My first impression of East London was naturally a general one. Later
the details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos of misery I
found little spots where a fair measure of happiness reigned--sometimes
whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way streets, where artisans
dwell and where a rude sort of family life obtains. In the evenings the
men can be seen at the doors, pipes in their mouths and children on their
knees, wives gossiping, and laughter and fun going on.
The content of
these people is manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness that
encompasses them, they are well off.
But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full
belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are
stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a
stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them.
Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor
delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the
evening pipe, with their regular "arf an' arf," is all they demand, or
dream of demanding, from existence.
This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all. The
satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that
precedes dissolution. There is no progress, and with them not to
progress is to fall back and into the Abyss. In their own lives they may
only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their children
and their children's children. Man always gets less than he demands from
life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get
cannot save them.
At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the city
life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman or
workwoman cannot stand it. Mind and body are sapped by the undermining
influences ceaselessly at work. Moral and physical stamina are broken,
and the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first city
generation a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid of
push and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform the
labour his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the
bottom of the Abyss.
If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is
sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes
unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening
on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.
Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, consider
but the one item of smoke. Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, curator of Kew
Gardens, has been studying smoke deposits on vegetation, and, according
to his calculations, no less than six tons of solid matter, consisting of
soot and tarry hydrocarbons, are deposited every week on every quarter of
a square mile in and about London. This is equivalent to twenty-four
tons per week to the square mile, or 1248 tons per year to the square
mile. From the cornice below the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral was
recently taken a solid deposit of crystallised sulphate of lime. This
deposit had been formed by the action of the sulphuric acid in the
atmosphere upon the carbonate of lime in the stone. And this sulphuric
acid in the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by the London workmen
through all the days and nights of their lives.
It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults,
without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless
breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with
the invading hordes from the country. The railway men, carriers, omnibus
drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those who require physical
stamina, are largely drawn from the country; while in the Metropolitan
Police there are, roughly, 12,000 country-born as against 3000 London-born.
So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge
man-killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way
streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a
greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless wretches
dying at the bottom of the pit. They, at least, are dying, that is the
point; while these have yet to go through the slow and preliminary pangs
extending through two and even three generations.
And yet the quality of the life is good. All human potentialities are in
it. Given proper conditions, it could live through the centuries, and
great men, heroes and masters, spring from it and make the world better
by having lived.
I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has been
jerked out of its little out-of-the-way streets and has started on the
fatal fall to the bottom. Her husband was a fitter and a member of the
Engineers' Union. That he was a poor engineer was evidenced by his
inability to get regular employment. He did not have the energy and
enterprise necessary to obtain or hold a steady position.
The pair had two daughters, and the four of them lived in a couple of
holes, called "rooms" by courtesy, for which they paid seven shillings
per week. They possessed no stove, managing their cooking on a single
gas-ring in the fireplace. Not being persons of property, they were
unable to obtain an unlimited supply of gas; but a clever machine had
been installed for their benefit. By dropping a penny in the slot, the
gas was forthcoming, and when a penny's worth had forthcome the supply
was automatically shut off. "A penny gawn in no time,"
she explained,
"an' the cookin' not arf done!"
Incipient starvation had been their portion for years.
Month in and
month out, they had arisen from the table able and willing to eat more.
And when once on the downward slope, chronic innutrition is an important
factor in sapping vitality and hastening the descent.
Yet this woman was a hard worker. From 4.30 in the morning till the last
light at night, she said, she had toiled at making cloth dress-skirts,
lined up and with two flounces, for seven shillings a dozen. Cloth dress-skirts, mark you, lined up with two flounces, for seven shillings a
dozen! This is equal to $1.75 per dozen, or 14.75 cents per skirt.
The husband, in order to obtain employment, had to belong to the union,
which collected one shilling and sixpence from him each week. Also, when
strikes were afoot and he chanced to be working, he had at times been
compelled to pay as high as seventeen shillings into the union's coffers
for the relief fund.
