, say-
ing he had a mate outside, he brought me in and we did
the work together. When it was done the householder told
the maid to take us out a cup of tea. I remember the terri-
fied way in which she brought it out, and then, losing her
courage, set the cups down on the path and bolted back to
the house, shutting herself in the kitchen. So dreadful is the
name of ‘tramp’. They paid us sixpence each, and we bought
a threepenny loaf and half an ounce of tobacco, leaving five-
pence.
Paddy thought it wiser to bury our fivepence, for the
Tramp Major at Lower Binfield was renowned as a tyrant
and might refuse to admit us if we had any money at all. It
is quite a common practice of tramps to bury their money.
Down and Out in Paris and London
If they intend to smuggle at all 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 reg-
ular 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 morn-
ing 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.
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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 fat-
tish, 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 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 other soul; a small, blinkered, femi-
nine soul, that had learned absolutely nothing from years
0
Down and Out in Paris and London
on the road. She was, no doubt, a respectable widow wom-
an, 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 prac-
tice; 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 arti-
cles, 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 giv-
en.)‘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 there-
after he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with
a kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the bath-
room he actually gave me a clean towel to myself—an
unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word ‘gentleman’ in
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1
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 short-
coming 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 morn-
ing. 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 inspec-
tion, 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 al-
ready, 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
Down and Out in Paris and London
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 Hotel X. The paupers said that they habitually
gorged to the bursting-point on Sunday and were under-
fed the rest of the week. After dinner the cook set me to do
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the washing up, and told me to throw away the food that
remained. The wastage was astonishing and, in the circum-
stances, appalling. Half-eateh 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 bel-
lies 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.
At three I went back to the spike. The tramps had been
sitting there since eight, with hardly room to move an el-
bow, 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.
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 col-
lar and tie and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of