Down and Out in Paris and London (24 page)

except perhaps a penny in the hat. People won’t give you

anything if they see you got a bob or two already.’

Bozo had the deepest contempt for the other screevers

on the Embankment. He called them ‘the salmon platers’.

At that time there was a screever almost every twenty-five

yards along the Embankment—twenty-five yards being the

recognized minimum between pitches. Bozo contemptu-

ously pointed out an old white-bearded screever fifty yards

away.

‘You see that silly old fool? He’s bin doing the same pic-

ture every day for ten years. ‘A faithful friend’ he calls it. It’s

of a dog pulling a child out of the water. The silly old bas-

tard can’t draw any better than a child of ten. He’s learned

just that one picture by rule of thumb, like you leam to put

a puzzle together. There’s a lot of that sort about here. They

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Down and Out in Paris and London

come pinching my ideas sometimes; but I don’t care; the

silly—s can’t think of anything for themselves, so I’m al-

ways ahead of them. The whole thing with cartoons is being

up to date. Once a child got its head stuck in the railings of

Chelsea Bridge. Well, I heard about it, and my cartoon was

on the pavement before they’d got the child’s head out of the

railings. Prompt, I am.’

Bozo seemed an interesting man, and I was anxious to

see more of him. That evening I went down to the Embank-

ment to meet him, as he had arranged to take Paddy and

myself to a lodging-house south of the river. Bozo washed

his pictures off the pavement and counted his takings—it

was about sixteen shillings, of which he said twelve or thir-

teen would be profit. We walked down into Lambeth. Bozo

limped slowly, with a queer crablike gait, half sideways,

dragging his smashed foot behind him. He carried a stick

in each hand and slung his box of colours over his shoulder.

As we were crossing the bridge he stopped in one of the al-

coves to rest. He fell silent for a minute or two, and to my

surprise I saw that he was looking at the stars. He touched

my arm and pointed to the sky with his stick.

‘Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like

a—great blood orange!’

From the way he spoke he might have been an art critic

in a picture gallery. I was astonished. I confessed that I did

not know which Aldebaran was—indeed, I had never even

noticed that the stars were of different colours. Bozo began

to give me some elementary hints on astronomy, pointing

out-the chief constellations. He seemed concerned at my ig-

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norance. I said to him, surprised:

‘You seem to know a lot about stars.’

‘Not a great lot. I know a bit, though. I got two letters

from the Astronomer Royal thanking me for writing about

meteors. Now and again I go out at night and watch for me-

teors. The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use

your eyes.’

‘What a good idea! I should never have thought of it.’

‘Well, you got to take an interest in something. It don’t

follow that because a man’s on the road he can’t think of

anything but tea-and-two-slices.’

‘But isn’t it very hard to take an interest in things—things

like stars—living this life?’

‘Screeving, you mean? Not necessarily. It don’t need turn

you into a bloody rabbit—that is, not if you set your mind

to it.’

‘It seems to have that effect on most people.’

‘Of course. Look at Paddy—a tea-swilling old mooch-

er, only fit to scrounge for fag-ends. That’s the way most of

them go. I despise them. But you don’t NEED to get like

that. If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if

you’re on the road for the rest of your life.’

‘Well, I’ve found just the contrary,’ I said. ‘It seems to me

that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing

from that moment.’

‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live

the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your

books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a

free man in HERE‘ —he tapped his forehead—‘and you’re

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Down and Out in Paris and London

all right.’

Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened

with attention. He seemed a very unusual screever, and he

was, moreover, the first person I had heard maintain that

poverty did not matter. I saw a good deal of him during the

next few days, for several times it rained and he could not

work. He told me the history of his life, and it was a curi-

ous one.

The son of a bankrupt bookseller, he had gone to work

as a house-painter at eighteen, and then served three years

in France and India during the war. After the war he had

found a house-painting job in Paris, and had stayed there

several years. France suited him better than England (he

despised the English), and he had been doing well in Paris,

saving money, and engaged to a French girl. One day the

girl was crushed to death under the wheels of an omnibus.

Bozo went on the drink for a week, and then returned to

work, rather shaky; the same morning he fell from a stage

on which he was working, forty feet on to the pavement, and

smashed his right foot to pulp. For some reason he received

only sixty pounds compensation. He returned to England,

spent his money in looking for jobs, tried hawking books in

Middlesex Street market, then tried selling toys from a tray,

and finally settled down as a screever. He had lived hand to

mouth ever since, half starved throughout the winter, and

often sleeping in the spike or on the Embankment.

