How to remain
thin. Abstain. Abstain from eating
food. Calories kill
the fat rats first. If she could say No
and balance Belgian truffles
on her tongue briefly before spitting
them out, she might remain. Live
long. Enjoy fruition. By shunning urges,
she could linger-dainty as a colt's
foot-deploying her charms raw,
dogtrotting a straddled chocolate Arabian
through mazes of lane. She could retire
to her body.

Alas, ankles thicken, braids recede,
the old mare conjured whenever she dare 
to look. Fight back. She may be forced to
cover the grey, yellow, but refuses to swallow
diet pills. Amphetamines in the olden days.

Dinner in the garbage rouses niggles of guilt.
She snuffles it out before Buddy can,
barfing rather than blowing
calories on fusty pizza
or molding, olive oil-sopped arugula.

Hooka squats on carpet, Buddha-esque.
Undulating spirals of sapphire
smoke hula up her nose. That buzz.
That buzz that slows your blood,

calls you back to bed like a lover.
Soothes your inner asshole.
B.C. bud. Best bud
in the world. Worth risking jail for.

High-resolution satellite images.
Narcs' warrant executed Tuesday.
Grow-op raided Wednesday.
Dozens of firearms. Five thousand plants.

Big bust for a small town, says Constable Cook.
For export, for sure. Cultivation facilities dismantled.
Straight people relieved. Green party over,
but Zoe cried. It was the best job ever.

Dope dealers pay well. Her boyfriend
sold product at school. Their responsibilities
included digging a tunnel under the border,
blaming black fingernails and muddy jeans
on dirt biking at the gravel pit.

Parents were shocked. We thought she was
on MSN, chatting. We thought he was
on the Internet, with her, boy's father chiding,
it's APPLEton, son, not Marijuanaton.

Behind a ribbon of evening mist, a chill sky distills,
and a melody of far waterfalls like ten silk strings
comes to my pillow to tug my feelings,
keeping me awake in sorrow past midnight.

Xue Tao

Someone took a picture of my left hand

that I found quite by chance

on a webpage.

Sinews and eczema

pressed fabulously on rosewood;

a chord I thought

quite beyond me,

but no.

Just to also say...

For Lisa

Just to say... 
Your reading tonight 
hit me in the solar plexus 
an intersection of bright sun 
and devastating truth. 

And just to say that 
fear of flying is fear of falling 
that striding into the road has its perils 
but there is space there 
and there is lift in the air 
and in surprising moments - 
in a quiet coffee house, perhaps - 
spirits soar.

         It was a watermelon afternoon.

         A thunderstorm had come and gone,

         And now the sky was blue again.

         Tommy and I were sprawling on the grass.

         The garden was abuzz with bees,

         Drunk on the nectar and the sun.

         One zoomed too close,

         And Tommy swatted it away.

         “I hate these stupid bees!” I heard him say.

         I raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And why is that?”

         “Because they sting and hurt us! Bees are bad!”

         “It’s true,” I said, “they could be quite annoying.

         But actually they aren’t bad or good.

         They are important, though.

         See how they fly from tree to tree?

         Well, what they do is carry pollen

         That turns the flowers into fruit.

         And what about the honey?

         You do like honey?”

         Tommy nodded. “Yes.

         But we are more important than the bees!

         We make the trees!”

         I smiled. “Well, not exactly.

         Only a tree can make another tree.”

         He frowned, and so I quickly added,

         “But we can help the trees. By planting seeds.”

Tommy perked up.

“But only trees can make the seeds,” I said.

He hung his head – then brightened up again.

“But we are more important than the trees!

We water them. Without us, the trees will die.”

“Yeah, well,” said I.

“The trees are mostly watered by the rain.”

“Oh,” Tommy said.

“Still, we can help,” I thought it best to add.

“By watering the trees when there’s no rain.”

He shrugged.        

I should have let it go at that.

But now I was well into the subject:

“See, if there were no people in the world,

The rain would still keep falling.

The flowers and the trees would still keep growing.

The bees would keep on spreading their pollen.

Nature can manage very well without us.

All we can do is keep out of its way.

And maybe help from time to time…”

I stopped.

I thought that summed it up quite nicely.

But when the silence grew too long,

I turned to look at Tommy.

He was crying.

I moved a little closer.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Well…” Tommy sniffled, “well, who needs us then?

What are we here for?”

