In Darkest London quotes

London is a city of sudden and violent contrasts.

You can step from comfort and security of existence into destitution within a few minutes. This sounds incredible; but it can be done as I have proved.

London is a city of sudden and violent contrasts.

You can step from comfort and security of existence into destitution within a few minutes.

This sounds incredible; but it can be done as I have proved. I wanted to find out how the woman without a home, without a reference, without money, friends or a decent wardrobe, supports life.

I had determined to start life from an entirely new angle. I would arrive in London with nothing but my personality between me and starvation. To do this I went to Euston, and mingled with the crowd of passengers on the 9:20 arriving from Liverpool.

It was an odd sensation to be derelict in a crowd without one familiar association.

Everybody seemed to have a friend to meet, and I pictured the sort of homes that they were going to. I had never troubled about this before when I arrived at a terminus, I was always too engrossed with my own personal affairs.

“There’s a Salvation Army Hostel off the Tottenham Court Road,” said he. “You couldn’t do better than go there.”

Now between asking what to do and doing it, there is a wide gulf fixed.

I had an awful tussle with myself before I plucked up courage to knock at the Hostel door.

It was my first experience of destitution, and it sank deep into my consciousness.

It is one thing to walk through London with the knowledge of a comfortable fireside awaiting you⁠—it is another to drag the weary length of interminable streets not knowing what lies at the end of the journey.

Along the Euston Road, up Pentonville Hill, on to the Angel, that was the first lap, and I enjoyed it. It was when I began the ghastly stretch of the Essex Road that I grew unhappy.

He looked me up and down, and then he put his big hand into his pocket. “Here you are,” said he, and gave me twopence. “Look sharp now, there’s a tram coming along.”

One gets into the habit of using words almost as if they were dead things, and then suddenly they quicken into life.

Gratitude is a word of easy coinage, it rises so glibly to the lips. I had never acutely felt that thing for which it stands, before.

I had never acutely felt that thing for which it stands, before. But when the policeman gave me twopence I understood and I wanted at that moment to do something to show what I felt.

It was not only that the money saved me a heartbreaking tramp in the bitter wind, it was the recognition of humanity which means so much to the outcast.

I might have been lying to him in the letter, as I was in the spirit, but I was still a woman, very tired and forlorn. His gift without question or suspicion reconciled me to my fellow man.

I was slowly, but surely, surrounded by terror—an almost ungovernable impulse urged me to flight. The five tall windows were pitiless—I fell into the depths of unknown misery.

I had set sail on an uncharted sea, and the waters lapped cold and deathly on my spirit.

And then the terror that walks in darkness was shattered by a cry. From the far corner of the room someone screamed for help and immediately the sleeping figures stirred and the room was full of life.

There was porridge, well made, with milk and sugar, plenty of hot tea, good bread and quite bearable margarine. There is a great deal in that word “bearable.”

Butter is beyond the dreams of the outcast, and the number and variety of horrors known as “marg,” are undreamt of by the comfortably placed.

It was a very human meal, with plenty of cheery talk. The majority of the women were quite young—domestic servants, for the most part—and very cheerful. The level of good looks was a high one, and I noticed an entire absence of powder or paint.

The girls were bobbed or shingled, wore pretty frocks, many of them sleeveless, smart shoes, and almost invariably silk stockings. That is one of the discoveries I made in my wanderings.

The outcast, until she gives up hope, tries at all costs after silk hosiery; indeed, apart from matchsellers, I was the only destitute woman who wore wool.

The meal was concluded by a short address and a hymn, and we all trooped out to the day room again and began to discuss our prospects. It was a very wonderful experience to hear these girls talk of their future.

It was a nice point, and I was very anxious to see how the triumphant mother would solve it; but, as I was to discover, the young women at the Salvation Army Shelter are for the most part realists.

They look facts straight between the eyes.

“The father pays, of course. He tried to wriggle out of the responsibility, because, like a fool, I burnt his letters, I was so mad when I knew he wouldn’t marry me. But my sister, she gave evidence and I get the money regular.

Thus, it is but seldom that Mare Street receives a call from the utterly down and out.

All women have their personal pride; it is perhaps the last thing that leaves us.

Such as I refer to go elsewhere for a bed. If they have as much as fivepence they can get a clean, not too hard, bed at another Army Shelter in Hansbury Street, Whitechapel. This I shall describe later.

I was never asked by my companions if I had seen better days, or interrogated as to why I had come down. Personally, I found it infinitely stimulating to be reckoned up apart from the social value set by clothes and other trifles.

In the bedrock of life, these things slip past you, and you are gauged by character alone.

