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CHAPTER 3

1

[SCENE: Trafalgar Square. Dimly visible through the mist, a dozen
people, Dorothy among them, are grouped about one of the benches
near the north parapet.]

CHARLIE [singing]: 'Ail Mary, 'ail Mary, 'a-il Ma-ary--[Big Ben
strikes ten.]

SNOUTER [mimicking the noise]: Ding dong, ding dong! Shut your
---- noise, can't you? Seven more hours of it on this ---- square
before we get the chance of a setdown and a bit of sleep! Cripes!

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Non sum qualis eram boni sub regno
Edwardi! In the days of my innocence, before the Devil carried me
up into a high place and dropped me into the Sunday newspapers--
that is to say when I was Rector of Little Fawley-cum-Dewsbury. . . .

DEAFIE [singing]: With my willy willy, WITH my willy willy--

MRS WAYNE: Ah, dearie, as soon as I set eyes on you I knew as you
was a lady born and bred. You and me've known what it is to come
down in the world, haven't we, dearie? It ain't the same for us as
what it is for some of these others here.

CHARLIE [singing]: 'Ail Mary, 'ail Mary, 'a-il Ma-ary, full of
grace!

MRS BENDIGO: Calls himself a bloody husband, does he? Four pound
a week in Covent Garden and 'is wife doing a starry in the bloody
Square! Husband!

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Happy days, happy days! My ivied church
under the sheltering hillside--my red-tiled Rectory slumbering
among Elizabethan yews! My library, my vinery, my cook, house-
parlourmaid and groom-gardener! My cash in the bank, my name in
Crockford! My black suit of irreproachable cut, my collar back to
front, my watered silk cassock in the church precincts. . . .

MRS WAYNE: Of course the one thing I DO thank God for, dearie, is
that my poor dear mother never lived to see this day. Because if
she ever HAD of lived to see the day when her eldest daughter--as
was brought up, mind you, with no expense spared and milk straight
from the cow. . . .

MRS BENDIGO: HUSBAND!

GINGER: Come on, less 'ave a drum of tea while we got the chance.
Last we'll get tonight--coffee shop shuts at 'ar-parse ten.

THE KIKE: Oh Jesus! This bloody cold's gonna kill me! I ain't
got nothing on under my trousers. Oh Je-e-e-EEZE!

CHARLIE [singing]: 'Ail Mary, 'ail Mary--

SNOUTER: Fourpence! Fourpence for six ---- hours on the bum! And
that there nosing sod with the wooden leg queering our pitch at
every boozer between Aldgate and the Mile End Road. With 'is ----
wooden leg and 'is war medals as 'e bought in Lambeth Cut!
Bastard!

DEAFIE [singing]: With my willy willy, WITH my willy willy--

MRS BENDIGO: Well, I told the bastard what I thought of 'im,
anyway. 'Call yourself a man?' I says. 'I've seen things like you
kep' in a bottle at the 'orspital,' I says. . . .

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Happy days, happy days! Roast beef and
bobbing villagers, and the peace of God that passeth all
understanding! Sunday mornings in my oaken stall, cool flower
scent and frou-frou of surplices mingling in the sweet corpse-laden
air! Summer evenings when the late sun slanted through my study
window--I pensive, boozed with tea, in fragrant wreaths of
Cavendish, thumbing drowsily some half-calf volume--Poetical Works
of William Shenstone, Esq., Percy's Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry, J. Lempriere, D.D., professor of immoral theology . . .

GINGER: Come on, 'oo's for that drum of riddleme-ree? We got the
milk and we got the tea. Question is, 'oo's got any bleeding
sugar?

DOROTHY: This cold, this cold! It seems to go right through you!
Surely it won't be like this all night?

MRS BENDIGO: Oh, cheese it! I 'ate these snivelling tarts.

CHARLIE: Ain't it going to be a proper perisher, too? Look at the
perishing river mist creeping up that there column. Freeze the
fish-hooks off of ole Nelson before morning.

MRS WAYNE: Of course, at the time that I'm speaking of we still
had our little tobacco and sweetstuff business on the corner,
you'll understand. . . .

THE KIKE: Oh Je-e-e-EEZE! Lend's that overcoat of yours, Ginger.
I'm bloody freezing!

SNOUTER: ---- double-crossing bastard! P'raps I won't bash 'is
navel in when I get a 'old of 'im!

CHARLIE: Fortunes o' war, boy, fortunes o' war. Perishing Square
tonight--rumpsteak and kip on feathers tomorrow. What else d'you
expect on perishing Thursday?

MRS BENDIGO: Shove up, Daddy, shove up! Think I want your lousy
old 'ed on my shoulder--me a married woman?

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: For preaching, chanting, and intoning I
was unrivalled. My Lift up your Hearts' was renowned throughout
the diocese. All styles I could do you, High Church, Low Church,
Broad Church and No Church. Throaty Anglo-Cat Warblings, straight
from the shoulder muscular Anglican, or the adenoidal Low Church
whine in which still lurk the Houyhnhnm-notes of neighing chapel
elders. . . .

DEAFIE [singing]: WITH my willy willy--

GINGER: Take your 'ands off that bleeding overcoat, Kikie. You
don't get no clo'es of mine while you got the chats on you.

CHARLIE [singing]:

As pants the 'art for cooling streams,
When 'eated in the chase--

MRS MCELLIGOT [in her sleep]: Was 'at you, Michael dear?

MRS BENDIGO: It's my belief as the sneaking bastard 'ad another
wife living when 'e married me.

MR TALLBOYS [from the roof of his mouth, stage curate-wise,
reminiscently]: If any of you know cause of just impediment
why these two persons should not be joined together in holy
matrimony . . .

THE KIKE: A pal! A bloody pal! And won't lend his bloody
overcoat!

MRS WAYNE: Well, now as you've mentioned it, I must admit as I
never WAS one to refuse a nice cup of tea. I know that when our
poor dear mother was alive, pot after pot we used to . . .

NOSY WATSON [to himself, angrily]: Sod! . . . Gee'd into it
and then a stretch all round. . . . Never even done the bloody
job. . . . Sod!

DEAFIE [singing]: WITH my willy willy--

MRS MCELLIGOT [half asleep]: DEAR Michael. . . . He was real
loving, Michael was. Tender an' true. . . . Never looked at
another man since dat evenin' when I met'm outside Kronk's
slaughter-house an' he gimme de two pound o' sausage as he'd
bummed off de International Stores for his own supper. . . .

MRS BENDIGO: Well, I suppose we'll get that bloody tea this time
tomorrow.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting, reminiscently]: By the waters of Babylon we
sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion! . . .

DOROTHY: Oh, this cold, this cold!

SNOUTER: Well, I don't do no more ---- starries this side of
Christmas. I'll 'ave my kip tomorrow if I 'ave to cut it out of
their bowels.

NOSY WATSON: Detective, is he? Smith of the Flying Squad! Flying
Judas more likely! All they can bloody do--copping the old
offenders what no beak won't give a fair chance.

GINGER: Well, I'm off for the fiddlede-dee. 'Oo's got a couple of
clods for the water?

MRS MCELLIGOT [waking]: Oh dear, oh dear! If my back ain't fair
broke! Oh holy Jesus, if dis bench don't catch you across de
kidneys! An' dere was me dreamin' I was warm in kip wid a nice cup
a' tea an' two o' buttered toast waitin' by me bedside. Well, dere
goes me last wink o' sleep till I gets into Lambeth public lib'ry
tomorrow.

DADDY [his head emerging from within his overcoat like a tortoise's
from within its shell]: Wassat you said, boy? Paying money for
water! How long've you bin on the road, you ignorant young scut?
Money for bloody water? Bum it, boy, bum it! Don't buy what you
can bum and don't bum what you can steal. That's my word--fifty
year on the road, man and boy. [Retires within his coat.]

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: O all ye works of the Lord--

DEAFIE [singing]: WITH my willy willy--

CHARLIE: 'Oo was it copped you, Nosy?

THE KIKE: Oh Je-e-e-EEZE!

MRS BENDIGO: Shove up, shove up! Seems to me some folks think
they've took a mortgage on this bloody seat.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: O all ye works of the Lord, curse ye the
Lord, curse Him and vilify Him for ever!

MRS MCELLIGOT: What I always says is, it's always us poor bloody
Catholics dat's down in de bloody dumps.

NOSY WATSON: Smithy. Flying Squad--flying sod! Give us the plans
of the house and everything, and then had a van full of coppers
waiting and nipped the lot of us. I wrote it up in the Black
Maria:

'Detective Smith knows how to gee;
Tell him he's a ---- from me.'

SNOUTER: 'Ere, what about our ---- tea? Go on, Kikie, you're a
young 'un; shut that ---- noise and take the drums. Don't you pay
nothing. Worm it out of the old tart. Snivel. Do the doleful.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: O all ye children of men, curse ye the
Lord, curse Him and vilify Him for ever!

CHARLIE: What, is Smithy crooked too?

MRS BENDIGO: I tell you what, girls, I tell you what gets ME down,
and that's to think of my bloody husband snoring under four
blankets and me freezing in this bloody Square. That's what _I_
can't stomach. The unnatural sod!

GINGER [singing]: THERE they go--IN their joy--Don't take that
there drum with the cold sausage in it, Kikie.

NOSY WATSON: Crooked? CROOKED? Why, a corkscrew 'ud look like a
bloody bradawl beside of him! There isn't one of them double ----
sons of whores in the Flying Squad but 'ud sell his grandmother to
the knackers for two pound ten and then sit on her gravestone
eating potato crisps. The geeing, narking toe rag!

CHARLIE: Perishing tough. 'Ow many convictions you got?

GINGER [singing]:

THERE they go--IN their joy--
'APpy girl--LUcky boy--

NOSY WATSON: Fourteen. You don't stand no chance with that lot
against you.

MRS WAYNE: What, don't he keep you, then?

MRS BENDIGO: No, I'm married to this one, sod 'im!

CHARLIE: I got perishing nine myself.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: O Ananias, Azarias and Misael, curse ye
the Lord, curse Him and vilify Him for ever!

GINGER [singing]:

THERE they go--IN their joy--
'APpy girl--LUcky boy--
But 'ere am _I-I-I_--
Broken--'A-A-AARted!

God, I ain't 'ad a dig in the grave for three days. 'Ow long since
you washed your face, Snouter?

MRS MCELLIGOT: Oh dear, oh dear! If dat boy don't come soon wid
de tea me insides'll dry up like a bloody kippered herring.

CHARLIE: YOU can't sing, none of you. Ought to 'ear Snouter and
me 'long towards Christmas time when we pipe up 'Good King
Wenceslas' outside the boozers. 'Ymns, too. Blokes in the bar
weep their perishing eyes out to 'ear us. 'Member when we tapped
twice at the same 'ouse by mistake, Snouter? Old tart fair tore
the innards out of us.

MR TALLBOYS [marching up and down behind an imaginary drum and
singing]:

All things vile and damnable,
All creatures great and small--

[Big Ben strikes half past ten.]

SNOUTER [mimicking the clock]: Ding dong, ding dong! Six and a
---- half hours of it! Cripes!

GINGER: Kikie and me knocked off four of them safety-razor blades
in Woolworth's 's afternoon. I'll 'ave a dig in the bleeding
fountains tomorrow if I can bum a bit of soap.

DEAFIE: When I was a stooard in the P. & O., we used to meet them
black Indians two days out at sea, in them there great canoes as
they call catamarans, catching sea-turtles the size of dinner
tables.

MRS WAYNE: Did yoo used to be a clergyman, then, sir?

MR TALLBOYS [halting]: After the order of Melchizedec. There is
no question of 'used to be', Madam. Once a priest always a priest.
Hoc est corpus hocus-pocus. Even though unfrocked--un-Crocked, we
call it--and dog-collar publicly torn off by the bishop of the
diocese.

GINGER [singing]: THERE they go--IN their joy--Thank Christ! 'Ere
comes Kikie. Now for the consultation-free!

MRS BENDIGO: Not before it's bloody needed.

CHARLIE: 'Ow come they give you the sack, mate? Usual story?
Choirgirls in the family way?

MRS MCELLIGOT: You've took your time, ain't you, young man? But
come on, let's have a sup of it before me tongue falls out o' me
bloody mouth.

MRS BENDIGO: Shove up, Daddy! You're sitting on my packet of
bloody sugar.

MR TALLBOYS: Girls is a euphemism. Only the usual flannel-
bloomered hunters of the unmarried clergy. Church hens--altar-
dressers and brass-polishers--spinsters growing bony and desperate.
There is a demon that enters into them at thirty-five.

THE KIKE: The old bitch wouldn't give me the hot water. Had to
tap a toff in the street and pay a penny for it.

SNOUTER: ---- likely story! Bin swigging it on the way more
likely.

DADDY [emerging from his overcoat]: Drum o' tea, eh? I could sup
a drum o' tea. [Belches slightly.]

CHARLIE: When their bubs get like perishing razor stops? _I_
know.

NOSY WATSON: Tea--bloody catlap. Better'n that cocoa in the stir,
though. Lend's your cup, matie.

GINGER: Jest wait'll I knock a 'ole in this tin of milk. Shy us a
money or your life, someone.

MRS BENDIGO: Easy with that bloody sugar! 'Oo paid for it, I sh'd
like to know?

MR TALLBOYS: When their bubs get like razor stops. I thank thee
for that humour. Pippin's Weekly made quite a feature of the case.
'Missing Canon's Sub Rosa Romance. Intimate Revelations.' And
also an Open Letter in John Bull: 'To a Skunk in Shepherd's
Clothing'. A pity--I was marked out for preferment. [To Dorothy]
Gaiters in the family, if you understand me. You would not think,
would you, that the time has been when this unworthy backside
dented the plush cushions of a cathedral stall?

CHARLIE: 'Ere comes Florry. Thought she'd be along soon as we got
the tea going. Got a nose like a perishing vulture for tea, that
girl 'as.

SNOUTER: Ay, always on the tap. [Singing]

Tap, tap, tappety tap,
I'm a perfec' devil at that--

MRS MCELLIGOT: De poor kid, she ain't got no sense. Why don't she
go up to Piccadilly Circus where she'd get her five bob reg'lar?
She won't do herself no good bummin' round de Square wid a set of
miserable ole Tobies.

DOROTHY: Is that milk all right?

