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The two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten days. 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 unenviable 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 frequently 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 fight for better treatment. The job all sandwich men covet is distributing handbills, which is paid for at the same rate. When you see a man distributing handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.
Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life—a
squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days together
there was nothing to do but sit in the underground kitchen, reading
yesterday’s newspaper, or, when one could get hold of it, a
back number of the UNION JACK. It rained a great deal at this time,
and everyone who came in Steamed, so that the kitchen stank
horribly. One’s only excitement was the periodical
tea-and-two-slices. I do not know how many men are living this life
in London—it must be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it
was actually the best life he had known for two years past. His
interludes from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid hands
on a few shillings, had all been like this; the tramping itself had
been slightly worse. Listening to his whimpering voice—he was
always whimpering when he was not eating —one realized what
torture unemployment must be to him. People are wrong when they
think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages;
on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his
bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man
can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils
of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time,
is as miserable out of work as a dog on the (...)
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