Chapter XXIII

As soon as I left the CCAN Bistro I went to bed and slept the clock round, all but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best suit to CCAN, leant against the bar and spent five pounds on a bottle of English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we were up and coming and there was a chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he tells me that he is making a hundred pounds a day and has set up a girl who is very serious and never smells of garlic.

I spent a day wandering about Sneinton, saying good-bye to everyone. It was on this day that Charlie told me about the death of old Pinchbeck the miser, who had once lived in Sneinton. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.

Pinchbeck died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Sneinton, but the people in the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He went to the Victoria Centre Market every morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat's meat, and wore newspaper instead of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack--all this with half a million pounds invested. I should like very much to have known him.

Like many misers, Pinchbeck came to a bad end through putting his money into a wildcat scheme. One day a man appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap who had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into Derby on the Red Arrow. It is easy enough, of course, to buy cocaine in Sneinton, and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is always some spy who betrays the plan to the bus driver. It is said that this is often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the hands of a large syndicate, who do not want competition. The man, however, swore that there was no danger. He knew a way of getting cocaine direct from Birmingham, not through the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch with Pinchbeck through a young artist, a student at Nottingham Trent, who was going to put four thousand pounds into the scheme if Pinchbeck would put six thousand. For this they could buy ten pounds of cocaine, which would be worth a small fortune in Derby.

The man had a tremendous struggle to get the money from between old Pinchbeck's claws. Six thousand pounds was not much--he had more than that sewn into the mattress in his room--but it was agony for him to part with a penny. The student and the man were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty thousand pounds' profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk the money. He used to sit in a comer with his head in his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony, and often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he couldn't do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed and handed over six thousand pounds.

The man delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not surprising after the fuss Pinchbeck had made, the affair had been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.

Pinchbeck and the student were in agonies. The police were downstairs, working their way up and searching every room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table, with no place to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. The student was for throwing the stuff out of the window, but Pinchbeck would not hear of it. Charlie told me that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet from Pinchbeck he clasped it to his breast and struggled like a madman, although he was seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

At last, when the police were searching only one floor below, somebody had an idea. A man on Pinchbeck's floor had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off as face-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine substituted, and the tins were put openly on Pinchbeck's table, as though there there were nothing to conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search Pinchbeck's room. They tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins on the table.

'Ay up,' he said, 'have a look at those tins. I hadn't noticed them. What's in them, eh?'

'Face-powder,' said the student as calmly as he could manage. But at the same instant Pinchbeck let out a loud groaning noise, from alarm, and the police became suspicious immediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling it, the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Pinchbeck and the student began swearing on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men were arrested and led off to Sneinton Police Station on the Dale, followed by half the quarter.

At the station, Pinchbeck and the student were interrogated by the Police Detective while a tin of the cocaine was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Pinchbeck made was beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the student all at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen almost burst with laughing at him.

After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a note from the analyst. He was laughing.

'This is not cocaine, sir,' he said.

'What, not cocaine?' said the Police Detective. ‘then--what is it, then?'

'It is face-powder.'

Pinchbeck and the student were released at once, entirely exonerated but very angry. The man had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out that he had played the same trick on two other people in the quarter.

The student was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four thousand pounds, but poor old Pinchbeck was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all that day and half the night they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes yelling out at the top of his voice:

'Six thousand pounds! That’s my fee for writing Down and Out in Paris and Sneinton! Six thousand pounds!'

Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead--of a broken heart, Charlie said.

Chapter XXII

For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Nottingham potwash. When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising is why this life goes on--what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a potwasher’s life.

I think one should start by saying that a potwash is one of the slaves of the modem world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Nottingham for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a potwash; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If potwashers thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.

The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary--we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a potwasher’s work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering.

Is a potwasher’s work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a potwash. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.

As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation--whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.

Similarly with the potwasher. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa in West Bridgford. Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, potwasher might work six or eight hours a day instead often or fifteen.

Suppose it is granted that a potwasher’s work is more or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people -- comfortably situated people -- do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good--for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

'We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the flu, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Biennales, sweat and be damned to you.'

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like student and townie. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line 'NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU'AUX FENESTRES' by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

To sum up. A potwash is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the potwash because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a potwasher’s life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's head by working in an hotel.

