9781784878993 by Smakprov Media AB

GEORGE ORWELL

George Orwell (1903–1950) is one of England’s most famous writers and social commentators. He is the author of the classic political satire

Animal Farm and the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is also well known for his essays and journalism, particularly his works covering his travels and his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His writing is celebrated for its piercing clarity, purpose and wit and his books continue to be bestsellers all over the world.

BY GEORGE ORWELL

Ficti O n

Burmese Days

A Clergyman’s Daughter

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Coming Up for Air

Animal Farm

Nineteen Eighty-Four

nO n-Ficti O n

The Road to Wigan Pier

Homage to Catalonia

A Kind of Compulsion (1903–36)

Facing Unpleasant Facts (1937–39)

A Patriot After All (1940–41)

All Propaganda is Lies (1941–42)

Keeping Our Little Corner Clean (1942–43)

Two Wasted Years (1943)

I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (1943–44)

I Belong to the Left (1945)

Smothered Under Journalism (1946)

It Is What I Think (1947–48)

Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living (1949–50)

Critical Essays

Narrative Essays

Diaries

A Life in Letters

GEORGE ORWELL DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON

O scathful harm, condition of poverte!

Chaucer

W it H A n int RODU cti O n BY Kerry Hudson

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Introduction

I first read Down and Out in Paris and London at university while taking a module on travel writing. At the time I thought it an incongruous inclusion, but I soon understood that, in fact, the majority of the students were being taken on an odyssey, not through 1920s Paris and London, but through the grim annals of poverty, hunger, deprivation and the degrading, cyclical spiralling consequences.

Forever out of place in the university, which seemed designed for those with different upbringings, different educations and far bigger resources, I finally felt I had the upper hand reading and analysing Orwell’s text describing his own experiences of grinding deprivation. I was an expert through lived experience.

My fellow students’ shock and disbelief helped me see how much work there still was to be done. This book rammed home the urgency and importance of writing about hardship, because I knew that much of what Orwell had written about had changed in era only.

In the 1980s I had grown up with my single mum and baby sister in homeless B&Bs full of the destitute men Orwell wrote about. Large houses – some squalid, some quite neat – where people, mostly older men, whiled away hours and looked forward to what they might eat and drink, and had little hope of anything more. I knew poor men with expansive stories but empty bellies. I knew the hot mortification of going to buy a loaf of bread – the pile of coins

clutched in my sweaty palm, having been scraped together from the bottom of dusty handbags and the back of sofa cushions – only to find we were 5p short, and of never wanting to go to that shop again.

We, too, sold everything of any value to pawnshops and were often met with derisive laughter when what we had to offer was deemed worthless. To this day I cannot look at a pawnshop, or its more recent incarnation, Cash Converters, without feeling the sting of humiliation. I know the relentless eking of nothing, the endless sums and bargaining to get to the next paltry sum of money, and the resignation of hunger. I also know that even when a job is forthcoming – even when you are desperate and grateful for it – it is in the poorest, lowest-paying jobs that you’ll be treated the worst.

Sitting in that lecture hall with the weight of childhood, one large student loan and two student overdrafts heavy on my shoulders, I realised that what I had lived through in the 1980s and ’90s was truly as old as time. Of course I had known that there has always been a structure that benefited some and saw others ground down, but never had I seen my own experiences written so truthfully. Never had I imagined that, across decades and borders and gender, someone might so perfectly encapsulate the utter brutality of what it is to be poor and to feel hopeless.

Although, of course, we know that Orwell wasn’t in fact hopeless. He was from a solidly middle-class background. In Paris, when he was going without food for days and eating half-cooked potatoes like they were a feast, he had an aunt he might have turned to. At any time he might have returned to his family in England or sought help through them. He could also have sought out his wide network of Eton school friends who, one assumes, might have helped out a fellow

Etonian rather than see them starve or make their way through the workhouse ‘spikes’.

Much later in my life, in another university lecture hall, but now attending as a professional writer, I’d been asked to present a guest lecture on working-class writing. In the question-and-answer section, a young, bright, self-identifying working-class student asked me whether it was only those from the working class who should write working-class literature and, if so, what did I think about George Orwell? I replied that, in my opinion, anyone could write about absolutely anything they wanted to, but if they were going to stray from their own authentic experience they had better get it absolutely right; that it had better read as vividly as someone who had learned the hard lessons and small comparative joys through years of that existence.

