In Darkest London · Chapter 4 (2/2)

Destitution in most cases brings a furtive manner, an air that arouses immediate suspicion. I found myself acquiring that same manner after a very little while, so that when I was faced by an official I answered as though I were afraid (indeed, I sometimes was), and instead of entering a room in my usual fashion, I would slink round the doorway and sit humbly on the edge of a chair. By these, my own experiences, I learned how easy it is to form cruelly wrong conclusions from certain obvious facts. A straight glance of the eye, a clear tone in the voice, an assured and ready bearing; these are but the manifestations of a well-fed life. Take away your regular meals, your comfortable bed, your sense of security, and you will find yourself like any other outcast, slinking along the pavement, shrinking from attention, utterly void of that self-confidence which is the hall mark of success.

I succeeded in evading Ida’s tender care for some time, but at last the hour struck. She beckoned me with her claw-like hand.

“Now, Miss Twenty Eight,” said she, “it’s time you went to bed.”

I followed her along the courtyard, through a sinister-looking door and up a flight of stone steps, on to a landing, from which opened a room which led into two others. My sleeping place was on the first floor. The floors above were planned much in the same way. Three beds stood in a row with one bed across the foot. Mine was next to the wall, farthest from the door. The floor was clean, but that is all that can be said in regard to cleanliness. My bed was very hard, lumpy and badly stained. The sheets obviously had been slept in many times, there were no pillow cases, and the blankets were so short that you had to choose between cold feet and icy shoulders. There was no washing accommodation in the room where I slept, but at the end of the adjoining room there was a washstand which apparently had to serve all the inmates on that floor. The only other means of washing is in a scullery, off the courtyard, where tin lavatory basins are provided, and only cold water is laid on.

Consider for a moment what this means. A woman goes to bed with all the day’s dirt and fatigue upon her. In the morning if she desires to wash⁠—and who does not?⁠—she has to choose between dabbing herself in a limited supply of water or going downstairs across the courtyard and into the scullery. Which means that she must dress to go downstairs⁠—you carry your wardrobe with you⁠—and undress again on a flagged floor in the cruel cold of a winter’s morning. The man who goes to a public lodging house is very differently placed. He can have a hot bath, and, if he wishes, wash his shirt or pants and dry them in a hot-air closet in a few minutes. Woman, whose physical formation calls for more scrupulous cleanliness than man, is shut off from access to soap and water unless she is prepared to stand the unpleasant conditions above described.

This lack of washing accommodation is not confined to Kennedy Court. Women’s public lodging houses are all deficient in this respect, though the establishments run by religious bodies are generally better equipped.

For the accommodation I have outlined⁠—the use of a soiled bed, cold water and the lodging house kitchen⁠—the charge is one shilling and twopence a night. This is an economic rent; eight and twopence a week for the use of a bed, is sufficient to provide clean sheets, proper bathrooms and human conditions. But even on the plea of good business I have been unable to get anyone to move in this matter. Thus, within a stone’s throw of the most luxurious part of London, you have a condition of things differing in essentials very little from the slums. And what I have said as to Kennedy Court holds good in varying degrees about the other lodging houses.

The process of undressing for the outcast is simple. A dim gas mantle gave an irritating light which enabled me darkly to follow the movements of my room mates. The general custom is to sleep⁠—in the winter at all events⁠—in all your clothes, removing your hat and shoes for the sake of courtesy. The younger girls take off their outer garments sometimes, but the older hands cling tightly to every stitch; a course⁠—as I was subsequently to discover⁠—highly to be commended.

I produced a nightgown from my brown paper parcel, and placed my clothes at the end of the bed, from whence at intervals they slipped on to the floor, to be recaptured by my groping hand, only to slide off once again. It must have been about two o’clock before the last vacant bed was filled. Downstairs in the kitchen high jinks were in progress; they were singing songs, dancing and generally enjoying life.

“It’s an awful noise, dear, isn’t it?” said the latest comer. She spoke with refinement, so much refinement that she was almost “naice.”

“One does not sleep in such a place as this from choice,” she continued. “I have never been here before but once.”

“It isn’t very comfortable,” I agreed, and watched her divest herself of two coats, two skirts, and other articles of apparel, all in duplicate.

“No, I don’t care to go into the room downstairs, and let all those women see me. They’re not fit to associate with, dear. But, as I say, in these hard times, one can’t afford four and sixpence for a night’s lodging; things have changed since the war.”

By this time she was in her petticoat. She stared at me curiously from the other side of the bed. I don’t think she altogether liked the look of me, for she solemnly re-invested herself in two of everything, and complacently got in between the sheets, fully clothed.

“I have a flat of my own, dear, beautifully appointed, electric light and hot and cold. But nowadays tradespeople are so tiresome; and I’ve had to leave it. You see I can’t go back because they insist I must settle their bills. That,” she said, with a spacious gesture, “is why I wear my two costumes.”

Presently the old crone extinguished the defective gas mantle, the noise died away from the kitchen downstairs, and Kennedy Court composed itself to slumber. I slept, but fitfully. I had not dreamt there were so many women without habitation or home, and the knowledge that, purely through force of circumstances, and by no individual merit, I was in possession of both, rankled⁠—a sore injustice. Why should these young girls, these elderly women, be cut off from those things without which the soul cannot flower? Why should I, and so many hundreds like me, sleep softly and securely while their dragging feet walked the pavement, or, at best, found soiled shelter for the night?

The tragedy of the outcast came very close to me next morning. Ida woke us up about nine, and from under the clothes my room mates emerged, like full fledged chrysalis, completely clothed. The lady of the flat was not very cheerful. Like the rest, she dressed herself entirely in bed⁠—an art that cannot easily be learned⁠—and then, when the second coat was buttoned and she crawled from the dirty sheets, she began to cry.

“Aren’t you well?” I asked, and felt the utter feebleness of the words.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s the walking about, the walking about. Day after day, it’s always the same.”

And this is the sort of thing that goes on among the homeless. Walking about until the body aches and the mind becomes half doped. Is it any wonder that to get shelter at night the destitute do desperate things? This woman was not, I think, a prostitute, save at such times when self-preservation drove her to get money anyhow. I should say she had once been a shop assistant, or, perhaps, kept a lodging house. One seemed to trace her steady declension, slipping from room to room, at a cheaper and cheaper rent, and always leaving something behind, until at last, her whole wealth on her back, she is faced with destitution.

Soon one of the costumes will have to go. It will be necessary to sell it for food or shelter. And then her boots will begin to disintegrate, her remaining costume will grow dirty, she will be unable to change her underwear, and finally, perhaps she will be discovered in the street in a state of collapse. Not improbably, she will be charged at the police station for being without visible means of support. If she is lucky she will be sent to the workhouse; if things are against her, she may go to prison. In any case the interregnum will be a short one; and she will emerge into the light of day to resume the walking about, the never-ending, monotonously-grinding walking about.