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travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury,
I which is the cheapest and not the worst way of crossing
the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in
the saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers.
I find this entry in my diary for that day:
‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen wom-
en. Of the women, not a single one has washed her face this
morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the wom-
en merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with
powder. Q. A secondary sexual difference?’
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere
children, who were going to England on their honeymoon
trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and
I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting
home, after being hard up for months in a foreign city, that
England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed,
many things in England that make you glad to get home;
bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly
cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable
hops—they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. Eng-
land is a very good country when you are not poor; and, of
course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to
be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patri-
otic. The more questions the Roumanians asked, the more I

1 0 Down and Out in Paris and London