For me, Orwell does this. By putting himself through the privations that he did, he was able to act as an ally and advocate for those who would be silenced otherwise. When I read his literature, and especially Down and Out in Paris and London, I feel seen and represented.

I am often asked if I think things are better now than when I was growing up. It’s true that the 1980s and ’90s were grim. But it’s also true that, despite the fact we were a vulnerable single-parent family and my mum couldn’t work due to mental-health issues, we had a safety net. Yes, we sometimes moved as often as three times a year, with no warning, frequently leaving us homeless. I had nine primary schools and five high schools and left aged fifteen without any qualifications, but although the fear of absolute destitution loomed, we were never truly threatened by that fate.

Why? Because we had the ability to access social housing. While there was still social housing stock (however badly it

x was maintained), we were not at the mercy of private slum landlords, we never had to find an impossible deposit or pass a credit check that could never have been passed. It’s true that we often found ourselves in temporary B&Bs while waiting for a council flat, but there was always the surety that one would come up and we’d have somewhere to call home. We also had a benefits system that, while designed to be the least a person could possibly live on, was, at least, guaranteed. It’s true that sometimes the benefits money ran out too soon, and sometimes it wasn’t spent in the most prudent way, but the money was there again each week when we expected it, and we knew we might go hungry for a few days, but that we would not starve. And eventually I was able to break out of that cycle of poverty because, no matter where we were, I had access to libraries and, once I was ready, access to good-quality further and higher education, with financial support and without crippling tuition fees. Today? I don’t know whether my family would have survived. Certainly I don’t think I could have built the productive, happy life that I now have.

There are now more food banks than McDonald’s in the UK , with approximately 1,300 McDonald’s restaurants to at least 2,000 food banks (although this is thought to be an extremely conservative estimate). Food banks and their use have become so ubiquitous, so normalised, that they are in danger of being considered simply a supplementary community service. But food banks are an absolute last resort. They are where you turn when you have exhausted the options for what might be taken to sell at a pawnshop, what might be borrowed or what coins might be scrabbled together. They are where a person goes when they are literally in fear of starving.

At the beginning of 2020 official statistics showed that there had been an increase of 100,000 children living below the breadline since the previous year. The latest figure was 4.2 million children living in relative poverty (meaning living on below 60 per cent of the UK average household income, after housing costs have been paid), equating to around 30 per cent of all children. Not only this, but 4 million children are in ‘deep poverty’, meaning that they live at least 50 per cent below the breadline.

I admit here that I am poverty-fatigued, as many of you might be, too. I read daily about record highs in homelessness, poverty and the poor outcomes for children related to these things. And daily I have to shake myself to remember what that generic, bland term ‘poor outcomes’ really means. It means all the things expressed in this book: hunger, shame, frustration and degradation. It means achievement, potential and aspirations left to stagnate. It means that any quality of life – and any hope of one day having a better one – becomes a luxury. It means parents who desperately need help themselves caring for children who will grow up to believe that society has forgotten them. It means future generations who will embody the trauma, anger, vulnerability and, often, dysfunction that growing up in the shadow of poverty engenders.

At the moment of writing this we are facing our worst crisis as a country since the Second World War. The advent of the Covid-19 global pandemic has thrown into stark relief our inequalities as a society and our failings as a welfare state. It’s also risibly noticeable that priorities have changed, and how quickly things can be readjusted in society when desperately needed. Councils were given forty-eight hours to house all rough sleepers in the UK . Loan and credit-card

Many of those who have been made suddenly redundant are those who were in the lowest-paid jobs with zero-hour contracts, proving – whether you’re a plongeur in 1929 or one of the 43,000 staff of JD Wetherspoon in 2020 – very little has changed.

Now the slow erosion of the NHS is brutally obvious, in the falling numbers of nurses and the fact that we only have 6.6 ICU beds for every 100,000 people, compared to say, Germany, which has 29.9.

In 1946 Orwell said of his reasons for writing, ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.’

As I re-read Down and Out in Paris and London I was once again reminded of the power of narrative to overcome apathy. Through human story, one person to another, we can truly engender compassion and empathy. It is by living with another person’s hunger, cold and hopelessness and feeling it on a human level that we can find the strength to fight for a better society.

xii payments were frozen for three months. Suddenly those who were seen as ‘low-skilled’ workers – our cleaners, delivery, refuse and supermarket staff – are some of our most vital contributors to a functioning society. It seems that all of a sudden everyone knows the truth that, as Orwell says, ‘The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.’

