The third class of destitute—the itinerant match-vendors—rarely come to the one and twopenny type of lodging house. They simply have not the means. They go to the unlicensed doss house, which still secretly flourishes in the backways of the city. They go also to a huge shelter in Whitechapel, concerning which I shall have much to say. But be they prostitute, office cleaner, or matchseller—whether they pay a few pence or a larger sum—they all suffer from the same crying and shameful injustice; the inadequacy of accommodation, the lack of proper bathrooms, the glaring inequality which supplies the outcast male with the decencies of life and denies them to women.
VI
The Black Plush Coat
When I left the lodging house in Kennedy Court I had no money, and my sole stock-in-trade consisted of the two boxes of matches, which, soaked by the last night’s rain, were now dry. I got them off my hands at twopence each; it was too early in the day to get a better price—men grow more generous as the evening approaches!
I craved for a cup of coffee, but I was stern with myself; I would not run the risk of spending half my capital. I therefore bought four more boxes of matches, and determined to effect a speedy sale. I was not content, however, to accept my failure to get employment as a cook as final. Good cooks are always in demand and, as I have said before—l am an extremely good cook. I regard the production of a well-thought-out repast as a piece of creative work every bit as important as a chapter in a novel, let alone a triolet. Why, therefore, should I be debarred from practising my vocation? Surely this was an occasion when personality should be able to surmount the difficulties arising from the absence of what is known as a “character?”
I sold my matches well that day. I got fourpence for two and sixpence for two, and I bought myself a hunch of bread and cheese and a cup of coffee at a Lockhart’s. The food is very good in these establishments, much better and cheaper than at far more imposing places. It is a question, as Bernard Shaw said years ago, of whether you prefer nine-pennyworth of tablecloth and three-pennyworth of food for your shilling, or vice versa. The service is negligible at Lockhart’s, and the table implements are not at all refined, but your food and drink are both steaming hot, and the company has a rough and ready humour which gives salt to the poorest meal.
I had a conversation with the manageress as to the chances of engaging me as cook. There might, she thought, be a vacancy for a washer-up, but in the higher walks of domestic economy there was nothing doing; it was a matter of a reference once again.
It is a nice point—this discrimination between the washing of dishes and their preparation. In the scullery, it would seem, absence of character does not matter: it is, I suppose, difficult to abstract a soup tureen or conceal a dish. But when it comes to the roasting of joints or the boiling of potatoes, custom steps in with a rigid hand. Alas! there was no admission for me into anybody’s kitchen, save as a hewer of wood or a drawer of water, and both these pursuits were too poorly paid for me to consider; I always went back to the match trade.
I thought it probable that I might find less rigid requirements in the foreign quarters of Soho, where little restaurants jostle small cafés in every street. In the course of my pilgrimage I visited many kitchens where succulent repasts are prepared. Dark underground places, where the temperature is like that of a hothouse and the air vibrates with dramatic directions in the French and Italian tongues. Here again I could have got work as a vegetable maid at ninepence an hour, but the employment would have been irregular, and, as I early experienced, I could make more than that in the fine art of matchselling.
I had already discovered that in Soho you can buy matches by the dozen at reduced rates, but I decided to continue my own methods. I felt that if I laid in a larger stock-in-trade my market would slump, for whether I concealed them about my person or brandished them in the face of heaven, the fact that I had matches in reserve would
