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Great Writing - Home > Extended > The Down and Out King - Chapter 10
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Extended Work
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| The Down and Out King - Chapter 10 | |
| By jean.day | ||||||||||
| 08 May 2008 | ||||||||||
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Chapter 10 – WILLIAM
Here it is nearly Easter, and I have been in the workhouse for several weeks. I must admit that I am happier here than I was for the past several years before. However, Sam has urged upon me to communicate in some way or other with my children. He says I owe it to them to let them know that I am alive and well, and to tell them they can come and visit me if they wish to. So sending Easter greetings is a good excuse for doing it. With such dainties as these no man ought to grumble; It’s true they doesn’t give us stunning joints to carve, But then there’s lots of soup, though it’s rather humble, And if you’re not content with this they tell you to go and starve. My son, Alfred William, was born in 1858, so he is now 23. I think he is working as a grocer in Dorking. My eldest daughter, Mary Elizabeth, was born in 1860, so that makes her 21 now. When last I heard she was an assistant at a warehouse in London. Florence, our youngest daughter is 19 and I think she is a saleswoman and living in Lewisham. I last saw them all a year ago Christmas. I will just write and say that I am here, and then leave it up to them if they want to make any contact. I think that is the best. Not to make any demands or assume that they will want to come. I am going back to my writing now that is done. Back to writing about Sam and what he has found out by talking to others who have been here much longer than we have. I must admit that these are his thoughts - and although I agree with him on most of them, it was he who spoke of them and made me think about them. He says, “Sunday is not a pleasant day in this house of ours. But as it is, in all its weary dreariness, so it was intended to be, and nothing else. The principle of its managers, that is to say, its guardians, has been from the first to make the place anything rather than an agreeable sojourn; and they have succeeded perfectly in realizing their intent. “It must be admitted that they are remarkably impartial here; though whether the impartiality be just, judicious, or even politic, are matters admitting of question. They treat everybody exactly alike: the old have no further privileges than those accorded to the young; and the best conducted and most useful stand on precisely the same footing, so far as the board of guardians is concerned, as the most worthless and blackguardly. “The Sabbath among us is a day of rest; emphatically so, or of stagnation rather. We have an hour longer in bed of a morning in the summer. We go to divine service once a day - that is, those of us who belong to the Established Church - in our case at St. Mary the Virgin C of E Church, and, immediately after supper, we have a troop of preachers let in upon us, who howl at us in the most uncompromising manner, without ever asking leave - very much against the will of many of us, indeed - from half-past six until bedtime. “Beyond this, it may be as well to state, no special provision is made for the spiritual wants of any of the numerous body of Dissenters. We have Baptists, Independents, Congregationalists, etc., among us, and a few Roman Catholics, too. The latter are duly looked to by their priest; but the Dissenters are on Sundays as though they were not. “As to how we are to spend the eight hours, or thereabouts, that remain after meals, church, and howlers are disposed of, nobody, except ourselves and a few private friends outside; cares in the least. “The letter-writing of the place is not much: perhaps fifty letters a week may be received and replied to by its hundreds of inmates. Some of the replies are penned as soon after the receipt of the letter as circumstances will permit, but the greater number are deferred till Sundays. Then - always after church - about a dozen men wait their turn for the use of the solitary ink-pot and pen belonging to the apartment. This for the young men's hall. But it is much the same among the old men, and in each of the divisions into which the females are divided. “Letter-writing, however, occupies but a few inmates out of many; and these few for no more than half an hour or so apiece. They get through the rest of the time as the others get through the whole of it - anyhow, and mostly very drearily. The lazy fling themselves on the benches or on the floor in the corners, and doze through the day in a way utterly beyond the comprehension of people with active brains. But this plan of killing time is not peculiar to the workhouse. It is that invariably adopted by the sluggish of the lower classes when lack of funds, or the fact that the public-houses are closed, forbids them to resort to the only livelier means of getting through their leisure that they care to adopt. “Others lounge about the yard in listless fashion; and a most uninteresting promenade that said yard is. It is a broad quadrangle, girt in by the main building and its offices on three sides. The fourth side is bounded by a lofty wall, beyond which rises a high-level railway. We can hear the snorting of the engine, and we can see the steam and smoke, as a train passes; and that is the sum and substance of our intercourse with the world, apart from letters and from the visits of friends once a month. “This yard is covered with gravel from side to side. Not a leaf of grass or green thing is to be seen anywhere. The very sparrows seem to avoid the place. There is none of their chatter in the eaves, and none of their Sunday gambols on the ground. There is nothing whatever, indeed, to relieve the dull monotony of this dullest of haunts. “Here men lounge on the low wall of