XXXIV
The next morning, our money being at an end, Paddy and I set out for the spike. We went southward by the Old Kent Road, making for Cromley; we could not go to a London spike, for Paddy had been in one recently and did not care to risk going again. It was a sixteen-mile walk over asphalt, blistering to the heels, and we were acutely hungry.
Paddy browsed the pavement, laying up a store of cigarette ends against his time in the spike. In the end his perseverance was rewarded, for he picked up a penny. We bought a large piece of stale bread, and devoured it as we walked.
When we got to Cromley, it was too early to go to the spike, and we walked several miles farther, to a plantation beside a meadow, where one could sit down. It was a regular caravanserai of tramps—one could tell it by the worn grass and the sodden newspaper and rusty cans that they had left behind. Other tramps were arriving by ones and twos. It was jolly autumn weather. Near by, a deep bed of tansies was growing; it seems to me that even now I can smell the sharp reek of those tansies, warring with the reek of tramps.
In the meadow two carthorse colts, raw sienna colour with white manes and tails, were nibbling at a gate. We. sprawled about on the ground, sweaty and exhausted. Someone managed to find dry sticks and get a fire going, and we all had milkless tea out of a tin ‘drum’ which was passed round.
Some of the tramps began telling stories. One of them, Bill, was an interesting type, a genuine sturdy beggar of the old breed, strong as Hercules and a frank foe of work. He boasted that with his great strength he could get a nawying job any time he liked, but as soon as he drew his first week’s wages he went on a terrific drunk and was sacked. Between whiles he ‘mooched’, chiefly from shopkeepers. He talked like this:
‘I ain’t goin’ far in—Kent. Kent’s a tight county, Kent is.
There’s too many bin’ moochin’ about ‘ere. The—bakers get so as they’ll throw their bread away sooner’n give it you.
Now Oxford, that’s the place for moochin’, Oxford is. When I was in Oxford I mooched bread, and I mooched bacon, and I mooched beef, and every night I mooched tanners for my kip off of the students. The last night I was twopence short of my kip, so I goes up to a parson and mooches ‘im for threepence. He give me threepence, and the next moment he turns round and gives me in charge for beggin’. ‘You bin beggin’,’ the copper says. ‘No I ain’t,’ I says, ‘I was askin’ the gentleman the time,’ I says. The copper starts feelin’ inside my coat, and he pulls out a pound of meat and two loaves of bread. ‘Well, what’s all this, then?’ he says. ‘You better come ‘long to the station,’ he says. The beak give me seven days. I don’t mooch from no more—parsons. But Christ! what do I care for a lay-up of seven days?’ etc. etc.
It seemed that his whole life was this—a round of mooching, drunks, and lay-ups. He laughed as he talked of it, taking it all for a tremendous joke. He looked as though he made a poor thing out of begging, for he wore only a corduroy suit, scarf, and cap—no socks or linen. Still, he was fat and jolly, and he even smelt of beer, a most unusual smell in a tramp nowadays.
Two of the tramps had been in Cromley spike recently, and they told a ghost story connected with it. Years earlier, they said, there had been a suicide there. A tramp had managed to smuggle a razor into his cell, and there cut his throat. In the morning, when the Tramp Major came round, the body was jammed against the door, and to open it they had to break the dead man’s arm. In revenge for this, the dead man haunted his cell, and anyone who slept there was certain to die within the year; there were copious instances, of course. If a cell door stuck when you tried to open it, you should avoid that cell like the plague, for it was the haunted one.Two tramps, ex-sailors, told another grisly story. A man (they swore they had known him) had planned to stow away on a boat bound for Chile. It was laden with manufactured goods packed in big wooden crates, and with the help of a docker the stowaway had managed to hide himself in one of these. But the docker had made a mistake about the order in which the crates were to be loaded. The crane gripped the stowaway, swung him aloft, and deposited him—at the very bottom of the hold, beneath hundreds of crates. No one discovered what had happened until the end of the voyage, when they found the stowaway rotting, dead of suffocation.
Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy was the man who was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!) hanged him. The tramps liked the story, of course, but the interesting thing was to see that they had got it all wrong. Their version was that Gilderoy escaped to America, whereas in reality he was recaptured and put to death. The story had been amended, no doubt deliberately; just as children amend the stories of Samson and Robin Hood, giving them happy endings which are quite imaginary.
This set the tramps talking about history, and a very old man declared that the ‘one bite law’ was a survival from days when the nobles hunted men instead of deer. Some of the others laughed at him, but he had the idea firm in his head. He had heard, too, of the Corn Laws, and the JUs PRIMAE NOCTIS (he believed it had really existed); also of the Great Rebellion, which he thought was a rebellion of poor against rich—perhaps he had got it mixed up with the peasant rebellions. I doubt whether the old man could read, and certainly he was not repeating newspaper articles.
His scraps of history had been passed from generation to generation of tramps, perhaps for centuries in some cases.
It was oral tradition lingering on, like a faint echo from the Middle Ages.
Paddy and I went to the spike at six in the evening, getting out at ten in the morning. It was much like Romton and Edbury, and we saw nothing of the ghost. Among the casuals were two young men named William and Fred, exfishermen from Norfolk, a lively pair and fond of singing.
They had a song called ‘Unhappy Bella’ that is worth writing down. I heard them sing it half a dozen times during the next two days, and I managed to get it by heart, except a line or two which I have guessed. It ran:
Bel a was young and Bel a was fair With bright blue eyes and golden hair, O unhappy Bel a!
Her step was light and her heart was gay, But she had no sense, and one fine day She got herself put in the family way By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
Poor Bel a was young, she didn’t believe That the world is hard and men deceive, O unhappy Bel a!
She said, ‘My man will do what’s just, He’ll marry me now, because he must’; Her heart was full of loving trust In a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
She went to his house; that dirty skunk Had packed his bags and done a bunk, O unhappy Bel a!
Her landlady said, ‘Get out, you whore, I won’t have your sort a-darkening my door.’ Poor Bel a was put to affliction sore By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
All night she tramped the cruel snows, What she must have suffered nobody knows, O unhappy Bel a!
And when the morning dawned so red, Alas, alas, poor Bel a was dead, Sent so young to her lonely bed By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.
So thus, you see, do what you wil , The fruits of sin are suffering stil , O unhappy Bel a!
As into the grave they laid her low, The men said, ‘Alas, but life is so,’ But the women chanted, sweet and low, ‘It’s all the men, the dirty bastards!’ Written by a woman, perhaps.
William and Fred, the singers of this song, were thorough scallywags, the sort of men who get tramps a bad name. They happened to know that the Tramp Major at Cromley had a stock of old clothes, which were to be given at need to casuals. Before going in William and Fred took off their boots, ripped the seams and cut pieces off the soles, more or less ruining them. Then they applied for two pairs of boots, and the Tramp Major, seeing how bad their boots were, gave them almost new pairs. William and Fred were scarcely outside the spike in the morning before they had sold these boots for one and ninepence. It seemed to them quite worth while, for one and ninepence, to make their own boots practically unwearable.
Leaving the spike, we all started southward, a long slouching procession, for Lower Binfield and Ide Hill. On the way there was a fight between two of the tramps. They had quarrelled overnight (there was some silly CASUS BELLI about one saying to the other, ‘Bull shit’, which was taken for Bolshevik—a deadly insult), and they fought it out in a field. A dozen of us stayed to watch them. The scene sticks in my mind for one thing—the man who was beaten going down, and his cap falling off and showing that his hair was quite white. After that some of us intervened and stopped the fight. Paddy had meanwhile been making inquiries, and found that the real cause of the quarrel was, as usual, a few pennyworth of food.