XIII
The Trap of the Institution
When I began this account of my experiences, I made the point that it was impossible for a woman without a reference or a friendly recommendation to find employment of a regular and recognised description. I steadily tried to get some sort of daily work, but all I succeeded in obtaining was, as I have said, occasional charing jobs, the cleaning of steps, and washing up in a cheap restaurant. And, meanwhile—and I want to emphasise this point—I had a skilled trade at my fingers’ ends. I can cook sufficiently well to get a situation tomorrow, backed up by a personal character from an employer or a friend. But, because I could produce no such proofs of honesty, I was compelled to earn my bread from a different angle.
It may be, and has been, argued that to take a strange woman into your house is to court disaster, it being the explicit belief of ninety people out of every hundred that unrecommended humanity is inevitably dishonest. Indeed, the faith in what is known as a “character” is almost touching in its innocence. Few women give an entirely truthful estimate of their late employee, a wholesome fear of an action for slander restrains the expression of some of their opinions, while fundamental good-heartedness acts as a similar deterrent. For this reason indifferent cooks get situation after situation, and complacently impair the digestions and spoil the tempers of countless families. It occurs to me that it should not need very great courage to engage a woman on probation, so to speak, and set her to cook a specimen meal. If she is adequate, she might be retained, even if such retention meant keeping a close eye on the silver. It would not call for a very great display of trust to adopt this course, remembering how blindly the majority of housewives accept the statement of their predecessors in regard to a prospective household gem.
I do not suggest that a number of outcasts—using the term in the sense that they are outcast from home and security—are competent cooks. But a certain proportion are skilled, as I have said, in the domestic arts, and if an employer could persuade herself to try them out at a proper wage—none of your ninepence an hour—they would discover unlooked for ability, and at the same time have the satisfaction of feeling that they had offered an opportunity, very rarely to be found.
Clothes are, of course, the great barrier. I have experimented deliberately to test my theory that where a woman is concerned, her social value is estimated on externals. I have gone out of my home in a soiled raincoat and a bedraggled hat, and have immediately been placed in a totally different social strata from that to which I am usually relegated. The same policeman who would touch his hat when I pass him at the corner of the street in my ordinary attire, stares blankly at me when I put on shabby garments. The porter at a block of flats who knows me very well and is always most polite, has failed to recognise me when I turned up in what my friends call my “Annie Turner” clothes. I do not think this is the case where a destitute man is concerned. People have learned that they must look beneath the habit in the case of masculine appraisement, but women still suffer from the old test. Bedraggled garments not only spell destitution, but incapacity, dishonesty, and a total lack of sex morals.
In my own particular case I discovered a means profitably to exploit such personality as I possess. I developed my latent talent for commerce, and evolved a system of attack which brought me, in gradual stages of increase, enough to live on. When I went back to my home I was making sufficient on the commission I received on the sale of metal cigarette cases, etc., to keep me in meals, find me a bed—when there was one available—and to permit me to have an occasional wash and bath. Had I kept on a little longer, by extending my area of trade and increasing my experience, I should have been able, either to rent a weekly bed at a lodging house, or to have taken one of those top attics, which are to be found in the alleys and byways of Soho.
It would have taken me a long time, however, to have accumulated sufficient to renovate my wardrobe. I might have managed a new pair of shoes, and perhaps, have picked up a hat in one of the cheaper stalls at Berwick Market, the New Cut or Petticoat Lane, but a complete renewal of wardrobe could not have been accomplished without considerable difficulty. Still, I formed the nucleus of a livelihood which in the fullness of time, would, I think, have grown into a moderate but stable income.
When I had reached that point in my commercial career, however, I should have been faced by new difficulties. Directly you grow prosperous in this particular walk of life, the police get wise to you. While you remain furtive, dirty, and obviously destitute, so long as you are civilly spoken and quiet mannered you are allowed to rub along. But appear on your beat with the least appearance of well-doing, and keep up that appearance for a week or ten days and you will be pounced upon. For this reason my friend of the black plush coat clung to her unsavoury habiliments. For this reason—apart from her vagrant instinct and her tendency to drug—she would never sleep two nights running in the same house. Admitted, that her appearance militated against her in the sense that customers were not drawn towards her, still this disability was counterbalanced by her employment of younger and less dilapidated women who, like myself, worked on commission for sales.
I should say this woman has a tidy sum put away somewhere, probably sewn in the innermost recesses of her rags, where even she cannot easily get hold of it. I know of more than one case where women carry a sum about with them that would surprise the casual observer, but it is very rarely that they will break into this store. They know that once this happens they may lack the resolution to stay their hand, and so winter and summer the greasy wad of fingered notes, done up in newspaper, sewn into oilskin and packed away with intimate garments next the skin, travels about with the owner, for in no circumstances would my friend or those like her, put their money into any sort of bank.
