George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

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 one

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.

die rather than work or wash, and wants nothing but to

beg, drink and rob hen-houses. This tramp-monster is

no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the

magazine stories, but he is very hard to get rid of. The

very word "tramp" evokes his image. And the belief in

him obscures the real questions of vagrancy.

To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do

tramps exist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few