The woman who washed up for the dining-room

One day a week at the Hôtel X, George Orwell washed up for the dining-room. Not the plates, which went to the kitchen, but the crockery, silver, knives and glasses, which took thirteen hours and thirty to forty dishcloths. He worked in a combined pantry and scullery that opened straight onto the dining-room through a double door. On the far side were spotless tablecloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors, gilt cornices and painted cherubim. On this side the floor was a compound of soapy water, lettuce leaves, torn paper and trodden food that nobody had time to sweep before evening. There were two sinks and no washbasin, and it was ordinary for a waiter to wash his face in the water where clean crockery was rinsing.

He did the job one day a week and found it thoroughly odious. The woman he was standing in for did it six. She was quite sixty years old, and she had been at that sink thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round. A dozen waiters sat at the table in their shirtsleeves mixing salads and putting their thumbs into the cream pots, and Orwell says most of them were intolerably insolent and that he had to use his fists more than once to get common civility out of them himself. They made her life a misery.

She gave out that she had once been an actress. Orwell doubts it in print and records his own guess as a guess: he imagines she had been a prostitute, since most prostitutes end as charwomen. What surprised him was not the work but what she brought to it. In spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty, for a job nobody saw her do. So apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave a person with some vitality. He adds that it is dreadful to think some people spend whole decades at such occupations.