Several mornings Ginger and I worked helping the porters at Billingsgate. You go there at about five and stand at the corner of one of the streets which lead up from Billingsgate into Eastcheap. When a porter is having trouble to get his barrow up, he shouts 'Up the 'ill!' and you spring forward (there is fierce competition for the jobs, of course) and shove the barrow behind. The payment is 'twopence an up'. They take on about one shover-up for four hundredweight, and the work knocks it out of your thighs and elbows, but you don't get enough jobs to tire you out. Standing there from five till nearly midday, I never made more than 1/6d. If you are very lucky a porter takes you on as his regular assistant, and then you make about 4/6d a morning. The porters themselves seem to make about PS4 or PS5 a week. There are several things worth noticing about Billingsgate. One is that vast quantities of the work done there are quite unnecessary, being due to the complete lack of any centralised transport system. What with porters, barrowmen, shovers-up etc, it now costs round about PS1 to get a ton of fish from Billingsgate to one of the London railway termini. If it were done in an orderly manner, by lorries, I suppose it would cost a few shillings. Another thing is that the pubs in Billingsgate are open at the hours when other pubs are shut. And another is that the barrowmen at Billingsgate do a regular traffic in stolen fish, and you can get fish dirt cheap if you know one of them.
After about a fortnight in the lodging house I found that I was writing nothing, and the place itself was beginning to get on my nerves, with its noise and lack of privacy, and the stifling heat of the kitchen, and above all the dirt. The kitchen had a permanent sweetish reek of fish, and all the sinks were blocked with rotting fish guts which stank horribly. You had to store your food in dark corners which were infested by black beetles and cockroaches, and there were clouds of horrible languid flies everywhere. The dormitory was also disgusting, with the perpetual din of coughing and spitting - everyone in a lodging house has a chronic cough, no doubt from the foul air. I had got to write some articles, which could not be done in such surroundings, so I wrote home for money and took a room in Windsor Street near the Harrow Road. Ginger has gone off on the road again. Most of this narrative was written in the Bermondsey public library, which has a good reading room and was convenient for the lodging house.
NOTES.
New words (i.e. words new to me) discovered this time.
Shackles
broth or gravy.
Drum, a
a billy can. (With verb to drum up meaning to light a fire.)
Toby, on the
on the tramp. (Also to toby, and a toby, meaning a tramp. Slang Dictionary gives the toby as the highroad.)
Chat, a
a louse. (Also chatty, lousy. S.D. gives this but not a chat.)
Get, a?
(Word of abuse, meaning unknown.)
Didecai, a
a gypsy.
Sprowsie, a
a sixpence.
Hard-up
tobacco made from fag ends. (S.D. gives a hard-up as a man who collects fag ends.)
Skipper, to
to sleep out. (S.D. gives a skipper as a barn.)
Scrump, to
to steal.
Knock off, to
to arrest.
Jack off, to
to go away.
Jack, on his
on his own.
Clods
coppers.
Burglars' slang.
A stick, or a cane
a jemmy. (S.D. gives stick.)
Peter, a
a safe. (In S.D.)
Bly,* a
an oxy-acetylene blowlamp.
Use of the word 'tart' among the East Enders. This word now seems absolutely interchangeable with 'girl', with no implication of 'prostitute'. People will speak of their daughter or sister as a tart.
Rhyming slang. I thought this was extinct, but it is far from it. The hop-pickers used these expressions freely: A dig in the grave, meaning a shave. The hot cross bun, meaning the sun. Greengages, meaning wages. They also used the abbreviated rhyming slang, e.g. 'Use your twopenny' for 'Use your head'. This is arrived at like this: Head, loaf of bread, loaf, twopenny loaf, twopenny.
Homosexual vice in London. It appears that one of the great rendezvous is Charing Cross underground station. It appeared to be taken for granted by the people on Trafalgar Square that youths could earn a bit this way, and several said to me, 'I need never sleep out if I choose to go down to Charing Cross.' They added that the usual fee is a shilling.
