In Darkest London · Chapter 10 (1/2)

X

A Very Gallant Gentleman

To spend a whole night in the streets is an experience that has a permanent effect on the psychology.

My first adventure of this kind found me unprepared. I was compelled to walk about, not from lack of money to pay for a bed, but because I could not find any place that would take me in.

It was on a Saturday night, and I had had a good day. I had got into touch with my friend of the plush coat, and had secured from her a number of cigarette cases which I had sold at profit to myself. After I had bought myself a meal and a glass of port, I was the proud possessor of three shillings and sixpence, and I felt entitled to a luxurious time. I had learned from my fellow outcasts that the beds at the Church Army Shelter in Great Peter Street were very cosy, and I anticipated an agreeable lodging. Sunday, I knew, there would not be much trade astir, so I could stay in bed as long as they would let me, buy myself a bit of lunch, and resume my commercial activities in the evening, reinvigorated and refreshed.

Such was the programme I mapped out⁠—and I recall to this moment the pleasurable feeling with which I sauntered down Whitehall. My open-air life, in spite of the biting weather, had given me an added strength, of which hunger and lack of sleep could not deprive me. After all, I thought, there is a lot to be said for the physical existence which consists of a continual struggle to provide the body with essentials and leaves untouched the field of the mind. This may sound fantastic, but it holds much validity. Later on, when you have led the life of the homeless at a continuous stretch, your imagination comes into play, and the old appetite for ideas returns, invigorated. But at the outset the material blocks all other avenues of approach; you want to feed your belly, as Kitty would say, and rest your limbs, and your body is clamorous until these things are accomplished.

It was just after nine when I arrived at the Church Army Shelter. The house has an appearance of prosperity that a little chilled me. Through the wide open door I caught a glimpse of white paint and shining brass, which made me very conscious of my bedraggled skirts. But, after all, I had nothing to fear. I could pay for my bed, and I had experienced so much humanity, such ready kindliness in my travels, that I had forgotten the other side of the picture. A woman directed me to the Sister. I went along a passage, and turning to the right, found myself on a small landing, from which a flight of stairs led down into a very bright and pleasant little kitchen. A young woman, in official cap and apron, was frying sausages which sent forth a most appetising smell.

I made to go down the stairs, but was stopped by a sudden gesture from the Sister. She waved a frying fork at me.

“Stop where you are,” she said. “Don’t come down here.”

As she spoke I felt that I was destitute in every sense of the word.

“Good evening,” I said, politely. “May I have a bed?”

“Stay where you are,” she repeated, and I went back to the little pen at the top of the stairs, surprised and hurt. I realised for the first time since I began my journey, how demoralising it is to be sized up on your external appearance, and the tears were very near my eyes when I asked again for a bed, and announced that I could pay for it.

The statement did not impress the Sister, and under her eyes my shabbiness increased. Draggled coat and sodden hat grew visibly more and more demoralised.

“Please stay there.” The frying fork marked out the frontier. Then there followed a searching cross-examination, which I bore patiently and politely, under the belief that when the interrogatory was finished I should be allowed a bed. As I discovered later, however, my impression was wrong.

“What is your name and occupation?”

“I am out of work,” I said.

“When were you in a regular job?”

“Some time since,” I answered, and felt almost criminal.

“Your address?”

“I haven’t one.”

“No permanent address?”

In face of what I had told her the question seemed irrelevant.

“Well then,” she faced me with frank hostility, “where did you spend last night?”

I had to tell her the truth. I could not frame a suitable lie, besides this was a case when, it seemed to me, fiction would not help matters. The Church Army Shelter existed, I had been told, to supply beds at tenpence a night for destitute women. Why, then, should I shirk the admission of a palpable fact? And yet I felt somehow that my answer would do me out of the comfortable bed I needed so badly.

She seemed shocked at the mention of the casual ward, and positively bristled when I confessed to a common lodging house.

“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give you a bed,” and I knew that the words were the spontaneous expression of her feeling. She did not want me and my bedraggled clothes in her bright, clean kitchen. She had no use for a woman who quite recently had lodged in Kennedy Court, and she hurled at me the condemnation of a whole world when she turned me down.

