First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness through
which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the vileness
which I have thrust into it. I have been to the spike, and slept in the
spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run away from the spike.
After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel casual
ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before three o'clock
in the afternoon. They did not "let in" till six, but at that early hour
I was number twenty, while the news had gone forth that only twenty-two
were to be admitted. By four o'clock there were thirty-four in line, the
last ten hanging on in the slender hope of getting in by some kind of a
miracle. Many more came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to the
bitter fact that the spike would be "full up."
Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one side
of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they had been
in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full house of sixteen
hundred patients had prevented their becoming acquainted. But they made
up for it, discussing and comparing the more loathsome features of their
disease in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way. I learned that the
average mortality was one in six, that one of them had been in three
months and the other three months and a half, and that they had been
"rotten wi' it." Whereat my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked
them how long they had been out. One had been out two weeks, and the
other three weeks. Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured
the other that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their
hands and under the nails the smallpox "seeds" still working out. Nay,
one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went, right
out of his flesh into the air. I tried to shrink up smaller inside my
clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope that it had not
popped on me.
In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their being
"on the doss," which means on the tramp. Both had been working when
smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the hospital "broke,"
with the gloomy task before them of hunting for work.
So far, they had
not found any, and they had come to the spike for a
"rest up" after three
days and nights on the street.
It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for his
involuntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by disease or
accident. Later on, I talked with another man--"Ginger"
we called
him--who stood at the head of the line--a sure indication that he had
been waiting since one o'clock. A year before, one day, while in the
employ of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of fish which was
too much for him. Result: "something broke," and there was the box on
the ground, and he on the ground beside it.
At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said it
was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to rub on it,
kept him four hours, and told him to get along. But he was not on the
streets more than two or three hours when he was down on his back again.
This time he went to another hospital and was patched up. But the point
is, the employer did nothing, positively nothing, for the man injured in
his employment, and even refused him "a light job now and again," when he
came out. As far as Ginger is concerned, he is a broken man. His only
chance to earn a living was by heavy work. He is now incapable of
performing heavy work, and from now until he dies, the spike, the peg,
and the streets are all he can look forward to in the way of food and
shelter. The thing happened--that is all. He put his back under too
great a load of fish, and his chance for happiness in life was crossed
off the books.
Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were
wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves for
their folly in ever having left. England had become a prison to them, a
prison from which there was no hope of escape. It was impossible for
them to get away. They could neither scrape together the passage money,
nor get a chance to work their passage. The country was too overrun by
poor devils on that "lay."
I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack, and
they all condoled with me and gave me much sound advice.
To sum it up,
the advice was something like this: To keep out of all places like the
spike. There was nothing good in it for me. To head for the coast and
bend every effort to get away on a ship. To go to work, if possible, and
scrape together a pound or so, with which I might bribe some steward or
underling to give me chance to work my passage. They envied me my youth
and strength, which would sooner or later get me out of the country.
These they no longer possessed. Age and English hardship had broken
them, and for them the game was played and up.
There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure, will in
the end make it out. He had gone to the United States as a young fellow,
and in fourteen years' residence the longest period he had been out of
work was twelve hours. He had saved his money, grown too prosperous, and
returned to the mother-country. Now he was standing in line at the
spike.
For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook. His
hours had been from 7 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., and on Saturday to 12.30
p.m.--ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received twenty
shillings, or five dollars.
"But the work and the long hours was killing me," he said, "and I had to
chuck the job. I had a little money saved, but I spent it living and
looking for another place."
This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to get
rested. As soon as he emerged, he intended to start for Bristol, a one-hundred-and-ten-mile walk, where he thought he would eventually get a
ship for the States.
But the men in the line were not all of this calibre.
Some were poor,
wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many
ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after the
day's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, who
had run to meet him, could climb in. But the cart was big, the young
hopeful little, and he failed in his several attempts to swarm up.
Whereupon one of the most degraded-looking men stepped out of the line
and hoisted him in. Now the virtue and the joy of this act lies in that
it was service of love, not hire. The carter was poor, and the man knew
it; and the man was standing in the spike line, and the carter knew it;
and the man had done the little act, and the carter had thanked him, even
as you and I would have done and thanked.
Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the
"Hopper" and his "ole
woman." He had been in line about half-an-hour when the
"ole woman" (his
mate) came up to him. She was fairly clad, for her class, with a weather-worn bonnet on her grey head and a sacking-covered bundle in her arms. As
she talked to him, he reached forward, caught the one stray wisp of the
white hair that was flying wild, deftly twirled it between his fingers,
and tucked it back properly behind her ear. From all of which one may
conclude many things. He certainly liked her well enough to wish her to
be neat and tidy. He was proud of her, standing there in the spike line,
and it was his desire that she should look well in the eyes of the other
unfortunates who stood in the spike line. But last and best, and
underlying all these motives, it was a sturdy affection he bore her; for
man is not prone to bother his head over neatness and tidiness in a woman
for whom he does not care, nor is he likely to be proud of such a woman.
