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Essay
It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman,
lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk
much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes
sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were
covered with blossom. and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost
motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban
riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the
seashore.
What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil,
everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling. blasphemous, uncharitable
dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a
tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back
answer. When You, came to be searched. he fair held you upside down and
shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was bell to. Pay, and if
you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.
I had eightpence on me. 'For the love of Christ, mate,' the old hands
advised me, 'don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into
the spike with eightpence!'
So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a
lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for
it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes. and one is supposed
to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the
twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in
their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with
contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of
elephantiasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp
Majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was
caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired
by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock
at the wrong moment, and was impounded.
At six. the sates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate
entered our names and other particulars in the regis. ter and took our
bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we
others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place,
consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow
stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us
into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly
man of forty. who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the
dipping-pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their
faces. But when he came to myself. he looked hard at me, and said:
'You are a gentleman?'
'I suppose so,' I said.
He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he
said, 'that's bloody bad luck, that is.' And thereafter he took it into
his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.
It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our
underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of
string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary
garments. some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt.
The room became a press m of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the
tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike.
Some of the men refused the bath, and washed only their 'toe-rags', the
horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of
us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery
roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.
When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were
dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts,
reaching to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the
diningroom, where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the
invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or
supper--half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of
so-called tea. It took us five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious
food. Then the Tramp Major served us with three cotton blankets each, and
drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were locked on the
outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for
the next twelve hours.
The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus
except a tiny. barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the
door. There were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare
luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some
on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to
myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night's rest. But I did not
get it, for there is always something wrong in the spike, and the
peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered immediately, was the cold. May
had begun, and in honour of the season--a little sacrifice to the gods
of spring, perhaps--the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot
pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent the night in
turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and waking half
frozen, and watching for dawn.
As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fan comfortably
asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp. Major came marching down
the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us
to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad
figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was Only One tub full of
water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served.
When I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one
glance at the black scum on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for
the day.
We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the diningroom to bolt our
breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the
military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight,
so that it was as hard as ship's bisciut. But we were glad of our tea
after the cold, restless night. I do not know what tramps would do
without tea, or rather the stuff they miscall tea. It is their food,
their medicine, their panacea for all evils. Without the half goon or so
of it that they suck down a day, I truly believe they could not face
their existence.
After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which
is a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before
the doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what
manner of men we were. it, was an instructive sight. We stood shivering
naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light,
bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can
imagine, unless he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate
curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat
feet, sagging muscles--every kind of malformation and physical
rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all tramps are
under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen there stay
ineradicably in my mind. Old 'Daddy', aged seventy-four, with his truss,
and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard
and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive
picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles,
coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him
nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten
decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in
hospital.
This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As
soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its
door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably
dreary with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison
smell. The windows were so high up that one could not look outside, and
the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any
casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one
could not move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight
o'clock in the morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was
nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and
bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of
the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these
subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing
worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no
speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next
meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except
the next meal.
Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back
bent like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor.
George, a dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in
his hat. grumbled about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the toad.
Bill the moocher, the best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar
who smelt of beer even after twelve hours in the spike, told tales of
mooching, of pints stood him in the boozers, and of a parson who had
peached to the police and got him seven days. William and, Fred, two
young. ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song about Unhappy Bella,
who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled, about an
imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden
sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities.
Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and
he was so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings
of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like
schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major's step, for smoking though
connived at, was officially forbidden.
Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is
hard to imagine how they put up with 11. I have come to think that
boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and
discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially
disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all
day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. only an
educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure
confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face
their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a
comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they
think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They
have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so,
since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer
agonies from boredom.
I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the Tramp
Major picked me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the
job of helping in the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to
be done there, and I was able to make off and hide in a shed used for
storing potatoes, together with some workhouse paupers who were skulking
to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There was a stove burning there, and
comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back numbers of the FAMILY
HERALD, and even a copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse library. It was
paradise after the spike.
Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the
biggest meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice
in the year, in the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they
always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and went hungry six days
of the week. When the meal was over the cook set me to do the washing-up,
and told me to throw away. the food that remained. The wastage was
astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of broad and
vegetables, were pitched away. like rubbish, and then defiled with
tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And
while I did so my follow tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in
the spike, their bellies half filled with the spike dinner of the
everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in
honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away from
deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.
At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The,
boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even
smoking had ceased, for a tramp's only tobacco is picked-up cigarette
ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is long away from the
pavement-pasture. To occupy the time 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 one of Scott's novels on all his
wanderings. He told me he never entered 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-machines for weeks
at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which 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 three 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 tune immediately. I saw
that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman.
Though he had been famished. along with the rest, 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 pleasant
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 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 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 how subtly he disassociated himself from his
fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months. but in the sight of
God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the
spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle
classes.
The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too
bored even to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating
yawns. One would force his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an
age, and then look back again to see that the hands had advanced three
minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our bones ached
because of it. The clock's hands stood at four, and supper was not
till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting
moon.
At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant
arrived with supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at
feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad
enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it was so hard that
even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older men
went almost supperless, and not a man could finish. his portion, hungry
though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served
out immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly
cells.
Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to
squabble over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and
tea. Our time in the spike was up, but we could riot go until the doctor
had examined us again, for the authorities have a terror of smallpox and
its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours this
time, and it was ten o'clock before we finally escaped.
At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright
everything looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy,
reeking spike! The Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated
possessions, and a hunk of bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then
we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the spike and its
discipline, This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights
of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour
the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had
to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike,
where the game would begin anew.
I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable,
downhearted tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the
Labour Exchanges. Our late companions were scattering north, south, cast
and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the
spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.
Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars
passing, the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles.
Everything was so quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that
only a few minutes ago we had been packed with that band of prisoners in
a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all disappeared; we two
seemed to be the only tramps on the road.
Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was
little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box
from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is 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.
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