This time I chose my words before I spoke:

“You know what I think?

I think we’re here for one another.

That’s right. We need each other, don’t we?

To help each other grow, to love each other,

To keep each other company… You know?

Us human beans, we‘ve got to stick together. OK?”

I put an arm around his shoulder. “OK?”

He shrugged.

“OK,” he finally said.

I took a breath and looked around the garden.

The trees were still.

The bees had gone somewhere.

A sudden chill was in the twilight air,

And shadows where none had been before.

We sat in silence for a little while…

“Who wants some cookies?”

Tommy looked up at me, eyes open wide.

“Some milk and chocolate cookies, anyone?”

“I’m coming, mom!” he hollered, sprinting for the house.

“Hey, wait for me!” I cried.

But he was gone.

A boy was blowing bubbles       

Perfect little spheres detached themselves from his bubble-stick

And floated off in a play of rainbow colors

Or burst

Raining down upon his face

Yet one bubble stayed and grew

And wouldn’t burst

So the young man continued blowing

Watching it shimmer and expand

And slowly take a woman’s shape

Her bellybutton connected to the bubble-stick

Her breasts and arms and shapely legs growing bigger

More and more breath-taking and life-like

And still she wouldn’t burst but kept on growing

Drawing last drops of air from his lungs

As the man with livid face and bulging eyes running out of breath kept blowing and blowing and still she wouldn’t burst

But suddenly tore off

And floated away and kept on floating receding in the distance

While the man shriveled up and collapsed

Breathless……

THE BALL

         That summer, as usual, little Papa and his parents were staying at their summer-cottage by the Black Sea. Well, actually little Papa and his mom and little Papa’s grandparents were living there all summer long. His dad had to stay in the city for his work, but he came down every weekend. Little Papa and his mom would go to meet him at the train station.

         One day, little Papa’s dad brought him a beach ball. Little Papa had never had a beach ball before. He loved it. It was perfect, white and yellow and blue, and just the right size. He couldn’t wait for the next morning, when he could take it down to the beach and try it out.

         In the morning, they walked down to the beach, little Papa proudly carrying his new ball. Now little Papa understood why it was called a beach ball. It was blue like the water, white like the sand, yellow like the sun. It belonged.

For a while, little Papa and his parents and some of their friends tossed the ball around. Then the grown-ups got tired and went back to their beach-towels.

Little Papa took the ball down to the water. He waded in waste-deep, as far as he was allowed to go by himself. (This was before little Papa had learned to really swim and snorkel and catch crabs with his bare hands.) He stayed there in the warm shallow waters, happily throwing the ball up and trying to catch it, or hugging it with both arms and kicking his legs.

Then the ball slipped out of little Papa’s hands. He tried to grab it, but it was now too far to reach. “My ball, my ball!” cried Little Papa. The grown-ups back on the beach lifted their faces from their card game. His dad came into the water and patted little Papa on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it back,” he said, and dove in.

At first it looked easy. The ball was still just a short swim away. Strangely, though, just as he came within reach, the ball floated a little further away, as if teasing little Papa’s dad, playing a game with him. Still, he was a good strong swimmer, and it would be just a matter of time, just a few more strokes, before he caught up with it. Besides, he knew how disappointed little Papa would be if he came back empty-handed.       

         This went on for quite some time. Little Papa’s dad kept swimming after the ball, and the ball kept floating away, and no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t catch up with it. By now he was getting really tired. When he finally stopped to take a breath, he turned to look back at the beach. The beach was a thin line, unbelievably far, and the people on it were tiny specks. Little Papa’s dad realized he was too exhausted to swim. What’s more, his legs were getting cramps. And cramps are the worst thing that can happen to you when you are in the middle of the sea.

         He started to panic. He suddenly knew with perfect clarity that there was a very good chance he might not make it. Wildly, he began to thrash in the water, looking in all directions for any sign of help. He was lucky. Not too far off, out in the sea, he spotted a fishing boat. “Help! Help!” he shouted. The next thing he knew, two pairs of strong hands were lifting him out of the water and into the boat. He was saved.

         When little Papa’s dad got back to the beach, everyone was very relieved. He had to lie on the warm sand for a long time before he felt himself again. Little Papa had missed all that. He was too deep in his misery over the lost ball. “But where is my ball!” he kept asking his dad. “I want my ball!”

“I’ll get you another ball,” his dad said weakly.

