I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them past fifty. The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into the spike; but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was turned away to tramp the streets all night.
The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty feet wide. The sidewalks were three feet wide. It was a residence street. At least workmen and their families existed in some sort of fashion in the houses across from us. And each day and every day, from one in the afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the principal feature of the view commanded by their front doors and windows. One workman sat in his door directly opposite us, taking his rest and a breath of air after the toil of the day. His wife came to chat with him. The doorway was too small for two, so she stood up. Their babes sprawled before them. And here was the spike line, less than a score of feet away-neither privacy for the workman, nor privacy for the pauper. About our feet played the children of the neighborhood. To them our presence was nothing unusual. We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and ordinary as the brick walls and stone curbs of their environment. They had been born to the sight of the spike line, and all their brief days they had seen it.
At six o’clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution, and the previous night’s ‘doss,’ were taken with lightning-like rapidity by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man’s thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting into my ear, ‘Any knives, matches, or tobacco?’ ‘No, sir,’ I lied, as lied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the cellar, I looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to the language it might be called ‘bread.’ By its weight and hardness it certainly must have been unleavened.
The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand. Then I stumbled on to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men. The place smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices from out of the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the infernal regions.
Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced the meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with which their feet were wrapped. This added to the general noisomeness, while it took away from my appetite.
In fact, I found that I had made a mistake. I had eaten a hearty dinner five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare before me I should have fasted for a couple of days. The pannikin contained skilly, three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn and hot water. The men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt scattered over the dirty tables. I attempted the same, but the bread seemed to stick in my mouth, and I remembered the words of the Carpenter: ‘You need a pint of water to eat the bread nicely.’
I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going, and found the water. Then I returned and attacked the skilly. It was coarse of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter. This bitterness which lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly had passed on, I found especially repulsive. I struggled manfully, but was mastered by my qualms, and half a dozen mouthfuls of skilly and bread was the measure of my success. The man beside me ate his own share, and mine to boot, scraped the pannikins, and looked hungrily for more.
‘I met a “towny,” and he stood me too good a dinner,’ I explained.
‘An’ I ‘aven’t ‘ad a bite since yesterday mornin’,’ he replied.
‘How about tobacco?’ I asked. ‘Will the bloke bother with a fellow now?’
‘Oh, no,’ he answered me. ‘No bloody fear. This is the easiest spike goin’. Y’oughto see some of them. Search you to the skin.’
The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up. ‘This super’tendent ‘ere is always writin’ to the papers ‘bout us mugs,’ said the man on the other side of me.
‘What does he say?’ I asked.
‘Oh, ‘e sez we’re no good, a lot o’ blackguards an’ scoundrels as won’t work. Tells all the ole tricks I’ve bin ‘earin’ for twenty years an’ w’ich I never seen a mug ever do. Las’ thing of ‘is I see, ‘e was tellin’ ‘ow a mug gets out o’ the spike, wi’ a crust in ‘is pockit. An’ w’en ‘e sees a nice ole gentleman comin’ along the street ‘e chucks the crust into the drain, an’ borrows the old gent’s stick to poke it out. An’ then the ole gent gi’es ‘im a tanner’ [sixpence].
A roar of applause greeted the time-honored yarn, and from somewhere over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating angrily:-
‘Talk o’ the country bein’ good for tommy [food]. I’d like to see it. I jest came up from Dover, an’ blessed little tommy I got. They won’t gi’ ye a drink o’ water, they won’t, much less tommy.’
‘There’s mugs never go out of Kent,’ spoke a second voice, ‘an’ they live bloomin’ fat all along.’
‘I come through Kent,’ went on the first voice, still more angrily, ‘an’ Gawd blimey if I see any tommy. An’ I always notices as the blokes as talks about ‘ow much they can get, w’en they’re in the spike can eat my share o’ skilly as well as their bleedin’ own.’
‘There’s chaps in London,’ said a man across the table from me, ‘that get all the tommy they want, an’ they never think o’ goin’ to the country. Stay in London the year ‘round. Nor do they think of lookin’ for a kip [place to sleep), till nine or ten o’clock at night.’
A general chorus verified this statement.
‘But they’re bloody clever, them chaps,’ said an admiring voice.
‘Course they are,’ said another voice. ‘But it’s not the likes of me an’ you can do it. You got to be born to it, I say. Them chaps ‘ave ben openin’ cabs an’ sellin’ papers since the day they was born, an’ their fathers an’ mothers before ‘em. It’s all in the trainin’, I say, an’ the likes of me an’ you ‘ud starve at it.’
This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the statement that there were ‘mugs as lives the twelvemonth ‘round in the spike an’ never get a blessed bit o’ tommy other than spike skilly an’ bread.’
‘I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike,’ said a new voice. Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale. ‘There was three of us breakin’ stones. Wintertime, an’ the cold was cruel. T’other two said they’d be blessed if they do it, an’ they didn’t; but I kept wearin’ into mine to warm up, you know. An’ then the guardians come, an’ t’other chaps got run in for fourteen days, an’ the guardians, w’en they see wot I’d been doin’, gives me a tanner each, five o’ them, an’ turns me up.’
The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like the spike, and only come to it when driven in. After the ‘rest up’ they are good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they are driven in again for another rest. Of course, this continuous hardship quickly breaks their constitutions, and they realize it, though only in a vague way; while it is so much the common run of things that they do not worry about it.
‘On the doss,’ they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to ‘on the road’ in the United States. The agreement is that kipping, or dossing, or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face, harder even than that of food. The inclement weather and the harsh laws are mainly responsible for this, while the men themselves ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who take their places at lower wages and establish the sweating system.
By seven o’clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed. We stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our belts about them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the floor-a beautiful scheme for the spread of vermin. Then, two by two, we entered the bathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know: the two men preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and it was not changed for the two men that followed us. This I know; but I am quite certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the same water.