Page 214 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

XXXIII

he two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten
Tdays. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had
learned parsimony on the road and considered even one
sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had
come to mean simply bread and margarine—the eternal
tea-and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or
two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco, and all,
at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn a
few extra shillings by ‘glimming’ in the evenings. It was a
precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a little and
eked out our money.
One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We
went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there
was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and after
two hours we were told that there was no work for us. We
had not missed much, for sandwich men have an unenvi-
able job. They are paid about three shillings a day for ten
hours’ work—it is hard work, especially in windy weather,
and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes round fre-
quently to see that the men are on their beat. To add to their
troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or sometimes
for three days, never weekly, so that they have to wait hours
for their job every morning. The number of unemployed
men who are ready to do the work makes them powerless to

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