These cases are by no means numerous, nor do I for a moment want to suggest that it is common for an outcast to have a secret hoard. But such phenomena do exist, and they are generally recruited from the educated classes. They have not always been homeless, but have become Arabs of the pavement through circumstances allied to an inborn dislike of ordered routine. Very often these people disappear from the homeless world and return to the place from whence they came. But I do not think they permanently stay there. There is an urge about street life difficult to resist, and once you have experienced the stimulus of an almost complete isolation, there is a danger that you may indulge in it too often.
Such people as I have indicated, do not offer the problems which assail the rank and file. Personality, which in its ultimate, means resistance, is difficult to destroy, but given a long monotone of semi-starvation and lack of easy sleep, its fibres disintegrate and gradually weaken. Change of suffering is a stimulus; the sudden alternation of prosperity with penury inspires the imagination and revives the spirit. My friend of the plush coat had known such contrasting periods and by such means maintained her capacity to fight. But the overwhelming majority of the destitute work an unending treadmill in which lean day succeeds lean day, varied only by the fitful night.
Such an existence effaces individuality, weighs down the will, clogs the instinct to do battle which is the heritage of man. And so my sisters of the street have not the power to find out newer ways of making pence. They respond automatically to a rebuff and human sympathy has lost for them its interior significance.
Something of this you will meet in a woman who has served a long term of imprisonment. She is, as it were, hypnotised by an unending submission and has lost even the desire to break her bonds. One instinct only remains vital, apart from the desire for food and shelter, and that is the passionate determination not to be trapped into an institution.
“I told one of these women that she was really too ill to be in the streets, and I tried to persuade her to go to a hospital, or to let me get her into the infirmary. I looked round to see if I could find a taxi, so that I could take her right away. But when I went to speak to her she had gone. Now, why do you suppose she did that?”
The question was put to me by a really good woman, who most sincerely wanted to assist the human wreck she had encountered. There was in her mind a suspicion that there was some dark and undesirable reason for this strange evasion.
“Hospitals are always so clean, and you get plenty of care at an infirmary. She must have known she would be more comfortable there than walking about.”
I tried to explain that there is a bondage of the soul more difficult to bear than even those privations of the body that are the daily portion of the homeless. But I could not make this kind, good creature understand.
“She would have been better in an Institution, and I don’t see that it matters even if she doesn’t want to go there. She ought to have been taken.”
Those last words embody the terror of the homeless. It is the trap they always scent, and from which, to the last gasp, they will run away. For there is that in common throughout the whole company of the destitute—workers in slop-shops, street-sellers, tramps and prostitutes, one and all, they will try their strength to the verge of collapse before they will enter the portals of any place within the shadow of state control.
Hospitals, we know, are exempt from constituted authority. But there is always the dread that a case of destitution may be referred to the Poor Law Guardians, and that the unhappy “case” may find herself imprisoned in a workhouse.
What then is to be done for these women?
In the first place I would enlist the help of the charitable to put up a number of free Shelters to be run on the principles adopted by the Salvation Army, which demands no explanations and institutes no inspection, the lack of money for a bed being the sole requirement for admission.
The next step should be shelters where beds can be obtained for threepence, rising in certain districts to fivepence. All these places should afford facilities for washing and should command continual supply of water, hot and cold. There might be an employment bureau in connection with the shelter where those women who are skilled in any domestic work could apply for jobs. The cost of such a scheme would not be enormous. The erection of even one such shelter would do much to assist the work already carried on at the Shelter in Crispin Street, Bishopsgate. It should not be regarded as in any sense a philanthropic enterprise, for philanthropy is generally associated with the idea of dividends, either in this world or the next. It should be, to my mind, a practical recognition of that sisterhood of which we women prate so much, and in whose cause we do so little. While one woman has to walk the streets at night without a place to lay her head, those of us who possess homes, however small, however poor, should regard it as an occasion of reproach. For in the ultimate—I put it to every woman who may read this—there is nothing in ourselves which has accorded us a happier fate. There, but by the favour of circumstances, might go you or I.
Once the homeless woman could feel there was a place for her, the power of resistance would enlarge, and with that quickness, indestructible in our sex, she might rediscover latent abilities. Only, and this is a point whose importance cannot be overestimated, the homeless must not be subjected to any inquisition. If you want to know how they live you must be patient, and if you are of them they will tell you themselves.
Women of the “tramp” category, who, like my splendid Kitty of the Casual Ward, pass their life upon the road, need help of a different kind. What is wanted for them is housing accommodation. It is here that individuals can do very much. Put Kitty, or any of her kind into a room, and she will become a self-supporting citizen. They are splendid workers these women of the soil, who can plant, and hoe and dig with any man, and at the same time possess a talent for the softer things of domestic life. A hostel for women engaged in manual work is what is needed, where at a small rental weekly, each tenant could make her own home.
But such a place must be conserved for women such as these. There are innumerable hostels where members of the middle class, typists, secretaries and the rest, can get ample accommodation. I do not know of any place where rooms are let out to women who, like Kitty, cannot ply their trade because they have no permanent place of abode.
