Down and Out in London and Paris

by Orwell, George

  anything but tea-and-two-slices."

  "But isn't it very hard to take an interest in things-

  things like stars-living this life?"

  "Screeving, you mean? Not necessarily. It don't need

  turn you into a bloody rabbit-that is, not if you set your

  mind to it."

  "It seems to have that effect on most people."

  "Of course. Look at Paddy-a tea-swilling old moocher,

  only fit to scrounge for fag-ends. That's the way most of

  them go. I despise them. But you don't need to get like that.

  If you've got any education, it don't matter to you if

  you're on the road for the rest of your life."

  "Well, I've found just the contrary," I said. "It seems to

  me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for

  nothing from that moment."

  "No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can

  live the same life, rich or poor. You 'can still keep on with

  your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself,

  'I'm a free man in here' "-he tapped his forehead-"and

  you're all right."

  Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened

  with attention. He seemed a very unusual screever, and he

  was, moreover, the first person I had heard maintain that

  poverty did not matter. I saw a good deal of him during

  the next few days, for several times it rained and he could

  not work. He told me the history of his life, and it was a

  curious one.

  The son of a bankrupt bookseller, he had gone to work

  as a house-painter at eighteen, and then served three years

  in France and India during the war. After the war he had

  found a house-painting job in Paris, and had stayed there

  several years. France suited him better than England (he

  despised the English), and he had been doing well in

  Paris, saving money, and engaged to a French girl. One

  day the girl was crushed to death under the wheels of an

  omnibus. Bozo went on the drink for a week, and then

  returned to work, rather shaky; the same morning he fell

  from a stage on which he was working, forty feet on to the

  pavement, and smashed his right foot to pulp. For some

  reason he received only sixty pounds compensation. He

  returned to England, spent his money in looking for jobs,

  tried hawking books in Middlesex Street market, then

  tried selling toys from a tray, and finally settled down as

  a screever. He had lived hand to mouth ever since, half

  starved throughout the winter, and often sleeping in the

  spike or on the Embankment. When I knew him he

  owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in, and his

  drawing materials and a few books. The clothes were the

  usual beggar's rags, but he wore a collar and tie, of

  which he was rather proud. The collar, a year or more

  old, was constantly "going" round the neck, and Bozo

  used to patch it with bits cut from the tail of his shirt so

  that the shirt had scarcely any tail left. His damaged leg

  was getting worse and would probably have to be

  amputated, and his knees, from kneeling on the stones,

  had pads of skin on them as thick as boot-soles. There

  was, clearly, no future for him but beggary and a death

  in the workhouse.

  With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor

  shame, nor self-pity. He had faced his position, and

  made a philosophy for himself. Being a beggar, he said,

  was not his fault, and he refused either to have any

  compunction about it or to let it trouble him. He was the

  enemy of society, and quite ready to take to crime if he

  saw a good opportunity. He _ refused on principle to be

  thrifty. In the summer he saved nothing, spending his

  surplus earnings on drink, as he did not care about

  women. If he was penniless when winter came on, then

  society must look after him. He was ready to extract

  every penny he could from charity, provided that he was

  not expected to say thank you for it. He avoided

  religious charities, however, for he said that it stuck in

  his throat to sing hymns for buns.

  He had various other points of honour; for instance, it

  was his boast that never in his life, even when starving,

  had he picked up a cigarette end. He considered himself

  in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he

  said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be

  ungrateful.

  He spoke French passably, and had read some of Zola's

  novels, all Shakespeare's plays, Gulliver's Travels, and a

  number of essays. He could describe his adventures in

  words that one remembered. For instance, speaking of

  funerals, he said to me:

  "Have you ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India.

  They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment I

  almost jumped out of my skin, because he'd started

  kicking. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat-

  still, it give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit

  like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and

  went off with a bang you could have heard fifty yards

  away. It fair put me against cremation."

  Or, again, apropos of his accident:

  "The doctor says to me, 'You fell on one foot, my man.