And I found myself questioning why this man and his mate, hard workers I
knew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper lodging. He had
pride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself.
When I asked him
what he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to earn at
"hopping," he
sized me up, and said that it all depended. Plenty of people were too
slow to pick hops and made a failure of it. A man, to succeed, must use
his head and be quick with his fingers, must be exceeding quick with his
fingers. Now he and his old woman could do very well at it, working the
one bin between them and not going to sleep over it; but then, they had
been at it for years.
"I 'ad a mate as went down last year," spoke up a man.
"It was 'is fust
time, but 'e come back wi' two poun' ten in 'is pockit, an' 'e was only
gone a month."
"There you are," said the Hopper, a wealth of admiration in his voice.
"'E was quick. 'E was jest nat'rally born to it, 'e was."
Two pound ten--twelve dollars and a half--for a month's work when one is
"jest nat'rally born to it!" And in addition, sleeping out without
blankets and living the Lord knows how. There are moments when I am
thankful that I was not "jest nat'rally born" a genius for anything, not
even hop-picking,
In the matter of getting an outfit for "the hops," the Hopper gave me
some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and tender
people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town.
"If you ain't got tins an' cookin' things, all as you can get'll be bread
and cheese. No bloomin' good that! You must 'ave 'ot tea, an'
wegetables, an' a bit o' meat, now an' again, if you're goin' to do work
as is work. Cawn't do it on cold wittles. Tell you wot you do, lad. Run
around in the mornin' an' look in the dust pans. You'll find plenty o'
tins to cook in. Fine tins, wonderful good some o'
them. Me an' the ole
woman got ours that way." (He pointed at the bundle she held, while she
nodded proudly, beaming on me with good-nature and consciousness of
success and prosperity.) "This overcoat is as good as a blanket," he
went on, advancing the skirt of it that I might feel its thickness. "An'
'oo knows, I may find a blanket before long."
Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead certainty
that he _would_ find a blanket before long.
"I call it a 'oliday, 'oppin'," he concluded rapturously. "A tidy way o'
gettin' two or three pounds together an' fixin' up for winter. The only
thing I don't like"--and here was the rift within the lute--"is paddin'
the 'oof down there."
It was plain the years were telling on this energetic pair, and while
they enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, "paddin'
the 'oof," which
is walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them.
And I looked at
their grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten years, and wondered how
it would be with them.
I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them past
fifty. The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into the spike;
but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was turned away to
tramp the streets all night.
The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty feet
wide. The sidewalks were three feet wide. It was a residence street. At
least workmen and their families existed in some sort of fashion in the
houses across from us. And each day and every day, from one in the
afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the principal feature of the
view commanded by their front doors and windows. One workman sat in his
door directly opposite us, taking his rest and a breath of air after the
toil of the day. His wife came to chat with him. The doorway was too
small for two, so she stood up. Their babes sprawled before them. And
here was the spike line, less than a score of feet away-
-neither privacy
for the workman, nor privacy for the pauper. About our feet played the
children of the neighbourhood. To them our presence was nothing unusual.
We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and ordinary as the brick
walls and stone curbs of their environment. They had been born to the
sight of the spike line, and all their brief days they had seen it.
At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution,
and the previous night's "doss," were taken with lightning-like rapidity
by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man's
thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting
into my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?" "No, sir," I lied, as
lied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the cellar, I
looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to the
language it might be called "bread." By its weight and hardness it
certainly must have been unleavened.
The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand.
Then I stumbled on
to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men. The place
smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices from out
of the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the infernal
regions.
Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced the
meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with which
their feet were wrapped. This added to the general noisomeness, while it
took away from my appetite.
In fact, I found that I had made a mistake. I had eaten a hearty dinner
five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare before me I
should have fasted for a couple of days. The pannikin contained skilly,
three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn and hot water. The
men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt scattered over the dirty
tables. I attempted the same, but the bread seemed to stick in my mouth,
and I remembered the words of the Carpenter, "You need a pint of water to
eat the bread nicely."
I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going and
found the water. Then I returned and attacked the skilly. It was coarse
of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter. This bitterness which
lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly had passed on, I
found especially repulsive. I struggled manfully, but was mastered by my
qualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly and bread was the measure of
my success. The man beside me ate his own share, and mine to boot,
scraped the pannikins, and looked hungrily for more.
"I met a 'towny,' and he stood me too good a dinner," I explained.
"An' I 'aven't 'ad a bite since yesterday mornin'," he replied.
"How about tobacco?" I asked. "Will the bloke bother with a fellow now?"
"Oh no," he answered me. "No bloomin' fear. This is the easiest spike
goin'. Y'oughto see some of them. Search you to the skin."