Chapter XXI

This life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight increase of work as more customers came to the restaurant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to find time to change lodgings--or, for that matter, to get my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress completely. After ten days I managed to find a free quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London asking him if he could get me a job of some sort--anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years. There was a girl in a pub near St. Stephen’s Road who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that she had not been farther than the street corner for several months. She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Nottingham.

After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Richard, who skulked persistently. The quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours' one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few minutes. 'Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). 'Get it down yourself, you old whore,' I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.

We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of quarrels--whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor, where she was bound to trip over it.

'Now, you cow,' I said, 'move it yourself.'

Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has upon one's manners.

After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy and her artistic nature, and she and I were not on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and Boris and Richard were not on speaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that the tetes a tetes of working hours did not count between times; but we had called each other things too bad to be forgotten--and besides, there were no between times. Richard grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly--from a sense of duty, he said. He called the rest of us blackleg -- when we would not join with him in stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged upon a member of the artscene.

The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen doorway jeering at us for working too hard:

'Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the customers? THEY don't know what's going on. What is restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you come back by another door -- with the same chicken. That is restaurant work,' etc.

And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the CCAN Bistro was actually a success. For the first few days all our customers were artists, friends of the curator, and these were followed by Arts Council Officers and other funders -- no members of the public. Then one night there was tremendous excitement, because our first member of the public had arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked his thumb over his shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:

'Sh! Attention, a local!'

A moment later the curator's wife came and whispered:

'Attention! A local. See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables.'

While the member of the public ate, the curator’s wife stood behind the cast of the door by Rachel Whiteread and watched the expression of his face. Next night the member of the public came back with two other members of the public. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be frequented only by artists. Probably part of the reason for our success was that the curator, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that the public know good food when they see it. Or perhaps we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Nottingham standards; in which case the bad ones must be past imagining.

In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say that there was a job he could get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure after CCAN. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my passage – just enough for a National Express Fun Fare, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one day's notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the curator, for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty pounds short. However he stood me a glass of Courvoisier '48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent potwash, in my place, and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two first-rate people in the kitchen, the potwashers’ work had been cut down to fifteen hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.

Chapter XX

The curator had engaged me as kitchen potwash; that is, my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as usual, five hundred pounds a month and food, but I had no free day and no fixed working hours. At the Hotel X I had seen catering at its best, with unlimited money and good organization. Now, at the CCAN Bistro, I learned how things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is worth describing, for there are hundreds of similar restaurants in Nottingham, and every visitor feeds in one of them occasionally.

I should add, by the way, that CCAN Bistro was not the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than twenty-five pounds, and we were picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the minimalist decorations – designer wallpaper, electric lights done up as a Martin Creed installation, Grayson Perry pottery, even a Rachel Whiteread cast of a door where the door should have been -- and the curator and the head waiter were ex-Royal Academy, and many of the customers were artists and lecturers. In short, we were decidedly chic.

Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty. For this is what our service arrangements were like.

The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and half this space was taken up by the stoves and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of reach, and there was only room for one dustbin. This dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of trampled food.

For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without ovens, and all joints had to be sent out to the bakery.

There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats.

There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up had to be heated in pans, and, as there was no room for these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of the plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with soft soap and the hard Lace Market water, meant scraping the grease off with old copies of Arts Monthly.

We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each one as soon as it was done with, instead of leaving them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an hour a day.

Owing to some scamping of expense in the Martin Creed installation, the electric light usually fused at eight in the evening. The curator would only allow us three candles in the kitchen, and the cook said three were unlucky, so we had only two.

Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from Delilah’s near by, and our dustbin and brooms from the Broadway. After the first week a quantity of linen did not come back from the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in trouble with the inspector of labour, who had discovered that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had several private interviews with the curator, who, I believe, was obliged to bribe him. The utility companies were still charging us, and when the gas board found that we would buy them off with aperitifs, they came every morning. We were in debt at the grocery, and credit would have been stopped, only the grocer's wife (a moustachio'd woman of sixty) had taken a fancy to Richard, who was sent every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour every day haggling over vegetables at Victoira Centre Market, to save a few pence.

These are the results of starting a restaurant on insufficient capital. And in these conditions the cook and I were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and would later on be serving a hundred. From the first day it was too much for us. The cook's working hours were from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the morning till half past twelve the next morning--seventeen and a half hours, almost without a break. We never had time to sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not to catch the last tram home, worked from eight in the morning till two the next morning--eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in the arts.

Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hotel Deux seem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove myself out of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed, hurried up to the Wheat Cross and fought for a place on the tram. By seven I was in the desolation of the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones and fishtails littered on the floor, and a pile of plates, stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I could not start on the plates yet, because the water was cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready. Also, there were always several copper saucepans to clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a potwashers life. They have to be scoured with sand and bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art of making them has been lost and they are gradually vanishing from Nottingham kitchens, though one can still buy them second-hand.

When I had begun on the plates the cook would take me away from the plates to begin skinning onions, and when I had begun on the onions the curator would arrive and send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back with the cabbages the curator’s wife would tell me to go to some shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by the time I came back there would be more vegetables waiting, and the plates were still not done. In this way our incompetence piled one job on another throughout the day, everything in arrears.

Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we were working fast, and no one lost his temper. The cook would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say did I not think Tolstoy was stunning, and sing in a fine soprano voice as she minced beef on the board. But at ten the waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which they had early, and at eleven the first customers would be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry and bad temper. There was not the same furious rushing and yelling as at the Hotel Deux, but an atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It was unbearably cramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on them. The cook's vast buttocks banged against me as she moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders streamed from her:

'Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you not to bleed the beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink! Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What have you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those potatoes alone. Didn't I tell you to skim the bouillon? Take that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil over! Now get to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this plate clean? Wipe it on your apron. Put that salad on the floor. That's right, put it where I'm bound to step in it! Look out, that pot's boiling over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one. Put this on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don't waste time, throw them on the floor. Tread them in. Now throw down some sawdust; this Hoor's like a skating-rink. Look, you fool, that steak's burning! My God, why did they send me an idiot for a potwash? Who are you talking to? Do you realize that my aunt was a Russian countess?' etc. etc. etc.

This went on till three o'clock without much variation, except that about eleven the cook usually had a panic attack and a flood of tears. From three to five was a fairly slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy, and I was working my fastest, for there was a pile of dirty plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or partly done, before dinner began. The washing up was doubled by the primitive conditions — a cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths, and a sink that got blocked once in an hour. By five the cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having eaten or sat down since seven. We used to collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a bottle of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said in the morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during the day.

At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again, and now worse than before, because everyone was tired out. The cook had a panic attack at six and another at nine; they came on so regularly that one could have told the time by them. She would flop down on the dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that never, no, never had she thought to come to such a life as this; her nerves would not stand it; she had studied music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to support, etc. etc. At another time one would have been sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering voice merely infuriated us. Richard used to stand in the doorway and mimic her weeping. The curator’s wife nagged, and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules shirked his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the larger share of the tips. Only the second day after the restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over a two-pound tip, and the cook and I had to separate them. The only person who never forgot his manners was the curator. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he had no work to do, for it was his wife who really managed things. His sole job, besides commisioning the artists, was to stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking gentlemanly, and he did that to perfection.

The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner between ten and eleven o'clock. At midnight the cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow it under her clothes, and make off, whimpering that these hours would kill her and she would give notice in the morning. Richard also left at midnight, usually after a dispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two. Between twelve and half past I did what I could to finish the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off the plates with table-napkins. As for the dirt on the floor, I let it lie, or swept the worst of it out of sight under the stoves.

At half past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. The curator would stop me as I went down the alley-way past the bar. 'But my dear boy, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of accepting this glass of brandy.'

He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a potwash. He treated all of us like this. It was our compensation for working seventeen hours a day.

As a rule the last tram was almost empty--a great advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by half past one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I could have slept on cobblestones at that time.

Chapter IXX

One day, when we had been at the Hotel Deux five or six weeks, Boris disappeared without notice. In the evening I found him waiting for me on Mansfield Road. He slapped me gaily on the shoulder.

'Free at last, my friendI! You can give notice in the morning. CCAN opens tomorrow.'

'Tomorrow?'

'Well, possibly we shall need a day or two to arrange things. But, at any rate, no more Hotel Deux! We are up and coming, my friend! My tail coat is out of pawn already.'