  And bloody lucky for you you didn't fall on both feet,' he

  says. 'Because if you had of fallen on both feet you'd

  have shut up like a bloody concertina, and your thigh

  bones'd be sticking out of your ears!"

  Clearly the phrase was not the doctor's but Bozo's

  own. He had a gift for phrases. He had managed to keep

  his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him

  succumb to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even

  starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for

  meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.

  He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who

  does not so much disbelieve in God as personally

  dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that

  human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said,

  when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him

  to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were

  probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious

  theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because

  the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars,

  with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far

  poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on

  earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence,

  on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought

  cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very

  exceptional man.

  XXXI

  THE charge at Bozo's lodging-house was ninepence a

  night. It was a large, crowded place, with accommodation

  for five hundred men, and a well-known rendezvous of

  tramps, beggars and petty criminals. All races, even black

  and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were

  Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad

  Urdu he addressed me as "tum"-a thing to make one

  s
hudder, if it had been in India. We had got below the

  range of colour prejudice. One had glimpses of curious

  lives. Old "Grandpa," a tramp of seventy who made his

  living, or a great part of it, by collecting cigarette ends and

  selling the tobacco at threepence an ounce. " The Doctor"-

  he was a real doctor, who had been struck off the register

  for some offence, and besides selling newspapers gave

  medical advice at a few pence a time. A little Chittagonian

  lascar, barefoot and starving, who had deserted his ship

  and wandered for days through London, so

  vague and helpless that he did not even know the name of

  the city he was in-he thought it was Liverpool, until I told

  him. A begging-letter writer, a friend of Bozo's, who

  wrote pathetic appeals for aid to pay for his wife's funeral,

  and, when a letter had taken effect, blew himself out with

  huge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He was a

  nasty, hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that,

  like most swindlers, he believed a great part of his own

  lies. The lodging-house was an Alsatia for types like

  these.

  While I was with Bozo he taught me something about

  the technique of London begging. There is more in it than

  one might suppose. Beggars vary greatly, and there is a

  sharp social line between those who merely cadge and

  those who attempt to give some value for money. The

  amounts that one can earn by the different "gags" also

  vary. The stories in the Sunday papers about beggars who

  die with two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers are,

  of course, lies; but the better-class beggars do have runs of

  luck, when they earn a living wage for weeks at a time.

  The most prosperous beggars are street acrobats and street

  photographers. On a good pitch-a theatre queue, for

  instance-a street acrobat will often earn five pounds a

  week. Street photographers can earn about the same, but

  they are dependent on fine weather. They have a cunning

  dodge to stimulate trade. When they see a likely victim

  approaching, one of them runs behind the camera and

  pretends to take a photograph. Then as the victim reaches

  them, they exclaim:

  "There y'are, Sir, took yer photo lovely. That'll be a

  bob."

  "But I never asked you to take it," protests the victim.

  "What, you didn't want it took? Why, we thought

  you signalled with your 'and. Well, there's a plate wasted!

  That's cost us sixpence, that 'as."

  At this the victim usually takes pity and says he will

  have the photo after all. The photographers examine the

  plate and say that it is spoiled, and that they will take a

  fresh one free of charge. Of course, they have not really

  taken the first photo; and so, if the victim refuses, they

  waste nothing.

  Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists

  rather than beggars. An organ-grinder named Shorty, a

  friend of Bozo's, told me all about his trade. He and his

  mate "worked" the coffee-shops and public-houses round

  Whitechapel and the Commercial Road. It is a mistake to

  think that organ-grinders earn their living in the street;

  nine-tenths of their money is taken in coffee-shops and

  pubs-only the cheap pubs, for they are not allowed into

  the good-class ones. Shorty's procedure was to stop

  outside a pub and play one tune, after which his mate,

  who had a wooden leg and could excite compassion, went

  in and passed round the hat. It was a point of honour

  with Shorty always to play another tune after receiving

  the "drop"an encore, as it were; the idea being that he

  was a genuine entertainer and not merely paid to go

  away. He and his mate took two or three pounds a week

  between them, but, as they had to pay fifteen shillings a

  week for the hire of the organ, they only averaged a

  pound a week each. They were on the streets from eight

  in the morning till ten at night, and later on Saturdays.

  Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes

  not. Bozo introduced me to one who was a "real" artist-

  that is, he had studied art in Paris and submitted

  pictures to the Salon in his day. His line was copies of

  Old Masters, which he did marvellously,

  considering that he was drawing on stone. He told me

  how he began as a screever:

  "My wife and kids were starving. I was walking home

  late at night, with a lot of drawings I'd been taking round

  the dealers, and wondering how the devil to raise a bob

  or two. Then, in the Strand, I saw a fellow kneeling on

  the pavement drawing, and people giving him pennies. As

  I came past he got up and went into a pub. 'Damn it,' I

  thought, 'if he can make money at that, so can L' So on

  the impulse I knelt down and began drawing with his

  chalks. Heaven knows how I came to do it; I must have

  been lightheaded with hunger. The curious thing was

  that I'd never used pastels before; I had to learn the

  technique as I went along. Well, people began to stop and

  say that my drawing wasn't bad, and they gave me nine-

  pence between them. At this moment the other fellow

  came out of the pub. 'What in are you doing on my

  pitch?' he said. I explained that I was hungry and had to

  earn something. 'Oh,' said he, 'come and have a pint with

  me.' So I had a pint, and since that day I've been a

  screever. I make a pound a week. You can't keep six kids

  on a pound a week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking

  in sewing.

  "The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next

  worst is the interference you have to put up with. At

  first, not knowing any better, I used sometimes to copy a

  nude on the pavement. The first I did was outside St.

  Martin's-in-the-Fields church. A fellow in blackI suppose

  he was a churchwarden or somethingcame out in a

  tearing rage. 'Do you think we can have that obscenity

  outside God's holy house?' he cried. So I had to wash it

  out. It was a copy of Botticelli's Venus. Another time I

  copied the same picture on the Embankment. A

  policeman passing looked at it, and

  then, without a word, walked on to it and rubbed it out

  with his great flat feet."

  Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the

  time when I was with him there had been a case of

  "immoral conduct" in Hyde Park, in which the police had

  behaved rather badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde

  Park with policemen concealed in the trees, and the

  legend, "Puzzle, find the policemen." I pointed out to him

  how much more telling it would be to put, "Puzzle, find

  the immoral conduct," but Bozo would not hear of it. He

  said that any policeman who saw it would move him on,

  and he would lose his pitch for good.

  Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or

  sell matches, or bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few

  grains of lavender-called, euphemistically, perfume. All

  these people are frankly beggars, expl
oiting an appearance

  of misery, and none of them takes on an average more

  than half a crown a day. The reason why they have to

  pretend to sell matches and so forth instead of begging

  outright is that this is demanded by the absurd English

  laws about begging. As the law now stands, if you

  approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call

  a policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if

  you make the air hideous by droning "Nearer, my God, to

  Thee," or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or

  stand about with a tray of matches-in short, if you make a

  nuisance of yourself-you are held to be following a

  legitimate trade and not begging. Match-selling and street-

  singing are simply legalised crimes. Not profitable crimes,

  however; there is not a singer or match-seller in London

  who can be sure of £5o a year-a poor return for standing

  eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars

  grazing your backside.

  It is worth saying something about the social position

  of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and

  found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot

  help being struck by the curious attitude that society

  takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is

  some essential difference between beggars and ordinary

  "working" men. They are a race apart, outcasts, like

  criminals and prostitutes. Working men "work," beggars

  do not "work"; they are parasites, worthless in their very

  nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not

  "earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic

  "earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated

  because we live in a humane age, but essentially

  despicable.

  Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no

  essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that

  of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it

  is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by

  swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up

  figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all

  weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis,

  etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course -

  but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as

  a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others.

  He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent

  medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday