Page 188 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

I fancy had been given to the Salvation Army in charity,
though they sold it at threehalfpence a cup. It was foul stuff.
At ten o’clock an officer marched round the hall blowing a
whistle. Immediately everyone stood up.
‘What’s this for?’ I said to Paddy, astonished.
‘Dat means you has to go off to bed. An’ you has to look
sharp about it, too.’
Obediently as sheep, the whole two hundred men trooped
off to bed, under the command of the officers.
The dormitory was a great attic like a barrack room, with
sixty or seventy beds in it. They were clean and tolerably
comfortable, but very narrow and very close together, so
that one breathed straight into one’s neighbour’s face. Two
officers slept in the room, to see that there was no smoking
and no talking after lights-out. Paddy and I had scarcely a
wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some
nervous trouble, shellshock perhaps, which made him cry
out ‘Pip!’ at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise,
something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never
knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of
sleep. It appeared that Pip, as the others called him, slept
regularly in the shelter, and he must have kept ten or twenty
people awake every night. He was an example of the kind
of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep
when men are herded as they are in these lodging-houses.
At seven another whistle blew, and the officers went
round shaking those who did not get up at once. Since then
I have slept in a number of Salvation Army shelters, and
found that, though the different houses vary a little, this

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