When I knew him he owned nothing but the clothes he

stood up in, and his drawing materials and a few books. The

clothes were the usual beggar’s rags, but he wore a collar

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and tie, of which he was rather proud. The collar, a year or

more old, was constantly ‘going’ round the neck, and Bozo

used to patch it with bits cut from the tail of his shirt so that

the shirt had scarcely any tail left. His damaged leg was get-

ting worse and would probably have to be amputated, and

his knees, from kneeling on the stones, had pads of skin on

them as thick as boot-soles. There was, clearly, no future for

him but beggary and a death in the workhouse.

With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor shame,

nor self-pity. He had faced his position, and made a phi-

losophy for himself. Being a beggar, he said, was not his

fault, and he refused either to have any compunction about

it or to let it trouble him. He was the enemy of society, and

quite ready to take to crime if he saw a good opportuni-

ty. He refused on principle to be thrifty. In the summer he

saved nothing, spending his surplus earnings on drink, as

he did not care about women. If he was penniless when win-

ter came on, then society must look after him. He was ready

to extract every penny he could from charity, provided that

he was not expected to say thank you for it. He avoided reli-

gious charities, however, for he said it stuck in his throat to

sing hymns for buns. He had various other points of hon-

our; for instance, it was his boast that never in his life, even

when starving, had he picked up a cigarette end. He consid-

ered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars,

who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency

to be ungrateful.

He spoke French passably, and had read some of Zola’s

novels, all Shakespeare’s plays, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS,

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Down and Out in Paris and London

and a number of essays. He could describe his adventures

in words that one remembered. For instance, speaking of

funerals, he said to me:

‘Have you-ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India.

They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment I

almost jumped out of my skin, because he’d started kick-

ing. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat—still, it

give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit like a kipper

on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with

a bang you could have heard fifty yards away. It fair put me

against cremation.’

Or, again, apropos of his accident:

‘The doctor says to me, ‘You fell on one foot, my man.

And bloody lucky for you you didn’t fall on both feet,’ he

says. ‘Because if you had of fallen on both feet you’d have

shut up like a bloody concertina, and your thigh bones’d be

sticking out of your ears!‘

Clearly the phrase was not the doctor’s but Bozo’s own.

He had a gift for phrases. He had managed to keep his brain

intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb

to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving,

but so long as he could read, think, and watch for meteors,

he was, as he said, free in his own mind.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does

not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him),

and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs

would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on

the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars

or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment

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sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on

earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the ne-

cessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty

water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher.

Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for steal-

ing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This

thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very

exceptional man.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

XXXI

The charge at Bozo’s lodging-house was ninepence a

night. It was a large, crowded place, with accommoda-

tion for five hundred men, and a well-known rendezvous of

tramps, beggars, and petty criminals. All races, even black

and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were In-

dians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu

he addressed me as ‘turn’—a thing to make one shudder, if

it had been in India. We had got below the range of colour

prejudice. One had glimpses of curious lives. Old ‘Grandpa’,

a tramp of seventy who made his living, or a great part of it,

by collecting cigarette ends and selling the tobacco at three-

pence an ounce. ‘The Doctor’—he was a real doctor, who

had been struck off the register for some offence, and be-

sides selling newspapers gave medical advice at a few pence

a time. A little Chittagonian lascar, barefoot and starving,

who had deserted his ship and wandered for days through

London, so vague and helpless that he did not even know

the name of the city he was in—he thought it was Liverpool,

until I told him. A begging-letter writer, a friend of Bozo’s,

who wrote pathetic appeals for aid to pay for his wife’s fu-

neral, and, when a letter had taken effect, blew himself out

with huge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He was a

nasty, hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that,

like most swindlers, he believed a great part of his own lies.

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The lodging-house was an Alsatia for types like these.

While I was with Bozo he taught me something about the

technique of London begging. There is more in it than one

might suppose. Beggars vary greatly, and there is a sharp

social line between those who merely cadge and those who

attempt to give some value for money. The amounts that one

can earn by the different ‘gags’ also vary. The stories in the

Sunday papers about beggars who die with two thousand

pounds sewn into their trousers are, of course, lies; but the

better-class beggars do have runs of luck, when they earn a

living wage for weeks at a time. The most prosperous beg-

gars are street acrobats and street photographers. On a good

pitch—a theatre queue, for instance—a street acrobat will

often earn five pounds a week. Street photographers can

earn about the same, but they are dependent on fine weath-

er. They have a cunning dodge to stimulate trade. When

they see a likely victim approaching one of them runs be-

hind the camera and pretends to take a photograph. Then as

the victim reaches them, they exclaim:

‘There y’are, sir, took yer photo lovely. That’ll be a bob.’

‘But I never asked you to take it,’ protests the victim.

‘What, you didn’t want it took? Why, we thought you sig-

nalled with your ‘and. Well, there’s a plate wasted! That’s

cost us sixpence, that ‘as.’

At this the victim usually takes pity and says he will have

the photo after all. The photographers examine the plate

and say that it is spoiled, and that they will take a fresh one