"An'
now," said the sweated one, the 'earty man who
worked so fast as to dazzle one's eyes, "I'll show you one of London's
lungs. This is Spitalfields Garden." And he
mouthed the word "garden" with scorn.
The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in the
shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I saw a sight I
never wish to see again.
There are no flowers in this garden, which is smaller than my own rose garden
at home. Grass only grows here, and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron
fencing, as are all the parks of London Town, so that homeless men and women
may not come in at night and sleep upon it.
As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passed us,
striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with two bulky
bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her. She was a woman
tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her failing carcass through
the workhouse door. Like the snail, she carried her home with her. In the two
sacking- covered bundles were her household goods, her wardrobe, linen, and
dear feminine possessions.
We went up the narrow gravelled walk. On the benches on either side arrayed a
mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which would have
impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in
achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin
diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities,
and bestial faces.
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"Are there no workhouses? Are there no
prisons?"
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A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures
huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep.
Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a
babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with
neither pillow nor covering, nor with any one looking after it. Next
half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in
their sleep.
In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms,
and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On
another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife,
and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his
clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman, not
more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them asleep
or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I learned. IT IS A
LAW OF THE POWERS THAT BE THAT THE HOMELESS SHALL NOT SLEEP BY NIGHT.
On the pavement, by the portico of Christ's Church,
where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were whole rows
of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor to rouse or
be made curious by our intrusion.
"A lung of London," I said; "nay, an abscess, a great
putrescent sore."
"Oh, why did you bring me here?" demanded the burning young
socialist, his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach
sickness.
"Those women there," said our guide, "will sell themselves for
thru'pence, or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread."
He said it with a cheerful sneer.
But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried,
"For heaven's sake let us get out of this."
Jack London, The
People of the Abyss, 1903
