Some “lodgers” wore wisps of sad-looking fur—“perfectly good mog,” as a cheery matchseller described it. I don’t know the origin of the name, but to me, it is an admirable synonym for an article of adornment highly cherished by the most destitute among my sex.
Apart from the flower-seller and a consumptive-looking girl who worked in a slop shop, i.e., a cheap tailor’s, my fellow lodgers were seasoned veterans. A few took off their hats, if you can so describe the battered objects perched on their matted hair, the rest retained them closely, fearful, I suppose, of losing a vital part of their possessions. Their faces were not clean, though I am sure before their mode of life shifted their perspective, they would have welcomed a wash.
There was very little chatter. Mostly they sat quiet, in an apathy of rest. Not that their faces expressed vacancy, but their minds were elsewhere. As I discovered, the eternal walking about erects a barrier between you and material things, and it is only the sharper and more primal needs of the body which arouse the active consciousness. My friend of the plush coat had disappeared, and presently I felt I would like to follow her. The lack of air, the smouldering smell of stale humanity affected me with a physical nausea, the like of which I had not before known.
I found the decrepit female in the passage outside—I could write a whole chapter on the psychology of these aged doorkeepers—and asked her for a bed. She pointed up a rickety flight of stairs lit by a faint gas-burner. The walls, originally painted brown, were black with age; the window on the landing, draped with torn curtains of Nottingham lace, had not been cleaned for generations. Up yet another flight, across a creaking landing, and into a large room filled with truckle beds.
The air was impossible. I tried the next room on the same floor. It was smaller, and the window was open at the top. There was a vacant bed just underneath it, and, thankful at the chance of better atmosphere, I decided it should be mine.
I did not dare to look at the sheets, I felt somehow they were alive; indeed, it needed a very definite act of will before I could induce myself to take off my raincoat and my costume. I put on my nightdress over the rest of my clothes, hoping they would serve as protection against the invading army of insects which I was sure lurked in the sodden palliasses and unsavoury blankets. This, however, was an affliction from which I was spared. Generally speaking, your lodging house and doss house is free from lice. The lodgers, many of them, are fruitfully verminous, but the strays, which they leave behind them, are dealt according to those preparations discovered during the war, so that though the shakedowns in Waterloo Bridge Road are horribly dirty, they are free from vermin, being daily sprayed with strong chemicals.
This I did not know until the next morning, and apprehension of crawlers and an uncanny sense of spiritual discomfort kept me awake. Now the senses of the outcast, as I discovered, grow preternaturally acute, and though I had been on the streets only a few days, I had already learned to feel not only the approach of physical danger, but the proximity of evil. I felt evil was near me, moving towards me from the nearest bed. There was no light in the room, only the pale sinister grey of the South London sky, which seemed to distort the features of the face on the flock pillow next to mine into something almost inhuman.
I did not feel drowsy, but if slumber had approached me I must have fought it off. I had put my bag with my day’s things under the pillow, and I clasped it quickly as I lay, uncomfortable in mind, body and estate. Bad nights, however, were telling on me, and towards dawn I suppose I must have dropped off. I do not think I can have slept more than a few minutes, for I awoke with a start, my heart thumping, as it always does in moments of stress. The bed next to me was empty, and—I knew it—I felt it—my bag had gone …
Now an unfamiliar sensation, something you have never quite experienced before is a psychological landmark. When I sat up and realized that the whole of my day’s takings, the money that I had so proudly earned by the sale of matches, plus the development of a special technique, had left me, I was gripped by actual terror. Not physical terror, which we must all of us have known, but a terror of the future, the material future that never before had touched me. I suppose the life I had been leading, one of hand-to-mouth destitution, had tangibly affected me, for I forget that behind all the hunger and anxiety my own home was waiting for me, and remembered only that I had to begin that day without a penny, and that before nightfall I must get a bed or walk the streets.
The terror slipped like
