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screever. I make a pound a week. You can't keep six kids
on a pound a week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking
in sewing.
"The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next
worst is the interference you have to put up with. At
first, not knowing any better, I used sometimes to copy a
nude on the pavement. The first I did was outside St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields church. A fellow in blackI suppose
he was a churchwarden or somethingcame out in a
tearing rage. 'Do you think we can have that obscenity
outside God's holy house?' he cried. So I had to wash it
out. It was a copy of Botticelli's Venus. Another time I
copied the same picture on the Embankment. A
policeman passing looked at it, and
then, without a word, walked on to it and rubbed it out
with his great flat feet."
Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the
time when I was with him there had been a case of
"immoral conduct" in Hyde Park, in which the police had
behaved rather badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde
Park with policemen concealed in the trees, and the
legend, "Puzzle, find the policemen." I pointed out to him
how much more telling it would be to put, "Puzzle, find
the immoral conduct," but Bozo would not hear of it. He
said that any policeman who saw it would move him on,
and he would lose his pitch for good.
Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or
sell matches, or bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few
grains of lavender-called, euphemistically, perfume. All
these people are frankly beggars, exploiting an appearance
of misery, and none of them takes on an average more
than half a crown a day. The reason why they have to
pretend to sell matches and so forth instead of begging
outright is that this is demanded by the absurd English
laws about begging. As the law now stands, if you
approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call
a policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if
you make the air hideous by droning "Nearer, my God, to
Thee," or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or
stand about with a tray of matches-in short, if you make a
nuisance of yourself-you are held to be following a
legitimate trade and not begging. Match-selling and street-
singing are simply legalised crimes. Not profitable crimes,
however; there is not a singer or match-seller in London
who can be sure of £5o a year-a poor return for standing
eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars
grazing your backside.
It is worth saying something about the social position
of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and
found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot
help being struck by the curious attitude that society
takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is
some essential difference between beggars and ordinary
"working" men. They are a race apart, outcasts, like
criminals and prostitutes. Working men "work," beggars
do not "work"; they are parasites, worthless in their very
nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not
"earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic
"earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated
because we live in a humane age, but essentially
despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no
essential
difference between a beggar's livelihood and that
of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it
is said; but, then, what is
work? A navvy works by
swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up
figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all
weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis,
etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course -
but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as
a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others.
He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent
medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday
newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-
purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless
parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from
the community, and, what should justify him according to
our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.
I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets
him in a different class from other people, or gives most
modern men the right to despise him.
Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? -
for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the
simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In
practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless,
productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it
shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy,
efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning
is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of
it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this
test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one
could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would
become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar,
looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting
his living, like other business men, in the way that comes
to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold
his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing
a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.
XXXII
I WANT to put in some notes, as short as possible, on
London slang and swearing. These (omitting the ones
that everyone knows) are some of the cant words now
used in London:
A gagger-beggar or street performer of any kind. A
moocher-one who begs outright, without pretence of
doing a trade. A nobbler-one who collects pennies for a
beggar. A chanter-a street singer. A clodhopper -a street
dancer. A mugfaker-a street photographer. A glimmer-
one who watches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee-it is
pronounced jee)-the accomplice of a cheapjack, who
stimulates trade by pretending to buy
something. A split-a detective. A flattie-a policeman. A
dideki-a gypsy. A toby-a tramp.
A drop-money given to a beggar. Funkumlavender or
other perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer -a public-
house. A slang-a hawker's licence. A kip -a place to
sleep in, or a night's lodging. SmokeLondon. A judy-a
woman. The spike-the casual ward. The lump-the casual
ward. A tosheroon-a half-crown. A denner-a shilling. A
hog-a shilling. A sprowsie-a sixpence. Clods-coppers. A
drum-a billy can. Shackles-soup. A chat-a louse. Hard-
up-tobacco made from cigarette ends. A stick or cane -a
burglar's jemmy. A peter-a safe. A bly-a burglar's oxy-
acetylene blow-lamp
To bawl-to suck or swallow. To knock off-to steal. To
skipper-to sleep in the open.
About half of these words are in the larger diction-
aries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some
of them, though one or two-for instance, "funkum" and
"tosheroon"-are beyond guessing. "Deaner" presumably
comes from "denier." "Glimmer" (with the verb "to
glim") may have something to do with the old word
"glim," meaning a light, or another old word "glim,"
meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation
of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be
older than motor-cars. "Gee" is a curious word;
conceivably it has arisen out of "gee," meaning horse, in
the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of "screever"
is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but
there has been no similar word in English for the past
hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly
from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in
France. "Judy" and "bawl" are East End words, not
found west of Tower Bridge. "Smoke" is a word used
only by tramps. "Kip" is Danish. Till quite recently
the word "doss" was used in this sense, but it is now
quite obsolete.
London slang and dialect seem to change very
rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens
and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has
now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know
it seems to have come up in the 'forties (it is first men-
tioned in an American book, Herman Melville's
White
Jacket
), and Cockney is already changing; there are few
people now who say "fice" for "face," "nawce" for
"nice" and so forth as consistently as they did twenty
years ago. The slang changes together with the accent.
Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the
"rhyming slang" was all the rage in London. In the
"rhyming slang" everything was named by something
rhyming with it-a "hit or miss" for a kiss, "plates of
meat" for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even
reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.' Perhaps
all the words I have mentioned above will have van-
ished in another twenty years.
The swear words also change-or, at any rate, they are
subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the
London working classes habitually used the word
"bloody." Now they have abandoned it utterly, though
novelists still represent them as using it. No born
Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish
origin) now says "bloody," unless he is a man of some
education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social
scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of
the working classes. The current London adjective, now
tacked on to every noun, is ---------
. No
doubt in time---, like "bloody," will find its way into
1 It survives in certain abbreviations, such as "use your
twopenny" or "use your head." "Twopenny" is arrived at like
this: head-loaf of bread-twopenny loaf-twopenny.
the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
The whole business of swearing, especially English
swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is
as irrational as magic-indeed, it is a species of magic.
But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our
intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we
do by mentioning something that should be kept secret -
usually something to do with the sexual functions. But
the strange thing is that when a word is well established
as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning;
that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word.
A word becomes an oath because it means a certain
thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to
mean that thing. For example, ----. The Londoners do
not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its
original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till
night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing.
Similarly with -------, which is rapidly losing its original
sense. One can think of similar instances in French-for
example,------,, which is now a quite meaningless
expletive. The word---
, also, is still used
occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most
of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule
seems to be that words accepted as swear words have
some magical character, which sets them apart and
makes them useless for ordinary conversation.
Words used as insults seem to be governed by the
same paradox as swear words. A word becomes an
insult, one would suppose, because it means something
bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with
its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult
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