His manner was so hearty that I felt sure there was something wrong, and I did not at all want to leave my safe and comfortable job at the hotel. However, I had promised Boris, so I gave notice, and the next morning at seven went down to CCAN. It was locked, and I went in search of Boris, who had once more bolted from his lodgings and taken a room in Lucia the producer’s house. I found him asleep, together with a girl whom he had picked up the night before, and who he told me was 'of a very sympathetic temperament.' As to the restaurant, he said that it was all arranged; there were only a few little things to be seen to before we opened.

At ten I managed to get Boris out of bed, and we unlocked the restaurant. At a glance I saw what the 'few little things' amounted to. It was briefly this: that the alterations had not been touched since our last visit. The stoves for the kitchen had not arrived, the water and electricity had not been laid on, and there was all manner of painting, polishing and carpentering to be done. Nothing short of a miracle could open the restaurant within ten days, and by the look of things it might collapse without even opening. It was obvious what had happened. The curator was short of money, and he had engaged the staff (there were four of us) in order to use us instead of workmen. He would be getting our services almost free, for waiters are paid no wages, and though he would have to pay me, he would not be feeding me till the restaurant opened. In effect, he had swindled us of several hundred pounds by sending for us before the restaurant was open. We had thrown up a good job for nothing.

Boris, however, was full of hope. He had only one idea in his head, namely, that here at last was a chance of being a waiter and wearing a tail coat once more. For this he was quite willing to do ten days' work unpaid, with the chance of being left jobless in the end. 'Patience!' he kept saying. 'That will arrange itself. Wait till the restaurant opens, and we'll get it all back. Patience,my friend.’

We needed patience, for days passed and the restaurant did not even progress towards opening. We cleaned out the cellars, fixed the shelves, distempered the walls, polished the woodwork, whitewashed the ceiling, stained the floor; but the main work, the plumbing and gas-fitting and electricity, was still not done, because the curator could not pay the bills. Evidently he was almost penniless, for he refused the smallest charges, and he had a trick of swiftly disappearing when asked for money. His blend of shiftiness and aristocratic manners made him very hard to deal with. Melancholy interns came looking for him at all hours, and by instruction we always told them that he was at the Venice Biennale, or Documenta, or some other place that was safely distant. Meanwhile, I was getting hungrier and hungrier. I had left the hotel with thirty pounds, and I had to go back immediately to a diet of dry bread. Boris had managed in the beginning to extract an advance of sixty pounds from the curator, but he had spent half of it, in redeeming his waiter's clothes, and half on the girl of sympathetic temperament. He borrowed three pounds a day from Jules, the second waiter, and spent it on bread. Some days we had not even money for tobacco.

Sometimes the cook came to see how things were getting on, and when she saw that the kitchen was still bare of pots and pans she usually wept. Richard, the second waiter, refused steadily to help with the work. He was a Live Artist, a sharp-featured fellow in jogging suit trousers, and very talkative; he had been a medical student, but had abandoned his training for lack of money. He had a taste for talking while other people were working, and he told me all about himself and his ideas. It appeared that he was a PhD student and had various strange theories (he could prove to you by figures that it was wrong to work), and he was also, like most Live Artists, passionately proud. Proud and lazy men do not make good waiters. It was Richard's dearest boast that once when a customer in a restaurant had insulted him, he had poured a plate of hot soup down the customer's neck, and then walked straight out without even waiting to be sacked.

As each day went by Richard grew more and more enraged at the trick the curator had played on us. He had a spluttering, oratorical way of talking. He used to walk up and down shaking his fist, and trying to incite me not to work:

'Put that brush down, you fool! You and I belong to proud races; we don't work for nothing, like these damned students. I tell you, to be cheated like this is torture to me. There have been times in my life, when someone has cheated me even of a commission or not invited me to a private view, when I have vomited--yes, vomited with rage.

'Besides, don't forget that I'm a Live Artist. Did any man alive ever see me working when I could avoid it? No. And not only I don't wear myself out working, like you other fools, but I steal, just to show my independence. Once I was in an arts centre where the curator thought he could treat me like a dog. Well, in revenge I found out a way to steal milk from the milk-cans and seal them up again so that no one should know. I tell you I just swilled that milk down night and morning. Every day I drank four litres of milk, besides half a litre of cream. The curator was at his wits' end to know where the milk was going. It wasn't that I wanted milk, you understand, because I hate the stuff; it was principle, just principle. So I started to a make work with the milk”

'Well, after three days I began to get dreadful pains in my belly, and I went to the doctor. "What have you been eating?" he said. I said: "I drink four litres of milk a day, and half a litre of cream." "Four litres!" he said. "Then stop it at once. You'll burst if you go on." "What do I care?" I said. "With me principle is everything. I shall go on drinking that milk, even if I do burst."