“But I don’t want another ball! I want this one!” cried little Papa.

Then his mom got very angry with little Papa for some reason, and they all went home.

         Years went by. Little Papa became big Papa. He now had a family of his own, and every summer they returned to their little cottage by the Black Sea. One day, as he stood on the beach watching the sunset, he saw something colorful and round bobbing up and down in the water. You will never guess what it was! Believe it or not, it was the beach ball! The same one he had lost years and years before! Papa fished it out of the water, and everything that had happened that long-ago summer day came back to him. Back at the cottage, he gave the ball to his kids and told them this story.

Yep, this would have made a great ending. Unfortunately, this is not what really happened. For one thing, little Papa and his parents moved far, far away, and they never went back to the summer cottage again. And the ball – the ball disappeared for good, wherever it is that things disappear. Of course little Papa had other beach balls after that, but none of them ever came close to the one he had lost.

Here is an interesting thing, though. To this day, little Papa’s dad is very careful of the sea. It is another sea now - an ocean, actually – but he doesn’t trust it anyway. He still likes to swim, but he doesn’t go further out where the water is deep. And when Papa, who is a grown up man now, goes in for a swim, his dad paces the shore, shielding his face against the sun and shouting: “Don’t go too far! That’s quite enough! Come back!”

Papa doesn’t listen though. He waves to his dad and just keeps on swimming, further and further away. 

One man, tired of his empty and pointless existence, heard of a great oracle, a sage who knew the answers to all questions, living atop a lonely mountain. So the man went in search of the oracle. After walking long and hard, at the end of his strength, he finally found the place.

He entered the hut, carrying a gift he had brought for the oracle – a bird in a cage – he thought would provide welcome company for the lonely man.

The oracle was seated on a mat, motionless and silent.

“Greetings, Oh Great Oracle,” said the man. “I have brought you a little gift, a bird, which I humbly beg you to accept.”

The oracle spoke not, nor looked at the proffered cage, but simply gestured for the man to sit down facing him.

“Oh Great Oracle,” began the man. “I have walked long and hard to find you. I have left behind my home, my family, my tasks, for life has grown stale and tepid in my mouth. Tell me, you who know everything: How do I find meaning in life?”

The oracle said not a word.

After a long pause, during which the man uncomfortably tried to glean the Oracle’s intention, he suddenly perked up. “Oh, I see. Just as I thought. I must find the answer within myself, right? Yes… Only how do I look for this answer? This you surely must know.”

Still the oracle was silent. After a yet longer pause, as the man furrowed his brow trying to understand why the oracle refused to answer, he suddenly beamed.

“Ah yes, now I see. What you’ve been trying to tell me all along is that I am asking the wrong questions. Of course, of course… And yet – what then is the right question? Now this you must tell me.”

And still the oracle was silent. The silence stretched on, almost reaching the snapping point. And then, just as the man felt he was on the brink of discovery, the oracle rose from his seat and silently pointed downward.

“What’s that? Ah, you mean if I sit in your place for a while I will know? Well, why not?”

So the man sat on the vacated mat and closed his eyes in anticipation.

The other picked up the cage and went to the door. There he opened the cage and watched the bird fly away.

Then he turned and faced the one sitting on the mat, motionless and silent. “Farewell, Oh Great Oracle,” he said with a smile. And was gone.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism—the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful IN TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant—I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary—and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery—and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a LARGE animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick—one never does when a shot goes home—but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time—it might have been five seconds, I dare say—he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

One summer, when Papa was a little boy, he went on a trip to a city called Leningrad. ‘So what?’ I hear you say. Sure, it would make it much more exciting to write that he went to the jungles of Borneo, or, say, some undiscovered island in the Pacific. But you see, until that time little Papa had never set foot outside of Odessa, the city he lived in. Nowadays, of course, kids of little Papa’s age fly off to Hawaii or Mexico or Florida at the drop of a hat, and think nothing of it. For little Papa, however, going to another city was a big deal indeed. Never mind going to a different country. At that time in Russia, to go abroad you had to get a special permission from the government, and only very important people could get a permission like that.

So in a way, going to another city was exciting enough, a little like going to a different country. Besides, sometimes you can spend a perfectly boring day in the middle of Africa, and have a most thrilling adventure waiting for you right outside your front door.