GINGER: All right? [Applies his mouth to one of the holes in the
tin and blows. A sticky greyish stream dribbles from the other.]

CHARLIE: What luck, Florry? 'Ow 'bout that perishing toff as I
see you get off with just now?

DOROTHY: It's got 'Not fit for babies' on it.

MRS BENDIGO: Well, you ain't a bloody baby, are you? You can drop
your Buckingham Palace manners, 'ere, dearie.

FLORRY: Stood me a coffee and a fag--mingy bastard! That tea you
got there, Ginger? You always WAS my favourite, Ginger dear.

MRS WAYNE: There's jest thirteen of us.

MR TALLBOYS: As we are not going to have any dinner you need not
disturb yourself.

GINGER: What-o, ladies and gents! Tea is served. Cups forward,
please!

THE KIKE: Oh Jeez! You ain't filled my bloody cup half full!

MRS MCELLIGOT: Well, here's luck to us all, an' a better bloody
kip tomorrow. I'd ha' took shelter in one o' dem dere churches
meself, only de b--s won't let you in if so be as dey t'ink you got
de chats on you. [Drinks.]

MRS WAYNE: Well, I can't say as this is exactly the way as I've
been ACCUSTOMED to drinking a cup of tea--but still--[Drinks.]

CHARLIE: Perishing good cup of tea. [Drinks.]

DEAFIE: And there was flocks of them there green parakeets in the
coco-nut palms, too. [Drinks.]

MR TALLBOYS:

What potions have I drunk of siren tears,
Distilled from limbecs foul as Hell within!

[Drinks.]

SNOUTER: Last we'll get till five in the ---- morning. [Drinks.]

[Florry produces a broken shop-made cigarette from her stocking,
and cadges a match. The men, except Daddy, Deafie, and Mr
Tallboys, roll cigarettes from picked-up fag-ends. The red ends
glow through the misty twilight, like a crooked constellation, as
the smokers sprawl on the bench, the ground, or the slope of the
parapet.]

MRS WAYNE: Well, there now! A nice cup of tea do seem to warm you
up, don't it, now? Not but what I don't feel it a bit different,
as you might say, not having no nice clean table-cloth like I've
been accustomed to, and the beautiful china tea service as our
mother used to have; and always, of course, the very best tea as
money could buy--real Pekoe Points at two and nine a pound. . . .

GINGER [singing]:

THERE they go--IN their joy--
'APPY girl--LUCKY boy--

MR TALLBOYS [singing, to the tune of 'Deutschland, Deutschland uber
alles']: Keep the aspidistra flying--

CHARLIE: 'Ow long you two kids been in Smoke?

SNOUTER: I'm going to give them boozers such a doing tomorrow as
they won't know if theyr'e on their 'eads or their ---- 'eels.
I'll 'ave my 'alf dollar if I 'ave to 'old them upside down and
---- shake 'em.

GINGER: Three days. We come down from York--skippering 'alf the
way. God, wasn't it jest about bleeding nine carat gold, too!

FLORRY: Got any more tea there, Ginger dear? Well, so long,
folks. See you all at Wilkins's tomorrow morning.

MRS BENDIGO: Thieving little tart! Swallers 'er tea and then
jacks off without so much as a thank you. Can't waste a bloody
moment.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Cold? Ay, I b'lieve you. Skipperin' in de long
grass wid no blanket an' de bloody dew fit to drown you, an' den
can't get your bloody fire going' in de mornin', an' got to tap de
milkman 'fore you can make yourself a drum o' tea. I've had some'v
it when me and Michael was on de toby.

MRS BENDIGO: Even go with blackies and Chinamen she will, the
dirty little cow.

DOROTHY: How much does she get each time?

SNOUTER: Tanner.

DOROTHY: SIXPENCE?

CHARLIE: Bet your life. Do it for a perishing fag along towards
morning.

MRS MCELLIGOT: I never took less'n a shilling, never.

GINGER: Kikie and me skippered in a boneyard one night. Woke up
in the morning and found I was lying on a bleeding gravestone.

THE KIKE: She ain't half got the crabs on her, too.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Michael an' me skippered in a pigsty once. We was
just a-creepin' in, when, 'Holy Mary!' says Michael, 'dere's a pig
in here!' 'Pig be ----!' I says, 'he'll keep us warm anyway.' So
in we goes, an' dere was an old sow lay on her side snorin' like a
traction engine. I creeps up agen her an' puts me arms round her,
an' begod she kept me warm all night. I've skippered worse.

DEAFIE [singing]: WITH my willy willy--

CHARLIE: Don't ole Deafie keep it up? Sets up a kind of a 'umming
inside of 'im, 'e says.

DADDY: When I was a boy we didn't live on this 'ere bread and marg
and tea and suchlike trash. Good solid tommy we 'ad in them days.
Beef stoo. Black pudden. Bacon dumpling. Pig's 'ead. Fed like a
fighting-cock on a tanner a day. And now fifty year I've 'ad of it
on the toby. Spud-grabbing, pea-picking, lambing, turnip-topping--
everythink. And sleeping in wet straw and not once in a year you
don't fill your guts right full. Well--! [Retires within his coat.]

MRS MCELLIGOT: But he was real bold, Michael was. He'd go in
anywhere. Many's de time we've broke into an empty house an kipped
in de best bed. 'Other people got homes,' he'd say. 'Why shouln't
we have'm too!'

GINGER [singing]: But I'm dan--cing with tears--in my eyes--

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Absumet haeres Caecuba dignior! To
think that there were twenty-one bottles of Clos St Jacques 1911 in
my cellar still, that night when the baby was born and I left for
London on the milk train! . . .

MRS WAYNE: And as for the WREATHS we 'as sent us when our mother
died--well, you wouldn't believe! 'Uge, they was. . . .

MRS BENDIGO: If I 'ad my time over again I'd marry for bloody
money.

GINGER [singing]:

But I'm dan--cing with tears--in my eyes--
'Cos the girl--in my arms--isn't you-o-ou!

NOSY WATSON: Some of you lot think you got a bloody lot to howl
about, don't you? What about a poor sod like me? You wasn't
narked into the stir when you was eighteen year old, was you?

THE KIKE: Oh Je-e-eEEZE!

CHARLIE: Ginger, you can't sing no more'n a perishing tomcat with
the guts-ache. Just you listen to me. I'll give y'a treat.
[Singing]: Jesu, lover OF my soul--

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Et ego in Crockford. . . . With Bishops
and Archbishops and with all the Company of Heaven. . . .

NOSY WATSON: D'you know how I got in the stir the first time?
Narked by my own sister--yes, my own bloody sister! My sister's a
cow if ever there was one. She got married to a religious maniac--
he's so bloody religious that she's got fifteen kids now--well, it
was him put her up to narking me. But I got back on 'em, _I_ can
tell you. First thing, I done when I come out of the stir, I buys
a hammer and goes round to my sister's house, and smashed her piano
to bloody matchwood. 'There!' I says, 'that's what you get for
narking ME! You nosing mare!' I says.

DOROTHY: This cold, this cold! I don't know whether my feet are
there or not.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Bloody tea don't warm you for long, do it? I'm
fair froze myself.

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: My curate days, my curate days! My
fancywork bazaars and morris-dancers in aid of on the village
green, my lectures to the Mothers' Union-missionary work in Western
China with fourteen magic lantern slides! My Boys' Cricket Club,
teetotallers only, my Confirmation classes--purity lecture once
monthly in the Parish Hall--my Boy Scout orgies! The Wolf Cubs
will deliver the Grand Howl. Household Hints for the Parish
Magazine, 'Discarded fountain-pen fillers can be used as enemas for
canaries. . . .'

CHARLIE [singing]: Jesu, lover OF my soul--

GINGER: 'Ere comes the bleeding flattie! Get up off the ground,
all of you. [Daddy emerges from his overcoat.]

THE POLICEMAN [shaking the sleepers on the next bench]: Now then,
wake up, wake up! Rouse up, you! Got to go home if you want to
sleep. This isn't a common lodging house. Get up, there! [etc.,
etc.]

MRS BENDIGO: It's that nosy young sod as wants promotion.
Wouldn't let you bloody breathe if 'e 'ad 'is way.

CHARLIE [singing]:

Jesu, lover of my soul,
Let me TO Thy bosom fly--

THE POLICEMAN: Now then, YOU! What you think THIS is? Baptist
prayer meeting? [To the Kike] Up you get, and look sharp about
it!

CHARLIE: I can't 'elp it, sergeant. It's my toonful nature. It
comes out of me natural-like.

THE POLICEMAN [shaking Mrs Bendigo]: Wake up, mother, wake up!

MRS BENDIGO: Mother? MOTHER, is it? Well, if I am a mother,
thank God I ain't got a bloody son like you! And I'll tell you
another little secret, constable. Next time I want a man's fat
'ands feeling round the back of my neck, I won't ask YOU to do it.
I'll 'ave someone with a bit more sex-appeal.

THE POLICEMAN: Now then, now then! No call to get abusive, you
know. We got our orders to carry out. [Exit majestically.]

SNOUTER [sotto voce]: ---- off, you ---- son of a ----!

CHARLIE [singing]:

While the gathering waters roll,
While the tempest still is 'igh!

Sung bass in the choir my last two years in Dartmoor, I did.

MRS BENDIGO: I'll bloody mother 'im! [Shouting after the
policeman] 'I! Why don't you get after them bloody cat burglars
'stead of coming nosing round a respectable married woman?

GINGER: Kip down, blokes. 'E's jacked. [Daddy retires within his
coat.]

NOSY WATSON: Wassit like in Dartmoor now? D'they give you jam
now?

MRS WAYNE: Of course, you can see as they couldn't reely allow
people to sleep in the streets--I mean, it wouldn't be quite nice--
and then you've got to remember as it'd be encouraging of all the
people as haven't got homes of their own--the kind of riff-raff, if
you take my meaning. . . .

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Happy days, happy days! Outings with
the Girl Guides in Epping Forest--hired brake and sleek roan
horses, and I on the box in my grey flannel suit, speckled straw
hat, and discreet layman's necktie. Buns and ginger pop under the
green elms. Twenty Girl Guides pious yet susceptible frisking in
the breast-high bracken, and I a happy curate sporting among them,
in loco parentis pinching the girls' backsides. . . .

MRS MCELLIGOT: Well, you may talk about kippin' down, but begod
dere won't be much sleep for my poor ole bloody bones tonight. I
can't skipper it now de way me and Michael used to.

CHARLIE: Not jam. Gets cheese, though, twice a week.

THE KIKE: Oh Jeez! I can't stand it no longer. I going down to
the M.A.B.

[Dorothy stands up, and then, her knees having stiffened with the
cold, almost falls.]

GINGER: Only send you to the bleeding Labour Home. What you say
we all go up to Covent Garden tomorrow morning? Bum a few pears if
we get there early enough.

CHARLIE: I've 'ad my perishing bellyful of Dartmoor, b'lieve me.
Forty on us went through 'ell for getting off with the ole women
down on the allotments. Ole trots seventy years old they was--
spud-grabbers. Didn't we cop it just! Bread and water, chained to
the wall--perishing near murdered us.

MRS BENDIGO: No fear! Not while my bloody husband's there. One
black eye in a week's enough for me, thank you.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting, reminiscently]: As for our harps, we hanged
them up, upon the willow trees of Babylon! . . .

MRS MCELLIGOT: Hold up, kiddie! Stamp your feet an' get de blood
back into 'm. I'll take y'a walk up to Paul's in a coupla minutes.

DEAFIE [singing]: WITH my willy willy--

[Big Ben strikes eleven.]

SNOUTER: Six more--hours! Cripes!

[An hour passes. Big Ben stops striking. The mist thins and the
cold increases. A grubby-faced moon is seen sneaking among the
clouds of the southern sky. A dozen hardened old men remain on the
benches, and still contrive to sleep, doubled up and hidden in
their greatcoats. Occasionally they groan in their sleep. The
others set out in all directions, intending to walk all night and
so keep their blood flowing, but nearly all of them have drifted
back to the Square by midnight. A new policeman comes on duty.
He strolls through the Square at intervals of half an hour,
scrutinizing the faces of the sleepers but letting them alone when
he has made sure that they are only asleep and not dead. Round
each bench revolves a knot of people who take it in turns to sit
down and are driven to their feet by the cold after a few minutes.
Ginger and Charlie fill two drums at the fountains and set out in
the desperate hope of boiling some tea over the navvies' clinker
fire in Chandos Street; but a policeman is warming himself at the
fire, and orders them away. The Kike suddenly vanishes, probably
to beg a bed at the M.A.B. Towards one o'clock a rumour goes round
that a lady is distributing hot coffee, ham sandwiches, and packets
of cigarettes under Charing Cross Bridge; there is a rush to the
spot, but the rumour turns out to be unfounded. As the Square
fills again the ceaseless changing of places upon the benches
quickens until it is a game of musical chairs. Sitting down, with
one's hands under one's armpits, it is possible to get into a kind
of sleep, or doze, for two or three minutes on end. In this state,
enormous ages seem to pass. One sinks into a complex, troubling
dreams which leave one conscious of one's surroundings and of the
bitter cold. The night is growing clearer and colder every minute.
There is a chorus of varying sound--groans, curses, bursts of
laughter, and singing, and through them all the uncontrollable
chattering of teeth.]

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: I am poured out like water, and all my
bones are out of joint! . . .

MRS MCELLIGOT: Ellen an' me bin wanderin' round de City dis two
hours. Begod it's like a bloody tomb wid dem great lamps glarin'
down on you an' not a soul stirren' excep' de flatties strollin'
two an' two.

SNOUTER: Five past ---- one and I ain't 'ad a bite since dinner!
Course it 'ad to 'appen to us on a ---- night like this!

MR TALLBOYS: A drinking night I should have called it. But every
man to his taste. [Chanting] 'My strength is dried like a
potsherd, and my tongue cleaveth to my gums!' . . .

CHARLIE: Say, what you think? Nosy and me done a smash jest now.
Nosy sees a tobacconist's show-case full of them fancy boxes of
Gold Flake, and 'e says, 'By cripes I'm going to 'ave some of them
fags if they give me a perishing stretch for it!' 'e says. So 'e
wraps 'is scarf round 'is 'and, and we waits till there's a
perishing great van passing as'll drown the noise, and then Nosy
lets fly--biff! We nipped a dozen packets of fags, and then I bet
you didn't see our a--s for dust. And when we gets round the
corner and opens them, there wasn't no perishing fags inside!
Perishing dummy boxes. I 'ad to laugh.

