Page 155 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

stantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to
have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow
that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No
one had called me mate before in my life—it was the clothes
that had done it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the
attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a bad-
ly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him
with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a
dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s
clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not
to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the
same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in pris-
on.
At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read
about doss-houses (they are never called doss-houses, by
the way), and I supposed that one could get a bed for four-
pence or thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or something
of the kind, standing on the kerb in the Waterloo Road, I
stopped and questioned him. I said that I was stony broke
and wanted the cheapest bed I could get.
‘Oh,’ said he, ‘you go to that ‘ouse across the street there,
with the sign ‘Good Beds for Single Men”. That’s a good kip
[sleeping place], that is. I bin there myself on and off. You’ll
find it cheap AND clean.’
It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in
all the windows, some of which were patched with brown
paper. I entered a stone passage-way, and a little etiolated
boy with sleepy eyes appeared from a door leading to a cel-
lar. Murmurous sounds came from the cellar, and a wave of

1 Down and Out in Paris and London