the recreation area, or lie at full length, as in the halls, in the corners or close up against the walls on the sunny side; and here they stroll to and fro, at all seasons, in groups of twos, threes, and fours, but more frequently solitary. If they speak, it is with bated breath, in undertones, as if conscious that the very walls have ears to hear and tongues to tell to the authorities every word that falls. Nor is all this circumspection without reason; for the conversation is mostly in high criticism and censure of the shortcomings of the place, the poorness and scantiness of the food, the harshness - not to say tyranny - of the officials, and the general disregard displayed by the guardians of the wants and wishes of the pauper inmates. These, indeed, are the favourite themes of the talkers, indoors and out. “The solitary mope about, with downcast melancholy countenances, consuming their souls in the scathing fire of sad reflections and wretched memories. “Indoors there is more variety. There are loungers, single and in couples. There are readers also; only they themselves must provide the reading, unless they prefer something ultra-religious, which has lain in a waste-paper box for many months, the said waste-paper box and its contents being produced regularly every Sabbath. This, however, in the old men's hall only; and even these religious publications are the contribution of pious and charitable outsiders. All the guardians have done in this way is to place a single Bible in one of the windowsills, where it lies untouched from week's end to week's end, unless when a hypocrite of a certain class, of which we have several specimens, takes it up and appears to study it in order to make an impression on somebody, and so secure a selfish end. It may be an officer or a guardian that is thus aimed at, or it may be a few fellow-paupers whom the rascal wants to wheedle into trusting him, in order that he may obtain an opportunity for playing off a piece of characteristic chicanery. “We have one sedulous Bible reader in the young men's hall, a low-sized, swarthy fellow, with harsh features and an Italian name, evidently of the breed which one meets with halfway up the Apennines in the interior of Tuscany. And this man is notoriously the falsest inmate of the house: there is no believing a statement he makes, and no having dealings with him without being cheated. This is so thoroughly understood, that he and his Bible are left pretty much to themselves; and the Bible, in several instances, just because it is so regularly the companion of the other. “There are a few tattered novels about the room - only a few - which have been passing from hand to hand for months, continually losing leaves in the process, and which will continue so to pass until the last leaf has been consumed as a pipe light. Those in the very best state have lost covers, and the opening and concluding chapters as well. Others have three-fourths or a half of the pages remaining; while others, again, are reduced to a fourth or an eighth of their original size. But in all cases they are stuck to tenaciously by those who contrive to get hold of them, and read with as much attention as if there were life depending on it. “There are, perhaps, a dozen detached numbers of the cheapest illustrated publications - things relating the deeds of Claude Duval, Dick Turpin, and other desperadoes these among the younger inmates. “Newspapers, however, form the favourite intellectual fare. Three or four fortunate inmates receive a weekly journal regularly, and these are the men of standing of the place. They are deferred to, sought after, courted, and even paid in bits of bread or tobacco, for half-hour loans of the journals at their disposal. “Judging by the character of the newspapers among them, the politics of the indoor paupers are intensely radical. Reynolds's is preferred; then conies The Dispatch, and then Lloyd's. These three are common. Others appear occasionally; though, while we have odd specimens of county papers now and again, one of the great London dailies is hardly ever seen. “The indoor pauper, however, is simply content to read his journal. As a rule, he never talks about its contents, unless among them lies a divorce or breach-of-promise case, or a murder of more than usual interest. “Other men gather round the story-tellers, who are almost exclusively of the In-and-Out order, whose discourse is always of their own adventures, and who never by any chance have good to relate. On Sundays they dilate to attentive and sympathetic listeners concerning life on the road, and in the streets, prisons, casual wards, harlots, fences, thieving exploits, pugilistic encounters in the ring, ruffianly debauches, with their supplementary rows, dodging and squaring bobbies, and athletic competitions - the last being far and away the most innocent of the themes, even though they deal ad libitum with such personages as Jem Mace and Yankee Sullivan, and enlarge on how swell backers are 'done' by pre-arrangement between the competitors. “In spite, however, of all the methods of getting through the day just mentioned, the Workhouse Sunday, as we have it, is emphatically dull and dreary. “Some of the inmates, indeed - the married men - are allowed to pass an hour, immediately after divine service, with their wives and children; but in by far the majority of cases there is no pleasure in the interview. Such meetings take place under official supervision and in the sight of dozens. Tender feelings, therefore, must be suppressed, if such have survived the miserable period preceding the break-up of the home and the still more miserable - because in so many cases hopeless - imprisonment in the house that followed. “However, when the feelings are not tender, no great care is taken to suppress them at these interviews. Husbands and wives, who bear one another grudges, take advantage of them to 'speak their mind,' and spend them for the most part