The old-age pensioner

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, and this man belongs to the London half of it. With eight shillings left, Orwell moved east across London and took a bed in a common lodging-house in Pennyfields. It slept between fifty and a hundred men, fifteen or twenty to a dormitory, at ninepence or a shilling a night, cash down by seven in the evening or out you went.

Two or three of the lodgers were old men living on the state old-age pension of ten shillings a week and nothing else whatever. Orwell writes that until he met them he had not realised there were people in England who lived on the pension alone. One of them was talkative, so Orwell asked him how he managed.

The answer came back in figures. Ninepence a night for the bed made five shillings and threepence a week. Threepence for a shave on Saturday took it to five and six. A sixpenny haircut once a month worked out at another three halfpence a week. That left about four shillings and fourpence for food and tobacco. He could imagine no other expenses.

The four and fourpence bought bread and margarine and tea, and towards the end of the week dry bread and tea without milk. His clothes, Orwell supposed, came from charity. He seemed contented, and he valued his bed and the kitchen fire more than his food. What stopped Orwell was the shave. A man with ten shillings a week in the world was paying threepence of it to be shaved on a Saturday, and Orwell calls that awe-inspiring.

On Orwell's last night in the house there was a quarrel between two lodgers, and one of them was an old-age pensioner of about seventy, naked to the waist because he had been doing his washing. The book does not say whether it was the same man. He stood screaming abuse at a short, thickset dock labourer, making little rushes at him and spitting, working himself up to throw a punch and never quite managing it, until he sat down on a bench, put his face in his hands and cried. Steve, the senior lodger the others called head of the house, explained afterwards what it had been about. The old man had somehow lost his store of bread and margarine and had nothing to eat for three days but what the others gave him, and the other man, who was in work and well fed, had taunted him with it.