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 meself.”
Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “My curate days, my curate days! My fancywork bazaars and Morris-dances 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 neck-tie. 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 to-night. 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, scrutinising 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 like 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 complex, troubling dreams which leave one conscious of one’s
