Florry
A girl who turns up on the Square with a whoop, comparatively fresh from having spent part of the night in bed, with four other girls and a group of youths in blue suits. She flatters Ginger into giving her the tea, drinks it and goes without thanking anybody, which draws the verdict that she swallows her tea and then jacks off.
The book
At a glance
- A prostitute working around Trafalgar Square, who joins the group twice for the tea
- Flo, the cockney girl of the Kent walk in Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFlorry is a young prostitute working the streets around Trafalgar Square, and she crosses the third chapter of the book twice without ever quite joining it. That chapter, written as a play, follows a dozen people with nowhere to sleep through one freezing October night, and Florry is not one of them. She has somewhere to be. She comes over for the tea and goes again.
The older women on the benches have no patience with her. The Irishwoman Mrs McElligot's complaint is practical: the girl has no sense, and should be up at Piccadilly Circus earning five shillings regularly instead of hanging round the Square with a set of miserable old tramps. What she gets there instead, according to the men, is sixpence.
She should not be confused with Flo, the young woman who walks to the Kent hop fields with Dorothy Hare in the previous chapter. George Orwell gives two women in the same book names a syllable apart, and they never meet.
How the book draws them
- How she arrivesAs soon as the tea is brewed, and never before. "Got a nose like a perishing vulture for tea, that girl 'as," Charlie says when he sees her coming. Snouter's version is that she is always on the tap.
- How she gets itBy flattering the man in charge of it. "That tea you got there, Ginger? You always WAS my favourite, Ginger dear." It works twice in one night.
- The cigaretteA broken shop-made one, produced from her stocking, and a match cadged off somebody else. The men around her are rolling theirs from picked-up fag-ends.
- The night's earningsAsked what luck she had with the man they saw her leave with, she says he stood her a coffee and a cigarette and calls him a mingy bastard. The going rate the men quote for her is sixpence, and less than that towards morning.
- How she leaves"Well, so long, folks. See you all at Wilkins's tomorrow morning," and she is gone without thanking anybody. Mrs Bendigo's verdict follows her: swallows her tea and then jacks off, and cannot waste a moment.
- How she comes backAt five in the morning, outside the coffee shop, with a whoop and a rush -- four other girls with her, a gang of youths in blue suits behind them, and all of them comparatively fresh from having spent part of the night in bed. They hit the back of the waiting crowd hard enough to nearly break the door in. Inside, they order kippers, while the people who spent the night on the Square share one cup of tea between four.