The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (62 page)

All this strange, comfortless life Dorothy took utterly for granted–only dimly aware, if at all, that the other, unremembered life that lay behind her had been in some way different from this. After only a couple of days she had ceased to wonder any longer about her queer predicament. She accepted everything–accepted the dirt and hunger and fatigue, the endless trailing to and fro, the hot, dusty days and the sleepless, shivering nights. She was, in any
case, far too tired to think. By the afternoon of the second day they were all desperately, overwhelmingly tired, except Nobby, whom nothing could tire. Even the fact that soon after they set out a nail began to work its way through the sole of his boot hardly seemed to trouble him. There were periods of an hour at a time when Dorothy seemed almost to be sleeping as she walked. She had a burden to carry now, for as the two men were already loaded and Flo steadfastly refused to carry anything, Dorothy had volunteered to carry the sack that held the stolen potatoes. They generally had ten pounds or so of potatoes in reserve. Dorothy slung the sack over her shoulder as Nobby and Charlie did with their bundles, but the string cut into her like a saw and the sack bumped against her hip and chafed it so that finally it began to bleed. Her wretched, flimsy shoes had begun to go to pieces from the very beginning. On the second day the heel of her right shoe came off and left her hobbling; but Nobby, expert in such matters, advised her to tear the heel off the other shoe and walk flatfooted. The result was a fiery pain down her shins when she walked uphill, and a feeling as though the soles of her feet had been hammered with an iron bar.

But Flo and Charlie were in a much worse case than she. They were not so much exhausted as amazed and scandalized by the distances they were expected to walk. Walking twenty miles in a day was a thing they had never heard of till now. They were cockneys born and bred, and though they had had several months of destitution in London, neither of them had ever been on the road before. Charlie, till fairly recently, had been in good employment, and Flo, too, had had a good home until she had been seduced and turned out of doors to live on the streets. They had fallen in with Nobby in Trafalgar Square and agreed to come hop-picking with him, imagining that it would be a bit of a lark. Of course, having been ‘on the beach’ a comparatively short time, they looked down on Nobby and Dorothy. They valued Nobby’s knowledge of the road and his boldness in thieving, but he was their social inferior–that was their attitude. And as for Dorothy, they scarcely even deigned to look at her after her half-crown came to an end.

Even on the second day their courage was failing. They lagged behind, grumbled incessantly, and demanded more than their fair share of food. By the third day it was almost impossible to keep them on the road at all. They were pining to be back in London, and had long ceased to care whether they ever got to the hopfields or not; all they wanted to do was to sprawl in any comfortable halting place they could find, and, when there was any food left, devour endless snacks. After every halt there was a tedious argument before they could be got to their feet again.

‘Come on, blokes!’ Nobby would say. ‘Pack your peter up, Charlie. Time we was getting off.’

‘Oh, — getting off!’ Charlie would answer morosely.

‘Well, we can’t skipper here, can we? We said we was going to hike as far as Sevenoaks tonight, didn’t we?’

‘Oh, — Sevenoaks! Sevenoaks or any other bleeding place–it don’t make any bleeding difference to me.’

‘But — it! We want to get a job tomorrow, don’t we? And we got to get down among the farms ‘fore we can start looking for one.’

‘Oh, — the farms! I wish I’d never ’eard of a —’op! I wasn’t brought up to this–’iking and skippering like you was. I’m fed up; that’s what I am — fed up.’

‘If this is bloody ’opping,’ Flo would chime in, ‘I’ve ’ad my bloody bellyful of it already.’

Nobby gave Dorothy his private opinion that Flo and Charlie would probably ‘jack off’ if they got the chance of a lift back to London. But as for Nobby, nothing disheartened him or ruffled his good temper, not even when the nail in his boot was at its worst and his filthy remnant of a sock was dark with blood. By the third day the nail had worn a permanent hole in his foot, and Nobby had to halt once in a mile to hammer it down.

‘’Scuse me, kid,’ he would say; ‘got to attend to my bloody hoof again. This nail’s a mulligatawny.’

He would search for a round stone, squat in the ditch and carefully hammer the nail down.

‘There!’ he would say optimistically, feeling the place with his thumb. ‘
That
b—’s in his grave!’

The epitaph should have been Resurgam, however. The nail invariably worked its way up again within a quarter of an hour.

