Page 200 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

and a number of essays. He could describe his adventures
in words that one remembered. For instance, speaking of
funerals, he said to me:
‘Have you-ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India.
They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment I
almost jumped out of my skin, because he’d started kick-
ing. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat—still, it
give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit like a kipper
on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with
a bang you could have heard fifty yards away. It fair put me
against cremation.’
Or, again, apropos of his accident:
‘The doctor says to me, ‘You fell on one foot, my man.
And bloody lucky for you you didn’t fall on both feet,’ he
says. ‘Because if you had of fallen on both feet you’d have
shut up like a bloody concertina, and your thigh bones’d be
sticking out of your ears!‘‘
Clearly the phrase was not the doctor’s but Bozo’s own.
He had a gift for phrases. He had managed to keep his brain
intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb
to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving,
but so long as he could read, think, and watch for meteors,
he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does
not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him),
and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs
would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on
the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars
or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment

1