XI
Womanhood—In Extremis
Sunday is a meagre day for the street seller. No one likes to be asked to buy matches, at any rate, in the earlier part of the day. There is a general feeling that the unpleasant things of life should be hidden away until after church time. Churchgoing, as a matter of fact, does not predispose to the giving of alms. I amused myself with experiments in this direction, but never got so much as a penny from any would-be worshipper. After they leave the House of God they are a little softer, and if you attack them at the right moment, between leaving worship and getting home to dinner, you may be quite lucky.
No one with any sense will, of course, try to sell matches or beg coppers from the Sunday crowd in the park. I very much wanted to see what would happen if I asked one of the beautifully gowned women on church parade for the price of a bed, but I felt it was too risky. It was ninety to one that I should have been run in, and that was an experience which during this adventure, at least, I did not want to try.
I did not get much pleasure from watching the people in the park. Generally speaking, I take a vivid interest in clothes, and am always ready to discuss the latest cut or fashion. But this is one of the relaxations that do not appeal to the homeless. I found the joy of smart hats and dainty gowns had left me, with the keen interest in the newspapers which belonged to my other life. Again, flowers, when you are very tired, do not soothe you. You remember dully how much care is bestowed upon them, and in a dumb, unconscious way, resent it. Usually it is not until dusk that the destitute go to the parks in the West End. They prefer the commonwealth of the streets where, every now and then, you may meet an answering eye, and exchange an eloquent glance.
I found that Sunday very dull. Such museums and public galleries as are open do not appeal to the dispossessed. There again you meet the sharp contrast which is unbearable in moments of comparative leisure. For it is in those moments when, for the time being, the fight for bed and board is of necessity suspended, that you touch the bottom of rejection. It is then that woman, no matter what she be, craves for that thing which is called a home.
I tramped about the streets, sat for a while in Trafalgar Square, and had a rasher of bacon and a cup of coffee in an eating house. At the end of the afternoon I roused myself to begin business, and by a stroke of luck I met my friend of the plush coat in one of her favourite bars.
We did some business together. I made a shilling or two, and then my friend suggested we should go to a cinema, she standing treat. Now I have never been keen on films, except when Charlie Chaplin is on the screen, and I felt quite indifferent at the prospect of such enjoyment. She took two of the cheaper seats in a house near Shaftesbury Avenue, and I waited for the show to begin, quite incurious and even depressed. It was a story of the conventional type, in which a poor girl becomes a leader of society, following a round of luxurious enjoyment, but I found myself suddenly watching the pictures with eagerness, positive pleasure! I dwelt with rapture on her dinner with the hero in an expensive restaurant. I noted with extraordinary precision everything she ate. I enjoyed with her the roses he bought, and thrilled to the music the orchestra was playing. I would not have missed an inch of film. I would not have forfeited any one of the thousand mechanical sensations she enjoyed. It was not until it was all over that I asked myself why this change had come about, why it was that I, and the people in the cheap seats around me, had been wrought up to such excitement, almost ecstasy.
And then the solution came. When you are hungry and cold, without a home and without hope, the “Pictures” warm your imagination, heat your blood and somehow vitalise your body. The blank shutters that hem you in from enjoyment are suddenly down, and you look into a world of light and colour, expectancy and romance—that eternal longing for romance which dies so hardly. This is one of the things that I discovered in my experience. For the same reason this is, I think, why the inhabitants of drab homes in mean streets flock to the cinema. I do not think it has any educational value, nor does it generally stimulate the imagination. But it supplies a lack, and to those whose horizon is bounded by the four walls of a room, badly distempered, or hideously papered, the contemplation of the garish hotel, the spacious restaurant, or impossible heroines of the screen is compensation. This also accounts, I suppose, for the unending supply of this kind of picture. Commerce always caters for a steady public, and while the taste of the artistic is soon surfeited, the intelligence of the thinking easily annoyed, the vast residuum of the patient poor, who unendingly bear the burden of monotony, is a sure and certain market in a world of shifting values.
I parted with my friend outside the cinema. She suggested I should go with her to some doss house in the Borough, but I felt I could not endure a second dose of that kind of thing. I had been out for thirty-six hours, and the desire for bed was getting clamorous. I set my teeth and vowed that, whatever happened, I would sleep under a roof that night.