I remember looking at the list of addresses on that dull and bitter morning, wondering how women found the courage to go on, day after day, looking for work when I, who had been at it only for a few hours, already felt dejected.

“That’s all right,” he said, “I’ll treat you.”

There was nothing but the purest chivalry in the invitation.

He was distressed that I was cold and, manlike, wanted to give me succour. He took me to one of the little eating houses which abound in Hackney, and ordered a steaming bowl of hot, sweet coffee.

There can be no more hideous sight than hearthstoned steps, and I hope that everyone who indulges in such monstrosities, will have their carpets ground to pieces by the surplus white brought in from outside.

I cleaned those steps and the rage within my heart warmed the cold water.

I did them very badly—I know that—and I am not sorry. If step cleaners were less conscientious it would be a good thing for them, and “larn” householders to be content with the scrubbing brush.

Others like myself take it up as an odd job to help them over a bad stile. It is astonishing, however, that so many manage to make some sort of a living, though very few achieve even the semblance of a home.

For the outcast has no abiding place; and always, in hot or cold weather, when it is wet and when it is dry, there remains the eternal problem⁠—where and how to get a bed.

That particular problem was pressing on me acutely when I came out of the eating house. I went to the nearest Labour Exchange and went through the same performance as at Hackney.

I suppose I was still influenced by my normal valuation of ninepence, otherwise I cannot account for my inexcusable extravagance. I actually bought myself a cup of tea and a piece of cake, which reduced my capital to fourpence!

Four coppers between me and a night in the street.

It sounds romantic, but there is a grim hardness about the reality, difficult, if not impossible, for inexperience to gauge.

When one has become acclimatised to being homeless, the bed problem, though always there, is less urgent, but I was still too new to take things philosophically.

It had begun to rain, and to be on the streets when it is wet is to touch the very dregs of misery.

Later I was to find myself very often in the same predicament, but it is always the first impact that tells, and I began to be just a little frightened.

My judgment seemed to leave me, I lost initiative and the result was immediately apparent. None of the passersby reacted to me—I was just one of the crowd and, therefore, negligible. The same sort of thing happens at any social gathering.

You either make yourself felt or you are unnoticed; if you do not project your personality, the stream passes by and leaves you on one side.

I had almost relapsed into the woebegone condition that I have described above when of a sudden the feeling that I must do something roused me. Two of my matchboxes were soaked through, which reduced my chances of a bed by half.

The place was crowded when I entered, but I was not stared at, and nobody minded when I asked a woman near the door if I might sit down. She gave me a cheery welcome, and invited me to get warm.

In the world of the destitute there is a diversity of morals, but only one code of manners.

You ask no questions; a newcomer speaks only when spoken to; and observes a due diffidence in the choice of a seat, respectfully keeping at a distance from the fire. Moreover, criticism is ruled out.

I understood also why she had to cry out then and there without leaving one method of relief sealed up. Tomorrow she might be homeless. There might be no place in which to weep, vituperate or despair.

It is the tragedy of the destitute that when there is a roof above their heads they must seize the chance to give voice to their emotions⁠—emotions that we can take our time to think about, nicely to express and delicately to restrain.

For consider—can you cry out in the street, shriek your agony to the pavements, raise your streaming eyes to the sky?

Evanescent feeling? Easy tears? Hysterical outburst? Not a bit of it.

Wait until you have no home to cry in, and then you will understand.

Wait until you have walked about the streets, cut off from your kind as completely as though you were in a desert.

Only once did I meet a woman actuated by any interest in ideas.

Ideas do not easily flourish on a starvation diet, and all the energies of the outcast are bent towards the problem of board and bed.

This particular woman was about five and forty, tall, well built, with a face that had been beautiful and was still arresting.

A straight glance of the eye, a clear tone in the voice, an assured and ready bearing; these are but the manifestations of a well-fed life.

Take away your regular meals, your comfortable bed, your sense of security, and you will find yourself like any other outcast, slinking along the pavement, shrinking from attention, utterly void of that self-confidence which is the hall mark of success.

I succeeded in evading Ida’s tender care for some time, but at last the hour struck. She beckoned me with her claw-like hand.

I slept, but fitfully. I had not dreamt there were so many women without habitation or home, and the knowledge that, purely through force of circumstances, and by no individual merit, I was in possession of both, rankled—a sore injustice.

Why should these young girls, these elderly women, be cut off from those things without which the soul cannot flower?

Why should I, and so many hundreds like me, sleep softly and securely while their dragging feet walked the pavement, or, at best, found soiled shelter for the night?