Nobby had tried to make love to Dorothy, of course, and, when she repulsed him, bore her no grudge. He had that happy temperament that is incapable of taking its own reverses very seriously. He was always debonair, always singing in a lusty baritone voice–his three favourite songs were: ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘’Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse’ (to the tune of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’), and ‘“—!” was all the band could play’, given with lively renderings of military music. He was twenty-six years old and was a widower, and had been successively a seller of newspapers, a petty thief, a Borstal boy, a soldier, a burglar, and a tramp. These facts, however, you had to piece together for yourself, for he was not equal to giving a consecutive account of his life. His conversation was studded with casual picturesque memories–the six months he had served in a line regiment before he was invalided out with a damaged eye, the loathsomeness of the skilly in Holloway, his childhood in the Deptford gutters, the death of his wife, aged eighteen, in childbirth, when he was twenty, the horrible suppleness of the Borstal canes, the dull boom of the nitro-glycerine, blowing in the safe door at Woodward’s boot and shoe factory, where Nobby had cleared a hundred and twenty-five pounds and spent it in three weeks.

On the afternoon of the third day they reached the fringe of the hop country, and began to meet discouraged people, mostly tramps, trailing back to London with the news that there was nothing doing–hops were bad and the price was low, and the gypsies and ‘home pickers’ had collared all the jobs. At this Flo and Charlie gave up hope altogether, but by an adroit mixture of bullying and persuasion Nobby managed to drive them a few miles farther. In a little village called Wale they fell in with an old Irishwoman–Mrs McElligot was her
name–who had just been given a job at a neighbouring hopfield, and they swapped some of their stolen apples for a piece of meat she had ‘bummed’ earlier in the day. She gave them some useful hints about hop-picking and about what farms to try. They were all sprawling on the village green, tired out, opposite a little general shop with some newspaper posters outside.

‘You’d best go down’n have a try at Chalmers’s,’ Mrs McElligot advised them in her base Dublin accent. ‘Dat’s a bit above five mile from here. I’ve heard tell as Chalmers wants a dozen pickers still. I daresay he’d give y’a job if you gets dere early enough.’

‘Five miles! Cripes! Ain’t there none nearer’n that?’ grumbled Charlie.

‘Well, dere’s Norman’s. I got a job at Norman’s meself–I’m startin’ tomorrow morning’. But ’twouldn’t be no use for you to try at Norman’s. He ain’t takin’ on none but home pickers, an’ dey say as he’s goin’ to let half his hops blow.’

‘What’s home pickers?’ said Nobby.

‘Why, dem as has got homes o’ deir own. Eider you got to live in de neighbourhood, or else de farmer’s got to give y’a hut to sleep in. Dat’s de law nowadays. In de ole days when you come down hoppin’, you kipped in a stable an’ dere was no questions asked. But dem bloody interferin’ gets of a Labour Government brought in a law to say as no pickers was to be taken on widout de farmer had proper accommodation for ’em. So Norman only takes on folks as has got homes o’ deir own.’

‘Well, you ain’t got a home of your own, have you?’

‘No bloody fear! But Norman t’inks I have. I kidded’m I was stayin’ in a cottage near by. Between you an’ me, I’m skipperin’ in a cow byre. ’Tain’t so bad except for de stink o’ de muck, but you got to be out be five in de mornin’, else de cowmen ’ud catch you.’

‘We ain’t got no experience of hopping,’ Nobby said. ‘I wouldn’t know a bloody hop if I saw one. Best to let on you’re an old hand when you go up for a job, eh?’

‘Hell! Hops don’t need no experience. Tear ’em off an’ fling ’em into de bin. Dat’s all der is to it, wid hops.’

Dorothy was nearly asleep. She heard the others talking desultorily, first about hop-picking, then about some story in the newspapers of a girl who had disappeared from home. Flo and Charlie had been reading the posters on the shop-front opposite; and this had revived them somewhat, because the posters reminded them of London and its joys. The missing girl, in whose fate they seemed to be rather interested, was spoken of as ‘The Rector’s Daughter’.

‘J’a see that one, Flo?’ said Charlie, reading a poster aloud with intense relish: ‘“Secret Love Life of Rector’s Daughter. Startling Revelations.” Coo! Wish I ’ad a penny to ’ave a read of that!’

‘Oh? What’s ’t all about, then?’

‘What? Didn’t j’a read about it? Papers ’as bin full of it. Rector’s Daughter this and Rector’s Daughter that–wasn’t ’alf smutty, some of it, too.’

‘She’s bit of hot stuff, the ole Rector’s Daughter,’ said Nobby reflectively, lying on his back. ‘Wish she was here now! I’d know what to do
with her, all right, I would.’