I did not want to return to Kennedy Court. Experience, however, had already shown me how difficult it was to get a bed over the weekend, so I determined to pay my one and twopence, secure my lodging and then try my luck elsewhere, so that if no fresher accommodation were forthcoming I could be certain of a comparatively decent rest.
But Kennedy Court was full. The weekend, it seems, fills up every available corner in the world that lies beyond the ken of the well-fed. I wasn’t cast down, however, but took a tram to Camden Town, the next public lodging house on the list, where conditions are very similar. But here again I was foiled; there was not a bed to be had. I went back to the Strand, determined to fight with every weapon at my service for a roof. I went to Bow Street Police Station and asked if they could tell me of a lodging house within easy distance.
Now I generally found the police helpful in these emergencies, but on this occasion, though their spirit was quite willing, their knowledge was hopelessly out of date.
“There’s a Women’s Lodging House in Drury Lane, Miss,” said the constable on duty. “You’ll find it quite a decent place.”
I went on my voyage of discovery, fired with new hope, and after interminable questioning and considerable doubt and pain, discovered the number he had given me. It did not look at all like a lodging house, and when after repeated pealings at the bell, a man appeared, I learned that it was Baptist Mission.
“It used to be a lodging house twenty years ago,” said the caretaker, mournfully, “but it’s shut up now, and we’re holding service. No, I don’t know anywhere you could get a bed. Sister Etheldreda might tell you, she’s just round the corner.”
But Sister Etheldreda’s domain was bolted and barred, and in despair I held up a woman in the street and asked if she could help me. Time was getting on, and I simply could not face the prospect of a second night in the streets.
“There’s a decent woman who lets lodgings quite close here; you’ll know the house by the green door and the white steps. She doesn’t charge very much and I think you’ll be comfortable.”
As the proud possessor of a few shillings, I wasn’t afraid of the charge, and I walked up, bold as brass, to the green door and gave the regulation two knocks.
By this time it was dark, and in the dimness of the street, broken by one remote lamp, I hoped my shabbiness would pass unnoticed. But from the lynx eyes of the woman in the white starched apron, and immaculate black dress, there was no escape. One look was quite enough. Before I had time to frame my request I was answered.
“I haven’t got a room,” she said. “No, I couldn’t possibly take you.”
She shut the door firmly, with precision, and I knew that I might beat my hands against it—she would not reopen.
I think I went a little mad just then. I felt that London ought to be burned, that fire and brimstone should rain down on a city in which a decent woman could not find a bed. I could not go back to Mare Street, Hackney, it wasn’t fair to impose myself upon the Salvation Army as a destitute when I had money in my pocket. Besides, it seemed incredible that such a state of things could be. I returned doggedly to Bow Street and was told of a lodging house at the bottom of Craven Street leading to the Embankment.
There was no such place. The lodging house resolved itself into one-of the many private hotels whose price would have been beyond my means, and from whose doors my dilapidated appearance would have barred me.
The Church Army I could not try again and the Christian Herald Mission, full the previous night, would obviously still be crowded.
I returned to the charge and interrogated a policeman. He is the one member of the Force who has given me cause for dislike. He is a very superior person, enormously tall, with large and languorous hands that wave imperially towards the traffic at Charing Cross.
“Can you tell me of a place, please, where I can get a decent bed for half-a-crown or three shillings?”
He regarded me as if I were a sort of loathsome microbe, impertinently disturbing his contemplation of the universe.
“Six-and-sixpence is the cheapest you can get a bed in this district,” he said, languidly, in a pronounced Oxford accent.
“I can’t pay as much as that,” I answered.
“If you go across the river you could get it for ninepence.”
“I don’t want that sort of place,” I protested. “I want somewhere respectable.”
“You can’t get respectability for two and sixpence,” he said, as though shocked at the enormity of my demand. “Ninepence, or perhaps fourpence, across the river, or six and sixpence here; there’s no choice between.”
There was nothing more to be gained by talking to this guardian of the public, so I walked off, burning with rage and literally longing for a fight. Here was I, in the possession of money and unable to find a bed within three, four, or even five miles of Charing Cross this side of the river. I rebelled at the thought that I was to be cooped in a doss house and I had no wish to return to the casual ward.
