George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

learned just that one picture by rule of thumb, like you

learn to put a puzzle together. There's a lot of that sort

about here. They come pinching my ideas sometimes; but

I don't care; the silly s can't think of anything for

themselves, so I'm always ahead of them. The whole

thing with cartoons is being up to date. Once a child got

its head stuck in the railings of Chelsea Bridge. Well, I

heard about it, and my cartoon was on the pavement

before they'd got the child's head out of the railings.

Prompt, I am."

Bozo seemed an interesting man, and I was anxious to see

more of him. That evening I went down to the

Embankment to meet him, as he had arranged to take

Paddy and myself to a lodging-house south of the river.

Bozo washed his pictures off the pavement and counted

his takings-it was about sixteen shillings, of which he said

twelve or thirteen would be profit. We

walked down into Lambeth. Bozo limped slowly, with a

queer crablike gait, half sideways, dragging his smashed

foot behind him. He carried a stick in each hand and slung

his box of colours over his shoulder. As we were crossing

the bridge he stopped in one of the alcoves to rest. He fell

silent for a minute or two, and to my surprise I saw that he

was looking at the stars. He touched my arm and pointed

to the sky with his stick.

"Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour.

Like a ------------

great blood orange!"

From the way he spoke he might have been an art critic

in a picture gallery. I was astonished. I confessed that I

did not know which Aldebaran was, indeed, I had never

even noticed that the stars were of different colours. Bozo

began to give me some elementary hints on astronomy,

pointing out the chief constellations. He seemed

concerned at my ignorance. I said to him, surprised:

"You seem to know a lot about stars."

"Not a great lot. I know a bit, though. I got two letters

from the Astronomer Royal thanking me for writing about

meteors. Now and again I go out at night and watch for

meteors. The stars are a free show; it don't cost anything

to use your eyes."

"What a good idea! I should never have thought of it."

"Well, you got to take an interest in something. It don't

follow that because a man's on the road he can't think of

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

shudder, 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