DOROTHY: My knees are giving way. I can't stand up much longer.

MRS BENDIGO: Oh, the sod, the sod! To turn a woman out of doors
on a night like bloody this! You wait'll I get 'im drunk o'
Saturday night and 'e can't 'it back. I'll mash 'im to bloody shin
of beef, I will. 'E'll look like two pennorth of pieces after I've
swiped 'im with the bloody flat-iron.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Here, make room'n let de kid sit down. Press up
agen ole Daddy, dear. Put his arm round you. He's chatty, but
he'll keep you warm.

GINGER [double marking time]: Stamp your feet on the ground--only
bleeding thing to do. Strike up a song, someone, and less all
stamp our bleeding feet in time to it.

DADDY [waking and emerging]: Wassat? [Still half asleep, he lets
his head fall back, with mouth open and Adam's apple protruding
from his withered throat like the blade of a tomahawk.]

MRS BENDIGO: There's women what if they'd stood what I'VE stood,
they'd ave put spirits of salts in 'is cup of bloody tea.

MR TALLBOYS [beating an imaginary drum and singing]: Onward,
heathen so-oldiers--

MRS WAYNE: Well, reely now! If any of us'd ever of thought, in
the dear old days when we used to sit round our own Silkstone coal
fire, with the kettle on the hob and a nice dish of toasted
crumpets from the baker's over the way. . . .

[The chattering of her teeth silences her.]

CHARLIE: No perishing church trap now, matie. I'll give y'a bit
of smut--something as we can perishing dance to. You listen t'me.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Don't you get talkin' about crumpets, Missis. Me
bloody belly's rubbin' agen me backbone already.

[Charlie draws himself up, clears his throat, and in an enormous
voice roars out a song entitled 'Rollicking Bill the Sailor'. A
laugh that is partly a shudder bursts from the people on the bench.
They sing the song through again, with increasing volume of noise,
stamping and clapping in time. Those sitting down, packed elbow to
elbow, sway grotesquely from side to side, working their feet as
though stamping on the pedals of a harmonium. Even Mrs Wayne joins
in after a moment, laughing in spite of herself. They are all
laughing, though with chattering teeth. Mr Tallboys marches up and
down behind his vast swag belly, pretending to carry a banner or
crozier in front of him. The night is now quite clear, and an icy
wind comes shuddering at intervals through the Square. The
stamping and clapping rise to a kind of frenzy as the people feel
the deadly cold penetrate to their bones. Then the policeman is
seen wandering into the Square from the eastern end, and the
singing ceases abruptly.]

CHARLIE: There! You can't say as a bit of music don't warm you
up.

MRS BENDIGO: This bloody wind! And I ain't even got any drawers
on, the bastard kicked me out in such a 'urry.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Well, glory be to Jesus, 'twon't be long before dat
dere church in de Gray's Inn Road opens up for de winter. Dey
gives you a roof over your head of a night, 't any rate.

THE POLICEMAN: Now then, now THEN! D'you think this is the time
of night to begin singing like a blooming bear garden? I shall
have to send you back to your homes if you can't keep quiet.

SNOUTER [sotto voce]: You ---- son of a ----!

GINGER: Yes--they lets you kip on the bleeding stone floor with
three newspaper posters 'stead of blankets. Might as well be in
the Square and 'ave done with it. God, I wish I was in the
bleeding spike.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Still, you gets a cup of Horlicks an' two slices.
I bin glad to kip dere often enough.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: I was glad when they said unto me, We will
go into the house of the Lord! . . .

DOROTHY [starting up]: Oh, this cold, this cold! I don't know
whether it's worse when you're sitting down or when you're standing
up. Oh, how can you all stand it? Surely you don't have to do
this every night of your lives?

MRS WAYNE: You mustn't think, dearie, as there isn't SOME of us
wasn't brought up respectable.

CHARLIE [singing]: Cheer up, cully, you'll soon be dead! Brrh!
Perishing Jesus! Ain't my fish-hooks blue! [Double marks time and
beats his arms against his sides.]

DOROTHY: Oh, but how can you stand it? How can you go on like
this, night after night, year after year? It's not possible that
people can live so! It's so absurd that one wouldn't believe it if
one didn't know it was true. It's impossible!

SNOUTER: ---- possible if you ask me.

MR TALLBOYS [stage curate-wise]: With God, all things are possible.

[Dorothy sinks back on to the bench, her knees still being
unsteady.]

CHARLIE: Well, it's jest on 'ar-parse one. Either we got to get
moving, or else make a pyramid on that perishing bench. Unless we
want to perishing turn up our toes. 'Oo's for a little
constitootional up to the Tower of London?

MRS MCELLIGOT: 'Twon't be me dat'll walk another step tonight. Me
bloody legs've given out on me.

GINGER: What-o for the pyramid! This is a bit too bleeding nine-
day-old for me. Less scrum into that bench--beg pardon, Ma!

DADDY [sleepily]: Wassa game? Can't a man get a bit of kip but
what you must come worriting 'in and shaking of 'im?

CHARLIE: That's the stuff! Shove in! Shift yourself, Daddy, and
make room for my little sit-me-down. Get one atop of each other.
That's right. Never mind the chats. Jam all together like
pilchards in a perishing tin.

MRS WAYNE: Here! I didn't ask you to sit on my lap, young man!

GINGER: Sir on mine, then, mother--'sall the same. What-o! First
bit of stuff I've 'ad my arm round since Easter.

[They pile themselves in a monstrous shapeless clot, men and women
clinging indiscriminately together, like a bunch of toads at
spawning time. There is a writhing movement as the heap settles
down, and a sour stench of clothes diffuses itself. Only Mr
Tallboys remains marching up and down.]

MR TALLBOYS [declaiming]: O ye nights and days, ye light and
darkness, ye lightnings and clouds, curse ye the Lord!

[Deafie, someone having sat on his diaphragm, utters a strange,
unreproducible sound.]

MRS BENDIGO: Get off my bad leg, can't you? What you think I am?
Bloody drawing-room sofa?

CHARLIE: Don't ole Daddy stink when you get up agen 'im?

GINGER: Bleeding Bank 'oliday for the chats this'll be.

DOROTHY: Oh, God, God!

MR TALLBOYS [halting]: Why call on God, you puling deathbed
penitent? Stick to your guns and call on the Devil as I do.
Hail to thee, Lucifer, Prince of the Air! [Singing to the tune
of 'Holy, holy holy']: Incubi and Succubi, falling down before
Thee! . . .

MRS BENDIGO: Oh, shut up, you blarsphemous old sod! 'E's too
bloody fat to feel the cold, that's what's wrong with 'im.

CHARLIE: Nice soft be'ind you got, Ma. Keep an eye out for the
perishing flattie, Ginger.

MR TALLBOYS: Malecidite, omnia opera! The Black Mass! Why not?
Once a priest always a priest. Hand me a chunk of toke and I will
work the miracle. Sulphur candles, Lord's Prayer backwards,
crucifix upside down. [To Dorothy] If we had a black he-goat you
would come in useful.

[The animal heat of the piled bodies had already made itself felt.
A drowsiness is descending upon everyone.]

MRS WAYNE: You mustn't think as I'm ACCUSTOMED to sitting on a
gentleman's knee, you know . . .

MRS MCELLIGOT [drowsily]: It took my sacraments reg'lar till de
bloody priest wouldn't give me absolution along o' my Michael. De
ole get, de ole getsie! . . .

MR TALLBOYS [striking an attitude]: Per aquam sacratam quam nunc
spargo, signumque crucis quod nunc facio. . . .

GINGER: 'Oo's got a fill of 'ard-up? I've smoked by last bleeding
fag-end.

MR TALLBOYS [as at the altar]: Dearly beloved brethren we are
gathered together in the sight of God for the solemnization of
unholy blasphemy. He has afflicted us with dirt and cold, with
hunger and solitude, with the pox and the itch, with the headlouse
and the crablouse. Our food is damp crusts and slimy meat-scraps
handed out in packets from hotel doorways. Our pleasure is stewed
tea and sawdust cakes bolted in reeking cellars, bar-rinsing sand
spittle of common ale, the embrace of toothless hags. Our destiny
is the pauper's grave, twenty-feet deep in deal coffins, the kip-
house of underground. It is very meet, right and our bounden duty
at all times and in all places to curse Him and revile Him.
Therefore with Demons and Archdemons [etc., etc., etc.].

MRS MCELLIGOT [drowsily]: By holy Jesus, I'm half asleep right
now, only some b--'s lyin' across my legs and crushin' 'em.

MR TALLBOYS: Amen. Evil from us deliver, but temptation into not
us lead [etc., etc., etc.].

[As he reaches the first word of the prayer he tears the
consecrated bread across. The blood runs out of it. There is a
rolling sound, as of thunder, and the landscape changes. Dorothy's
feet are very cold. Monstrous winged shapes of Demons and
Archdemons are dimly visible, moving to and fro. Something, beak
or claw, closes upon Dorothy's shoulder, reminding her that her
feet and hands are aching with cold.]

THE POLICEMAN [shaking Dorothy by the shoulder]: Wake up, now,
wake up, wake up! Haven't you got an overcoat? You're as white as
death. Don't you know better than to let yourself sprawl about in
the cold like that?

[Dorothy finds that she is stiff with cold. The sky is now quite
clear, with gritty little stars twinkling like electric lamps
enormously remote. The pyramid has unrolled itself.]

MRS MCELLIGOT: De poor kid, she ain't used to roughin' it de way
us others are.

GINGER [beating his arms]: Brr! Woo! 'Taters in the bleeding
mould!

MRS WAYNE: She's a lady born and bred.

THE POLICEMAN: Is that so?--See here, Miss, you best come down to
the M.A.B. with me. They'll give you a bed all right. Anyone can
see with half an eye as you're a cut above these others here.

MRS BENDIGO: Thank you, constable, THANK you! 'Ear that, girls?
'A cut above us,' 'e says. Nice, ain't it? [To the policeman]
Proper bloody Ascot swell yourself, ain't you?

DOROTHY: No, no! Leave me, I'd rather stay here.

THE POLICEMAN: Well, please yourself. You looked real bad just
now. I'll be along later and take a look at you. [Moves off
doubtfully.]

CHARLIE: Wait'll the perisher's round the corner and then pile up
agen. Only perishing way we'll keep warm.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Come on, kid. Get underneath an' let'm warm you.

SNOUTER: Ten minutes to ---- two. Can't last for ever, I s'pose.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: I am poured out like water, and all my
bones are out of joint. My heart also in the midst of my body is
like unto melting wax! . . .

[Once more the people pile themselves on the bench. But the
temperature is now not many degrees above freezing-point, and the
wind is blowing more cuttingly. The people wriggle their wind-
nipped faces into the heap like sucking pigs struggling for their
mother's teats. One's interludes of sleep shrink to a few seconds,
and one's dreams grow more monstrous, troubling, and undreamlike.
There are times when the nine people are talking almost normally,
times when they can even laugh at their situation, and times when
they press themselves together in a kind of frenzy, with deep
groans of pain. Mr Tallboys suddenly becomes exhausted and his
monologue degenerates into a stream of nonsense. He drops his vast
bulk on top of the others, almost suffocating them. The heap rolls
apart. Some remain on the bench, some slide to the ground and
collapse against the parapet or against the others' knees. The
policeman enters the Square and orders those on the ground to their
feet. They get up, and collapse again the moment he is gone.
There is no sound from the ten people save of snores that are
partly groans. Their heads nod like those of joined porcelain
Chinamen as they fall asleep and reawake as rhythmically as the
ticking of a clock. Three strikes somewhere. A voice yells like a
trumpet from the eastern end of the Square: 'Boys! Up you get!
The noospapers is come!']

CHARLIE [starting from his sleep]: The perishing papers! C'm on,
Ginger! Run like Hell!

[They run, or shamble, as fast as they can to the corner of the
Square, where three youths are distributing surplus posters given
away in charity by the morning newspapers. Charlie and Ginger come
back with a thick wad of posters. The five largest men now jam
themselves together on the bench, Deafie and the four women sitting
across their knees; then, with infinite difficulty (as it has to be
done from the inside), they wrap themselves in a monstrous cocoon
of paper, several sheets thick, tucking the loose ends into their
necks or breasts or between their shoulders and the back of the
bench. Finally nothing is uncovered save their heads and the lower
part of their legs. For their heads they fashion hoods of paper.
The paper constantly comes loose and lets in cold shafts of wind,
but it is now possible to sleep for as much as five minutes
consecutively. At this time--between three and five in the
morning--it is customary with the police not to disturb the Square
sleepers. A measure of warmth steals through everyone and extends
even to their feet. There is some furtive fondling of the women
under cover of the paper. Dorothy is too far gone to care.

By a quarter past four the paper is all crumpled and torn to
nothing, and it is far too cold to remain sitting down. The people
get up, swear, find their legs somewhat rested, and begin to slouch
to and fro in couples, frequently halting from mere lassitude.
Every belly is now contorted with hunger. Ginger's tin of
condensed milk is torn open and the contents devoured, everyone
dipping their fingers into it and licking them. Those who have no
money at all leave the Square for the Green Park, where they will
be undisturbed till seven. Those who can command even a halfpenny
make for Wilkins's cafe not far from the Charing Cross Road. It is
known that the cafe will not open till five o'clock; nevertheless,
a crowd is waiting outside the door by twenty to five.]

MRS MCELLIGOT: Got your halfpenny, dearie? Dey won't let more'n
four of us in on one cup o'tea, de stingy ole gets!

MR TALLBOYS [singing]: The roseate hu-ues of early da-awn--

GINGER: God, that bit of sleep we 'ad under the newspapers done me
some good. [Singing] But I'm dan-cing with tears--in my eyes--

CHARLIE: Oh, boys, boys! Look through that perishing window, will
you? Look at the 'eat steaming down the window pane! Look at the
tea-urns jest on the boil, and them great piles of 'ot toast and
'am sandwiches, and them there sausages sizzling in the pan! Don't
it make your belly turn perishing summersaults to see 'em?