'Well, the next day the curator caught me stealing milk. "You're sacked," he said; "you leave at the end of the week." "Sorry Sir," I said, "I shall leave this morning." "No, you won't," he said, "I can't spare you till Saturday." "Very well," I thought to myself, "we'll see who gets tired of it first." And then I set to work to smash the crockery. I broke nine plates the first day and thirteen the second; after that the curator was glad to see the last of me. So I started to make work with plates.”

“I love process... it’s the best part of my practice'

Ten days passed. It was a bad time. I was absolutely at the end of my money, and my rent was several days overdue. We loafed about the dismal empty restaurant, too hungry even to get on with the work that remained. Only Boris now believed that the restaurant would open. He had set his heart on being the Head Waiter, and he invented a theory that the curator’s money was tied up in shares and he was waiting a favourable moment for selling. On the tenth day I had nothing to eat or smoke, and I told the curator that I could not continue working without an advance on my wages. As usual, the curator promised the advance, and then, according to his custom, vanished. I walked part of the way home, but I did not feel equal to a scene with Madame F. over the rent, so I passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable--the arm of the seat cuts into your back--and much colder than I had expected. There was plenty of time, in the long boring hours between dawn and work, to think what a fool I had been to deliver myself into the hands of these artists.

Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently the curator had come to an understanding with the Arts Council, for he arrived with money in his pockets, set the alterations going, and gave me my advance. Boris and I bought macaroni and a piece of horse's liver, and had our first hot meal in ten days.

The workmen were brought in and the alterations made, hastily and with incredible shoddiness. The tables, for instance, were to be covered with baize, but when the curator found that baize was expensive he bought instead disused army blankets, smelling incorrigibly of sweat. The table cloths (they were white, to go with the minimalist decorations) would cover them, of course. On the last night we were at work till two in the morning, getting things ready. The crockery did not arrive till eight, and, being new, had all to be washed. The cutlery did not arrive till the next morning, nor the linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery with a shirt of the curator's and an old pillowslip belonging to the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Richard was skulking, and the curator and his wife sat in the bar with a dun and some artist friends, drinking success to the new arts centre The cook was in the kitchen with her head on the table, crying, because she was expected to cook for fifty people, and there were not pots and pans enough for ten. About midnight there was a fearful interview with some interns, who came intending to seize eight copper saucepans which the curator had obtained on credit. Apparently it was an installation by Subodh Gupta that he’d borrowed from the Baltic. They were bought off with half a bottle of brandy.

Richard and I missed the last tram home and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant. The first thing we saw in the morning were two large rats sitting on the kitchen table, eating from a ham that stood there. It seemed a bad omen, and I was surer than ever that CCAN would turn out a failure.

Chapter XVIII

Charlie told us a good story one Saturday night in Gustos. Try and picture him -- drunk, but sober enough to talk consecutively. He bangs on the zinc bar and yells for silence:

'Silence, Ladies and Gentlemen -- silence, I implore you! Listen to this story, that I am about to tell you. A memorable story, an instructive story, one of the souvenirs of a refined and civilized life. Silence, Ladies and Gentlemen!

'It happened at a time when I was hard up. You know what that is like -- how damnable, that a man of refinement should ever be in such a condition. My money had not come from home; I had pawned everything, and there was nothing open to me except to work, which is a thing I will not do. I was living with a girl at the time--Yvonne her name was--a great half-witted peasant girl like Azaya there, with yellow hair and fat legs. The two of us had eaten nothing in three days. My God, what sufferings! The girl used to walk up and down the room with her hands on her belly, howling like a dog that she was dying of starvation. It was terrible.

'But to a man of intelligence nothing is impossible. I propounded to myself the question, "What is the easiest way to get money without working?" And immediately the answer came: "To get money easily one must be a woman. Has not every woman something to sell?" And then, as I lay reflecting upon the things I should do if I were a woman, an idea came into my head. I remembered the Government maternity hospitals -- you know the Government maternity hospitals? They are places where women who are pregnant are given meals free and no questions are asked. It is done to encourage childbearing. Any woman can go there and demand a meal, and she is given it immediately.

