In Darkest London · Chapter 11 (2/2)

The women of the company were a mixed lot. Some of them worked at millinery and dressmaking, slop shops, i.e., establishments where sweated rates are paid, or in more reputable emporiums. There were some prostitutes, but, as I have always found them, they were quite well mannered, and contributed their quota of gaiety. My Cockney friend was very entertaining. A man handed her a Russian cigarette, which she accepted with delighted abandon.

“There now, dearie,” she exclaimed, “with a cup of tea and a slice of lemon I shall be quite Russo Ballo!”

The cup of tea was forthcoming, with a small plate of sausage, brown bread and butter and some chocolollies, a succulent form of sour pickle, much esteemed in the foreign quarters. A large, placid looking woman with Tartar eyes, consumed vast quantities of borscht⁠—a Slav soup made from beetroot and other condiments⁠—conversing the while with a Chinese looking youth, with long, nervous hands, and a black tail coat.

My Cockney friend, having quite clearly “got off,” to use her own phraseology, I decided that it was time to depart. It would be no act of friendship on my part to interfere with a deal, so I slipped out of the club as easily as I had come in, with, at bottom, a feeling of regret. That little Whitechapel club, of which there are so many in the district, is the nearest approach to the familiar café of the continent. There is always the stir of social life, an air of geniality, and the centre of attraction is not the bar, laden with food and drink, but the conversation that circles round the marble-topped tables; you feel that here you will find someone to listen to, if not to talk with, a response to human interest, that fluttering up towards joy, even in the most poverty-stricken, which is so curiously absent from the English teashop.

There is, as I have cause to know, a camaraderie of the tavern which nothing can excel. But for the most part women are barred from this. They are not encouraged to sit about in public houses and join in the discussions of their male friends. They go in to drink, and having drunk, custom requires them to withdraw, while the notion that social intercourse is in any way associated with Lyons or the A.B.C. is too utterly fantastic for consideration.

I had hardly got to the end of the street when the little Cockney joined me. She had been running hard and was obviously out of breath.

“What did you leave like that for, dear?” she asked.

“I thought you’d found a friend,” I said, “and didn’t want me.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “He can wait. I told yer I’d show yer the wye and I will. I’m going to sleep there myself coming to think of it.”

She led me across the broad road and round to the back of a long, narrow street full of high buildings, engineering works, bakeries, etc. We found the shelter tucked away behind a narrow door, which was opened by a pleasant faced young woman, in Army uniform. The shelter is under the control of the Salvation Army, but it is run on ordinary commercial lines. I mean by this that no religious services are held, and that no enquiries are made. You may be good, bad, or indifferent, clean or dirty, so long as you want a bed and can pay fivepence you are admitted.

I paid my money and was led down a passage into an enormous hall. My friend was claimed by an old friend in transit, and got separated from me, and I did not see her again. You are forever making transitory acquaintances in the world of the destitute. You may feel you have found a kindred mind and sympathetic soul and long to hold renewed communion, but harsh circumstances, grim and inexorable, force you apart. There is no sustained drama in the underworld, only a series of incidents, beautiful, tragic, heartrending, which dissolve one into the other like figures on a film.

A wide gallery runs round the hall, which, like the floor, is entirely covered with narrow beds, just wide enough to lie and barely to turn in. There is only enough space between the beds to pass by; it is a sea of beds, every one of which, on the night when I was there, was occupied; and the number ran into hundreds. The big gas lamp in the roof burned till dawn, casting fantastic shadows on the sleeping faces. There they all lay⁠—there every night they lie, womanhood in extremis; old, young, middle-aged, hopeless, helpless, desperate and courageous.

The thing that hurt me most was the realisation that these women who have managed to gather their few pence to secure a bed, have lost all knowledge of anything remotely like a home. Migratory as any of the tribes of Asia, they know not where they may pitch their tent.

The place is clean, like all the Salvation Army houses, and there is an entire absence of officialdom. The beds are not too hard and the sheets and covering are clean and hygienic, mattresses and pillows are encased in American cloth, for the sake of sanitation, but with an outer cover of calico, and there is a sufficiency of bed clothing, also encased.

It was an eerie night. The sleep for which I longed, the sleep for which body and soul were craving would not come. There was something rather terrible in the presence of this army of the night; I felt myself encompassed by a tide of human desolation which at any moment might overpower and swamp me. I had found the workhouse cell solitary, but there was something worse than solitude in that huge bare ward crowded with beds. Not for one moment was there peace; there was a stirring as of the leaves in a dense forest, to a continual accompaniment of coughing. I never knew there were so many and such variety of coughs. One poor thing hacked hour after hour, her handkerchief soaked with blood. No one slept kindly, no one found rest. When the continual stirring of the leaves was still, there was a sound as of the wind over the sea, and once a woman’s voice screamed out in agony, “I can’t breathe⁠—I can’t breathe.”

