By George OrwellFrom: Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter 3
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 you sooner or later; and it,
is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be
quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would
be terrible; 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 an 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 to 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 keeps
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 your meals—meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at
meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in
the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle
your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread 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 equivalent of a day’s food. All day you arc telling lies,
and expensive lies.