DOROTHY: I've got a penny. I can't get a cup of tea for that,
can I?

SNOUTER: ---- lot of sausages we'll get this morning with
fourpence between us. 'Alf a cup of tea and a ---- doughnut more
likely. There's a breakfus' for you!

MRS MCELLIGOT: You don't need buy a cup o' tea all to yourself.
I got a halfpenny an' so's Daddy, an' we'll put'm to your penny an'
have a cup between de t'ree of us. He's got sores on his lip, but
Hell! who cares? Drink near de handle an' dere's no harm done.

[A quarter to five strikes.]

MRS BENDIGO: I'd bet a dollar my ole man's got a bit of 'addock to
'is breakfast. I 'ope it bloody chokes 'im.

GINGER [singing]: But I'm dan-cing with tears--in my eyes--

MR TALLBOYS [singing]: Early in the morning my song shall rise to
Thee!

MRS MCELLIGOT: You gets a bit o' kip in dis place, dat's one
comfort. Dey lets you sleep wid your head on de table till seven
o'clock. It's a bloody godsend to us Square Tobies.

CHARLIE [slavering like a dog]: Sausages! Perishing sausages!
Welsh rabbit! 'Ot dripping toast! And a rump-steak two inches
thick with chips and a pint of Ole Burton! Oh, perishing Jesus!

[He bounds forward, pushes his way through the crowd and rattles
the handle of the glass door. The whole crowd of people, about
forty strong, surge forward and attempt to storm the door, which is
stoutly held within by Mr Wilkins, the proprietor of the cafe. He
menaces them through the glass. Some press their breasts and faces
against the window as though warming themselves. With a whoop and
a rush Florry and four other girls, comparatively fresh from having
spent part of the night in bed, debouch from a neighbouring alley,
accompanied by a gang of youths in blue suits. They hurl
themselves upon the rear of the crowd with such momentum that the
door is almost broken. Mr Wilkins pulls it furiously open and
shoves the leaders back. A fume of sausages, kippers, coffee, and
hot bread streams into the outer cold.]

YOUTHS VOICES FROM THE REAR: Why can't he ---- open before five?
We're starving for our ---- tea! Ram the ---- door in! [etc.,
etc.]

MR WILKINS: Get out! Get out, the lot of you! Or by God not one
of you comes in this morning!

GIRLS' VOICES FROM THE REAR: Mis-ter Wil-kins! Mis-ter Wil-kins!
BE a sport and let us in! I'll give y'a kiss all free for nothing.
BE a sport now! [etc., etc.]

MR WILKINS: Get on out of it! We don't open before five, and you
know it. [Slams the door.]

MRS MCELLIGOT: Oh, holy Jesus, if dis ain't de longest ten minutes
o' de whole bloody night! Well, I'll give me poor ole legs a rest,
anyway. [Squats on her heels coal-miner-fashion. Many others do
the same.]

GINGER: 'Oo's got a 'alfpenny? I'm ripe to go fifty-fifty on a
doughnut.

YOUTHS' VOICES [imitating military music, then singing]:

'----!' was all the band could play;
'----! ----' And the same to you!

DOROTHY [to Mrs McElligot]: Look at us all! Just look at us!
What clothes! What faces!

MRS BENDIGO: You're no Greta Garbo yourself, if you don't mind my
mentioning it.

MRS WAYNE: Well, now, the time DO seem to pass slowly when you're
waiting for a nice cup of tea, don't it now?

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: For our soul is brought low, even unto the
dust: our belly cleaveth unto the ground!

CHARLIE: Kippers! Perishing piles of 'em! I can smell 'em
through the perishing glass.

GINGER [singing]:

But I'm dan-cing with tears--in my eyes--
'Cos the girl--in my arms--isn't you-o-ou!

[Much time passes. Five strikes. Intolerable ages seem to pass.
Then the door is suddenly wrenched open and the people stampede in
to fight for the corner seats. Almost swooning in the hot air,
they fling themselves down and sprawl across the tables, drinking
in the heat and the smell of food through all their pores.]

MR WILKINS: Now then, all! You know the rules, I s'pose. No
hokey-pokey this morning! Sleep till seven if you like, but if I
see any man asleep after that, out he goes on his neck. Get busy
with that tea, girls!

A DEAFENING CHORUS Of YELLS: Two teas 'ere! Large tea and a
doughnut between us four! Kippers! Mis-ter Wil-kins! 'Ow much
them sausages? Two slices! Mis-ter Wil-kins! Got any fag papers?
Kipp-ers! [etc., etc.]

MR WILKINS: Shut up, shut up! Stop that hollering or I don't
serve any of you.

MRS MCELLIGOT: D'you feel de blood runnin' back into your toes,
dearie?

MRS WAYNE: He do speak rough to you, don't he? Not what I'd call
a reely gentlemanly kind of man.

SNOUTER: This is ---- starvation Corner, this is. Cripes!
Couldn't I do a couple of them sausages!

THE TARTS [in chorus]: Kippers 'ere! 'Urry up with them kippers!
Mis-ter Wilkins! Kippers all round! AND a doughnut!

CHARLIE: Not 'alf! Got to fill up on the smell of 'em this
morning. Sooner be 'ere than on the perishing Square, ALL the
same.

GINGER: 'Ere, Deafie! You've 'ad your 'alf! Gimme me that
bleeding cup.

MR TALLBOYS [chanting]: Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongue with joy! . . .

MRS MCELLIGOT: Begod I'm half asleep already. It's de heat o' de
room as does it.

MR WILKINS: Stop that singing there! You know the rules.

THE TARTS [in chorus]: Kipp-ers!

SNOUTER: ---- doughnuts! Cold prog! It turns my belly sick.

DADDY: Even the tea they give you ain't no more than water with a
bit of dust in it. [Belches.]

CHARLIE: Bes' thing--'ave a bit of shut-eye and forget about it.
Dream about perishing cut off the joint and two veg. Less get our
'eads on the table and pack up comfortable.

MRS MCELLIGOT: Lean up agen me shoulder, dearie. I've got more
flesh on me bones'n what you have.

GINGER: I'd give a tanner for a bleeding fag, if I 'ad a bleeding
tanner.

CHARLIE: Pack up. Get your 'ead agenst mine, Snouter. That's
right. Jesus, won't I perishing sleep!

[A dish of smoking kippers is borne past to the tarts' table.]

SNOUTER [drowsily]: More ---- kippers. Wonder 'ow many times
she's bin on 'er back to pay for that lot.

MRS MCELLIGOT [half-asleep]: 'Twas a pity, 'twas a real pity, when
Michael went off on his jack an' left me wid de bloody baby an'
all. . . .

MRS BENDIGO [furiously, following the dish of kippers with accusing
finger]: Look at that, girls! Look at that! Kippers! Don't it
make you bloody wild? We don't get kippers for breakfast, do we,
girls? Bloody tarts swallering down kippers as fast as they can
turn 'em out of the pan, and us 'ere with a cup of tea between four
of us and lucky to get that! Kippers!

MR TALLBOYS [stage curate-wise]: The wages of sin is kippers.

GINGER: Don't breathe in my face, Deafie. I can't bleeding stand
it.

CHARLIE [in his sleep]: Charles-Wisdom-drunk-and-incapable-drunk?-
yes-six-shillings-move-on-NEXT!

DOROTHY [on Mrs McElligot's bosom]: Oh, joy, joy!

[They are asleep.]

2

And so it goes on.

Dorothy endured this life for ten days--to be exact, nine days and
ten nights. It was hard to see what else she could do. Her
father, seemingly, had abandoned her altogether, and though she had
friends in London who would readily have helped her, she did not
feel that she could face them after what had happened, or what was
supposed to have happened. And she dared not apply to organized
charity because it would almost certainly lead to the discovery of
her name, and hence, perhaps, to a fresh hullabaloo about the
'Rector's Daughter'.

So she stayed in London, and became one of that curious tribe, rare
but never quite extinct--the tribe of women who are penniless and
homeless, but who make such desperate efforts to hide it that they
very nearly succeed; women who wash their faces at drinking
fountains in the cold of the dawn, and carefully uncrumple their
clothes after sleepless nights, and carry themselves with an air
of reserve and decency, so that only their faces, pale beneath
sunburn, tell you for certain that they are destitute. It was not
in her to become a hardened beggar like most of the people about
her. Her first twenty-four hours on the Square she spent without
any food whatever, except for the cup of tea that she had had
overnight and a third of a cup more that she had had at Wilkins's
cafe in the morning. But in the evening, made desperate by hunger
and the others' example, she walked up to a strange woman, mastered
her voice with an effort, and said: 'Please, Madam, could you give
me twopence? I have had nothing to eat since yesterday.' The
woman stared, but she opened her purse and gave Dorothy threepence.
Dorothy did not know it, but her educated accent, which had made it
impossible to get work as a servant, was an invaluable asset to her
as a beggar.

After that she found that it was really very easy to beg the daily
shilling or so that was needed to keep her alive. And yet she
never begged--it seemed to her that actually she could not do it--
except when hunger was past bearing or when she had got to lay in
the precious penny that was the passport to Wilkins's cafe in the
morning. With Nobby, on the way to the hopfields, she had begged
without fear or scruple. But it had been different then; she had
not known what she was doing. Now, it was only under the spur of
actual hunger that she could screw her courage to the point, and
ask for a few coppers from some woman whose face looked friendly.
It was always women that she begged from, of course. She did once
try begging from a man--but only once.

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading--used
to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom,
and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she
had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation.
She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous
existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless
feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come
back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect
of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously
in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or
two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your
eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and
suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a
little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer,
grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.

Meanwhile, the police were getting to know her by sight. On the
Square people are perpetually coming and going, more or less
unnoticed. They arrive from nowhere with their drums and their
bundles, camp for a few days and nights, and then disappear as
mysteriously as they come. If you stay for more than a week or
thereabouts, the police will mark you down as an habitual beggar,
and they will arrest you sooner or later. It is impossible for
them to enforce the begging laws at all regularly, but from time to
time they make a sudden raid and capture two or three of the people
they have had their eye on. And so it happened in Dorothy's case.

One evening she was 'knocked off', in company with Mrs McElligot
and another woman whose name she did not know. They had been
careless and begged off a nasty old lady with a face like a horse,
who had promptly walked up to the nearest policeman and given them
in charge.

Dorothy did not mind very much. Everything was dreamlike now--the
face of the nasty old lady, eagerly accusing them, and the walk to
the station with a young policeman's gentle, almost deferential
hand on her arm; and then the white-tiled cell, with the fatherly
sergeant handing her a cup of tea through the grille and telling
her that the magistrate wouldn't be too hard on her if she pleaded
guilty. In the cell next door Mrs McElligot stormed at the
sergeant, called him a bloody get, and then spent half the night in
bewailing her fate. But Dorothy had no feeling save vague relief
at being in so clean and warm a place. She crept immediately on to
the plank bed that was fixed like a shelf to the wall, too tired
even to pull the blankets about her, and slept for ten hours
without stirring. It was only on the following morning that she
began to grasp the reality of her situation, as the Black Maria
rolled briskly up to Old Street Police Court, to the tune of
'Adeste fideles' shouted by five drunks inside.

CHAPTER 4

1

Dorothy had wronged her father in supposing that he was willing to
let her starve to death in the street. He had, as a matter of
fact, made efforts to get in touch with her, though in a roundabout
and not very helpful way.

His first emotion on learning of Dorothy's disappearance had been
rage pure and simple. At about eight in the morning, when he was
beginning to wonder what had become of his shaving water, Ellen had
come into his bedroom and announced in a vaguely panic-stricken
tone:

'Please, Sir, Miss Dorothy ain't in the house, Sir. I can't find
her nowhere!'

'What?' said the Rector.

'She ain't in the house, Sir! And her bed don't look as if it
hadn't been slept in, neither. It's my belief as she's GORN, Sir!'

'Gone!' exclaimed the Rector, partly sitting up in bed. 'What do
you mean--GONE?'

'Well, Sir, I believe she's run away from 'ome, Sir!'

'Run away from home! At THIS hour of the morning? And what about
my breakfast, pray?'

By the time the Rector got downstairs--unshaven, no hot water
having appeared--Ellen had gone down into the town to make
fruitless inquiries for Dorothy. An hour passed, and she did not
return. Whereupon there occurred a frightful, unprecedented thing--
a thing never to be forgotten this side of the grave; the Rector
was obliged to prepare his own breakfast--yes, actually to mess
about with a vulgar black kettle and rashers of Danish bacon--with
his own sacerdotal hands.

After that, of course, his heart was hardened against Dorothy for
ever. For the rest of the day he was far too busy raging over
unpunctual meals to ask himself WHY she had disappeared and whether
any harm had befallen her. The point was that the confounded girl
(he said several times 'confounded girl', and came near to saying
something stronger) HAD disappeared, and had upset the whole
household by doing so. Next day, however, the question became more
urgent, because Mrs Semprill was now publishing the story of the
elopement far and wide. Of course, the Rector denied it violently,
but in his heart he had a sneaking suspicion that it might be true.
It was the kind of thing, he now decided, that Dorothy WOULD do. A
girl who would suddenly walk out of the house without even taking
thought for her father's breakfast was capable of anything.

Two days later the newspapers got hold of the story, and a nosy
young reporter came down to Knype Hill and began asking questions.
The Rector made matters worse by angrily refusing to interview the
reporter, so that Mrs Semprill's version was the only one that got
into print. For about a week, until the papers got tired of
Dorothy's case and dropped her in favour of a plesiosaurus that had
been seen at the mouth of the Thames, the Rector enjoyed a horrible
notoriety. He could hardly open a newspaper without seeing some
flaming headline about 'Rector's Daughter. Further Revelations',
or 'Rector's Daughter. Is she in Vienna? Reported seen in Low-
class Cabaret'. Finally there came an article in the Sunday
Spyhole, which began, 'Down in a Suffolk Rectory a broken old man
sits staring at the wall', and which was so absolutely unbearable
that the Rector consulted his solicitor about an action for libel.
However, the solicitor was against it; it might lead to a verdict,
he said, but it would certainly lead to further publicity. So the
Rector did nothing, and his anger against Dorothy, who had brought
this disgrace upon him, hardened beyond possibility of forgiveness.