Seneca On the Shortness of Life
St Augustine Confessions of a Sinner
Thomas a Kempis The Inner Life
Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince
Michel de Montaigne On Friendship
Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub
Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract
Edward Gibbon The Christians and the Fall of Rome
Thomas Paine Common Sense
Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto
Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World
John Ruskin On Art and Life
Charles Darwin On Natural Selection
Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am So Wise
Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own
Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents
George Orwell Why I Write
Confucius The First Ten Books
Sun-tzu The Art of War
Plato The Symposium
Lucretius Sensation and Sex
Cicero An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job
Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan
Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies
Baldesar Castiglione How to Achieve True Greatness
Francis Bacon Of Empire
Thomas Hobbes Of Man
Sir Thomas Browne Urne-Burial
Voltaire Miracles and Idolatry
David Hume On Suicide
Carl von Clausewitz On the Nature of War
Soren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption
Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus
Hannah Arendt Eichmann and the Holocaust
Plutarch In Consolation to his Wife
Robert Burton Some Anatomies of Melancholy
Blaise Pascal Human Happiness
Adam Smith The Invisible Hand
Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature
Soren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death
John Ruskin The Lamp of Memory
Friedrich Nietzsche Man Alone with Himself
Leo Tolstoy A Confession
William Morris Useful Work v. Useless Toil
Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Marcel Proust Days of Reading
Leon Trotsky An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion
Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
George Orwell Books v. Cigarettes
Albert Camus The Fastidious Assassins
Frantz Fanon Concerning Violence
Michel Foucault The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching
Writings from the Zen Masters
Thomas More Utopia
Michel de Montaigne On Solitude
William Shakespeare On Power
John Locke Of the Abuse of Words
Samuel Johnson Consolation in the Face of Death
Immanuel Kant An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'
Joseph de Maistre The Ex
ecutioner
Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Arthur Schopenhauer The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion
Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg Address
Karl Marx Revolution and War
Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Grand Inquisitor
William James On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
Robert Louis Stevenson An Apology for Idlers
W. E. B. Du Bois Of the Dawn of Freedom
Virginia Woolf Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
George Orwell Decline of the English Murder
John Berger Why Look at Animals?
* This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by 'Frank Richards' and 'Martin Clifford', who are one and the same person! See articles in Horizon, May 1940, and Summer Pie, summer 1944. [Author's footnote, 1945.]
* There are several corresponding girls' papers. The Schoolgirl is companion-paper to the Magnet and has stories by 'Hilda Richards'. The characters are interchangeable to some extent. Bessie Bunter, Billy Bunter's sister, figures in the Schoolgirl. [Author's footnote.]
* This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the end of September 1939 no mention of the war has appeared in either paper. [Author's footnote.]
* Reviewing Applesauce, a variety show, in Time and Tide, 7 September 1940, Orwell wrote: 'Anyone wanting to see something really vulgar should visit the Holborn Empire, where you can get quite a good matinee seat for three shillings. Max Miller, of course, is the main attraction.
'Max Miller, who looks more like a Middlesex Street hawker than ever when he is wearing a tail coat and shiny top hat, is one of a long line of English comedians who have specialized in the Sancho Panza side of life, in real lowness. To do this probably needs more talent than to express nobility. Little Tich was a master at it. There was a music-hall farce which Little Tich used to act in, in which he was supposed to be factotum to a crook solicitor. The solicitor is giving him his instructions: '
"Now, our client who's coming this morning is a widow with a good figure. Are you following me?"
'Little Tich: "I'm ahead of you." '
'As it happens, I have seen this farce acted several times with other people in the same part, but I have never seen anyone who could approach the utter baseness that Little Tich could get into these simple words. There is a touch of the same quality in Max Miller. Quite apart from the laughs they give one, it is important that such comedians should exist. They express something which is valuable in our civilization and which might drop out of it in certain circumstances. To begin with, their genius is entirely masculine. A woman cannot be low without being disgusting, whereas a good male comedian can give the impression of something irredeemable and yet innocent, like a sparrow. Again, they are intensely national. They remind one how closely knit the civilization of England is, and how much it resembles a family, in spite of its out-of-date class distinctions. The startling obscenities which occur in Applesauce are only possible because they are expressed in doubles entendres which imply a common background in the audience. Anyone who had not been brought up on the Pink 'Un would miss the point of them. So long as comedians like Max Miller are on the stage and the comic coloured postcards which express approximately the same view of life are in the stationers' windows, one knows that the popular culture of England is surviving...'
* For instance, Dick's cafe in Billingsgate. Dick's was one of the few places where you could get a cup of tea for 1d, and there were fires there so that anyone who had a penny could warm himself for hours in the early mornings. Only this last week the L.C.C. closed it on the ground that it was unhygienic [Author's footnote].
* Appointed by the Labour Government [Author's footnote].
* No: a bit worse if anything [Author's footnote].
+ To this day I don't know which it was [Author's footnote].
* Or hop-juice, funnily enough [Author's footnote].
* I forgot to mention that these lamps are hired out to burglars. Ginger said that he had paid PS3.10.0 a night for the use of one. So also with other burglars' tools of the more elaborate kinds. When opening a puzzle-lock, clever safe-breakers use a stethoscope to listen to the click of the tumblers [Author's footnote].
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'Clink' written August 1932
'Decline of the English Murder' first published in Tribune, 15 February 1946
'Just Junk - But Who Could Resist It?' first published as the Saturday Essay, Evening Standard, 5 January 1946
'Good Bad Books' first published in Tribune, 2 November 1945
'Boys' Weeklies' first published in Horizon, March 1940
'Women's Twopenny Papers' extract from 'As I Please' first published in Tribune, 28 July 1944
'The Art of Donald McGill' first published in Horizon, September 1941
'Hop-Picking Diary', written 25 August to 8 October 1931
This selection first published in Penguin Books 2009
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