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.
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
belli 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, saying 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 terrified 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 fivepence.
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. 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 on
e
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
the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing and,
in the circumstances, appalling. Half-eaten 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 bellies 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 elbow, 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 collar and tie and was on the
road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little
aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a
free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and
carried a copy of Quentin Durward in his pocket. He told
me that he never went into a spike unless driven there by
hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in
preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day
and slept in bathing-huts for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticised the
system that makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day
in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging
the police. He spoke of his own case-six months at the
public charge for want of a few pounds' worth of tools.
It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the
workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that
he changed his tone instantly. I saw that I had awakened
the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman.
Though he had been famished along with the others, he
at once saw reasons why the food should have been
thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He
admonished me quite severely.
"They have to do it," he said. "If they made these
places too comfortable, you'd have all the scum of the
country flocking into them. It's only the bad food as
keeps all that scum away. These here tramps are too
lazy to work, that's all that's wrong with them. You
don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum."
I produced, arguments to prove him wrong, but he
would not listen. He kept repeating:
"You don't want to have any pity on these here
tramps-scum, they are. You don't want to judge them
by the same standards as men like you and me. They're
scum, just Scum."
It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he
disassociated himself from "these here tramps." He had
been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he
seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are
quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps.
They are like the trippers who say such cutting things
about trippers.
Three hours dragged by. At six supper arrived, and
turned out to be quite uneatable; the bread, tough enough
in the morning (it had been cut into slices on Saturday
night), was now as hard as ship's biscuit. Luckily it was
spread with dripping, and we scraped the dripping off and
ate that alone, which was better than nothing. At a quarter-
past six we were sent to bed. New tramps were arriving,
and in order not to mix the tramps of different days (for
fear of infectious diseases) the new men were put in the
cells and we in dormitories. Our dormitory was a barn-like
room with thirty beds close together, and a tub to serve as
a common chamber-pot. It stank abominably, and the
older men coughed and got up all night. But being so
many together kept the room
warm, and we had some
sleep.
We dispersed at ten in the morning, after a fresh
medical inspection, with a hunk of bread and cheese for
our midday dinner. William and Fred, strong in the
possession of a shilling, impaled their bread on the spike
railings-as a protest, they said. This was the second spike
in Kent that they had made too hot to hold them, and
they thought it a great joke. They were cheerful souls,
for tramps. The imbecile (there is an imbecile in every
collection of tramps) said that he was too tired to walk
and clung to the railings, until the Tramp Major had to
dislodge him and start him with a kick, Paddy and I
turned north, for London.
Most of the others were going on to Ide Hill, said to be
about the worst spike in England.'
Once again it was jolly autumn weather, and the road
was quiet, with few cars passing. The air was like sweet-
briar after the spike's mingled stenches of sweat, soap
and drains. We two seemed the only tramps on the road.
Then I heard a hurried step behind us, and someone
calling. It was little Scotty, the Glasgow tramp, who had
run after us panting. He produced a rusty tin from his
'pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like someone repaying
an obligation.
"Here y'are, mate," he said cordially. "I owe you some
fag ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp
Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come
out this morning. One good turn deserves another-here
y'are."
And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette
ends into my hand.
XXXVI
I WANT to set down some general remarks about
tramps. When one comes to think of it, tramps are a
queer product and worth thinking over. It is queer that a
tribe of men, tens of thousands in number, should be
marching up and down England like so many Wandering
Jews. But though the case obviously wants considering,
one cannot even start to consider it until one has got rid
of certain prejudices. These prejudices are rooted in the
idea that every tramp, ipso facto, is a blackguard. In
childhood we have been taught that tramps are
blackguards, and consequently there exists in our minds a
sort of ideal or typical tramp -a repulsive, rather
dangerous creature, who would
1 I have been in it since, and it is not so bad.
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 22