George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult

one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard"which, taken for

what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst

insult to a women, either in London

or Paris, is "cow"; a name which might even be a com-

pliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals.

Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as

an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning;

words, especially swear words, being what public opinion

chooses to make them. In this connection it is interesting

to see how a swear word can change character by crossing

a frontier. In England you can print «

Je m'en fous »

without protest from anybody. In France you have to print

it "

Je m'en f-----" Or, as another example,

take the word "barnshoot"a corruption of the Hindustani

word

bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this

word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even

seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of

Aristophanes' plays, and the annotator suggested it as a

rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian

ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what

bahinchut

meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had

lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.

   One other thing is noticeable about swearing in

London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in

front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A

Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front

of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and

the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are

more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.

   These are a few notes that I have set down more or less

at random. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing

with the subject does not keep a year-book of London

slang and swearing, registering the changes accurately. It

might throw useful light upon the formation, development

and obsolescence of words.

                         XXXIII

THE two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten

days. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had

learned parsimony on the road and considered even one

sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had

come to mean simply bread and margarine -the eternal tea-

and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or

two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco and all,

at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn

a few extra shillings by "glimming" in the evenings. It

was a precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a

little and eked out our money.

   One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We

went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there

was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and

after two hours we were told that there was no work for

us. We had not missed much, for sandwich men have an

unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings a day

for ten hours' work-it is hard work, especially in windy

weather, and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes

round frequently to see that the men are on their beat. To

add to their troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or

sometimes for three days, never weekly, so that they have

to wait hours for their job every morning. The number of

unemployed men who are ready to do the work makes

them powerless to fight for better treatment. The job all

sandwich men covet is distributing, handbills, which is

paid for at the same rate. When you see a man distributing

handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he

goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.

   Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life-

a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days

together there was nothing to do but sit in the under-

ground kitchen, reading yesterday's newspaper, or, when

one could get hold of it, a back number of the

Union Jack.

It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came

in steamed, so that the kitchen stank horribly. One's only

excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not

know how many men are living this life in London-it must

be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the

best life he had known for two years past. His interludes

from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid

hands on a few shillings, had all been like this; the

tramping itself had been slightly worse. Listening to his

whimpering voice-he was always whimpering when he was

not eating-one realised what torture unemployment must

be to him. People are wrong when they think that an

unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on

the contrary, 'an illiterate man, with the work habit in his

bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An

educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is

one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy,

with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of

work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such

nonsense to pretend that those who have "come down in

the world" are to be pitied above all others. The man who

really merits pity is the man who has been down from the

start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

   It was a dull time, and little of it stays in my mind,

except for talks with Bozo. Once the lodging-house was

invaded by a slumming-party. Paddy and I had been out,

and, coming back in the afternoon, we heard sounds of

music downstairs. We went down to find

three gentle-people, sleekly dressed, holding a religious

service in our kitchen. They were a grave and reverend

seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable

harmonium, and a chinless youth toying with a crucifix. It

appeared that they had marched in and started to hold

the service, without any kind of invitation whatever.

   It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this

intrusion. They did not offer the smallest rudeness to the

slummers; they just ignored them. By common consent

everyone in the kitchen-a hundred men, perhaps behaved

as though the slummers had not existed. There they stood

patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was

taken of them than if they had been earwigs. The

gentleman in the frock coat preached a sermon, but not a

word of it was audible; it was drowned in the usual din of

songs, oaths and the clattering of pans. Men sat at their

meals and card games three feet away from the

harmonium, peaceably ignoring it. Presently the slummers

gave it up and cleared out, not insulted in any way, but

merely disregarded. No doubt they consoled themselves by

thinking how brave they had been, "freely venturing into

the lowest dens," etc. etc.

   Bozo said that these people came to the lodginghouse

several times a month. They had influence with the police,

and the "deputy" could not exclude them. It is curious

how people take it for granted that they have a right to

preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income

falls below a certain level.

   After nine days B.'s two pounds was reduced to one and

ninepence. Paddy and I set aside eighteenpence for our

beds, and spent threepence on the usual tea-andtwo-

slices, which we shared-an appetiser rather than a meal.

By the afternoon we were damnably hungry and

Paddy remembered a church near King's Cross Station

where a free tea was given once a week to tramps. This

was the day, and we decided to go there. Bozo, though it

was rainy weather and he was almost penniless, would not

come, saying that churches were not his style.

   Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting,

dirty types who had gathered from far and wide at the

news of a free tea, like kites round a dead buffalo.

Presently the doors opened and a clergyman and some

girls shepherded us into a gallery at the top of the church.

It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with

texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and a

hymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one

hymns; reading some of the hymns, I concluded that the

book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse.

There was to be a service after the tea, and the regular

congregation were sitting in the well of the church below.

It was a week-day, and there were only a few dozen of

them, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of

boilingfowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and

were given our tea; it was a one-pound jam jar of tea each,

with six slices of bread and margarine. As soon as tea was

over, a dozen tramps who had stationed themselves near

the door bolted to avoid the service; the rest stayed, less

from gratitude than lacking the cheek to go.

   The organ let out a few preliminary hoots and the service

began. And instantly, as though at a signal, the tramps

began to misbehave in the most outrageous way. One

would not have thought such scenes possible in a church.

All round the gallery men lolled in their pews, laughed,

chattered, leaned over and flicked pellets of bread among

the congregation; I had to re

strain the man next to me, more or less by force, from

lighting a cigarette. The tramps treated the service as a

purely comic spectacle. It was, indeed, a sufficiently

ludicrous service-the kind where there are sudden yells of

"Hallelujah!" and endless extempore prayersbut their

behaviour passed all bounds. There was one old fellow in

the congregation-Brother Bootle or some such name-who

was often called on to lead us in prayer, and whenever he

stood up the tramps would begin stamping as though in a

theatre; they said that on a previous occasion he had kept

up an extempore prayer for twenty-five minutes, until the

minister had interrupted him. Once when Brother Bootle

stood up a tramp called out, "Two to one 'e don't beat

seven minutes!" so loud that the whole church must hear.

It was not long before we were making far more noise than

the minister. Sometimes somebody below would send up

an indignant "Hush!" but it made no impression. We had

set ourselves to guy the service, and there was no

stopping us.

   It was a queer, rather disgusting scene. Below were the

handful of simple, well-meaning people, trying hard to

worship; and above were the hundred men whom they had

fed, deliberately making worship impossible. A ring of

dirty, hairy faces grinned down from the gallery, openly

jeering. What could a few women and old men do against a

hundred hostile tramps? They were afraid of us, and we

were frankly bullying them. It was our revenge upon them

for having humiliated us by feeding us.

   The minister was a brave man. He thundered steadily

through a long sermon on Joshua, and managed almost to

ignore the sniggers and chattering from above. But in the

end, perhaps goaded beyond endurance, he announced

loudly:

   "I shall address the last five minutes of my sermon to

the

unsaved sinners!"

   Having said which, he turned his face to the gallery

and kept it so for five minutes, lest there should be any

doubt about who were saved and who unsaved. But much

we cared! Even while the minister was threatening hell

fire, we were rolling cigarettes, and at the last amen we

clattered down the stairs with a yell, many agreeing to