After this there came three letters from Dorothy, explaining what
had happened. Of course the Rector never really believed that
Dorothy had lost her memory. It was too thin a story altogether.
He believed that she either HAD eloped with Mr Warburton, or had
gone off on some similar escapade and had landed herself penniless
in Kent; at any rate--this he had settled once and for all, and no
argument would ever move him from it--whatever had happened to her
was entirely her own fault. The first letter he wrote was not to
Dorothy herself but to his cousin Tom, the baronet. For a man of
the Rector's upbringing it was second nature, in any serious
trouble, to turn to a rich relative for help. He had not exchanged
a word with his cousin for the last fifteen years, since they had
quarrelled over a little matter of a borrowed fifty pounds; still,
he wrote fairly confidently, asking Sir Thomas to get in touch with
Dorothy if it could be done, and to find her some kind of job in
London. For of course, after what had happened, there could be no
question of letting her come back to Knype Hill.

Shortly after this there came two despairing letters from Dorothy,
telling him that she was in danger of starvation and imploring him
to send her some money. The Rector was disturbed. It occurred to
him--it was the first time in his life that he had seriously
considered such a thing--that it IS possible to starve if you have
no money. So, after thinking it over for the best part of a week,
he sold out ten pounds' worth of shares and sent a cheque for ten
pounds to his cousin, to be kept for Dorothy till she appeared. At
the same time he sent a cold letter to Dorothy herself, telling her
that she had better apply to Sir Thomas Hare. But several more
days passed before this letter was posted, because the Rector had
qualms about addressing a letter to 'Ellen Millborough'--he dimly
imagined that it was against the law to use false names--and, of
course, he had delayed far too long. Dorothy was already in the
streets when the letter reached 'Mary's'.

Sir Thomas Hare was a widower, a good-hearted, chuckle-headed man
of about sixty-five, with an obtuse rosy face and curling
moustaches. He dressed by preference in checked overcoats and
curly brimmed bowler hats that were at once dashingly smart and
four decades out of date. At a first glance he gave the impression
of having carefully disguised himself as a cavalry major of the
'nineties, so that you could hardly look at him without thinking of
devilled bones with a b and s, and the tinkle of hansom bells, and
the Pink 'Un in its great 'Pitcher' days, and Lottie Collins and
'Tarara-BOOM-deay'. But his chief characteristic was an abysmal
mental vagueness. He was one of those people who say 'Don't you
know?' and 'What! What!' and lose themselves in the middle of their
sentences. When he was puzzled or in difficulties, his moustaches
seemed to bristle forward, giving him the appearance of a well-
meaning but exceptionally brainless prawn.

So far as his own inclinations went Sir Thomas was not in the least
anxious to help his cousins, for Dorothy herself he had never seen,
and the Rector he looked on as a cadging poor relation of the worst
possible type. But the fact was that he had had just about as much
of this 'Rector's Daughter' business as he could stand. The
accursed chance that Dorothy's surname was the same as his own had
made his life a misery for the past fortnight, and he foresaw
further and worse scandals if she were left at large any longer.
So, just before leaving London for the pheasant shooting, he sent
for his butler, who was also his confidant and intellectual guide,
and held a council of war.

'Look here, Blyth, dammit,' said Sir Thomas prawnishly (Blyth was
the butler's name), 'I suppose you've seen all this damn' stuff in
the newspapers, hey? This "Rector's Daughter" stuff? About this
damned niece of mine.'

Blyth was a small sharp-featured man with a voice that never rose
above a whisper. It was as nearly silent as a voice can be while
still remaining a voice. Only by watching his lips as well as
listening closely could you catch the whole of what he said. In
this case his lips signalled something to the effect that Dorothy
was Sir Thomas's cousin, not his niece.

'What, my cousin, is she?' said Sir Thomas. 'So she is, by Jove!
Well, look here, Blyth, what I mean to say--it's about time we got
hold of the damn' girl and locked her up somewhere. See what I
mean? Get hold of her before there's any MORE trouble. She's
knocking about somewhere in London, I believe. What's the best way
of getting on her track? Police? Private detectives and all that?
D'you think we could manage it?'

Blyth's lips registered disapproval. It would, he seemed to be
saying, be possible to trace Dorothy without calling in the police
and having a lot of disagreeable publicity.

'Good man!' said Sir Thomas. 'Get to it, then. Never mind what it
costs. I'd give fifty quid not to have that "Rector's Daughter"
business over again. And for God's sake, Blyth,' he added
confidentially, 'once you've got hold of the damn' girl, don't let
her out of your sight. Bring her back to the house and damn' well
keep her here. See what I mean? Keep her under lock and key till
I get back. Or else God knows what she'll be up to next.'

Sir Thomas, of course, had never seen Dorothy, and it was therefore
excusable that he should have formed his conception of her from the
newspaper reports.

It took Blyth about a week to track Dorothy down. On the morning
after she came out of the police-court cells (they had fined her
six shillings, and, in default of payment, detained her for twelve
hours: Mrs McElligot, as an old offender, got seven days), Blyth
came up to her, lifted his bowler hat a quarter of an inch from his
head, and inquired noiselessly whether she were not Miss Dorothy
Hare. At the second attempt Dorothy understood what he was saying,
and admitted that she WAS Miss Dorothy Hare; whereupon Blyth
explained that he was sent by her cousin, who was anxious to help
her, and that she was to come home with him immediately.

Dorothy followed him without more words said. It seemed queer that
her cousin should take this sudden interest in her, but it was no
queerer than the other things that had been happening lately. They
took the bus to Hyde Park Corner, Blyth paying the fares, and then
walked to a large, expensive-looking house with shuttered windows,
on the borderland between Knightsbridge and Mayfair. They went
down some steps, and Blyth produced a key and they went in. So,
after an absence of something over six weeks, Dorothy returned to
respectable society, by the area door.

She spent three days in the empty house before her cousin came
home. It was a queer, lonely time. There were several servants in
the house, but she saw nobody except Blyth, who brought her her
meals and talked to her, noiselessly, with a mixture of deference
and disapproval. He could not quite make up his mind whether she
was a young lady of family or a rescued Magdalen, and so treated
her as something between the two. The house had that hushed,
corpselike air peculiar to houses whose master is away, so that you
instinctively went about on tiptoe and kept the blinds over the
windows. Dorothy did not even dare to enter any of the main rooms.
She spent all the daytime lurking in a dusty, forlorn room at the
top of the house which was a sort of museum of bric-a-brac dating
from 1880 onwards. Lady Hare, dead these five years, had been an
industrious collector of rubbish, and most of it had been stowed
away in this room when she died. It was a doubtful point whether
the queerest object in the room was a yellowed photograph of
Dorothy's father, aged eighteen but with respectable side-whiskers,
standing self-consciously beside an 'ordinary' bicycle--this was in
1888; or whether it was a little sandalwood box labelled 'Piece of
Bread touched by Cecil Rhodes at the City and South Africa Banquet,
June 1897'. The sole books in the room were some grisly school
prizes that had been won by Sir Thomas's children--he had three,
the youngest being the same age as Dorothy.

It was obvious that the servants had orders not to let her go out
of doors. However, her father's cheque for ten pounds had arrived,
and with some difficulty she induced Blyth to get it cashed, and,
on the third day, went out and bought herself some clothes. She
bought herself a ready-made tweed coat and skirt and a jersey to go
with them, a hat, and a very cheap frock of artificial printed
silk; also a pair of passable brown shoes, three pairs of lisle
stockings, a nasty, cheap little handbag, and a pair of grey cotton
gloves that would pass for suede at a little distance. That came
to eight pounds ten, and she dared not spend more. As for
underclothes, nightdresses, and handkerchiefs, they would have to
wait. After all, it is the clothes that show that matter.

Sir Thomas arrived on the following day, and never really got over
the surprise that Dorothy's appearance gave him. He had been
expecting to see some rouged and powdered siren who would plague
him with temptations to which alas! he was no longer capable of
succumbing; and this countrified, spinsterish girl upset all his
calculations. Certain vague ideas that had been floating about his
mind, of finding her a job as a manicurist or perhaps as a private
secretary to a bookie, floated out of it again. From time to time
Dorothy caught him studying her with a puzzled, prawnish eye,
obviously wondering how on earth such a girl could ever have
figured in an elopement. It was very little use, of course,
telling him that she had NOT eloped. She had given him her version
of the story, and he had accepted it with a chivalrous 'Of course,
m'dear, of course!' and thereafter, in every other sentence,
betrayed the fact that he disbelieved her.

So for a couple of days nothing definite was done. Dorothy
continued her solitary life in the room upstairs, and Sir Thomas
went to his club for most of his meals, and in the evening there
were discussions of the most unutterable vagueness. Sir Thomas was
genuinely anxious to find Dorothy a job, but he had great
difficulty in remembering what he was talking about for more than a
few minutes at a time. 'Well, m'dear,' he would start off, 'you'll
understand, of course, that I'm very keen to do what I can for you.
Naturally, being your uncle and all that--what? What's that? Not
your uncle? No, I suppose I'm not, by Jove! Cousin--that's it;
cousin. Well, now, m'dear, being your cousin--now, what was I
saying?' Then, when Dorothy had guided him back to the subject, he
would throw out some such suggestion as, 'Well, now, for instance,
m'dear, how would you like to be companion to an old lady? Some
dear old girl, don't you know--black mittens and rheumatoid
arthritis. Die and leave you ten thousand quid and care of the
parrot. What, what?' which did not get them very much further.
Dorothy repeated a number of times that she would rather be a
housemaid or a parlourmaid, but Sir Thomas would not hear of it.
The very idea awakened in him a class-instinct which he was usually
too vague-minded to remember. 'What!' he would say. 'A dashed
skivvy? Girl of your upbringing? No, m'dear--no, no! Can't do
THAT kind of thing, dash it!'

But in the end everything was arranged, and with surprising ease;
not by Sir Thomas, who was incapable of arranging anything, but by
his solicitor, whom he had suddenly thought of consulting. And the
solicitor, without even seeing Dorothy, was able to suggest a job
for her. She could, he said, almost certainly find a job as a
schoolmistress. Of all jobs, that was the easiest to get.

Sir Thomas came home very pleased with this suggestion, which
struck him as highly suitable. (Privately, he thought that Dorothy
had just the kind of face that a schoolmistress ought to have.)
But Dorothy was momentarily aghast when she heard of it.

'A schoolmistress!' she said. 'But I couldn't possibly! I'm sure
no school would give me a job. There isn't a single subject I can
teach.'

'What? What's that? Can't teach? Oh, dash it! Of course you
can! Where's the difficulty?'

'But I don't know enough! I've never taught anybody anything,
except cooking to the Girl Guides. You have to be properly
qualified to be a teacher.'

'Oh, nonsense! Teaching's the easiest job in the world. Good
thick ruler--rap 'em over the knuckles. They'll be glad enough
to get hold of a decently brought up young woman to teach the
youngsters their ABC. That's the line for you, m'dear--
schoolmistress. You're just cut out for it.'

And sure enough, a schoolmistress Dorothy became. The invisible
solicitor had made all the arrangements in less than three days.
It appeared that a certain Mrs Creevy, who kept a girls' day school
in the suburb of Southbridge, was in need of an assistant, and was
quite willing to give Dorothy the job. How it had all been settled
so quickly, and what kind of school it could be that would take on
a total stranger, and unqualified at that, in the middle of the
term, Dorothy could hardly imagine. She did not know, of course,
that a bribe of five pounds, miscalled a premium, had changed
hands.

So, just ten days after her arrest for begging, Dorothy set out for
Ringwood House Academy, Brough Road, Southbridge, with a small
trunk decently full of clothes and four pounds ten in her purse--
for Sir Thomas had made her a present of ten pounds. When she
thought of the ease with which this job had been found for her, and
then of the miserable struggles of three weeks ago, the contrast
amazed her. It brought home to her, as never before, the
mysterious power of money. In fact, it reminded her of a favourite
saying of Mr Warburton's, that if you took 1 Corinthians, chapter
thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity',
the chapter had ten times as much meaning as before.

2

Southbridge was a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from
London. Brough Road lay somewhere at the heart of it, amid
labyrinths of meanly decent streets, all so indistinguishably
alike, with their ranks of semi-detached houses, their privet and
laurel hedges and plots of ailing shrubs at the crossroads, that
you could lose yourself there almost as easily as in a Brazilian
forest. Not only the houses themselves, but even their names were
the same over and over again. Reading the names on the gates as
you came up Brough Road, you were conscious of being haunted by
some half-remembered passage of poetry; and when you paused to
identify it, you realized that it was the first two lines of
Lycidas.

Ringwood House was a dark-looking, semi-detached house of yellow
brick, three storeys high, and its lower windows were hidden from
the road by ragged and dusty laurels. Above the laurels, on the
front of the house, was a board inscribed in faded gold letters:

RINGWOOD HOUSE ACADEMY FOR GIRLS

Ages 5 to 18

Music and Dancing Taught

Apply within for Prospectus

Edge to edge with this board, on the other half of the house, was
another board which read:

RUSHINGTON GRANGE HIGH SCHOOL FOR BOYS

Ages 6 to 16

Book-keeping and Commercial Arithmetic a Speciality

Apply within for Prospectus

The district pullulated with small private schools; there were four
of them in Brough Road alone. Mrs Creevy, the Principal of
Ringwood House, and Mr Boulger, the Principal of Rushington Grange,
were in a state of warfare, though their interests in no way
clashed with one another. Nobody knew what the feud was about, not
even Mrs Creevy or Mr Boulger themselves; it was a feud that they
had inherited from earlier proprietors of the two schools. In the
mornings after breakfast they would stalk up and down their
respective back gardens, beside the very low wall that separated
them, pretending not to see one another and grinning with hatred.

Dorothy's heart sank at the sight of Ringwood House. She had not
been expecting anything very magnificent or attractive, but she had
expected something a little better than this mean, gloomy house,
not one of whose windows was lighted, though it was after 8 o'clock
in the evening. She knocked at the door, and it was opened by a
woman, tall and gaunt-looking in the dark hallway, whom Dorothy
took for a servant, but who was actually Mrs Creevy herself.
Without a word, except to inquire Dorothy's name, the woman led the
way up some dark stairs to a twilit, fireless drawing-room, where
she turned up a pinpoint of gas, revealing a black piano, stuffed
horsehair chairs, and a few yellowed, ghostly photos on the walls.