One daughter, the elder, had worked as green hand for a dressmaker, for
one shilling and sixpence per week--37.5 cents per week, or a fraction
over 5 cents per day. However, when the slack season came she was
discharged, though she had been taken on at such low pay with the
understanding that she was to learn the trade and work up. After that
she had been employed in a bicycle store for three years, for which she
received five shillings per week, walking two miles to her work, and two
back, and being fined for tardiness.
As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played. They
had lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit. But what
of the daughters? Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic innutrition,
being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what chance have they to
crawl up and out of the Abyss into which they were born falling?
As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous by a
free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that is back to
back with my yard. When the first sounds reached me I took it for the
barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were required to convince
me that human beings, and women at that, could produce such a fearful
clamour.
Drunken women fighting! It is not nice to think of; it is far worse to
listen to. Something like this it runs--
Incoherent babble, shrieked at the top of the lungs of several women; a
lull, in which is heard a child crying and a young girl's voice pleading
tearfully; a woman's voice rises, harsh and grating,
"You 'it me! Jest
you 'it me!" then, swat! challenge accepted and fight rages afresh.
The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined with
enthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that make
one's blood run cold, are borne to my ears. Happily, I cannot see the
combatants.
A lull; "You let that child alone!" child, evidently of few years,
screaming in downright terror. "Awright," repeated insistently and at
top pitch twenty times straight running; "you'll git this rock on the
'ead!" and then rock evidently on the head from the shriek that goes up.
A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being
resuscitated; child's voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower note
of terror and growing exhaustion.
Voices begin to go up the scale, something like this:-
"Yes?"
"Yes!"
"Yes?"
"Yes!"
"Yes?"
"Yes!"
"Yes?"
"Yes!"
Sufficient affirmation on both sides, conflict again precipitated. One
combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from the way the
other combatant screams bloody murder. Bloody murder gurgles and dies
out, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold.
Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly broken
from the way bloody murder goes up half an octave higher than before;
general hullaballoo, everybody fighting.
Lull; new voice, young girl's, "I'm goin' ter tyke my mother's part;"
dialogue, repeated about five times, "I'll do as I like, blankety, blank,
blank!" "I'd like ter see yer, blankety, blank, blank!"
renewed
conflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during which my landlady calls
her young daughter in from the back steps, while I wonder what will be
the effect of all that she has heard upon her moral fibre.
CHAPTER VI--FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO
Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and one was a hero. He was a
slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like Fra
Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him over. He
was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and ripe
for martyrdom. As platform speaker or chairman he had taken an active
and dangerous part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer meetings which
have vexed the serenity of Merry England these several years back. Little
items he had been imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed in
parks and on tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn
hope, when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down by
the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he and
three others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying missiles and the
crashing of stained glass, they had fought off the mob till rescued by
platoons of constables; of pitched and giddy battles on stairways,
galleries, and balconies; of smashed windows, collapsed stairways,
wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads and bones--and then, with a
regretful sigh, he looked at me and said: "How I envy you big, strong
men! I'm such a little mite I can't do much when it comes to fighting."
And I, walking head and shoulders above my two companions, remembered my
own husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my custom, in turn, to
envy there. Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a
lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and
shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.
But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight, who eked out a
precarious existence in a sweating den.
"I'm a 'earty man, I am," he announced. "Not like the other chaps at my
shop, I ain't. They consider me a fine specimen of manhood. W'y, d' ye
know, I weigh ten stone!"
I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy pounds,
or over twelve stone, so I contented myself with taking his measure.
Poor, misshapen little man! His skin an unhealthy colour, body gnarled
and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders bent
prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily forward
and out of place! A "'earty man,' 'e was!"
"How tall are you?"
"Five foot two," he answered proudly; "an' the chaps at the shop . . . "
"Let me see that shop," I said.
The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it. Passing
Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into
Frying-pan Alley. A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for
all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry
pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her,
sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and
libelling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black and narrow hall
behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an even
narrower and fouler stairway. Up we went, three flights, each landing
two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house. In six of the
rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept,
and worked. In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly
nine. The seventh room we entered. It was the den in which five men
"sweated." It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which
the work was performed took up the major portion of the space. On this
table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand to
their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather,
bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used
in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.