‘’Twas a kid run away from home,’ put in Mrs McElligot. ‘She was carryin’ on wid a man twenty year older’n herself, an’ now she’s disappeared an’ dey’re searchin’ for her high an’ low.’

‘Jacked off in the middle of the night in a motor-car with no clo’es on ’cep’’er nightdress,’ said Charlie appreciatively. ‘The ’ole village sore ’em go.’

‘Dere’s some t’ink as he’s took her abroad an’ sold her to one o’ dem flash cat-houses in Parrus,’ added Mrs McElligot.

‘No clo’es on ‘cep’’er nightdress? Dirty tart she must ’a been!’

The conversation might have proceeded to further details, but at this moment Dorothy interrupted it. What they were saying had roused a faint curiosity in her. She realized that she did not know the meaning of the word ‘Rector’. She sat up and asked Nobby:

‘What is a Rector?’

‘Rector? Why, a sky-pilot–parson bloke. Bloke that preaches and gives out the hymns and that in church. We passed one of ’em yesterday–riding a green bicycle and had his collar on back to front. A priest–clergyman.
You
know.’

‘Oh…. Yes, I think so.’

‘Priests! Bloody ole getsies dey are too, some o’ dem,’ said Mrs McElligot reminiscently.

Dorothy was left not much the wiser. What Nobby had said did enlighten her a little, but only a very little. The whole train of thought connected with ‘church’ and ‘clergyman’ was strangely vague and blurred in her mind. It was one of the gaps–there was a number of such gaps–in the mysterious knowledge that she had brought with her out of the past.

That was their third night on the road. When it was dark they slipped into a spinney as usual to ‘skipper’, and a little after midnight it began to pelt with rain. They spent a miserable hour stumbling to and fro in the darkness, trying to find a place to shelter, and finally found a hay-stack, where they huddled themselves on the lee side till it was light enough to see. Flo blubbered throughout the night in the most intolerable manner, and by the morning she was in a state of semi-collapse. Her silly fat face, washed clean by rain and tears, looked like a bladder of lard, if one can imagine a bladder of lard contorted with self-pity. Nobby rooted about under the hedge until he had collected an armful of partially dry sticks, and then managed to get a fire going and boil some tea as usual. There was no weather so bad that Nobby could not produce a can of tea. He carried, among other things, some pieces of old motor tyre that would make a flare when the wood was wet, and he even possessed the art, known only to a few cognoscenti among tramps, of getting water to boil over a candle.

Everyone’s limbs had stiffened after the horrible night, and Flo declared herself unable to walk a step farther. Charlie backed her up. So, as the other two refused to move, Dorothy and Nobby went on to Chalmers’s farm, arranging a rendezvous where they should meet when they had tried their luck. They got to Chalmers’s, five miles away, found their way through vast orchards to the hop-fields, and were told that the overseer ‘would be along
presently’. So they waited four hours on the edge of the plantation, with the sun drying their clothes on their backs, watching the hop-pickers at work. It was a scene somehow peaceful and alluring. The hop bines, tall climbing plants like runner beans enormously magnified, grew in green leafy lanes, with the hops dangling from them in pale green bunches like gigantic grapes. When the wind stirred them they shook forth a fresh, bitter scent of sulphur and cool beer. In each lane of bines a family of sunburnt people were shredding the hops into sacking bins, and singing as they worked; and presently a hooter sounded and they knocked off to boil cans of tea over crackling fires of hop bines. Dorothy envied them greatly. How happy they looked, sitting round the fires with their cans of tea and their hunks of bread and bacon, in the smell of hops and wood smoke! She pined for such a job–however, for the present there was nothing doing. At about one o’clock the overseer arrived and told them that he had no jobs for them, so they trailed back to the road, only avenging themselves on Chalmers’s farm by stealing a dozen apples as they went.

When they reached their rendezvous, Flo and Charlie had vanished. Of course they searched for them, but, equally of course, they knew very well what had happened. Indeed, it was perfectly obvious. Flo had made eyes at some passing lorry driver, who had given the two of them a lift back to London for the chance of a good cuddle on the way. Worse yet, they had stolen both bundles. Dorothy and Nobby had not a scrap of food left, not a crust of bread nor a potato nor a pinch of tea, no bedding, and not even a snuff-tin in which to cook anything they could cadge or steal–nothing, in fact, except the clothes they stood up in.