Down and Out in Paris and London

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to ou sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically diferente. You thought it would be quite simple. it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terribl; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to na income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it - you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. you stop sending clothes o the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist  asking why you have cut down your smoking. there are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. and then there are our meals - meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, aloaf na hour in the Luxembrg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bred and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalente of  day's food. All day you are telling lies,and expensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Meand disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spend your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your naul, and it falls plop! straight into the milk. there is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in yor belly, you go ou and look into the show Windows. Everywhere there is ood insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones. 

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune sqelette in Baudelaire's poem.Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a weel on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outwighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indiferente; for three furher than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. Yout think vaguely, "I shall be starving in a day or two - shocking, isn't it?" And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.

George Orwell

1903 - 1950