Page 158 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating
out of newspaper parcels, and drinking tea in vast saucer-
less mugs like china tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew,
muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon.
‘Could I have some tea and bread and butter?’ I said to
the girl.
She stared. ‘No butter, only marg,’ she said, surprised.
And she repeated the order in the phrase that is to London
what the eternal COUP DE ROUGE is to Paris: ‘Large tea
and two slices!’
On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying
‘Pocketing the sugar not allowed,’ and beneath it some po-
etic customer had written:

He that takes away the sugar,

Shall be called a dirty——
but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last
word. This was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost three-
pence halfpenny, leaving me with eight and twopence.

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