Mrs Creevy was a woman somewhere in her forties, lean, hard, and
angular, with abrupt decided movements that indicated a strong will
and probably a vicious temper. Though she was not in the least
dirty or untidy there was something discoloured about her whole
appearance, as though she lived all her life in a bad light; and
the expression of her mouth, sullen and ill-shaped with the lower
lip turned down, recalled that of a toad. She spoke in a sharp,
commanding voice, with a bad accent and occasional vulgar turns of
speech. You could tell her at a glance for a person who knew
exactly what she wanted, and would grasp it as ruthlessly as any
machine; not a bully exactly--you could somehow infer from her
appearance that she would not take enough interest in you to want
to bully you--but a person who would make use of you and then throw
you aside with no more compunction than if you had been a worn-out
scrubbing-brush.

Mrs Creevy did not waste any words on greetings. She motioned
Dorothy to a chair, with the air rather of commanding than of
inviting her to sir down, and then sat down herself, with her hands
clasped on her skinny forearms.

'I hope you and me are going to get on well together, Miss
Millborough,' she began in her penetrating, subhectoring voice.
(On the advice of Sir Thomas's everwise solicitor, Dorothy had
stuck to the name of Ellen Millborough.) 'And I hope I'm not going
to have the same nasty business with you as I had with my last two
assistants. You say you haven't had an experience of teaching
before this?'

'Not in a school,' said Dorothy--there had been a tarradiddle in
her letter of introduction, to the effect that she had had
experience of 'private teaching'.

Mrs Creevy looked Dorothy over as though wondering whether to
induct her into the inner secrets of school-teaching, and then
appeared to decide against it.

'Well, we shall see,' she said. 'I must say,' she added
complainingly, 'it's not easy to get hold of good hardworking
assistants nowadays. You give them good wages and good treatment,
and you get no thanks for it. The last one I had--the one I've
just had to get rid of--Miss Strong, wasn't so bad so far as the
teaching part went; in fact, she was a B.A., and I don't know what
you could have better than a B.A., unless it's an M.A. You don't
happen to be a B.A. or an M.A., do you, Miss Millborough?'

'No, I'm afraid not,' said Dorothy.

'Well, that's a pity. It looks so much better on the prospectus if
you've got a few letters after your name. Well! Perhaps it
doesn't matter. I don't suppose many of OUR parents'd know what
B.A. stands for; and they aren't so keen on showing their
ignorance. I suppose you can talk French, of course?'

'Well--I've learnt French.'

'Oh, that's all right, then. Just so as we can put it on the
prospectus. Well, now, to come back to what I was saying, Miss
Strong was all right as a teacher, but she didn't come up to my
ideas on what I call the MORAL SIDE. We're very strong on the
moral side at Ringwood House. It's what counts most with the
parents, you'll find. And the one before Miss Strong, Miss Brewer--
well, she had what I call a weak nature. You don't get on with
girls if you've got a weak nature. The end of it all was that one
morning one little girl crept up to the desk with a box of matches
and set fire to Miss Brewer's skirt. Of course I wasn't going to
keep her after that. In fact I had her out of the house the same
afternoon--and I didn't give her any refs either, I can tell you!'

'You mean you expelled the girl who did it?' said Dorothy,
mystified.

'What? The GIRL? Not likely! You don't suppose I'd go and turn
fees away from my door, do you? I mean I got rid of Miss Brewer,
not the GIRL. It's no good having teachers who let the girls get
saucy with them. We've got twenty-one in the class just at
present, and you'll find they need a strong hand to keep them down.'

'You don't teach yourself?' said Dorothy.

'Oh dear, no!' said Mrs Creevy almost contemptuously. 'I've got a
lot too much on my hands to waste my time TEACHING. There's the
house to look after, and seven of the children stay to dinner--I've
only a daily woman at present. Besides, it takes me all my time
getting the fees out of the parents. After all, the fees ARE what
matter, aren't they?'

'Yes. I suppose so,' said Dorothy.

'Well, we'd better settle about your wages,' continued Mrs Creevy.
'In term time I'll give you your board and lodging and ten
shillings a week; in the holidays it'll just be your board and
lodging. You can have the use of the copper in the kitchen for
your laundering, and I light the geyser for hot baths every
Saturday night; or at least MOST Saturday nights. You can't have
the use of this room we're in now, because it's my reception-room,
and I don't want you to go wasting the gas in your bedroom. But
you can have the use of the morning-room whenever you want it.'

'Thank you,' said Dorothy.

'Well, I should think that'll be about all. I expect you're
feeling ready for bed. You'll have had your supper long ago, of
course?'

This was clearly intended to mean that Dorothy was not going to get
any food tonight, so she answered Yes, untruthfully, and the
conversation was at an end. That was always Mrs Creevy's way--she
never kept you talking an instant longer than was necessary. Her
conversation was so very definite, so exactly to the point, that it
was not really conversation at all. Rather, it was the skeleton of
conversation; like the dialogue in a badly written novel where
everyone talks a little too much in character. But indeed, in the
proper sense of the word she did not TALK; she merely said, in her
brief shrewish way, whatever it was necessary to say, and then got
rid of you as promptly as possible. She now showed Dorothy along
the passage to her bedroom, and lighted a gas-jet no bigger than an
acorn, revealing a gaunt bedroom with a narrow white-quilted bed, a
rickety wardrobe, one chair and a wash-hand-stand with a frigid
white china basin and ewer. It was very like the bedrooms in
seaside lodging houses, but it lacked the one thing that gives such
rooms their air of homeliness and decency--the text over the bed.

'This is your room,' Mrs Creevy said; 'and I just hope you'll keep
it a bit tidier than what Miss Strong used to. And don't go
burning the gas half the night, please, because I can tell what
time you turn it off by the crack under the door.'

With this parting salutation she left Dorothy to herself. The room
was dismally cold; indeed, the whole house had a damp, chilly
feeling, as though fires were rarely lighted in it. Dorothy got
into bed as quickly as possible, feeling bed to be the warmest
place. On top of the wardrobe, when she was putting her clothes
away, she found a cardboard box containing no less than nine empty
whisky bottles--relics, presumably, of Miss Strong's weakness on
the MORAL SIDE.

At eight in the morning Dorothy went downstairs and found Mrs
Creevy already at breakfast in what she called the 'morning-room'.
This was a smallish room adjoining the kitchen, and it had started
life as the scullery; but Mrs Creevy had converted it into the
'morning-room' by the simple process of removing the sink and
copper into the kitchen. The breakfast table, covered with a cloth
of harsh texture, was very large and forbiddingly bare. Up at Mrs
Creevy's end were a tray with a very small teapot and two cups, a
plate on which were two leathery fried eggs, and a dish of
marmalade; in the middle, just within Dorothy's reach if she
stretched, was a plate of bread and butter; and beside her plate--
as though it were the only thing she could be trusted with--a cruet
stand with some dried-up, clotted stuff inside the bottles.

'Good morning, Miss Millborough,' said Mrs Creevy. 'It doesn't
matter this morning, as this is the first day, but just remember
another time that I want you down here in time to help me get
breakfast ready.'

'I'm so sorry,' said Dorothy.

'I hope you're fond of fried eggs for your breakfast?' went on Mrs
Creevy.

Dorothy hastened to assure her that she was very fond of fried
eggs.

'Well, that's a good thing, because you'll always have to have the
same as what I have. So I hope you're not going to be what I call
DAINTY about your food. I always think,' she added, picking up her
knife and fork, 'that a fried egg tastes a lot better if you cut it
well up before you eat it.'

She sliced the two eggs into thin strips, and then served them in
such a way that Dorothy received about two-thirds of an egg. With
some difficulty Dorothy spun out her fraction of egg so as to make
half a dozen mouthfuls of it, and then, when she had taken a slice
of bread and butter, she could not help glancing hopefully in the
direction of the dish of marmalade. But Mrs Creevy was sitting
with her lean left arm--not exactly ROUND the marmalade, but in a
protective position on its left flank, as though she suspected that
Dorothy was going to make an attack upon it. Dorothy's nerve
failed her, and she had no marmalade that morning--nor, indeed,
for many mornings to come.

Mrs Creevy did not speak again during breakfast, but presently the
sound of feet on the gravel outside, and of squeaky voices in the
schoolroom, announced that the girls were beginning to arrive.
They came in by a side-door that was left open for them. Mrs
Creevy got up from the table and banged the breakfast things
together on the tray. She was one of those women who can never
move anything without banging it about; she was as full of thumps
and raps as a poltergeist. Dorothy carried the tray into the
kitchen, and when she returned Mrs Creevy produced a penny notebook
from a drawer in the dresser and laid it open on the table.

'Just take a look at this,' she said. 'Here's a list of the girls'
names that I've got ready for you. I shall want you to know the
whole lot of them by this evening.' She wetted her thumb and
turned over three pages: 'Now, do you see these three lists here?'

'Yes,' said Dorothy.

'Well, you'll just have to learn those three lists by heart, and
make sure you know what girls are on which. Because I don't want
you to go thinking that all the girls are to be treated alike.
They aren't--not by a long way, they aren't. Different girls,
different treatment--that's my system. Now, do you see this lot on
the first page?'

'Yes,' said Dorothy again.

'Well, the parents of that lot are what I call the good payers.
You know what I mean by that? They're the ones that pay cash on
the nail and no jibbing at an extra half-guinea or so now and
again. You're not to smack any of that lot, not on ANY account.
This lot over here are the MEDIUM payers. Their parents do pay up
sooner or later, but you don't get the money out of them without
you worry them for it night and day. You can smack that lot if
they get saucy, but don't go and leave a mark their parents can
see. If you'll take MY advice, the best thing with children is to
twist their ears. Have you ever tried that?'

'No,' said Dorothy.

'Well, I find it answers better than anything. It doesn't leave a
mark, and the children can't bear it. Now these three over here
are the BAD payers. Their fathers are two terms behind already,
and I'm thinking of a solicitor's letter. I don't care WHAT you do
to that lot--well, short of a police-court case, naturally. Now,
shall I take you in and start you with the girls? You'd better
bring that book along with you, and just keep your eye on it all
the time so as there'll be no mistakes.'

They went into the schoolroom. It was a largish room, with grey-
papered walls that were made yet greyer by the dullness of the
light, for the heavy laurel bushes outside choked the windows, and
no direct ray of the sun ever penetrated into the room. There was
a teacher's desk by the empty fireplace, and there were a dozen
small double desks, a light blackboard, and, on the mantelpiece, a
black clock that looked like a miniature mausoleum; but there were
no maps, no pictures, nor even, as far as Dorothy could see, any
books. The sole objects in the room that could be called
ornamental were two sheets of black paper pinned to the walls, with
writing on them in chalk in beautiful copperplate. On one was
'Speech is Silver. Silence is Golden', and on the other
'Punctuality is the Politeness of Princes'.

The girls, twenty-one of them, were already sitting at their desks.
They had grown very silent when they heard footsteps approaching,
and as Mrs Creevy came in they seemed to shrink down in their places
like partridge chicks when a hawk is soaring. For the most part
they were dull-looking, lethargic children with bad complexions, and
adenoids seemed to be remarkably common among them. The eldest of
them might have been fifteen years old, the youngest was hardly more
than a baby. The school had no uniform, and one or two of the
children were verging on raggedness.

'Stand up, girls,' said Mrs Creevy as she reached the teacher's
desk. 'We'll start off with the morning prayer.'

The girls stood up, clasped their hands in front of them, and shut
their eyes. They repeated the prayer in unison, in weak piping
voices, Mrs Creevy leading them, her sharp eyes darting over them
all the while to see that they were attending.

'Almighty and everlasting Father,' they piped, 'we beseech Thee
that our studies this day may be graced by Thy divine guidance.
Make us to conduct ourselves quietly and obediently; look down upon
our school and make it to prosper, so that it may grow in numbers
and be a good example to the neighbourhood and not a disgrace like
some schools of which Thou knowest, O Lord. Make us, we beseech
Thee, O Lord, industrious, punctual, and ladylike, and worthy in
all possible respects to walk in Thy ways: for Jesus Christ's sake,
our Lord, Amen.'

This prayer was of Mrs Creevy's own composition. When they had
finished it, the girls repeated the Lord's Prayer, and then sat
down.

'Now, girls,' said Mrs Creevy, 'this is your new teacher, Miss
Millborough. As you know, Miss Strong had to leave us all of a
sudden after she was taken so bad in the middle of the arithmetic
lesson; and I can tell you I've had a hard week of it looking for a
new teacher. I had seventy-three applications before I took on
Miss Millborough, and I had to refuse them all because their
qualifications weren't high enough. Just you remember and tell
your parents that, all of you--seventy-three applications! Well,
Miss Millborough is going to take you in Latin, French, history,
geography, mathematics, English literature and composition,
spelling, grammar, handwriting, and freehand drawing; and Mr Booth
will take you in chemistry as usual on Thursday afternoons. Now,
what's the first lesson on your time-table this morning?'

'History, Ma'am,' piped one or two voices.

'Very well. I expect Miss Millborough'll start off by asking you a
few questions about the history you've been learning. So just you
do your best, all of you, and let her see that all the trouble
we've taken over you hasn't been wasted. You'll find they can be
quite a sharp lot of girls when they try, Miss Millborough.'

'I'm sure they are,' said Dorothy.

'Well, I'll be leaving you, then. And just you behave yourselves,
girls! Don't you get trying it on with Miss Millborough like you
did with Miss Brewer, because I warn you she won't stand it. If I
hear any noise coming from this room, there'll be trouble for
somebody.'

She gave a glance round which included Dorothy and indeed suggested
that Dorothy would probably be the 'somebody' referred to, and
departed.

Dorothy faced the class. She was not afraid of them--she was too
used to dealing with children ever to be afraid of them--but she
did feel a momentary qualm. The sense of being an impostor (what
teacher has not felt it at times?) was heavy upon her. It suddenly
occurred to her, what she had only been dimly aware of before, that
she had taken this teaching job under flagrantly false pretences,
without having any kind of qualification for it. The subject she
was now supposed to be teaching was history, and, like most
'educated' people, she knew virtually no history. How awful, she
thought, if it turned out that these girls knew more history than
she did! She said tentatively:

'What period exactly were you doing with Miss Strong?'

