MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS
From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings, or
a dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair. From the
American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished,
uncomfortable, and small. By the time I had added an ordinary
typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn
around; at the best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of vermicular
progression requiring great dexterity and presence of mind.
Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockabout
clothes and went out for a walk. Lodgings being fresh in my mind, I
began to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a poor
young man with a wife and large family.
My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between—so
far between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles
over a large area, I still remained between. Not one empty house could
I find—a conclusive proof that the district was “saturated.”
It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no
houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms,
unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and
chattels. There were not many, but I found them, usually in the
singular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man’s
family in which to cook and eat and sleep. When I asked for two rooms,
the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I imagine, that a
certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he asked for more.
Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family,
but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much
space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two. When such
rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a
fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space
for, say, from eightpence to a shilling. He may even be able to board
with the sublettees for a few shillings more. This, however, I failed
to inquire into—a reprehensible error on my part, considering that I
was working on the basis of a hypothetical family.
Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned
that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen.
Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of
lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a
bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking. But, it
seems, the compensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all’s
well, and God’s still in heaven.
However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright’s
street. What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various
cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind’s eye had become
narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at
once. The immensity of it was awe-inspiring. Could this be the room I
had rented for six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady,
knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my
doubts.
“Oh yes, sir,” she said, in reply to a question. “This street is the
very last. All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago,
and all the people were very respectable. But the others have driven
our kind out. Those in this street are the only ones left. It’s
shocking, sir!”
And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental
value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.
“You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others
do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class
people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only
get one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It
_is_ shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this
neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be.”
I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English
working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly
engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers
that be are pouring eastward out of London Town. Bank, factory, hotel,
and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic
breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and
degrading neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of
workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging
them down, if not in the first generation, surely in the second and
third.
It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright’s street must go.
He realises it himself.
“In a couple of years,” he says, “my lease expires. My landlord is one
of our kind. He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and
this has enabled us to stay. But any day he may sell, or any day he may
die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned. The house is
bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of
ground at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents
it a room to a family. There you are, and Johnny Upright’s gone!”
And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters,
and frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward through the
gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels.
But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting. Far, far out, on the
fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and
successful clerks. They dwell in cottages and semi-detached villas,
with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space. They
inflate themselves with pride, and throw out their chests when they
contemplate the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God
that they are not as other men. And lo! down upon them comes Johnny
Upright and the monster city at his heels. Tenements spring up like
magic, gardens are built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into
many dwellings, and the black night of London settles down in a greasy
pall.