This is but one branch of commerce for which these young and quick-brained creatures would be eligible. There is plenty of capacity among them, and, as I have said, very little vice. What has happened to them is what happens to many.

They have missed the train of life at a certain junction and have been left behind.

The least little assistance—proffered frankly and uncoloured by preaching—would help them catch the train at the next stopping place. Stern, inflexible officialdom, the solution of the reformatory, institution, or “Fallen Home,” is worse than useless; they are all tarred with the same brush;

they are all tarred with the same brush; they all postulate the same thing—that the prostitute is intrinsically evil and must be purged by fire. It is the entire absence of moral superiority that gives the Salvation Army such a great influence.

Your social reformer wants always to reform; the Salvation Army, so far as I know it, wants only to help.

There is a whole world of difference in the result of these two opposite ideals.

The money they pay per week for their bed would rent a room in a poor locality, but even if such accommodation were available, and they could collect the necessary furniture, there is one overwhelming obstacle to such a mode of life.

For the single woman well on to middle age, to live alone is to court a desolation of spirit that saps vitality.

The loneliness of such an existence is intolerable. Few of these odd women have friends, or even acquaintances; they sustain their hold on life through the younger women whom they meet at the lodging house.

They have that respect for liberty of action and privacy of thought which among women of ordered and leisured lives is rarely met with. They are void of that desire of possession which mars so many friendships.

They desire to possess their own lives, they shrink from the responsibility of possessing their neighbours.

So keen is this appreciation of spiritual aloofness, that it is hopeless for anybody to attempt to offer them material assistance, who does not share that same passion.

I was not content, however, to accept my failure to get employment as a cook as final. Good cooks are always in demand and, as I have said before—l am an extremely good cook.

I regard the production of a well-thought-out repast as a piece of creative work every bit as important as a chapter in a novel, let alone a triolet.

Why, therefore, should I be debarred from practising my vocation? Surely this was an occasion when personality should be able to surmount the difficulties arising from the absence of what is known as a “character?”

“You’re clever at selling,” she went on, and I could feel her studying me closely. “Will you have a drink?” she asked, and, nothing daunted, I accepted yet another port and further biscuits.

You never refuse anything when you are destitute.

It is a mistake not to eat because you are not hungry. As a wise woman once observed to me, “You may want it later.”

You never refuse anything when you are destitute. It is a mistake not to eat because you are not hungry.

As a wise woman once observed to me, “You may want it later.”

“I’ve been watching you,” she went on, sipping her port, “and it occurs to me that we might do business together.”

I was frankly curious as to my companion’s history. But I never learned very much about her. She must have made enough to keep herself by selling her goods, but she belonged to no type of outcast in any settled place.

Some few are born like that⁠—the inheritance, perhaps, of some far off gypsy blood⁠—others acquire the fear of four walls and a roof, and no amount of suffering can dissipate it.

My friend, I think, belonged to the latter category.

Think of the whole universe resolving itself into an anguished frenzy for a mutton chop, friend bacon and a poached egg!

Think of wanting to eat so much that you could almost barter your most cherished recollections; your love of literature, the swing of those stately phrases which march through the mind like a triumphant army⁠—for food!

A curious state—when the sheer force of an ill-fed body masters the mind and, like a savage, makes you run amuck. But it is something to have experienced such a moment.

And at that he smiled, and then began to laugh, and I knew the day was won.

For a man may resist tears, harden his heart to importunity, turn aside invective, but there is no son of Adam, who, can deny a woman when she makes him laugh.

He surrendered at discretion, took me to the nearest tea shop and ordered bacon, eggs, toast and hot coffee. We talked over the meal, and I told him how hard I found it to get regular employment without a reference.

This is why your outcasts often appear stupid, stolid, almost mentally deficient. They know nothing of the affairs of the political or the literary world, they are unthrilled by the falling of dynasties, or the discovery of a planet.

The avenues of interest open to the well-fed are closed to them, they are haunted always by the spectres, hunger and sleeplessness.

For them so cruelly often there is only the street for a bed.

St. Crispin’s is open from October to May. During the summer months it shuts down, for when the weather is warm a night on the Embankment or in one of the many open spaces of London is not insufferable.

It is when the world is freezing and the wind cuts to your very soul that you cry out blindly for a bed.

At such a time a dog kennel would seem hospitable: and yet all through the winter months hundreds of outcast women spend the night huddled in doorways, under arches, or keep themselves from freezing by that everlasting walking about.

There are brands of margarine which pass muster on the palate; but these are not for the delectation of the outcast.

Poverty is their crime, and the punishment is unremitting.