Then we have the question of the common lodging house where, at prices varying from tenpence to one and fourpence per night, a bed can be secured. This is an economic proposition, and as such should engage the attention of the capitalist. As I have said, the London County Council refuses to assume the responsibility of running municipal lodging houses for the female sex on the plea that we are difficult to manage. This means, in effect, that the L.C.C., like the majority of people, confuse lack of means with lack of morals, and are terrified to be associated in the work of providing beds for prostitutes lest they should be accused of countenancing a loose method of life.
Prostitutes, indeed, form a fair proportion of the lodgers in licensed houses, and for this reason I suppose the L.C.C. continues to remain extraordinarily lax in the matter of inspection. It would seem that prostitutes may be put to sleep in soiled sheets and on insanitary mattresses; that their lack of chastity should debar them from the use of baths, and that the process of washing shall assume the form of a penance in the winter and an odorous experience in the summer. Prostitutes, in fact, may be exploited by anyone whom the L.C.C. decides to license, and none of the excellent gentlemen and virtuous ladies, who are elected to a seat on the council, are concerned to raise a finger on their behalf.
There are many women speakers who grow eloquent upon the platform on the subject of equal immorality for both sexes. But while they demand ample scope for the practice of free love, they are quite indifferent to the housing conditions of the freelance in the sisterhood. The fact, apparently, that “a little money passes” is sufficient to shut out the less successful harlot from the smallest amenity of life. Thus, while the male party to a sex transaction in a back alley may straightway depart to a bed in Rowton House, clean, well ordered, with the fullest lavatory accommodation, the partner of his moral lapse must be content with unsavoury surroundings at the same price.
An illogical and indefensible position.
There is yet another category of the destitute. Women, who, as I was, are in need of temporary shelter: who are neither tramps nor prostitutes, but simply down on their luck, and for the time being are without any shelter or unable to get one when they have the money to pay for it. The first named have certain places where they can go free of charge. Of these the largest and most kindly run is a Catholic Shelter in Crispin Street under the auspices of the Sisters of the neighbouring Convent of Mercy. This place will be dealt with in a chapter to itself. I have already referred to it, and I mention it now as being on the list of refuges for the penniless, without distinction of creed, and regardless of record. Other shelters include Mare Street, Hackney, and the Christian Herald Mission in Union Street, Southwark, which I shall also describe. A third and smaller shelter is in King’s Road, Chelsea. Primarily a home for discharged women prisoners, there are a few beds reserved for the homeless, and even when these are filled it is rarely that anyone is turned away. When we add to these the casual ward of Southwark Workhouse, we cover the free lodgings to be found in London, with the exception, possibly, of some small charitable houses known only to the few.
For the woman who can pay, there are only the public lodging houses, and when these are full, she must either walk the streets, or claim a corner in one of these free shelters.
The last category of the destitute can be described as rovers. Unlike my friend of the plush coat, they do not suggest a romantic, or a criminal past. Neither are they heavy drinkers, nor addicted to dope. They are born with that migratory instinct which prevents them from permanently settling to anything or in any place. They preserve their personality undimmed, for the reason that when times get too bad, they have sufficient resilience to emerge from the underworld and do profitable work.
The rovers are invariably artistic. Men and women, and I have met both, they always possess the gift of expression. They are musicians, singers, and can spontaneously dramatise a situation or a story. Some of them are clever draughtsmen and can dash off a pencil portrait of an onlooker with a sureness of line that is amazing. Their tastes are not expensive, they can be as charming and as content in a shelter as in a restaurant or studio. The one thing they cannot and do not bear is any measure of routine.
Outcasts of this type then find their way to the Crispin Refuge. One such case I remember where a woman of undoubted genius continually returned to claim a bed. She was a brilliant pianist, with exceptional execution, and when she touched the notes you sat up at attention, recognising a master hand. A handsome woman, with a fine head, her accent was cultured, and she could talk on any subject. I was told that this woman’s daughter came to see her at the refuge. She was in a good position, with a husband and children and was always trying to persuade her mother to settle down. It seems that the latter was the widow of a clergyman, who, apparently unable to bear parochial restraint after his death, went forth into the wide world. There was not any money forthcoming from the deceased gentleman, but the daughter explained that she could give her mother a home, and that friends would be pleased to help, and in any case there was always her gift for music.
The “rover” allowed the daughter to take her out to dinner and to buy tickets for a concert. But further than that she would not go. She stayed her allotted time at the refuge and then departed to play at a cinema in the East End until, growing tired of her paid monotony, she drifted off again, and in the fullness of time came back to Crispin Street.
These types are, of course, few and no social system could cater for them; nor need we waste sympathy upon them, for they possess the thing they desire most—freedom from material responsibilities and from that burden of possessions which so often blocks the way to the kingdom of the spirit.
There will always be wanderers to and fro on the face of the earth, and you may know them by their clear gaze which seems to look upon horizons far beyond our sight. They are largely indifferent to hunger, cold or exposure because—and this is the secret of their content—they can always turn the exigence of the moment to account. Their wants being but small, they have but to do a hand’s turn to find their outstretched palm holds money.