in mutual recrimination. “The only features about these Sunday meetings between members of the same family that excite sympathy are witnessed in the cases wherein husbands and fathers, who have lost cherished wives, meet 'children of tender years. The way in which the youngsters fix themselves on a father's knees, and nestle in his breast with arms round his neck and cheeks against his, the way in which they lie there to the end of the interview, the melancholy aspect of the man, the silence of the group - for hardly a word is dropped among them - and the reluctance with which father and children tear themselves asunder, when they are compelled at length to quit the scene - are things that go straight to the heart. “I do not think that guardians are acting wisely in leaving indoor paupers to pass their Sundays as I have described. A hardening and deteriorating process is always going on among them, and most rapidly when they are most unemployed, that is, on Sundays. The Sabbath, indeed, which should be the day to elevate minds from the low level of weekday thoughts, does just the opposite among indoor paupers: it sharpens their original vices, and begets others to which they were strangers in another state. The listless and lazy become still more so; the filthy grow filthier still; while those who heretofore possessed merely a lurking and uncertain inclination towards certain vices have it strengthened and confirmed here. As for the positively vicious, they are rendered proud of their iniquitous doings, and therefore all the more ready and willing to repeat and improve upon them when opportunity serves. “Yet even in the very worst of these men there is left a little good which may be got at and expanded. This cannot be done by the single Sunday service, nor yet by the howling preachers. They care little for the former, and are notably contemptuous for the latter. They make a point, indeed, of laughing at sermon and good advice, when either attacks them directly, before comrades. It is bravado, of course; but even the most obviously simulated bravado has its effect on the listener and on the speaker too. “A book, however, unlike advice and sermon, does not attack a man and rouse his hostility; it gets at him quietly. Its sentences reach him alone, and are not conveyed to bystanders as well. There is, therefore, seldom or never aught stimulating him to hold the lessons it contains up to ridicule. And if its good be conveyed under cover of an interesting narrative, it cannot but prove beneficial. “A series of good stories, with high moral tone, perused Sunday after Sunday without break, cannot fail to make an impression on the most stolid, and compel them, first to admire the virtues as painted in action, and then to imitate them on their own account. “A good book - which does not mean a goody-goody book, by any means - is a good thing anywhere and under any circumstances; but to my thinking it never can be so good as in places like the workhouse and on Sunday. Here and then there is positively nothing whatever to prevent it from fixing its grasp firmly on the mind of the reader, but everything to aid. Men, indeed, are literally ravenous for literary food - that is, supposing them able to read at all - and will put up with almost anything in book shape that comes in their way. “I can safely assert that it would be a gain to the ratepayers in many respects, and a very decided aid to the officers, if every workhouse was provided with a small library of well-selected volumes - such as are published in great numbers for popular use by various societies at the cheapest rate. Twenty pounds would provide at least two hundred such volumes; and this number would suffice in most places. If not, there are plenty of people dwelling in every union who would gladly contribute in money or books to swell the collection. Nor would it be either difficult or expensive to keep such a library in working order. A small apartment to contain the volumes, a ledger to record the lendings and returnings, and a pauper librarian would suffice. “And the results? Besides the general one already specified, such a library would tend to render the paupers less discontented, less given to running in all directions with complaints against everything about them and against everybody above them, but chiefly far less liable to be influenced by firebrands, such as the one to be described elsewhere, who has proved himself an unmitigated nuisance to everybody concerned with the establishment. “And less discontented means a good many things besides - as more care of the property of the ratepayers, more industry in the workshops, and more decorum and geniality in conduct and conversation. In short, the library would pay for itself several times over in the course of a single year. “But to resume my account of our Sundays, the howlers, as I have already stated, close the Sunday with us; and they never do anything save howl. They rant and roar at the men before them collectively, but never attempt to get at individuals, except by distributing leaflets, which are seldom read and invariably consumed as pipe-lights. As to the rant itself, it is mostly miserable stuff, disjointed, rambling, headless and tailless, abounding in endless repetitions and in the most astounding rashness of assertion and ignorance also. The intellect of the howlers, indeed, seems to have fattened on the narrow-minded theology of past centuries, and never to have heard of modern scholarship or tolerance. Every sentence they utter smells of the brimstone-lake. No doubt they mean well; but thanks to their deficiencies of culture and judgment, their discourses, in result, are merely so many illustrations of the old saw respecting good intentions.” I wish that I could think as clearly and sharply as Sam does. I do so wish I knew more of his background, but he is very determined to keep that a close secret.
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