I have been assured that the Church Army affords help to many destitute women. Facts and figures have been poured upon me. Statistics have set forth how many hundreds and thousands of homeless creatures have been fed and housed. This may be so, but there is an interior sympathy which expresses itself not only in statistics, and when I went to Great Peter Street that night I felt that spirit was not there.

And here I must say a word as to the moral effect of this particular treatment. I discovered that since I had left my home I had acquired a new psychology. I not only looked, but I felt destitute, and the Sister’s refusal struck me like a blow in the face. Why should she turn me down? I was clean, I was honest, I had the money to pay⁠—and I needed a comfortable bed.

I suddenly comprehended with a dreadful clearness what destitution does to the soul. It destroys the sense of human dignity, and as your rags are, so you become. I was bedraggled, I looked miserable and I had not slept⁠—anywhere, and the Sister in the pretty kitchen cooking supper did not want anything like me among the clean, white paint and shining brass fittings.

I once heard a prosperous-looking man say something that expressed what the Sister at that moment must have felt. Someone was speaking with anger as to the terrible condition of the slums which breed deterioration of mind and body.

“That’s all very well,” said the prosperous one, “but after all they are dogs⁠—let them live in their kennels!”

Well, I hadn’t got even a kennel, though at that moment I wanted to slink off and find one. But I wasn’t through yet. I did not want unjustly to condemn the Sister, and it was necessary that I should discover the type of lodger that was acceptable.

I lurked in the passage near the entrance⁠—lurking is one of the fine arts I learned in my wanderings⁠—and watched the door to the kitchen like a lynx. Presently a nice-looking young woman carrying a despatch case walked briskly up the street and into the house. I judged her to be a shop assistant, who wanted to get away from living-in for a night. I watched her enter the little lobby and descend the stairs⁠—no frying fork barred her way, and I listened to her conversation with the Sister.

She answered all enquiries satisfactorily and was fixed up for the night.

I left that house with a burning sense of injury.

It was not that I was penniless. I had been through that stage and had not scrupled to ask for help. When I was hungry I had begged. But now it seemed to me I was in an even more desperate condition. I had the money for a decent bed and I could not get one!

Had the Sister merely told me at the first that she had no accommodation I should not have been so hurt. But it seemed to me deliberate cruelty to interrogate me and then to tum me down. The fact that she did this effectively disposes of any suggestion that she knew from the first that there was no bed available, and that this was not so I subsequently learned.

By this time it was close on ten, and I did not relish the walk back to Holborn. Besides, I could not accept the possibility that only in Kennedy Court could I be taken in. Surely there was some other shelter?

The stars were cruelly bright that evening, and the glory of the sky made my position more unhappy. I think I could have borne it better had it rained. I watched the electric signs on the Embankment dazzling in their shifting brilliance. Where was I to go? What on earth was I to do?

I went to the inevitable policeman and asked if he could tell me of a lodging house.

“There’s one in Belvedere Road, over the Bridge and turn to the right,” he told me, and I set off on my tramp.

There is always something to discover in the land of the homeless. You learn quite a lot about streets which invariably escape your notice in ordinary life. Belvedere Road seemed to me one of the longest in London; it is full of many and curious depositories. I passed the office of the State of India tucked in between a beer-house and something to do with deep sea fisheries. Large and imposing brass plates recorded the names of obscure Government departments, hoary with age and decrepitude.

There were not many people in the road that night, and those that I passed were respectably dressed and seemed to be hurrying home to a nice supper. When I had almost given up hope of its discovery I chanced on the lodging house.

A large, austere-looking building, the exterior did not discourage me⁠—I was prepared to scale any physical barriers to get a bed. It was the chill of the spirit that held me back. The lodging house was under the auspices of the Church Army, and this paralysed my will. I ought, of course, to have applied for admission, when I might have chanced on a more kindly reception. It was, I admit, a piece of moral cowardice to turn away from a door, but my state of mind was very raw, my emotions had been badly twisted. Something told me I should be refused for the second time, and it is too much to ask of even destitute humanity to be twice crucified on the same cross.

So I went off again on the tramp, making instinctively for a policeman.