'"My God!" I thought, "if only I were a woman! I would eat at one of those places every day. Who can tell whether a woman is pregnant or not, without an examination?"

'I turned to Yvonne. "Stop that insufferable bawling." I said, "I have thought of a way to get food."

'"How?" she said.

'"It is simple," I said. "Go to the Government maternity hospital. Tell them you are pregant and ask for food. They will give you a good meal and ask no questions."

'Yvonne was appalled. "But my God," she cried, "I am not pregnant!"

'"Who cares?" I said. "That is easily remedied. What do you need except a cushion--two cushions if necessary? It is an inspiration from heaven, me duck. Don't waste it."

'Well, in the end I persuaded her, and then we borrowed a cushion and I got her ready and took her to the maternity hospital. They received her with open arms. They gave her cabbage soup, a ragout of beef, a puree of potatoes, bread and cheese and beer, and all kinds of advice about her baby. Yvonne gorged till she almost burst her skin, and managed to slip some of the bread and cheese into her pocket for me. I took her there every day until I had money again. My intelligence had saved us.

'Everything went well until a year later. I was with Yvonne again, and one day we were walking down the Boulevard Port Royal, near the barracks. Suddenly Yvonne's mouth fell open, and she began turning red and white, and red again.

'"My God!" she cried, "look at that who is coming! It is the nurse who was in charge at the maternity hospital. I am ruined!"

'"Quick!" I said, "run!" But it was too late. The nurse had recognized Yvonne, and she came straight up to us, smiling. She was a big fat woman with a gold pince-nez and red cheeks like the cheeks of an apple. A motherly, interfering kind of woman.

'"I hope you are well, me duck?" she said kindly. "And your baby, is he well too? Was it a boy, as you were hoping?"

'Yvonne had begun trembling so hard that I had to grip her arm. "No," she said at last.

'"Ah, then, obviously, it was a girl?"

'Thereupon Yvonne, the idiot, lost her head completely. "No," she actually said again!

'The nurse was taken aback. "How!" she exclaimed, "neither a boy nor a girl! But how can that be?"

'Go figure, Ladies and Gentlemen, it was a dangerous moment. Yvonne had turned the colour of a beetroot and she looked ready to burst into tears; another second and she would have confessed everything. Heaven knows what might have happened. But as for me, I had kept my head; I stepped in and saved the situation.

'"It was twins," I said calmly.

'"Twins!" exclaimed the nurse. And she was so pleased that she took Yvonne by the shoulders and embraced her on both cheeks, publicly.

'Yes, twins...'

Chapter XVII

With thirty pounds a week to spend on drinks I could take part in the social life of the quarter. We had some jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in the little pub at the foot of the Hill, The Moot Inn.

The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was packed with twenty people, and the air dim with smoke. The noise was deafening, for everyone was either talking at the top of his voice or singing. Sometimes it was just a confused din of voices; sometimes everyone would burst out together in the same song – ‘Is this the way to Amarillo’, or ‘the Birdie song’, or something by Akon, or 'Agadoo’. Azaya, a great clumping peasant girl who worked fourteen hours a day in a glass factory, sang a song, ‘I would walk ten thousand miles.' Her friend Marinette, a thin, dark Gorsican girl of obstinate virtue, tied her knees together and danced the Maccarena. The old Rougiers wandered in and out, cadging drinks and trying to tell a long, involved story about someone who had once cheated them over a bedstead. R., cadaverous and silent, sat in his comer quietly boozing. Charlie, drunk, half danced, half staggered to and fro with a glass of sham absinthe balanced in one fat hand, pinching the women's breasts and declaiming poetry. People played darts and diced for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the girls to the bar and shook the dice-box against their bellies, for luck. Madame F. stood at the bar rapidly pouring wine through the pewter funnel, with a wet dishcloth always handy, because every man in the room tried to make love to her. Two children, bastards of big Louis the bricklayer, sat in a comer sharing a glass of coke. Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable set of people.