The many indescribable noises broke into definite movement. The woman was upstairs in the gallery. With the swift kindliness of the destitute, people rose from their beds and went to her from all over the hall; curious, pathetic figures, some of them clinging to the last rags of what had been a night dress which they had carried with them on their endless journeying. Others, partially undressed, with bare feet, in a skirt and a man’s sweater; others again, fully dressed, ashamed, perhaps, to show their apologies for underwear, or maybe, too proud or cold, to take their outer garments off. The girl continued to cry out, tossing from side to side. Somebody fetched the superintendent, who presently arrived, followed by an anxious queue. She administered drops, and at the second dose the pain subsided.

“I shouldn’t half like some of that,” said one of the watchers, raucously.

“Garn!” was the answer. “It’s only ginger!” and suddenly the whole place shrieked with mirth. The laughter subsided, the sick woman moaned herself to sleep, the hacking cough broke out with less disturbance. It seemed as though at long last the silence of the night was going to descend upon that troubled place. But with the increased stillness I became aware of other barriers from slumber.

The building has central heating and the warm air, heavy with the strong stench of humanity and the odour of stale clothes⁠—hot, acrid, sickly⁠—made me feel faint. I stumbled across the floor into the flag-stoned passage and got a glass of water. My endurance had nearly reached the limit, I did not see how I was going to live through to the morning. Not so much because of the physical discomforts, but by reason of my tribulation of soul. The accumulation of experiences had reached a point when it was difficult to bear any more. The knowledge that I was but one of many hundreds of broken women, and that this hall held but a remnant of the legion of the dispossessed, frightened me. It was something in life that I had not guessed at; and the knowledge made me afraid.

It was piercingly cold in the lavatory and I was compelled to go back into the warm stench of the sleeping hall. I curled under the clothes and tried to set myself counting sheep. But it is difficult to realise placid munchers when you are surrounded by suffering humans. The coughing broke out again, and the woman in the bed next to mine began to cry.

“I did so want to sleep,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about getting a bed all day, and now there isn’t any chance of peace. My head feels all light, and I shan’t be fit for anything tomorrow. If only I could get some sleep!”

She was a frail creature with big, bright eyes, and she told me in a whisper that she worked in a slop shop in Bethnal Green. She used to rent a couple of rooms with her husband and three children, but he was a German and had been killed in the war, and she and the children had lost their home.

“The kids are at an institution in the country,” she said. “I used to think that one day I’d be able to get them back, but I’ve given up hoping now. It’s cruel difficult to live. I’m afraid, somehow, they’ll forget me, and I always promised him I’d look after them whatever happened. But, what am I to do?” she asked. “What am I to do?”

There was a terrible note of resignation in her voice. Indeed, all these poor women seem to accept their lot as though it was the will of God, rather than the inhumanity of man. Their endurance is heroic, their generosity unending; all they want is to live decent, human lives, with some sort of a home, no matter how poor, no matter how fragmentary the furnishing.

These things are of no consequence, so long as the home is theirs.

Most of the women who frequent this shelter make Whitechapel their headquarters. Some of them are employed in slop shops, others are street sellers on their own. Others again, do odd jobs of charing, and a fair proportion are out of work dressmakers, fur workers, or employed in similar trades. There are one or two prostitutes, like my little Cockney friend, but they are the exception. The majority of the women are British. I came across one or two Scandinavian women, whose white skins and fair hair were unimpaired by hardship, and I also met a Russian, her native love of adventure undimmed by what she had passed through. She was young, however, and by force of character and personality, likely to find a niche somehow in the social framework of comfort and security. Only one Jewess did I meet in this shelter. Indeed, I very rarely encountered a woman of this race throughout my experiences. We know, of course, that the percentage of Jews among the population in this country is a small percentage, but even so it is, I think, a testimony to their feeling of racial responsibility that so few among them should be without the means of support.

The bell roused us at six o’clock, and from every bed dragged out a tired figure with the morning cough, faced with the problem of living yet another day. The art of dressing underneath the sheets is practised in Whitechapel, and it was curious and fascinating to watch women emerging from the chrysalis of American cloth, booted and hatted.

I did not attempt to wash myself that morning. I had stood all I could endure, and I left the shelter as dirty and begrimed as I had entered it. This, I think, shows what creatures of environment we are. The average middle-class woman is not happy without her morning bath, which is an aesthetic enjoyment as well as physically refreshing. But there was I, after a comparatively short sojourn in a world where baths abound not, dismissing the idea of so much as wiping my face with a damp cloth, or removing the black from my finger nails.

A long course in the underworld would, I am sure, cure the most fastidious of that impulse towards clean lingerie, which most of us delight in. Dirty faces and hands, soiled underwear, matted hair, what are these but trifles compared with the devastating problems of board and bed? You will not have much energy left to trouble about cleanliness when you have been bedless for a few nights, with but scant intervals of food.