Page 251 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

SEZ-FAIRE atmosphere and the warm home-like kitchens
where one can lounge at all hours of the day or night. They
are squalid dens, but some kind of social life is possible in
them. The women’s lodging-houses are said to be generally
worse than the men’s, and there are very few houses with
accommodation for married couples. In fact, it is nothing
out of the common for a homeless man to sleep in one lodg-
ing-house and his wife in another.
At this moment at least fifteen thousand people in London
are living in common lodging-houses. For an unattached
man earning two pounds a week, or less, a lodging-house is
a great convenience. He could hardly get a furnished room
so cheaply, and the lodging-house gives him free firing, a
bathroom of sorts, and plenty of society. As for the dirt, it is
a minor evil. The really bad fault of lodging-houses is that
they are places in which one pays to sleep, and in which
sound sleep is impossible. All one gets for one’s money is a
bed measuring five feet six by two feet six, with a hard con-
vex mattress and a pillow like a block of wood, covered by
one cotton counterpane and two grey, stinking sheets. In
winter there are blankets, but never enough. And this bed
is in a room where there are never less than five, and some-
times fifty or sixty beds, a yard or two apart. Of course,
no one can sleep soundly in such circumstances. The only
other places where people are herded like this are barracks
and hospitals. In the public wards of a hospital no one even
hopes to sleep well. In barracks the soldiers are crowded,
but they have good beds, and they are healthy; in a common
lodging-house nearly all the lodgers have chronic coughs,

0 Down and Out in Paris and London