For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about midnight there was a piercing shout of 'Citizens!' and the sound of a chair falling over. A blond, red-faced workman had risen to his feet and was banging a bottle on the table. Everyone stopped singing; the word went round, 'Sh! The Beast is starting!' Beeston was a strange creature, a Sneinton woodsman who worked steadily all the week and drank himself into a kind of paroxysm on Saturdays. He had lost his memory and could not remember anything before the Falklands War, he wasn't there he had just seen it on TV, and he would have gone to pieces through drink if Madame F. had not taken care of him. On Saturday evenings at about five o'clock she would say to someone, 'Catch the Beast before he spends his wages,' and when he had been caught she would take away his money, leaving him enough for one good drink. One week he escaped, and, rolling blind drunk in Sneinton Market, was run over by a car and badly hurt.

The queer thing about Beeston was that, though he was a liberal leftie when sober, he turned violently patriotic when drunk. He started the evening with good proletariat principles, but after four or five pints he was a rampant chauvinist, denouncing benefit cheats, challenging all foreigners to fight, and, if he was not prevented, throwing bottles. It was at this stage that he made his speech--for he made a patriotic speech every Saturday night. The speech was always the same, word for word. It ran:

'Citizens of Sneinton, are there any Englishmen here? If there are any Englishmen here, I rise to remind them--to remind them in effect, of the glorious days of the Falklands war. When one looks back upon that time of comradeship and heroism--one looks back, in effect, upon that time of comradeship and heroism. When one remembers the heroes who are dead—one remembers, in effect, the heroes who are dead. Citizens of Sneinton, I was wounded at the Battle of Goose Green --'

Here he partially undressed and showed the wound he had received at Goose Green. Although he was not there because he was a toddler and had received it from his lathe. There were shouts of applause. We thought nothing in the world could be funnier than this speech of Beeston's. He was a well-known spectacle in the quarter; people used to come in from other pubs to watch him when his fit started.

The word was passed round to bait the Beast. With a wink to the others someone called for silence, and asked him to sing the National Anthem. He sang it well, in a fine bass voice, with patriotic gurgling noises deep down in his chest when he came to ‘Send her victorious!’ Veritable tears rolled down his cheeks; he was too drunk to see that everyone was laughing at him. Then, before he had finished, two strong workmen seized him by either arm and held him down, while Azaya shouted, ‘Vive la France!' just out of his reach. Furex's face went purple at such infamy. Everyone in the pub began shouting together, ‘Vive la France!’ while Beeston struggled to get at them. But suddenly he spoiled the fun. His face turned pale and doleful, his limbs went limp, and before anyone could stop him he was sick on the table. Then Madame F. hoisted him like a sack and carried him up to bed. In the morning he reappeared quiet and civil, and bought a copy of the Guardian.

The table was wiped with a cloth, Madame F. brought more litre bottles and loaves of bread, and we settled down to serious drinking. There were more songs. An itinerant singer came in with his banjo and performed for five-pence pieces. An Arab and a girl from the bar down the street did a dance, the man wielding a painted wooden phallus the size of a rolling-pin. There were gaps in the noise now. People had begun to talk about their love-affairs, and the war, and fishing in the Trent and the best way to cheat unemployment benefits and to tell stories. Charlie, grown sober again, captured the conversation and talked about his soul for five minutes. The doors and windows were opened to cool the room. The street was emptying, and in the distance one could hear the lonely milk float thundering down the Carlton Road. The air blew cold on our foreheads, and the coarse African wine still tasted good: we were still happy, but meditatively, with the shouting and hilarious mood finished.

By one o'clock we were not happy any longer. We felt the joy of the evening wearing thin, and called hastily for more bottles, but Madame F. was watering the wine now, and it did not taste the same. Men grew quarrelsome. The girls were violently kissed and hands thrust into their bosoms and they made off lest worse should happen. Big Louis, the bricklayer, was drunk, and crawled about the floor barking and pretending to be a dog. The others grew tired of him and kicked at him as he went past. People seized each other by the arm and began long rambling confessions, and were angry when these were not listened to. The crowd thinned. Manuel and another man, both gamblers, went across to Spice Arena, where card-playing went on till daylight. Charlie suddenly borrowed thirty pounds from Madame F. and disappeared, probably to Bubbles Spa. Men began to empty their glasses, call briefly, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!' and go off to bed.

By half past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating. One's head had swollen up like a balloon, the floor rocked, one's tongue and lips were stained purple. At last it was no use keeping it up any longer. Several men went out into the yard behind the pub and were sick. We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours.

Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in Sneinton, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.