Down and Out in London and Paris

by Orwell, George

  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.