In Darkest London · Chapter 4 (1/2)

IV

The House in Kennedy Court

Somewhere at the back of the Holborn Restaurant⁠—out of one of those queer streets that seem off the map of London⁠—there is a paved court. Tumbledown dwellings surround it, swarming with humanity, and when you enter through the archway you feel you might be in Montmartre. At the top of the court there is a wooden door with a latch. Lift the latch and you will find yourself in a world of which the ordinary well-fed man or woman has no knowledge.

It is the kitchen of the L.C.C.-inspected lodging house in Kennedy Court.

The floor is of asphalt, the walls whitewashed, with a shelf running round at easy distance from the ground⁠—just the right height for tired backs to lean against. In front of the shelf are wooden benches, straight and uncompromising, and every evening these are closely packed with women. The first night I went there I came straight from the bitter rain into the blaze of a huge coke fire jutting out into the room, which is lit by a dim gas burner that occasionally flames into erratic brightness.

Through dark arches on either side of the fireplace is a vista of another room, gloomy and chill. Here comes the homeless who have collected the price of a bed.

The place was crowded when I entered, but I was not stared at, and nobody minded when I asked a woman near the door if I might sit down. She gave me a cheery welcome, and invited me to get warm. In the world of the destitute there is a diversity of morals, but only one code of manners. You ask no questions; a newcomer speaks only when spoken to; and observes a due diffidence in the choice of a seat, respectfully keeping at a distance from the fire. Moreover, criticism is ruled out. The woman next you may be a gaol-bird, a pickpocket, a hardworking office cleaner, an itinerant char or street vendor, or, as often happened, just a prostitute. It makes no difference. You never comment⁠—you observe, listen and try to understand.

That night, it seemed to me, every type was present. Women in the raw, emotionally speaking, expressing themselves without reserve, in a tongue that has a knife behind each word. The majority of my fellow lodgers were young, pretty and attractively dressed. They all wore sunset silk stockings from the very cheapest kind to a better variety. Their slim little trocks were well cut, and their coats, save for the quality, might have been bought in the West End. There was a sprinkling of elderly women and a few middle-aged. They all sat about and talked and laughed, and occasionally one of the girls would go out and return with chocolate, fruit, or a bottle of lemonade. Intoxicants must not be brought into a public lodging house. It is one of the few rules which the L.C.C. insist should be observed.

A decrepit old creature in black, who might have been hundreds of years old, rose from her seat by the fire and shuffled towards me. She was an “official” of the house, paid by the proprietor, and kept a close espionage on all his clients.

“Have you paid for your bed?” she asked. It is a parrot cry, which punctuates all the emotional stress and storm occasionally let loose in that queer kitchen.

“It’s one and tuppence,” she quavered. “Go to the window up the courtyard and ask for bed number 28. Don’t forget it’s one and tuppence.”

You can imagine how thankfully I fingered the two coppers I had received for my last box of matches. In the cruel cold of that night, the warm, close kitchen seemed a paradise. Another old woman sat at a table by the open window up in the courtyard. She took my money and I waited for a ticket or some form of receipt. I need not have troubled, however. There seems to be some subtle form of communication between the window and the aged crone, for if ever some poor thing tries to get a bed on the nod, insisting to “Ida” that she has deposited the cash, the ruse always fails.

“You haven’t paid your money!” That high-pitched, quavering voice must sound to many like the trump of doom.

The kitchen was still crowded when I returned, and I listened to a babel of voices. Very few of the women were Londoners, they mostly seemed to hail from the provinces. Quite a number from Liverpool, some from Wales and Ireland with bonny Scotland holding its own. A sturdy young woman with bright eyes was industriously marking up her face. She wore the inevitable sunset stockings and her patent shoes, brightly polished, were painfully thin.

“I’ve had awful bad luck today,” she said. “But I’m going to have another shot before I turn in. There’ll be time before the pubs close to go up to the park, and maybe, I’ll get a man to buy me a drink.”

A dark faced, bobbed haired girl said she would go too, though, as she explained, she was rather tired, and had already walked from Hendon, where, among other things, she had been shying for coconuts. With the lavish generosity of her type, she handled round large pieces which we all accepted. The two went off together to try their luck, I hoped sincerely they already had the price of their beds. There was something inexpressibly tragic in the thought that these two young things had to go to the park, not for a drink alone, but to earn a pitifully small sum for the hire of their bodies.