Nobody answered. Dorothy saw the older girls exchanging glances,
as though asking one another whether it was safe to say anything,
and finally deciding not to commit themselves.

'Well, whereabouts had you got to?' she said, wondering whether
perhaps the word 'period' was too much for them.

Again no answer.

'Well, now, surely you remember SOMETHING about it? Tell me the
names of some of the people you were learning about in your last
history lesson.'

More glances were exchanged, and a very plain little girl in the
front row, in a brown jumper and skirt, with her hair screwed into
two tight pigtails, remarked cloudily, 'It was about the Ancient
Britons.' At this two other girls took courage, and answered
simultaneously. One of them said, 'Columbus', and the other
'Napoleon'.

Somehow, after that, Dorothy seemed to see her way more clearly.
It was obvious that instead of being uncomfortably knowledgeable as
she had feared, the class knew as nearly as possible no history at
all. With this discovery her stage-fright vanished. She grasped
that before she could do anything else with them it was necessary
to find out what, if anything, these children knew. So, instead of
following the time-table, she spent the rest of the morning in
questioning the entire class on each subject in turn; when she had
finished with history (and it took about five minutes to get to the
bottom of their historical knowledge) she tried them with geography,
with English grammar, with French, with arithmetic--with everything,
in fact, that they were supposed to have learned. By twelve o'clock
she had plumbed, though not actually explored, the frightful abysses
of their ignorance.

For they knew nothing, absolutely nothing--nothing, nothing,
nothing, like the Dadaists. It was appalling that even children
could be so ignorant. There were only two girls in the class who
knew whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the
earth, and not a single one of them could tell Dorothy who was the
last king before George V, or who wrote Hamlet, or what was meant
by a vulgar fraction, or which ocean you crossed to get to America,
the Atlantic or the Pacific. And the big girls of fifteen were not
much better than the tiny infants of eight, except that the former
could at least read consecutively and write neat copperplate. That
was the one thing that nearly all of the older girls could do--they
could write neatly. Mrs Creevy had seen to that. And of course,
here and there in the midst of their ignorance, there were small,
disconnected islets of knowledge; for example, some odd stanzas
from 'pieces of poetry' that they had learned by heart, and a few
Ollendorffian French sentences such as 'Passez-moi le beurre, s'il
vous plait' and 'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau', which
they appeared to have learned as a parrot learns 'Pretty Poll'. As
for their arithmetic, it was a little better than the other
subjects. Most of them knew how to add and subtract, about half of
them had some notion of how to multiply, and there were even three
or four who had struggled as far as long division. But that was
the utmost limit of their knowledge; and beyond, in every direction,
lay utter, impenetrable night.

Moreover, not only did they know nothing, but they were so unused
to being questioned that it was often difficult to get answers out
of them at all. It was obvious that whatever they knew they had
learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape
in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves.
However, they did not seem unwilling, and evidently they had made
up their minds to be 'good'--children are always 'good' with a new
teacher; and Dorothy persisted, and by degrees the children grew,
or seemed to grow, a shade less lumpish. She began to pick up,
from the answers they gave her, a fairly accurate notion of what
Miss Strong's regime had been like.

It appeared that, though theoretically they had learned all the
usual school subjects, the only ones that had been at all seriously
taught were handwriting and arithmetic. Mrs Creevy was particularly
keen on handwriting. And besides this they had spent great
quantities of time--an hour or two out of every day, it seemed--in
drudging through a dreadful routine called 'copies.' 'Copies' meant
copying things out of textbooks or off the blackboard. Miss Strong
would write up, for example, some sententious little 'essay' (there
was an essay entitled 'Spring' which recurred in all the older
girls' books, and which began, 'Now, when girlish April is tripping
through the land, when the birds are chanting gaily on the boughs
and the dainty flowerets bursting from their buds', etc., etc.), and
the girls would make fair copies of it in their copybooks; and the
parents, to whom the copybooks were shown from time to time, were no
doubt suitably impressed. Dorothy began to grasp that everything
that the girls had been taught was in reality aimed at the parents.
Hence the 'copies', the insistence on handwriting, and the parroting
of ready-made French phrases; they were cheap and easy ways of
creating an impression. Meanwhile, the little girls at the bottom
of the class seemed barely able to read and write, and one of them--
her name was Mavis Williams, and she was a rather sinister-looking
child of eleven, with eyes too far apart--could not even count. This
child seemed to have done nothing at all during the past term and a
half except to write pothooks. She had quite a pile of books filled
with pothooks--page after page of pothooks, looping on and on like
the mangrove roots in some tropical swamp.

Dorothy tried not to hurt the children's feelings by exclaiming at
their ignorance, but in her heart she was amazed and horrified.
She had not known that schools of this description still existed in
the civilized world. The whole atmosphere of the place was so
curiously antiquated--so reminiscent of those dreary little private
schools that you read about in Victorian novels. As for the few
textbooks that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them
without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid
nineteenth century. There were only three textbooks of which each
child had a copy. One was a shilling arithmetic, pre Great War but
fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The
Hundred Page History of Britain--a nasty little duodecimo book with
a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea
with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot. Dorothy
opened this book at random, came to page 91, and read:

After the French Revolution was over, the self-styled Emperor
Napoleon Buonaparte attempted to set up his sway, but though he won
a few victories against continental troops, he soon found that in
the 'thin red line' he had more than met his match. Conclusions
were tried upon the field of Waterloo, where 50,000 Britons put to
flight 70,000 Frenchmen--for the Prussians, our allies, arrived too
late for the battle. With a ringing British cheer our men charged
down the slope and the enemy broke and fled. We now come on to the
great Reform Bill of 1832, the first of those beneficent reforms
which have made British liberty what it is and marked us off from
the less fortunate nations [etc., etc.]. . . .

The date of the book was 1888. Dorothy, who had never seen a
history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling
approaching horror. There was also an extraordinary little
'reader', dated 1863. It consisted mostly of bits out of Fenimore
Cooper, Dr Watts, and Lord Tennyson, and at the end there were the
queerest little 'Nature Notes' with woodcut illustrations. There
would be a woodcut of an elephant, and underneath in small print:
'The elephant is a sagacious beast. He rejoices in the shade of
the Palm Trees, and though stronger than six horses he will allow a
little child to lead him. His food is Bananas.' And so on to the
Whale, the Zebra, and Porcupine, and the Spotted Camelopard. There
were also, in the teacher's desk, a copy of Beautiful Joe, a
forlorn book called Peeps at Distant Lands, and a French phrase-
book dated 1891. It was called All you will need on your Parisian
Trip, and the first phrase given was 'Lace my stays, but not too
tightly'. In the whole room there was not such a thing as an atlas
or a set of geometrical instruments.

At eleven there was a break of ten minutes, and some of the girls
played dull little games at noughts and crosses or quarrelled over
pencil-cases, and a few who had got over their first shyness
clustered round Dorothy's desk and talked to her. They told her
some more about Miss Strong and her methods of teaching, and how
she used to twist their ears when they made blots on their
copybooks. It appeared that Miss Strong had been a very strict
teacher except when she was 'taken bad', which happened about twice
a week. And when she was taken bad she used to drink some medicine
out of a little brown bottle, and after drinking it she would grow
quite jolly for a while and talk to them about her brother in
Canada. But on her last day--the time when she was taken so bad
during the arithmetic lesson--the medicine seemed to make her worse
than ever, because she had no sooner drunk it than she began
sinking and fell across a desk, and Mrs Creevy had to carry her out
of the room.

After the break there was another period of three quarters of an
hour, and then school ended for the morning. Dorothy felt stiff
and tired after three hours in the chilly but stuffy room, and she
would have liked to go out of doors for a breath of fresh air, but
Mrs Creevy had told her beforehand that she must come and help get
dinner ready. The girls who lived near the school mostly went home
for dinner, but there were seven who had dinner in the 'morning-
room' at tenpence a time. It was an uncomfortable meal, and passed
in almost complete silence, for the girls were frightened to talk
under Mrs Creevy's eye. The dinner was stewed scrag end of mutton,
and Mrs Creevy showed extraordinary dexterity in serving the pieces
of lean to the 'good payers' and the pieces of fat to the 'medium
payers'. As for the three 'bad payers', they ate a shamefaced
lunch out of paper bags in the school-room.

School began again at two o'clock. Already, after only one
morning's teaching, Dorothy went back to her work with secret
shrinking and dread. She was beginning to realize what her life
would be like, day after day and week after week, in that sunless
room, trying to drive the rudiments of knowledge into unwilling
brats. But when she had assembled the girls and called their names
over, one of them, a little peaky child with mouse-coloured hair,
called Laura Firth, came up to her desk and presented her with a
pathetic bunch of browny-yellow chrysanthemums, 'from all of us'.
The girls had taken a liking to Dorothy, and had subscribed
fourpence among themselves, to buy her a bunch of flowers.

Something stirred in Dorothy's heart as she took the ugly flowers.
She looked with more seeing eyes than before at the anaemic faces
and shabby clothes of the children, and was all of a sudden
horribly ashamed to think that in the morning she had looked at
them with indifference, almost with dislike. Now, a profound pity
took possession of her. The poor children, the poor children! How
they had been stunted and maltreated! And with it all they had
retained the childish gentleness that could make them squander
their few pennies on flowers for their teacher.

She felt quite differently towards her job from that moment
onwards. A feeling of loyalty and affection had sprung up in her
heart. This school was HER school; she would work for it and be
proud of it, and make every effort to turn it from a place of
bondage into a place human and decent. Probably it was very little
that she could do. She was so inexperienced and unfitted for her
job that she must educate herself before she could even begin to
educate anybody else. Still, she would do her best; she would do
whatever willingness and energy could do to rescue these children
from the horrible darkness in which they had been kept.

3

During the next few weeks there were two things that occupied
Dorothy to the exclusion of all others. One, getting her class
into some kind of order; the other, establishing a concordat with
Mrs Creevy.

The second of the two was by a great deal the more difficult. Mrs
Creevy's house was as vile a house to live in as one could possibly
imagine. It was always more or less cold, there was not a
comfortable chair in it from top to bottom, and the food was
disgusting. Teaching is harder work than it looks, and a teacher
needs good food to keep him going. It was horribly dispiriting to
have to work on a diet of tasteless mutton stews, damp boiled
potatoes full of little black eyeholes, watery rice puddings, bread
and scrape, and weak tea--and never enough even of these. Mrs
Creevy, who was mean enough to take a pleasure in skimping even her
own food, ate much the same meals as Dorothy, but she always had
the lion's share of them. Every morning at breakfast the two fried
eggs were sliced up and unequally partitioned, and the dish of
marmalade remained for ever sacrosanct. Dorothy grew hungrier and
hungrier as the term went on. On the two evenings a week when she
managed to get out of doors she dipped into her dwindling store of
money and bought slabs of plain chocolate, which she ate in the
deepest secrecy--for Mrs Creevy, though she starved Dorothy more or
less intentionally, would have been mortally offended if she had
known that she bought food for herself.

The worst thing about Dorothy's position was that she had no
privacy and very little time that she could call her own. Once
school was over for the day her only refuge was the 'morning-room',
where she was under Mrs Creevy's eye, and Mrs Creevy's leading idea
was that Dorothy must never be left in peace for ten minutes
together. She had taken it into her head, or pretended to do so,
that Dorothy was an idle person who needed keeping up to the mark.
And so it was always, 'Well, Miss Millborough, you don't seem to
have very much to do this evening, do you? Aren't there some
exercise books that want correcting? Or why don't you get your
needle and do a bit of sewing? I'm sure _I_ couldn't bear to just
sit in my chair doing nothing like you do!' She was for ever
finding household jobs for Dorothy to do, even making her scrub the
schoolroom floor on Saturday mornings when the girls did not come
to school; but this was done out of pure ill nature, for she did
not trust Dorothy to do the work properly, and generally did it
again after her. One evening Dorothy was unwise enough to bring
back a novel from the public library. Mrs Creevy flared up at the
very sight of it. 'Well, really, Miss Millborough! I shouldn't
have thought you'd have had time to READ!' she said bitterly. She
herself had never read a book right through in her life, and was
proud of it.

Moreover, even when Dorothy was not actually under her eye, Mrs
Creevy had ways of making her presence felt. She was for ever
prowling in the neighbourhood of the schoolroom, so that Dorothy
never felt quite safe from her intrusion; and when she thought
there was too much noise she would suddenly rap on the wall with
her broom-handle in a way that made the children jump and put them
off their work. At all hours of the day she was restlessly,
noisily active. When she was not cooking meals she was banging
about with broom and dustpan, or harrying the charwoman, or
pouncing down upon the schoolroom to 'have a look round' in hopes
of catching Dorothy or the children up to mischief, or 'doing a bit
of gardening'--that is, mutilating with a pair of shears the
unhappy little shrubs that grew amid wastes of gravel in the back
garden. On only two evenings a week was Dorothy free of her, and
that was when Mrs Creevy sallied forth on forays which she called
'going after the girls'; that is to say, canvassing likely parents.
These evenings Dorothy usually spent in the public library, for
when Mrs Creevy was not at home she expected Dorothy to keep out of
the house, to save fire and gaslight. On other evenings Mrs Creevy
was busy writing dunning letters to the parents, or letters to the
editor of the local paper, haggling over the price of a dozen
advertisements, or poking about the girls' desks to see that their
exercise books had been properly corrected, or 'doing a bit of
sewing'. Whenever occupation failed her for even five minutes she
got out her workbox and 'did a bit of sewing'--generally
restitching some bloomers of harsh white linen of which she had
pairs beyond number. They were the most chilly looking garments
that one could possibly imagine; they seemed to carry upon them, as
no nun's coif or anchorite's hair shirt could ever have done, the
impress of a frozen and awful chastity. The sight of them set you
wondering about the late Mr Creevy, even to the point of wondering
whether he had ever existed.

Looking with an outsider's eye at Mrs Creevy's manner of life, you
would have said that she had no PLEASURES whatever. She never did
any of the things that ordinary people do to amuse themselves--
never went to the pictures, never looked at a book, never ate
sweets, never cooked a special dish for dinner or dressed herself
in any kind of finery. Social life meant absolutely nothing to
her. She had no friends, was probably incapable of imagining such
a thing as friendship, and hardly ever exchanged a word with a
fellow being except on business. Of religious belief she had not
the smallest vestige. Her attitude towards religion, though she
went to the Baptist Chapel every Sunday to impress the parents with
her piety, was a mean anti-clericalism founded on the notion that
the clergy are 'only after your money'. She seemed a creature
utterly joyless, utterly submerged by the dullness of her
existence. But in reality it was not so. There were several
things from which she derived acute and inexhaustible pleasure.

