I met her once at the Relieving Office under Hungerford Bridge, and she told me in her quiet, well-bred manner she was going to the Casual Ward that night, as she felt she must have a hot bath. The effects of the dope were wearing off, and her pleasant, cultured voice had its inevitable effect.
Everybody likes her at the House, and she is as popular with the casuals as with the officials. I saw her again one day in the West End, beautifully dressed and evidently in the receipt of her pension. She greeted me most charmingly, and asked me to tea. A few days after I knew she would reappear in rags, and later on go in as a casual.
Then there is a little woman who has had a lawsuit pending for years. She will produce masses of letters and documents—and, like Miss Flite, thrust them into your hand with impassioned vituperation of certain nefarious solicitors and perjured witnesses. She is an embroidress by day, but works only by fits and starts, lured by that mirage of wealth that has led many a poor soul to shipwreck. It may be that one day she will come into her own, or it is equally on the cards that she may throw herself into the river, and end her misfortunes. She is possessed by this one idea, and when she goes into the House, can speak of nothing but her case.
Sometimes an elderly actress, long since out of work, comes to Great Guildford Street. She does not complain, but retails the story of her sufferings and her triumphs without comment. Now and again she gets a job in a “fit-up,” and tours through the country from village to village, playing at the local halls. Then again, there is a little woman, the wife, probably, of a professional man, who has outbreaks of dipsomania. On such occasions she will leave her home, sell what belongings she can carry, and steadily and blindly drink until the fit passes and she finds herself either in a doss house or derelict upon the pavement. It is at this point that, like a homing pigeon, she comes to Southwark, where her clothes are baked and generally tidied, and the rest restores her to something like her normal self. What happens when she goes back nobody knows, but, apparently, her husband always receives her—for every time she come to the casual ward she is wearing clothes which were once expensive and of a new and fashionable cut.
This strange and fitful company flit in and out of the great doors. But for them the House has not the terrors that it holds for the perennially destitute—those who have no abiding place, and for whom life has no foothold. I do not suppose the horror of the coffin-shaped cell ever affects the repose of the widow who drugs, the one who drinks, or those other transitory visitors who take the workhouse in their stride. But for the homeless it remains a thing of menace—a trap from which, once caught, they cannot escape.
Then we come to the women on the road—sturdy, fine specimens, who have become tramps from economic necessity. Such an one is Kitty Grimshaw, who was forced from her lodging in circumstances common to many. Kitty does a regular round, returning to Southwark as the central point. She has still friends among her former employers, and as she told me, could earn a decent living, if only she had a room. Physically fit and astonishingly witty, she is as clean a living woman as could be found.
“Many’s the opportunity I get of seeing life,” she told me. “A man will tell me in the road, ‘Come on, Kitty, an’ give me a love, an’ there’s a sixpence for you.’ But I says to them, ‘keep your sixpence, I’ve a man of me own in the Navy, and, please God, I’ll be married next Christmas.”
She told me a great deal, about her “man.” He is a bo’sun’s mate, and her great anxiety is to keep from him that she is a tramp. He writes to her every few weeks and always sends a little money.
“How do you get his letters?” I asked. It did not seem possible that the workhouse should act as a clearing station for correspondence.
“I pays an old lady sixpence a week to take his letters in, me dear. She lives at Peckham, an’ I call there every time I come to town.”
I often think of Kitty with her big, bright eyes and unconquerable spirit. It’s a great thing to know that, though life has dealt her such heavy buffets and left her without a home—forcing her to tramp the roads with her small stock of matches, hairpins, etc.—she still preserves her capacity for happiness, her belief in the good things to come. What can a woman who, at sixty years of age, believes confidently that her man is coming home to marry her? I am not a sentimentalist, but I share Kitty’s faith in her sailor. I hope he will come back to her; my belief in humanity will receive a blow if he does not return.
It was Kitty who put me wise as to the advantages and disadvantages of certain local workhouses. But whatever their varying degrees of discomfort, one and all prescribe the same penalty for poverty. You have to pay for your night’s bed by a day