In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.
In another vile
hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of
consumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and
more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of
milk he daily required. Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste
meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat
cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine
eat.
"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my sweated friend,
referring to the dying boy. "We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're workin', an'
it's terrible, I say, terrible!"
And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.
My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in
his eight-by-seven room. In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the day
and added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and
breathed, and breathed again.
In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he
could earn as high as "thirty bob a week."--Thirty shillings! Seven
dollars and a half!
"But it's only the best of us can do it," he qualified.
"An' then we
work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we can.
An' you should see us sweat! Just running from us! If you could see us,
it'd dazzle your eyes--tacks flyin' out of mouth like from a machine.
Look at my mouth."
I looked. The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the
metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.
"I clean my teeth," he added, "else they'd be worse."
After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools,
brads, "grindery," cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it was plain
that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.
"But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high
wage of thirty bob?" I asked.
"Four months," was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he informed
me, they average from "half a quid" to a "quid" a week, which is
equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars. The present
week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar. And yet I
was given to understand that this was one of the better grades of
sweating.
I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards of
the neighbouring buildings. But there were no back yards, or, rather,
they were covered with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in which people
lived. The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in
some places a couple of feet deep--the contributions from the back
windows of the second and third storeys. I could make out fish and meat
bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and all
the general refuse of a human sty.
"This is the last year of this trade; they're getting machines to do away
with us," said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the woman
with the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the cheap young
life.
We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County
Council on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison's "Child of
the Jago." While the buildings housed more people than before, it was
much healthier. But the dwellings were inhabited by the better-class
workmen and artisans. The slum people had simply drifted on to crowd
other slums or to form new slums.
"An' now," said the sweated one, the 'earty man who worked so fast as to
dazzle one's eyes, "I'll show you one of London's lungs.
This is
Spitalfields Garden." And he mouthed the word "garden"
with scorn.
The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in
the shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I saw a
sight I never wish to see again. There are no flowers in this garden,
which is smaller than my own rose garden at home. Grass only grows here,
and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron fencing, as are all the parks
of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come in at night
and sleep upon it.
As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passed
us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with two
bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her. She
was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her failing
carcass through the workhouse door. Like the snail, she carried her home
with her. In the two sacking-covered bundles were her household goods,
her wardrobe, linen, and dear feminine possessions.
We went up the narrow gravelled walk. On the benches on either side
arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which
would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever
succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner
of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency,
leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing,
and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most
part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from
twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying
asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor
with any one looking after it. Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt
upright or leaning against one another in their sleep.
In one place a
family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the
husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another
bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and
another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man
holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his clothing
caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman, not more
than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them
asleep or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I
learned. _It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not
sleep by night_. On the pavement, by the portico of Christ's Church,
where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were whole
rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor to
rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.
"A lung of London," I said; "nay, an abscess, a great putrescent sore."
"Oh, why did you bring me here?" demanded the burning young socialist,
his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach sickness.
"Those women there," said our guide, "will sell themselves for
thru'pence, or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread."
He said it with a cheerful sneer.
But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried,
"For heaven's sake let us get out of this."
CHAPTER VII--A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS
I have found that it is not easy to get into the casual ward of the
workhouse. I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make a
third. The first time I started out at seven o'clock in the evening with
four shillings in my pocket. Herein I committed two errors. In the
first place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward must be
destitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he must really be
destitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings, is sufficient
affluence to disqualify him. In the second place, I made the mistake of
tardiness. Seven o'clock in the evening is too late in the day for a
pauper to get a pauper's bed.
For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain what
a ward is. It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless man,
if he be lucky, may _casually_ rest his weary bones, and then work like a
navvy next day to pay for it.
My second attempt to break into the casual ward began more auspiciously.
I started in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied by the burning
young socialist and ano