For instance, there was her avarice over money. It was the leading
interest of her life. There are two kinds of avaricious person--
the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never
looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the
enterprise actually to MAKE money, but who will always, as the
saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth. Mrs
Creevy belonged to the second type. By ceaseless canvassing and
impudent bluff she had worked her school up to twenty-one pupils,
but she would never get it much further, because she was too mean
to spend money on the necessary equipment and to pay proper wages
to her assistant. The fees the girls paid, or didn't pay, were
five guineas a term with certain extras, so that, starve and sweat
her assistant as she might, she could hardly hope to make more than
a hundred and fifty pounds a year clear profit. But she was fairly
satisfied with that. It meant more to her to save sixpence than to
earn a pound. So long as she could think of a way of docking
Dorothy's dinner of another potato, or getting her exercise books a
halfpenny a dozen cheaper, or shoving an unauthorized half guinea
on to one of the 'good payers'' bills, she was happy after her
fashion.

And again, in pure, purposeless malignity--in petty acts of spite,
even when there was nothing to be gained by them--she had a hobby
of which she never wearied. She was one of those people who
experience a kind of spiritual orgasm when they manage to do
somebody else a bad turn. Her feud with Mr Boulger next door--a
one-sided affair, really, for poor Mr Boulger was not up to Mrs
Creevy's fighting weight--was conducted ruthlessly, with no quarter
given or expected. So keen was Mrs Creevy's pleasure in scoring
off Mr Boulger that she was even willing to spend money on it
occasionally. A year ago Mr Boulger had written to the landlord
(each of them was for ever writing to the landlord, complaining
about the other's behaviour), to say that Mrs Creevy's kitchen
chimney smoked into his back windows, and would she please have it
heightened two feet. The very day the landlord's letter reached
her, Mrs Creevy called in the bricklayers and had the chimney
lowered two feet. It cost her thirty shillings, but it was worth
it. After that there had been the long guerrilla campaign of
throwing things over the garden wall during the night, and Mrs
Creevy had finally won with a dustbinful of wet ashes thrown on to
Mr Boulger's bed of tulips. As it happened, Mrs Creevy won a neat
and bloodless victory soon after Dorothy's arrival. Discovering by
chance that the roots of Mr Boulger's plum tree had grown under the
wall into her own garden, she promptly injected a whole tin of
weed-killer into them and killed the tree. This was remarkable as
being the only occasion when Dorothy ever heard Mrs Creevy laugh.

But Dorothy was too busy, at first, to pay much attention to Mrs
Creevy and her nasty characteristics. She saw quite clearly that
Mrs Creevy was an odious woman and that her own position was
virtually that of a slave; but it did not greatly worry her. Her
work was too absorbing, too all-important. In comparison with it,
her own comfort and even her future hardly seemed to matter.

It did not take her more than a couple of days to get her class
into running order. It was curious, but though she had no
experience of teaching and no preconceived theories about it, yet
from the very first day she found herself, as though by instinct,
rearranging, scheming, innovating. There was so much that was
crying out to be done. The first thing, obviously, was to get rid
of the grisly routine of 'copies', and after Dorothy's second day
no more 'copies' were done in the class, in spite of a sniff or two
from Mrs Creevy. The handwriting lessons, also, were cut down.
Dorothy would have liked to do away with handwriting lessons
altogether so far as the older girls were concerned--it seemed to
her ridiculous that girls of fifteen should waste time in practising
copperplate--but Mrs Creevy would not hear of it. She seemed to
attach an almost superstitious value to handwriting lessons. And
the next thing, of course, was to scrap the repulsive Hundred Page
History and the preposterous little 'readers'. It would have been
worse than useless to ask Mrs Creevy to buy new books for the
children, but on her first Saturday afternoon Dorothy begged leave
to go up to London, was grudgingly given it, and spent two pounds
three shillings out of her precious four pounds ten on a dozen
secondhand copies of a cheap school edition of Shakespeare, a big
second-hand atlas, some volumes of Hans Andersen's stories for the
younger children, a set of geometrical instruments, and two pounds
of plasticine. With these, and history books out of the public
library, she felt that she could make a start.

She had seen at a glance that what the children most needed, and
what they had never had, was individual attention. So she began by
dividing them up into three separate classes, and so arranging
things that two lots could be working by themselves while she 'went
through' something with the third. It was difficult at first,
especially with the younger girls, whose attention wandered as soon
as they were left to themselves, so that you could never really
take your eyes off them. And yet how wonderfully, how unexpectedly,
nearly all of them improved during those first few weeks! For the
most part they were not really stupid, only dazed by a dull,
mechanical rigmarole. For a week, perhaps, they continued
unteachable; and then, quite suddenly, their warped little minds
seemed to spring up and expand like daisies when you move the
garden roller off them.

Quite quickly and easily Dorothy broke them in to the habit of
thinking for themselves. She got them to make up essays out of
their own heads instead of copying out drivel about the birds
chanting on the boughs and the flowerets bursting from their buds.
She attacked their arithmetic at the foundations and started the
little girls on multiplication and piloted the older ones through
long division to fractions; she even got three of them to the point
where there was talk of starting on decimals. She taught them the
first rudiments of French grammar in place of 'Passez-moi le
beurre, s'il vous plait' and 'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son
chapeau'. Finding that not a girl in the class knew what any of
the countries of the world looked like (though several of them knew
that Quito was the capital of Ecuador), she set them to making a
large contour-map of Europe in plasticine, on a piece of three-ply
wood, copying it in scale from the atlas. The children adored
making the map; they were always clamouring to be allowed to go on
with it. And she started the whole class, except the six youngest
girls and Mavis Williams, the pothook specialist, on reading
Macbeth. Not a child among them had ever voluntarily read anything
in her life before, except perhaps the Girl's Own Paper; but they
took readily to Shakespeare, as all children do when he is not made
horrible with parsing and analysing.

History was the hardest thing to teach them. Dorothy had not
realized till now how hard it is for children who come from poor
homes to have even a conception of what history means. Every
upper-class person, however ill-informed, grows up with some notion
of history; he can visualize a Roman centurion, a medieval knight,
an eighteenth-century nobleman; the terms Antiquity, Middle Ages,
Renaissance, Industrial Revolution evoke some meaning, even if a
confused one, in his mind. But these children came from bookless
homes and from parents who would have laughed at the notion that
the past has any meaning for the present. They had never heard of
Robin Hood, never played at being Cavaliers and Roundheads, never
wondered who built the English churches or what Fid. Def. on a
penny stands for. There were just two historical characters of
whom all of them, almost without exception, had heard, and those
were Columbus and Napoleon. Heaven knows why--perhaps Columbus and
Napoleon get into the newspapers a little oftener than most
historical characters. They seemed to have swelled up in the
children's minds, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, till they blocked
out the whole landscape of the past. Asked when motor-cars were
invented, one child, aged ten, vaguely hazarded, 'About a thousand
years ago, by Columbus.'

Some of the older girls, Dorothy discovered, had been through the
Hundred Page History as many as four times, from Boadicea to the
first Jubilee, and forgotten practically every word of it. Not
that that mattered greatly, for most of it was lies. She started
the whole class over again at Julius Caesar's invasion, and at
first she tried taking history books out of the public library and
reading them aloud to the children; but that method failed, because
they could understand nothing that was not explained to them in
words of one or two syllables. So she did what she could in her
own words and with her own inadequate knowledge, making a sort of
paraphrase of what she read and delivering it to the children;
striving all the while to drive into their dull little minds some
picture of the past, and what was always more difficult, some
interest in it. But one day a brilliant idea struck her. She
bought a roll of cheap plain wallpaper at an upholsterer's shop,
and set the children to making an historical chart. They marked
the roll of paper into centuries and years, and stuck scraps that
they cut out of illustrated papers--pictures of knights in armour
and Spanish galleons and printing-presses and railway trains--at
the appropriate places. Pinned round the walls of the room, the
chart presented, as the scraps grew in number, a sort of panorama
of English history. The children were even fonder of the chart
than of the contour map. They always, Dorothy found, showed more
intelligence when it was a question of MAKING something instead of
merely learning. There was even talk of making a contour map of
the world, four feet by four, in papiermache, if Dorothy could 'get
round' Mrs Creevy to allow the preparation of the papiermache--a
messy process needing buckets of water.

Mrs Creevy watched Dorothy's innovations with a jealous eye, but
she did not interfere actively at first. She was not going to show
it, of course, but she was secretly amazed and delighted to find
that she had got hold of an assistant who was actually willing to
work. When she saw Dorothy spending her own money on textbooks for
the children, it gave her the same delicious sensation that she
would have had in bringing off a successful swindle. She did,
however, sniff and grumble at everything that Dorothy did, and she
wasted a great deal of time by insisting on what she called
'thorough correction' of the girls' exercise books. But her system
of correction, like everything else in the school curriculum, was
arranged with one eye on the parents. Periodically the children
took their books home for their parents' inspection, and Mrs Creevy
would never allow anything disparaging to be written in them.
Nothing was to be marked 'bad' or crossed out or too heavily
underlined; instead, in the evenings, Dorothy decorated the books,
under Mrs Creevy's dictation, with more or less applauding comments
in red ink. 'A very creditable performance', and 'Excellent! You
are making great strides. Keep it up!' were Mrs Creevy's favourites.
All the children in the school, apparently, were for ever 'making
great strides'; in what direction they were striding was not stated.
The parents, however, seemed willing to swallow an almost unlimited
amount of this kind of thing.

There were times, of course, when Dorothy had trouble with the
girls themselves. The fact that they were all of different ages
made them difficult to deal with, and though they were fond of her
and were very 'good' with her at first, they would not have been
children at all if they had been invariably 'good'. Sometimes they
were lazy and sometimes they succumbed to that most damnable vice
of schoolgirls--giggling. For the first few days Dorothy was
greatly exercised over little Mavis Williams, who was stupider than
one would have believed it possible for any child of eleven to be.
Dorothy could do nothing with her at all. At the first attempt to
get her to do anything beyond pothooks a look of almost subhuman
blankness would come into her wide-set eyes. Sometimes, however,
she had talkative fits in which she would ask the most amazing and
unanswerable questions. For instance, she would open her 'reader',
find one of the illustrations--the sagacious Elephant, perhaps--and
ask Dorothy:

'Please, Miss, wass 'at thing there?' (She mispronounced her words
in a curious manner.)

'That's an elephant, Mavis.'

'Wass a elephant?'

'An elephant's a kind of wild animal.'

'Wass a animal?'

'Well--a dog's an animal.'

'Wass a dog?'

And so on, more or less indefinitely. About half-way through the
fourth morning Mavis held up her hand and said with a sly
politeness that ought to have put Dorothy on her guard:

'Please, Miss, may I be 'scused?'

'Yes,' said Dorothy.

One of the bigger girls put up her hand, blushed, and put her hand
down again as though too bashful to speak. On being prompted by
Dorothy, she said shamefacedly:

'Please, Miss, Miss Strong didn't used to let Mavis go to the
lavatory alone. She locks herself in and won't come out, and then
Mrs Creevy gets angry, Miss.'

Dorothy dispatched a messenger, but it was too late. Mavis
remained in latebra pudenda till twelve o'clock. Afterwards, Mrs
Creevy explained privately to Dorothy that Mavis was a congenital
idiot--or, as she put it, 'not right in the head'. It was totally
impossible to teach her anything. Of course, Mrs Creevy didn't
'let on' to Mavis's parents, who believed that their child was only
'backward' and paid their fees regularly. Mavis was quite easy to
deal with. You just had to give her a book and a pencil and tell
her to draw pictures and be quiet. But Mavis, a child of habit,
drew nothing but pothooks--remaining quiet and apparently happy for
hours together, with her tongue hanging out, amid festoons of
pothooks.

But in spite of these minor difficulties, how well everything went
during those first few weeks! How ominously well, indeed! About
the tenth of November, after much grumbling about the price of
coal, Mrs Creevy started to allow a fire in the schoolroom. The
children's wits brightened noticeably when the room was decently
warm. And there were happy hours, sometimes, when the fire
crackled in the grate, and Mrs Creevy was out of the house, and the
children were working quietly and absorbedly at one of the lessons
that were their favourites. Best of all was when the two top
classes were reading Macbeth, the girls squeaking breathlessly
through the scenes, and Dorothy pulling them up to make them
pronounce the words properly and to tell them who Bellona's
bridegroom was and how witches rode on broomsticks; and the girls
wanting to know, almost as excitedly as though it had been a
detective story, how Birnam Wood could possible come to Dunsinane
and Macbeth be killed by a man who was not of woman born. Those
are the times that make teaching worth while--the times when the
children's enthusiasm leaps up, like an answering flame, to meet
your own, and sudden unlooked-for gleams of intelligence reward
your earlier drudgery. No job is more fascinating than teaching if
you have a free hand at it. Nor did Dorothy know, as yet, that
that 'if' is one of the biggest 'ifs' in the world.

Her job suited her, and she was happy in it. She knew the minds
of the children intimately by this time, knew their individual
peculiarities and the special stimulants that were needed before
you could get them to think. She was more fond of them, more
interested in their development, more anxious to do her best for
them, than she would have conceived possible a short while ago.
The complex, never-ended labour of teaching filled her life just as
the round of parish jobs had filled it at home. She thought and
dreamed of teaching; she took books out of the public library and
studied theories of education. She felt that quite willingly she
would go on teaching all her life, even at ten shillings a week and
her keep, if it could always be like this. It was her vocation,
she thought.

Almost any job that fully occupied her would have been a relief
after the horrible futility of the time of her destitution. But
this was more than a mere job; it was--so it seemed to her--a
mission, a life-purpose. Trying to awaken the dulled minds of
these children, trying to undo the swindle that had been worked
upon them in the name of education--that, surely, was something to
which she could give herself heart and soul? So for the time
being, in the interest of her work, she disregarded the beastliness
of living in Mrs Creevy's house, and quite forgot her strange,
anomalous position and the uncertainty of her future.

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