I decided to seek information from my own kind, and it being past ten o’clock, I went to the Adelphi Arches already filling up. It is the fashion, nowadays to state that people do not sleep in the streets of London. The Embankment, we are told, has been swept clean of the homeless, while the destitute who used to congregate in the Adelphi, have now migrated to the office under Hungerford Bridge.
This is but the expression of an airy fancy. There are still destitute men and women on the streets of London and, night after night in the cold weather, the Adelphi Arches are crowded with tired souls. They are very silent as a rule, keeping themselves to themselves for the most part, and rarely exchanging confidences. The men there—fewer in number than the women—keep together, a short distance from the other sex, who huddle close, friend and stranger, for the sake of warmth. There is the same tragic resignation in their faces as you find throughout their world, a blind acceptance of fate that has marked them out, for no direct fault or failing, as wanderers of the streets, sentenced to a perpetual walking about, with occasional periods of rest upon the stones, or, rarer still, a night in a lodging house.
Many of these women could afford a few pence if there were accommodation for them. But social reformers, political leaders, charitable workers, do not see the necessity for such provision. They are outcasts—let them sleep in the streets—and the same individual who will fight fiercely to secure man his human rights, will remain unmoved by an urge to do the same for woman.
I sat down beside an old, old crone, so frail it seemed a miracle that she could bear her slight body on her attenuated limbs. Her face was of the colour that comes of long years of bad feeding and ill-sleeping, but her eyes were bright and her mouth had not lost its humour. She had a wide knowledge of London’s lodging houses and told me that on a Sunday it was hard to get in anywhere.
“I’d advise you to go to Hanbury Street, Whitechapel,” she said, “to the Salvation Army Shelter. If they’ve got a bed, you’ll get in there for fivepence.”
It did not sound alluring, but there was no choice. I could not face the streets the second night, and I got a district train to Whitechapel.
The capital of the East End was in full flare. The broad pavements were crowded with well dressed women and sleek young men, talking many and foreign tongues. A number of cafés were open and brilliantly lighted windows showed model hats and dresses, Paris shoes and bags, all in the latest style and at moderate prices. Life in the West End at this hour on a Sunday is stagnant; in Whitechapel the current is strong. The foreign faces gleam, the quick and eager conversation has a vibrant influence; one feels very much alive.
Whitechapel to so many is still the synonym for drab wretchedness, that it is perhaps excusable here to point out that the splendid wide road that bisects the district is one of the finest in the metropolis, and still suggests the imperial straightness of the old Roman road on which it stands. There are no mean dwellings in the main thoroughfare, and spacious and leafy squares lie to the north and south. You have to penetrate into the congeries of alleys and byways before you come across the slum area which, even at its worst, is incomparably better than the purlieus of Benthal Green and Dalston.
I asked my way to Hanbury Street of an attractive little Cockney—one of the few I encountered in this neighbourhood.
“It’s early yet,” she said, “and you’re pretty sure of getting a bed. Come along with me and have a cup of cawfee.”
I was ready for companionship, and eagerly accompanied her to a dingy-looking place in a back street, where they run a sort of club. The room was large and cheery, with whitewashed walls on which were hung attractive posters, Continental, and some clever sketches. There was a bar at the far end of the room, where they served salad and other delicatessen, and strong sweet coffee and chocolate. There was no drink served on the premises; indeed, throughout my wanderings in the underworld, I came across no illicit drinking shop, nor can I think that such an establishment could pay. It is only people with money to burn, who can afford to buy bad liquor at exorbitant rates at illegal hours, and even these do not so much want the drink as to protest against the foolish restriction which seeks to treat adult people like small boys and girls.
The room was fairly crowded with men and women. Most of the former were Jews who had lately come to this country. Their broken English was picturesque, and though they looked revolutionary their sentiments were amiable. There was a strong mixture of the Slav element, both Russian and Polish Jews discussing the respective tyrannies of their adopted countries with animus and emphasis. For the moment England contented them—wages were higher over here, and I gathered they were just a little astonished to find that free speech—within four walls at any rate—still remains free.
It is common knowledge that police spies frequent these places, but the police have a shrewd idea as to where they will obtain evidence sufficiently important to secure promotion. The club where I was, and very many others like it, has no value to the aspirants of Scotland Yard. The happy hunting ground of narks lies elsewhere, more noticeably in the West Central district, than in the East End of London.
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.