The whole way through this book I kept thinking it is essentially Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential meets Knut Hamsum’s Hunger. A combination of the culinary scene and dire poverty.
In Paris he worked extremely hard as a dishwasher, and made a bit of money. In London he was much harder up and spent most of his time begging or bouncing around the charitable hostels of London. His experiences are clearly different, but they share a rhythm. Namely the peopl he meets.Orwell humanises the homeless brilliantly. Each person he meets has an interesting side to them. We experience new characters through the eyes of a great author. He almost makes the noble but simple pursuit of a bed each night seem not quite noble, but satisfying. This comes from the way he seems to approach life. He is always open to meeting new people, and experiences a place by getting to know the locals.
Paris
- Loc 173: “Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.”
- Loc 197: “Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences.”
- Loc 201: “A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed ‘Crédit est mort’; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage with big jack-knives;” - Long descriptive sentences
- Loc 208: “Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are tiny, his arms abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby’s. He has a way of dancing and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of life to keep still for an instant.” - very descriptive
- Loc 262: “‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl tried to escape; she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.” - Orwell is quite a dark author
- Loc 281: “I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half.”
- Loc 292: “It was now that my experiences of poverty began—for six francs a day, if not actual poverty, is on the fringe of it.”
- Loc 299: “But of course you dare not admit it—you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual.” - Hard part of poverty
- Loc 328: “It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.” - Nice quote
- Loc 342: “When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.” - No worries beyond tomorrow
- Loc 413: “I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together, playing chess and talking about war and hotels.”
- Loc 458: “Never worry, mon ami. Nothing is easier to get than money.’”
- Loc 487: “‘What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make money out of anything.”
- Loc 630: “I had walked twelve kilometres and had no food for sixty hours.”
- Loc 646: “This morning with five sous, and now look at us.” - Him and Boris worked schemes to get money. Like selling clothes or chasing up debtors
- Loc 767: “The point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of having fed recently.”
- Loc 888: “Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry.” - Got work in a busy hotel restaurant cafe
- Loc 926: “We had the heeltaps of bottles as well,” - Minesweeping
- Loc 934: “I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken and my skull filled with hot cinders. I did not think that I could possibly do a day’s work. And yet, after only an hour in the basement, I found that I was perfectly well.” - Classic tale - Tale as old as time. Reminds me of Kitchen Confidentil
- Loc 1081: “And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafés.” - Random political insights. Very Orwell
- Loc 1089: “Débrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se débrouiller—get it done somehow.”
- Loc 1105: “The dirt in the Hôtel X, as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting.”
- Loc 1121: “The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘une commande’ to him,” - No thought to cleanliness and hygene
- Loc 1256: “I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four francs was wealth. There was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple.”
- Loc 1257: “There was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life of a plongeur.” - His job. Dishwasher
- Loc 1332: “‘Silence, messieurs et dames—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.”
- Loc 1420: “I was absolutely at the end of my money, and my rent was several days overdue.”
- Loc 1422: “Only Boris now believed that the restaurant would open.” - New russian restaurant
- Loc 1441: “I was surer than ever that the Auberge de Jehan Cottard would turn out a failure.”
- Loc 1443: “The patron had engaged me as kitchen plongeur; 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.”
- Loc 1470: “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.”
- Loc 1504: “Tea was what kept us going. We took care to have a”
- Loc 1530: “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.”
- Loc 1577: “life of a Paris plongeur.” - The book up to now
- Loc 1614: “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.” - Fight club like
- Loc 1622: “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.” - Theory for unnecessary slavery e.g. Plongeur
- Loc 1633: “It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.” - Political theory
- Loc 1645: “To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work.”
London
- Loc 1707: “I find this entry in my diary for that day: ‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual difference?’” - Kept a diary
- Loc 1960: “When we had finished bathing, the porter tied our clothes in bundles and gave us workhouse shirts—” - in a spike. A sort of hostel for tramps. He was in the tramp society of London now
- Loc 2108: “The dormitory was a great attic like a barrack room, with sixty or seventy beds in it.” - Salvation army shelter
- Loc 2148: “The beds were not more than two feet apart. About midnight I woke up to find that the man next to me was trying to steal the money from beneath my pillow.” - Mostly horros stories of charity lodgings he stayed in
- Loc 2211: “If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if you’re on the road for the rest of your life.’” - Bozo, an educated man living off street drawings
- Loc 2214: “If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here”’—he tapped his forehead—‘and you’re all right.’” - Bozo. Educated man living off begging and street drawing
- Loc 2245: “He had managed to keep his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read, think, and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.” - Bozo. Mentally free
- Loc 2264: “While I was with Bozo he taught me something about the technique of London begging.”
- Loc 2306: “the absurd English laws about begging.” - Begging illegal so they all find some trade to use as a front for begging
- Loc 2309: “Match-selling and street-singing are simply legalized crimes.” - Begging illegal in England so people use menial things to get around that but still essentially beg
- Loc 2319: “It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.” - Begging
- Loc 2321: “He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor,”
- Loc 2409: “People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty.”
- Loc 2426: “After nine days B.’s two pounds was reduced to one and ninepence.” - I woner if B, with his stable job an steady income, ever had much life experience to compete with Orwell
- Loc 2487: “He had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a twisted leg, his clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between himself and starvation. With all this, he could laugh over the loss of his razor. One could not help admiring him.” - Bozo
- Loc 2631: “to pass the time away I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools.” - Meets lots of people through simple converstion
- Loc 2678: “A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the trampmonster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more or less villainous motive for tramping.” - Tramps dont want to be tramps
- Loc 2692: “if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes.” - Humanising
- Loc 2741: “Each workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be made to do a sound day’s work. The produce of the farm or garden could be used for feeding the tramps,” - Good idea
- Loc 2757: “For the question is, what to do with men who are underfed and idle; and the answer—to make them grow their own food—imposes itself automatically.” - Very good idea
- Loc 2796: “For an unattached man earning two pounds a week, or less, a lodging-house is a great convenience. He could hardly get a furnished room so cheaply, and the lodging-house gives him free firing, a bathroom of sorts, and plenty of society. As for the dirt, it is a minor evil.”
- Loc 2828: “I should like to know people like Mario and Paddy and Bill the moocher, not from casual encounters, but intimately;” - Travel is about people you meet