“There’s a place where you may get put up somewhere near Southwark, in the neighbourhood of Union Street, I think.”

It was a cross-country journey, which you could not break by omnibus or tram; but I did not mind, for by this time the fascination of the streets had got me. There are two or three processes which you go through when you are homeless. At first when you have walked about for two or three hours you get very tired. Your head aches and your limbs are like lead; the fact that you have no fixed objective is like a pall on your spirits⁠—you urge yourself forward on mere will. But if you keep on for another hour, or two, or three, your pains vanish⁠—in some strange way you forget cold, hunger and thirst. Your brain is light, your feet move on air. The noises of the street form a monotonous accompaniment which gradually merges into silence; you see little, hear less, feel not at all. Trouble and regret fall from you⁠—it is as though you were doped. You have no sense of distance or time, and gradually your movements become automatic. Instinctively you adopt the slouch of the tramp; you feel yourself one with the streets; you have lost your entity.

I walked through many ages, as it seemed to me, until I chanced upon the place described by the policeman. By this time it was very late, and as it was Saturday, lodgings for the night were difficult to get. If you keep your eyes open on a Sunday morning you will find there are not many homeless creatures in the streets. Everyone, however desolate, makes a push to get put up, somehow or other, for the seventh day. For this reason the lodging house was full, but the management was very kind. The superintendent saw that I was done, and asked me if I would like to rest by the fire in the kitchen⁠—the same communal kitchen which sheltered me in many parts of London.

I was too tired to observe very closely, and with the understanding and good manners you always find among the destitute, I was not pestered with talk. I just sat by the fireside, feeling sorry for myself and all the rest. (This house is run by the Christian Herald Mission, and I found them very Christian. I visited the place later, and in due course shall have something to say on this count. But this story of my first night in the streets must not be broken in its continuity.) Very soon I went on the tramp again.

I could, I am sure, have sat there longer, but if you rest for more than a few minutes you get stiff, not only in body, but in mind, and the “doping” process I have mentioned, has to be gone through all over again. I explored many of the broad streets and fine roads of the district and gradually worked back to Blackfriars. It was past midnight, but near the Ring there was still a flaring whelk-stall round which some night birds were eating. There were no women among them. Women are not welcome at any kind of stall; indeed many coffee stall keepers will not serve you if you are alone, and even when you can persuade the proprietor to let you buy a cup of tea his manner is uncivil, even abusive. The most abject specimen of man is quite welcome if he has the pence to pay for his refreshment. But in the case of women there is the rooted belief that they must be bad lots or they would have a home; if they are not thieves they are prostitutes, and either way, even a commercial connection with them might cause trouble with the police.

When I hear eloquent and educated women declaim on the platforms as to the wrong done to our sex by some inequality of the law that gives the father priority of control over the child, or makes the husband responsible for his wife’s debts, my mind goes spinning back to those real disabilities which press on woman. Feminism might never have blared its trumpet for all the good it has done the derelict. Women have won the vote, it is true, but they have not won the right to decent lodging house accommodation, they have not won the right to purchase at a coffee stall a cup of tea or coffee or a penny bun. Their only hope of getting such refreshment, with civility, is to accompany a man. Woman qua woman among the derelict bears all the disabilities of her sex⁠—and no one cares a pin about it.

I have never been able to understand why because a woman is a prostitute⁠—often because she is tired of being without a bed⁠—Society should be held blameless in withholding from her the rights and privileges of an ordinary citizen. Rightly and properly, public indignation is felt and expressed if a man in any walk of life is refused a glass of beer in a saloon bar, on account of his shabbiness. But no one seems to think it unjust or even strange that a coffee stall keeper should “shoo” off a woman who wants to buy food or drink in the watches of the night. I have tested this particular attitude. I have been out late in my ordinary attire and have asked for a cup of coffee, and I have never been refused. Indeed, the same stall keeper who told me gruffly he did not serve women when I was destitute, was more than affable when I appeared decently dressed. He supposed I was having a look round for curiosity, and was quite ready to give me any number of legends as to his observations of life.

It was a curious experience and taught me very much. Once more I was conscious of the hideous standard which schedules you solely by externals, and cannot see beyond a woman’s bedraggled hat and sodden coat.