Several girls came in to “arrange their faces,” and one, a very slender, piquant creature, took out of her Dorothy bag an entire set of silk underclothing, which she had washed at the public baths and brought into the kitchen to dry. She held them before the coke fire, chatting the while of her experiences.

“Any luck, dearie?” said a soft-voiced Irishwoman.

“No, luck’s right out,” said the slim one. “I tell you I’m getting fed up with bits and scraps of things. I haven’t had a whole night with a man for six weeks.” She made the statement with a complete frankness that had not the least touch of obscenity, and her sentiment was generally applauded. You must understand that the attitude of these young people towards sex cannot be described as immoral; nor is it immoral. It is the result of the will to live; they are unable to keep themselves in any other manner. They have their own code of ethics, a rigid one, which demands an irrevocable decision not to let a pal down, and never in any circumstances whatsoever to interfere with other people’s business or give away their affairs. Business, generally speaking, seemed to be very dull, from what I gathered. A Lancashire lass with a strong burr sighed piteously for Liverpool.

“I’d go back there tonight, if I only had the fare,” said she.

“Maybe you’ll get enough to go up for the Grand National,” said the cheery little lady still drying her underwear before the fire. “I wonder now, if I was to meet the Prince of Wales, do you think he’d give me a pound if he wanted me?”

One of the elderly women⁠—an office cleaner as I afterwards learned⁠—answered the naive query.

“He couldn’t give you a pound, my dear, however much he wanted to. The Royal family never have no money of their own; they pay everything through their secretaries. You’d just have to send in the bill.”

“Not half,” said the cheery girl. “I wouldn’t give him away to Queen Mary.”

It was at this moment that the emotional tornado broke upon the kitchen. These atmospheric disturbances are not uncommon among the homeless. Circumstances force them to lead highly concentrated lives in that they must seize on the moment when they find it⁠—the moment which gives them the shelter of a roof, however pitifully impermanent.

The door was flung wide open, and a good-looking young woman in a dilapidated fur coat and battered feathered hat burst in. She flung a brown paper parcel on the floor with a gesture of tragedy.

“There it is,” she cried, “my old man’s washing⁠—I tell you he won’t want it again for sixteen months.”

She was all strung up as she spoke, and then, suddenly, she collapsed, and crouching down on the bench beside the parcel began to cry. I have never seen a woman cry as she did. The most emotional outburst of the women of the middle class is reticent, almost austere, by contrast. It seemed an intrusion somehow, to witness such devastating grief. Her body shook with big sobs, interspersed with coughs, sneezings and other primitive methods of expression. All conventional barriers were down⁠—the woman was raw, bleeding, utterly unable to hold herself in.

I cannot repeat her language. It is not printable, but as I listened it did not shock me. I understood the violence of the feeling that moved her. I understood also why she had to cry out then and there without leaving one method of relief sealed up. Tomorrow she might be homeless. There might be no place in which to weep, vituperate or despair. It is the tragedy of the destitute that when there is a roof above their heads they must seize the chance to give voice to their emotions⁠—emotions that we can take our time to think about, nicely to express and delicately to restrain. For consider⁠—can you cry out in the street, shriek your agony to the pavements, raise your streaming eyes to the sky? Such demonstration comes within the definition of “a disturbance,” and she who shows her heart rent and bleeding, runs the risk of arrest⁠—not to mention gaol. I am not here pleading that women should be allowed violently to weep in public places; I only say that emotional intemperance is inevitable if a woman has no home.

Presently she began to tell her story.

“The devils from Scotland Yard have got my Arthur for sixteen months. They came into court this morning and told⁠—bloody lies.”

“Lies, is it,” said the Irishwoman. “Sure God Almighty’s truth ’ud choke ’em, the⁠—bastards.”

“He’ll be six months in Wandsworth and nine in the Isle of Wight,” moaned the wife.

“But he knows the ropes; he’s done a stretch before, remember,” said a friend. “Besides, it’s not as if you didn’t know what it was like; you’ve done your bit, too, my girl.”

“That’s so, and everybody likes my Arthur, but⁠—but I want him⁠—oh, I want him!”

She hugged the spoiled packet of washing in her arms, and then threw it across the room. “Take it, Sally,” she said to a pretty girl. “I can’t bear to touch it now he’s gone from me.”

She sobbed on and on, and no one ventured near her. It is not manners to interfere. Some of the women continued their conversation in undertones, others waited, listening sympathetically, and then at last the Irishwoman chipped in.