The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up. "This
super'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the papers 'bout us mugs," said
the man on the other side of me.
"What does he say?" I asked.
"Oh, 'e sez we're no good, a lot o' blackguards an'
scoundrels as won't
work. Tells all the ole tricks I've bin 'earin' for twenty years an'
w'ich I never seen a mug ever do. Las' thing of 'is I see, 'e was
tellin' 'ow a mug gets out o' the spike, wi' a crust in
'is pockit. An'
w'en 'e sees a nice ole gentleman comin' along the street 'e chucks the
crust into the drain, an' borrows the old gent's stick to poke it out.
An' then the ole gent gi'es 'im a tanner."
A roar of applause greeted the time-honoured yarn, and from somewhere
over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating angrily:
"Talk o' the country bein' good for tommy [food]; I'd like to see it. I
jest came up from Dover, an' blessed little tommy I got.
They won't gi'
ye a drink o' water, they won't, much less tommy."
"There's mugs never go out of Kent," spoke a second voice, "they live
bloomin' fat all along."
"I come through Kent," went on the first voice, still more angrily, "an'
Gawd blimey if I see any tommy. An' I always notices as the blokes as
talks about 'ow much they can get, w'en they're in the spike can eat my
share o' skilly as well as their bleedin' own."
"There's chaps in London," said a man across the table from me, "that get
all the tommy they want, an' they never think o' goin'
to the country.
Stay in London the year 'round. Nor do they think of lookin' for a kip
[place to sleep], till nine or ten o'clock at night."
A general chorus verified this statement
"But they're bloomin' clever, them chaps," said an admiring voice.
"Course they are," said another voice. "But it's not the likes of me an'
you can do it. You got to be born to it, I say. Them chaps 'ave ben
openin' cabs an' sellin' papers since the day they was born, an' their
fathers an' mothers before 'em. It's all in the trainin', I say, an' the
likes of me an' you 'ud starve at it."
This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the statement
that there were "mugs as lives the twelvemonth 'round in the spike an'
never get a blessed bit o' tommy other than spike skilly an' bread."
"I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike," said a new voice.
Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.
"There was three of us breakin' stones. Winter-time, an' the cold was
cruel. T'other two said they'd be blessed if they do it, an' they
didn't; but I kept wearin' into mine to warm up, you know. An' then the
guardians come, an' t'other chaps got run in for fourteen days, an' the
guardians, w'en they see wot I'd been doin', gives me a tanner each, five
o' them, an' turns me up."
The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like the
spike, and only come to it when driven in. After the
"rest up" they are
good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they are
driven in again for another rest. Of course, this continuous hardship
quickly breaks their constitutions, and they realise it, though only in a
vague way; while it is so much the common run of things that they do not
worry about it.
"On the doss," they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on the
road" in the United States. The agreement is that kipping, or dossing,
or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face, harder even than
that of food. The inclement weather and the harsh laws are mainly
responsible for this, while the men themselves ascribe their homelessness
to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who take
their places at lower wages and establish the sweating system.
By seven o'clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed. We stripped
our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our belts about
them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the floor--a beautiful
scheme for the spread of vermin. Then, two by two, we entered the
bathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know: the two men
preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and it
was not changed for the two men that followed us. This I know; but I am
also certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the same water.
I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious liquid
at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from the
bodies of other men. My equanimity was not restored by seeing the back
of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatory
scratching.
A shirt was handed me--which I could not help but wonder how many other
men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I trudged off to
the sleeping apartment. This was a long, narrow room, traversed by two
low iron rails. Between these rails were stretched, not hammocks, but
pieces of canvas, six feet long and less than two feet wide. These were
the beds, and they were six inches apart and about eight inches above the
floor. The chief difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher than
the feet, which caused the body constantly to slip down.
Being slung to
the same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest were
set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle back to
the position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again.
Many hours passed before I won to sleep. It was only seven in the
evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in the
street, continued till nearly midnight. The smell was frightful and
sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept and
crawled till I was nearly frantic. Grunting, groaning, and snoring arose
like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times, afflicted
by nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells, aroused the lot
of us. Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some similar animal on
my breast. In the quick transition from sleep to waking, before I was
completely myself, I raised a shout to wake the dead.
At any rate, I
woke the living, and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.
But morning came, with a six o'clock breakfast of bread and skilly, which
I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks.
Some were set to
scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and eight of us were
convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel Infirmary where we were set
at scavenger work. This was the method by which we paid for our skilly
and canvas, and I, for one, know that I paid in full many times over.
Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was
considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in being
chosen to perform it.
"Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly,"
warned my working
partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage can.
It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither to
touch it, nor to allow it to touch me. Nevertheless, I had to carry the
sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in a
receptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strong
disinfectant.
Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this. These men of the spike, the
peg, and the street, are encumbrances. They are of no good or use to any
one, nor to themselves. They clutter the earth with their presence, and
a