Orwell went on to say in the same piece, ‘I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.’

It is heartbreaking that the same things Orwell wanted to give a hearing to are still so prevalent in today’s society, but through crisis accelerated change can also come. After all, Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government built more than a million homes, 80 per cent of which were council houses.

I hope this book will be for you what it was always for me – a bright flare shot up into the darkest sky. A battle cry that says: yes, we exist in a grossly unequal society, but we do have a choice. That choice is to bear witness, to recognise this inequality and fight it each day, just as we would if it were our own child going hungry.

Kerry

Hudson, Prague, April 2020

Chapter I

The Rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out onto the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

Madame Monce: ‘Sacrée salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you’ve bought the hotel, eh? Why can’t you throw them out of the window like everyone else? Espèce de traînée! ’

The woman on the third floor: ‘Va donc, eh! vieille vache!’

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.

I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the Rue du Coq d’Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there − but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street.

It was a very narrow street – a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though

they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week.

The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were of every trade – cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended lectures at the Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. One room was let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker. In another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both consumptive.

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.

There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of châteaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned

about a hundred francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.

Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather romanticlooking in his long sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with child. Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him halfwitted in a single day.

Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his parents and six months in France.

During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from then till midnight he was in his corner of the bistro, quietly and methodically soaking. While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.

There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Fureux the Limousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser – he died before my time, though – old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

Chapter II

Life in the quarter. Our bistro, for instance, at the foot of the Hotel des Trois Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed ‘Crédit est mort’; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage with big jack-knives; and Madame F., a splendid Auvergnat peasant woman with the face of a strongminded cow, drinking Malaga all day ‘for her stomach’; and games of dice for apéritifs ; and songs about ‘Les Fraises et Les Framboises’, and about Madelon, who said, ‘Comment épouser un soldat, moi qui aime tout le régiment?’; and extraordinarily public love-making. Half the hotel used to meet in the bistro in the evenings. I wish one could find a pub in London a quarter as cheery.

One heard queer conversations in the bistro. As a sample I give you Charlie, one of the local curiosities, talking.

Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home and lived on occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are tiny, his arms abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby’s. He has a way of dancing and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of life to keep still for an instant. It is three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the bistro except Madame F. and one or two men who are out of work; but it is all the same to Charlie whom he talks to, so long as he can

talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a barricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his short arms. His small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting to see.

He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

‘Ah, l’amour, l’amour! Ah, que les femmes m’ont tué! Alas, messieurs et dames, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have learned, what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have acquired the true wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word a civilised man, to have become raffiné, vicieux,’ etc. etc.

‘Messieurs et dames, I perceive that you are sad. Ah, mais la vie est belle– you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!

Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine, Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!

‘Ah, que la vie est belle! Listen, messieurs et dames, out of the fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will explain to you what is the true meaning of love – what is the true sensibility, the higher, more refined pleasure which is known to civilised men alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but I am past the time when I could know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever – the very possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.

‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris – he is a lawyer – and my parents had told him to find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my brother and I, but he preferred not to disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk upon three bottles of Bordeaux.

I took him back to his hotel, and on the way I bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a tumblerful of it – I told him it was something to make him sober. He drank it, and immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and propped his back against the bed; then I went through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did not know my address – I was safe.

‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the bordels, naturally. But you do not suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for navvies? Confound it, one is a civilised man! I was fastidious, exigeant, you understand, with a thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was looking for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed en smoking and with his hair cut à l’américaine, and we were talking in a quiet bistro away from the boulevards. We understood one another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that, and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi together and were driven away.

‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high blank wall of a convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts, and the door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large, crooked hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding money.

‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step. “How much do you want?” he said.

‘ “A thousand francs,” said a woman’s voice. “Pay up at once or you don’t come in.”

‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred to my guide; he said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously before letting me in. It was very dark inside; I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.

‘ “Voilà !” she said; “go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand – perfectly free.”

‘Ah, messieurs, need I describe to you – forcément, you know it yourselves – that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the scraping of my feet on the stones, otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar with a red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great rich garish bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves, messieurs et dames! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs, even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge square bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red velvet. At the

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