I have broken into this dissertation, because I am tired of hearing good and comfortable women complain of the wicked waste of good victuals bestowed at their back door.

I wished very much that I was coward enough to go back to my bed. But I knew that such a course would cut me off from the knowledge I was so desperately eager to gain.

To understand how an outcast feels, you yourself must be outcast.

“Where is the nearest casual ward, please?” I asked a young policeman.

I found nothing of either. The attitude of all the officials with whom I came in contact was quite human. There was nothing in their manner that could possibly affront that fundamental dignity born in the meanest of mankind.

I was destitute, but that did not impair my inalienable right to human treatment.

Throughout my stay I was never once made to feel I was a pauper.

I had always known that the Guardians deliberately adopt this regime, that their chief intent is to keep casuals “out,” not to welcome them in.

But to know a thing and to experience it is widely different.

I wish some of the guardians could be “destitute” and try their own wards.

But for Kitty’s entertainment time would have been a heavy burden.

There is nothing so enervating to the spirit as a repetition of totally useless work, and the only alternative to the re-scrubbing of tables already scrubbed, the re-polishing of handles already shining, is to pick oakum.

This is of all tasks the most cruel. It tears the finger nails and soils the soul; it has no value, social or economic. Oakum is employed, it is true, as hospital swabs, but, like all mechanical, impersonal labour, it is untouched with any satisfaction.

To spend a whole night in the streets is an experience that has a permanent effect on the psychology.

My first adventure of this kind found me unprepared. I was compelled to walk about, not from lack of money to pay for a bed, but because I could not find any place that would take me in.

I not only looked, but I felt destitute, and the Sister’s refusal struck me like a blow in the face. Why should she turn me down? I was clean, I was honest, I had the money to pay—and I needed a comfortable bed.

I suddenly comprehended with a dreadful clearness what destitution does to the soul.

It destroys the sense of human dignity, and as your rags are, so you become.

I suddenly comprehended with a dreadful clearness what destitution does to the soul.

It destroys the sense of human dignity, and as your rags are, so you become.

I was bedraggled, I looked miserable and I had not slept—anywhere, and the Sister in the pretty kitchen cooking supper did not want anything like me among the clean, white paint and shining brass fittings.

“There’s one in Belvedere Road, over the Bridge and turn to the right,” he told me, and I set off on my tramp.

There is always something to discover in the land of the homeless.

You learn quite a lot about streets which invariably escape your notice in ordinary life. Belvedere Road seemed to me one of the longest in London; it is full of many and curious depositories.

“It’s lonely like,” she said. “I’ve been by myself all the evening. I felt I’d like to be near someone for a bit.”

The loneliness of the streets is something that comes upon you in great waves.

You are not conscious of it when you are doped with the eternal walking about, but when consciousness stirs, you know you are alone, and very frightened.

The loneliness of the streets is something that comes upon you in great waves. You are not conscious of it when you are doped with the eternal walking about, but when consciousness stirs, you know you are alone, and very frightened.

It is as if you were in a cold sea, where you kept afloat by ceaseless striving, knowing that if a billow breaks over you, it will sweep you away.

“Is there anywhere you could get a bed?” said I.

“One gets tired,” she said. “

A bed sometimes is past dreaming.

”

Now, as I always found in this strata of society, silence is a master card.

You must leave it to others to speak to you.

Two men came and sat beside me. They had been on night shift on some engineering works. They had also been chums in the war and recounted many experiences. I sat and listened with proper admiration, as becomes a woman, and I had my reward.

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 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.

“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 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.”

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have myself experienced that overwhelming desire to smash up the smug contentment of the well-fed and well-housed section of society. But of the softer feelings little is shown.

When a woman gives way to tears you feel as if you had been present at some secret and terrible exposure.

It was at a poor doss house in the North of London that I saw a girl give way to sudden irrepressible grief. She was not like the woman in Kennedy Court, she was nourished on too low a diet for such vigorous display.

The homeless are, I admit, difficult to help through the ordinary channels. People who come under sectional headings—discharged prisoners, convicted prostitutes, unmarried mothers—are more easily assisted.

Human nature has a weakness for labels. It is distressed, almost affronted, by the silence of apparently inexplicable human wreckage.

“I always ask one of these women you speak of, what is wrong with her,” said a very kindly friend of mine. “But they never will tell me anything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She was in work and proudly produced a letter from her employer, which ran as follows:

“Mary Brown has worked for us for a year, and we ain’t missed nothing yet.”

The employee exhibited this testimonial with glowing rapture, for it would seem, in this quarter of London at any rate, dishonesty is the unforgivable crime.