The building has central heating and the warm air, heavy with the strong stench of humanity and the odour of stale clothes—hot, acrid, sickly—made me feel faint. I stumbled across the floor into the flag-stoned passage and got a glass of water. My endurance had nearly reached the limit, I did not see how I was going to live through to the morning. Not so much because of the physical discomforts, but by reason of my tribulation of soul. The accumulation of experiences had reached a point when it was difficult to bear any more. The knowledge that I was but one of many hundreds of broken women, and that this hall held but a remnant of the legion of the dispossessed, frightened me. It was something in life that I had not guessed at; and the knowledge made me afraid.
It was piercingly cold in the lavatory and I was compelled to go back into the warm stench of the sleeping hall. I curled under the clothes and tried to set myself counting sheep. But it is difficult to realise placid munchers when you are surrounded by suffering humans. The coughing broke out again, and the woman in the bed next to mine began to cry.
“I did so want to sleep,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about getting a bed all day, and now there isn’t any chance of peace. My head feels all light, and I shan’t be fit for anything tomorrow. If only I could get some sleep!”
She was a frail creature with big, bright eyes, and she told me in a whisper that she worked in a slop shop in Bethnal Green. She used to rent a couple of rooms with her husband and three children, but he was a German and had been killed in the war, and she and the children had lost their home.
“The kids are at an institution in the country,” she said. “I used to think that one day I’d be able to get them back, but I’ve given up hoping now. It’s cruel difficult to live. I’m afraid, somehow, they’ll forget me, and I always promised him I’d look after them whatever happened. But, what am I to do?” she asked. “What am I to do?”
There was a terrible note of resignation in her voice. Indeed, all these poor women seem to accept their lot as though it was the will of God, rather than the inhumanity of man. Their endurance is heroic, their generosity unending; all they want is to live decent, human lives, with some sort of a home, no matter how poor, no matter how fragmentary the furnishing.
These things are of no consequence, so long as the home is theirs.
Most of the women who frequent this shelter make Whitechapel their headquarters. Some of them are employed in slop shops, others are street sellers on their own. Others again, do odd jobs of charing, and a fair proportion are out of work dressmakers, fur workers, or employed in similar trades. There are one or two prostitutes, like my little Cockney friend, but they are the exception. The majority of the women are British. I came across one or two Scandinavian women, whose white skins and fair hair were unimpaired by hardship, and I also met a Russian, her native love of adventure undimmed by what she had passed through. She was young, however, and by force of character and personality, likely to find a niche somehow in the social framework of comfort and security. Only one Jewess did I meet in this shelter. Indeed, I very rarely encountered a woman of this race throughout my experiences. We know, of course, that the percentage of Jews among the population in this country is a small percentage, but even so it is, I think, a testimony to their feeling of racial responsibility that so few among them should be without the means of support.
The bell roused us at six o’clock, and from every bed dragged out a tired figure with the morning cough, faced with the problem of living yet another day. The art of dressing underneath the sheets is practised in Whitechapel, and it was curious and fascinating to watch women emerging from the chrysalis of American cloth, booted and hatted.
I did not attempt to wash myself that morning. I had stood all I could endure, and I left the shelter as dirty and begrimed as I had entered it. This, I think, shows what creatures of environment we are. The average middle-class woman is not happy without her morning bath, which is an aesthetic enjoyment as well as physically refreshing. But there was I, after a comparatively short sojourn in a world where baths abound not, dismissing the idea of so much as wiping my face with a damp cloth, or removing the black from my finger nails.
A long course in the underworld would, I am sure, cure the most fastidious of that impulse towards clean lingerie, which most of us delight in. Dirty faces and hands, soiled underwear, matted hair, what are these but trifles compared with the devastating problems of board and bed? You will not have much energy left to trouble about cleanliness when you have been bedless for a few nights, with but scant intervals of food.
XII
A Word to the Well-Fed
I found myself in an unexpected world that morning. It might have been a continental city, it was so early astir. Whitechapel was already going to work; foreign faces gleamed brightly in the street. Everyone wished each other good morning—mostly in foreign tongues, and from the open doorways and shop fronts, you caught occasional gleams of vivid colour. Most of the people are Jews especially the small shopkeepers, and some of them have retained to this day the externals of