“It’s not my business, I know, dear, and I’ve no call to speak to you, but I wouldn’t cry if I was you, it’ll hurt your stomach something cruel.”

The woman stared with streaming eyes, the racking sobs continued. At this moment the aged crone by the fireside felt it time to sound the official note.

“You haven’t paid for your bed,” she said.

A look of furtive distress crossed the woman’s face⁠—I suppose she felt the street was very near.

“I haven’t paid yet, Ida,” she said, “but I’ve got the money⁠—only do let me have my cry out, or it won’t come.”

Gradually she grew quieter; suddenly she started to her feet, began to laugh at the top of her bent, and, producing a parcel from under her coat, handed round a selection of pigs’ trotters.

Evanescent feeling? Easy tears? Hysterical outburst? Not a bit of it. Wait until you have no home to cry in, and then you will understand. Wait until you have walked about the streets, cut off from your kind as completely as though you were in a desert. Wait until, by a rare piece of luck, you get the money to pay for a bed, and can claim something of that community of interest and affection which goes by the name of home. Then, no sooner is your foot beyond the threshold, be it the kitchen of Kennedy Court, a doss house in the Waterloo Bridge Road, or any of the public lodging places, you will let fling, and laugh and scream and scoff, releasing the pent-up emotions of long and weary hours.

I want to make it quite plain that my friend of the pigs’ trotters was not in the least degree under the influence of drink. Throughout my adventures in the underworld, I did not meet a drunken woman. There is a fixed idea also that those poor little prostitutes, with their pitiful earnings of pence and shillings (it is an event if they should get a pound), spend a large proportion of their income in alcoholic refreshment. This is not so. The girls I met at Kennedy Court, like those I met at Camden Town, the Old Kent Road and all over London, are very moderate in their spirituous tastes. There is a freehanded dispensation of chocolate, and they are extravagant in the matter of fruitdrops and lemonade, but they rarely buy drink for themselves, and there is not much cigarette smoking. The causes for this abstinence may be economic, though, personally, I do not believe that shortage of money affects the manner in which that money is spent. If a woman wants drink, be she in the possession of fourpence, four shillings or four pounds, drink she will have. But, as I say, it is not a craving from which these pretty young prostitutes suffer.

The level of discussion in any public lodging house is not high. Small interest is shown in politics, and, save to a few women who have obviously drifted from different social strata, literature is a sealed book. Fashion is a fruitful topic of interest, and the passion for crossword puzzles, or the immediate equivalent, runs very high. Local gossip always holds the attention. So-and-so’s mother’s adventure with the lodger⁠—the prospect of a job for a young sister⁠—plans for the future when your own or a friend’s man comes out of gaol. Over and over again these things are talked over, and, save when an emotional tornado breaks up the calm, the conversation is leisurely, one might say spacious.

Only once did I meet a woman actuated by any interest in ideas. Ideas do not easily flourish on a starvation diet, and all the energies of the outcast are bent towards the problem of board and bed. This particular woman was about five and forty, tall, well built, with a face that had been beautiful and was still arresting. Ida had just shifted a newcomer to bed before she wished to go there⁠—a discipline from which I also suffered, though I managed to evade the clutching hand a little longer.

The complainant testified long, loud and very bitterly.

“She’s always interfering, that old woman! You can’t get a thing in this place unless you pay for it through the nose; she won’t let you have a drop of hot water unless you give her some coppers, and if you don’t tip the old cat she reports you, and you may find yourself chucked out.”

“Its all very well to complain,” said the older woman, “but it’s your own fault, every one of you. You sit there and talk about her when she’s out of the room, and when she comes back you haven’t a word to say. You ought to go in a body and make a complaint to the man who employs her and makes his money letting beds to us. That’s what’s the matter with women the world over; they grumble among themselves, and when it comes to showing fight, they turn tail and run away. It’s always been the same story; it’s like that in life as well as in this place. That’s why men will beat us every time.”

She swept out of the kitchen on the closing words, and someone mentioned that she was not coming back that night. She hadn’t any money.

“Poor Alice! It’s a shame⁠—she’s always so generous with her cash. I’d have lent her a bob myself, only as like as not she’d bite my head off. It’s all very well for her to talk⁠—people are afraid of her tongue; there’s something about Alice that you can’t get over, she’s different to us.”

I never discovered the story of Alice. I do not believe her life holds any dark mystery or hideous secret. I should think she had drifted from the professional classes for purely economic reasons, and that her tragedy, like so many others, is merely lack of means.