Pip

George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, is his own account of washing dishes in Paris and then tramping in England. Pip appears in the London half, and Orwell never speaks to him or sees him properly. Orwell and Paddy Jaques, the Irish tramp he was travelling with, had come into London from a workhouse casual ward with a halfpenny and two shillings between them, been turned away from a Rowton House for not having slept there the night before, and stood seven hours in the street because in London it costs money to sit down. At six they went to a Salvation Army shelter, where a bed was eightpence.

The dormitory was a great attic like a barrack room with sixty or seventy beds in it. Orwell found them clean and tolerably comfortable, but so narrow and so close together that a man breathed straight into his neighbour's face. Two Salvation Army officers slept in the room to see that there was no smoking and no talking after lights-out. At ten o'clock an officer had walked round the hall below blowing a whistle, and all two hundred men had gone up to bed at once.

Somewhere near them was a man with some nervous trouble, shellshock perhaps, who cried out "Pip!" at irregular intervals through the night. Orwell describes the noise as loud and startling, something like the toot of a small motor-horn, and says the point of it was that you never knew when it was coming. He and Paddy Jaques got scarcely a wink of sleep.

The other lodgers called the man Pip, after the noise. He slept in the shelter regularly, so Orwell reckons he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. Orwell does not make a joke of him. He uses him as an example of why nobody gets enough sleep in places where men are herded together like that: the shelter was clean and cheap and run on semi-military lines, with a whistle at ten and another at seven, and it was still impossible to rest in.