lanes that led nowhere, and sprawled exhausted in dry ditches smelling of fennel and tansies, and sneaked into private woods and “drummed up” in thickets where firewood and water were handy, and cooked strange, squalid meals in the two two-pound snuff-tins that were their only cooking pots. Sometimes, when their luck was in, they had excellent stews of cadged bacon and stolen cauliflowers, sometimes great insipid gorges of potatoes roasted in the ashes, sometimes jam made of stolen autumn raspberries which they boiled in one of the snuff-tins and devoured while it was still scalding hot. Tea was the one thing they never ran short of. Even when there was no food at all there was always tea, stewed, dark brown and reviving. It is a thing that can be begged more easily than most. “Please, ma’am, could you spare me a pinch of tea?” is a plea that seldom fails, even with the case-hardened Kentish housewives.
The days were burning hot, the white roads glared and the passing cars sent stinging dust into their faces. Often families of hop-pickers drove past, cheering, in lorries piled sky-high with furniture, children, dogs and birdcages. The nights were always cold. There is hardly such a thing as a night in England when it is really warm after midnight. Two large sacks were all the bedding they had between them. Flo and Charlie had one sack, Dorothy had the other, and Nobby slept on the bare ground. The discomfort was almost as bad as the cold. If you lay on your back, your head, with no pillow, lolled backwards so that your neck seemed to be breaking; if you lay on your side, your hip-bone pressing against the earth caused you torments. Even when, towards the small hours, you managed to fall asleep by fits and starts, the cold penetrated into your deepest dreams. Nobby was the only one who could really stand it. He could sleep as peacefully in a nest of sodden grass as in a bed, and his coarse, simian face, with barely a dozen red-gold hairs glittering on the chin like snippings of copper wire, never lost its warm, pink colour. He was one of those red-haired people who seem to glow with an inner radiance that warms not only themselves but the surrounding air.
All this strange, comfortless life Dorothy took utterly for granted—only dimly aware, if at all, that that other, unremembered life that lay behind her had been in some way different from this. After only a couple of days she had ceased to wonder any longer about her queer predicament. She accepted everything—accepted the dirt and hunger and fatigue, the endless trailing to and fro, the hot, dusty days and the sleepless, shivering nights. She was, in any case, far too tired to think. By the afternoon of the second day they were all desperately, overwhelmingly tired, except Nobby, whom nothing could tire. Even the fact that soon after they set out a nail began to work its way through the sole of his boot hardly seemed to trouble him. There were periods of an hour at a time when Dorothy seemed almost to be sleeping as she walked. She had a burden to carry now, for as the two men were already loaded and Flo steadfastly refused to carry anything, Dorothy had volunteered to carry the sack that held the stolen potatoes. They generally had ten pounds or so of potatoes in reserve. Dorothy slung the sack over her shoulder as Nobby and Charlie did with their bundles, but the string cut into her like a saw and the sack bumped against her hip and chafed it so that finally it began to bleed. Her wretched, flimsy shoes had begun to go to pieces from the very beginning. On the second day the heel of her right shoe came off and left her hobbling; but Nobby, expert in such matters, advised her to tear the heel off the other shoe and walk flat-footed. The result was a fiery pain down her shins when she walked uphill, and a feeling as though the soles of her feet had been hammered with an iron bar.
But Flo and Charlie were in a much worse case than she. They were not so much exhausted as amazed and scandalised by the distances they were expected to walk. Walking twenty miles in a day was a thing they had never even heard of till now. They were cockneys born and bred, and though they had had several months of destitution in London, neither of them had ever been on the road before. Charlie, till fairly recently, had been in good employment, and Flo, too, had had a good home until she had been seduced and turned out of doors to live on the streets. They had fallen in with Nobby on Trafalgar Square and agreed to come hop-picking with him, imagining that it would be a bit of a lark. Of course, having been “on the beach” a comparatively short time, they looked down on Nobby and Dorothy. They valued Nobby’s knowledge of the road and his boldness in thieving, but he was their social inferior—that was their attitude. And as for Dorothy, they scarcely even deigned to look at her after her half-crown came to an end.
Even on the second day their courage was failing. They lagged behind, grumbled incessantly and demanded more than their fair share of food. By the third day it was almost impossible to keep them on the road at all. They were pining to be back in London, and had long ceased to care whether they ever got to the hopfields or not; all they wanted to do was to sprawl in any comfortable halting place they could find, and, when there was any food left, devour endless snacks. After every halt there was a tedious argument before they could be got to their feet again.
“Come on, blokes!” Nobby would say. “Pack your peter up, Charlie. Time we was getting off.”
“Oh, —— getting off!” Charlie would answer morosely.
“Well, we can’t skipper here, can we? We said we was going to hike as far as Sevenoaks to-night, didn’t we?”
“Oh, —— Sevenoaks! Sevenoaks or any other bleeding place—it don’t make any bleeding difference to me.”
“But —— it! We want to get a job to-morrow, don’t we? And we got to get down among the farms ’fore we can start looking for one.”
“Oh, —— the farms! I wish I’d never ’eard of a —— ’op! I wasn’t brought up to this —— ’iking and skippering like you was. I’m fed up; that’s what I am—fed up.”
“If this is bloody ’opping,” Flo would chime in, “I’ve ’ad my bloody bellyful of it already.”
Nobby gave Dorothy his private opinion that Flo and Charlie would probably “jack off” if they got the chance of a lift back to London. But as for Nobby, nothing disheartened him or ruffled his good temper, not even when the nail in his boot was at its worst and his filthy remnant of a sock was dark with blood. By the third day the nail had worn a permanent hole in his foot, and Nobby had to halt once in a mile to hammer it down.
” ’Scuse me, kid,” he would say; “got to attend to my bloody hoof again. This nail’s a mulligatawny.”
He would search for a round stone, squat in the ditch and carefully hammer the nail down.
“There!” he would say optimistically, feeling the place with his thumb. “That b ——’s in his grave!”
The epitaph should have been Resurgam, however. The nail invariably worked its way up again within a quarter of an hour.
Nobby had tried to make love to Dorothy, of course, and, when she repulsed him, bore her no grudge. He had that happy temperament that is incapable of taking its own reverses very seriously. He was always debonair, always singing in a lusty baritone voice—his three favourite songs were; “Sonny Boy,” “ ’Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse” (to the tune of “The Church’s One Foundation”), and “ ‘——!’ was all the band could play,” given with lively renderings of military music. He was twenty-six years old and was a widower, and had been successively a seller of newspapers, a petty thief, a Borstal boy, a soldier, a burglar and a tramp. These facts, however, you had to piece together for yourself, for he was not equal to giving a consecutive account of his life. His conversation was studded with casual picturesque memories—the six months he had served in a line regiment before he was invalided out with a damaged eye, the loathsomeness of the skilly in Holloway, his childhood in the Deptford gutters, the death of his wife, aged eighteen, in childbirth, when he was twenty, the horrible suppleness of the Borstal canes, the dull boom of the nitro-glycerine, blowing in the safe door at Woodward’s boot and shoe factory, where Nobby had cleared a hundred and twenty-five pounds and spent it in three weeks.
On
