Down and Out in Paris and London (28 page)

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.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

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.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

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

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

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

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

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