Their traveling team was made up of five people: Little Papa, his mom, her friend Lusya, Lusya’s son Borya who was a year younger than Papa, and Aunt Linka. They were going to ride the train all night.

As soon as little Papa saw Borya at the train station, he smirked with glee. Borya was a pudgy, freckled-faced mama’s boy who spent hours each day practicing piano – which made him a sissy in little Papa’s books. Borya knew what was coming, and edged closer to his mother, who was having a lively conversation with little Papa’s mom.

 “Well-well,” said little Papa. “If it isn’t the great Shmozart himself. Long time no see, Shmozart. So, Shmozart, how’s your latest symphony coming along?”

Borya tried to look like he was ignoring little Papa, but his trembling lower lip gave him away. Hah, worked every time!

“Hey, Mo-zart, Mozzarella fart, written any masterpieces lately?” little Papa went on with his little routine. Little Papa wasn’t a bully, but he just couldn’t help it: Borya was such an easy target.

Borya looked up at his mother hopefully, but she was too busy chatting to be of any help.

“What’s the matter? Are you deaf like Mozart too?”

“You mean Beethoven,” said Borya quietly.

“What?”

“Beethoven,” repeated Borya more loudly. “He was the deaf one.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” said little Papa. He felt he was losing the advantage. He was clearly out of his musical depths. This called for a new line of attack. A couple of days ago, he had seen this adventure movie, where the hero says to the villain:  “Put up your sword, you wretched vermin! I shall make you pay for this!” Now, that was a great line. Little Papa was dying to try it on someone. Here was his chance. He looked Borya squarely in the eye, put his hand on the hilt of his sword, and opened his mouth – when his mom grabbed him by his sword hand and pulled him along. It was time to board the train.

************

After they had settled in and stowed away their luggage, they headed for the dining car. The train corridor was very narrow, barely enough for two people to squeeze by. A fat woman was walking towards them, with a little blond girl in tow. His mom and the woman met halfway, and after some shuffling and apologizing, they got into a conversation. Meanwhile, little Papa took a better look at the girl –and his heart stopped for a spit second, and then started racing like mad. She had blond silky hair, blue eyes, and a turned up nose. She was everything a girl should be. She was the girl of little Papa’s dreams. 

          The fat woman looked down and beamed at little Papa. “My, what a cute little boy you’ve got there,” she said, and pinched his cheek. Little Papa hated that.

“Cute?” said Mom. “Oh, he’s cute all right.” Then came the punch line: “When he is sleeping with his teeth to the wall.” That’s what she usually said when someone called little Papa cute. Or else she would say: “Who, this ugly little monkey?”

Little Papa, he didn’t know what to think. Actually, he did know. Mom had told him that she only said those things to ward off the evil eye. This meant that when people said nice things about you, you should pretend they are not true, or else something bad would happen to you.

While his mom and the fat lady went on chatting about nothing the way grown-ups do, little Papa kept sneaking glances at the girl. Each time he did that, he saw the girl looking straight back at him. Of course, he immediately looked away to make it very clear he had other, much more important things to do, like stare through the train window – where all he could see was darkness and his own blurry reflection. Finally, the two women said good night and they all went their separate ways. Little Papa saw the fat lady and the girl enter the compartment right next to theirs. Little Papa was in love.

Back in their compartment, they began to settle in for the night. There were five of them and only four bunks. Since Borya was afraid of heights anyway, he was sleeping on the floor. Little Papa was given the choice of the two top bunks. He picked the one on the side of the girl’s compartment. He had a brilliant idea. Chances were, the girl next door was sleeping on the top bunk as well (he couldn’t imagine the fat woman ever making it up the ladder). And chances were, she was on the side facing him, with only a thin wall between them. What he would do, he would send her secret messages by knocking on that wall. Of course, she would know it was him, and then maybe, just maybe, she would knock back. And that would mean that she liked him too.

As soon as little Papa began to hear even breathing and little snores coming form the other bunks, he proceeded with his plan. First he tapped on the wall quietly with his knuckles. Then he held his breath and waited. Nothing, except the creaking and rattling of the moving train. He knocked again, a little louder. And again. And finally he heard an answering knock. Yes! No, wait. Could it be just random noises? He knocked again, to make sure. He heard another knock in reply, a little louder this time. No, this was definitely human knocking. Hurray, it worked!

Little Papa lay there in the dark, knocking and listening. He imagined the girl on the other side, tapping on the wall, thinking of him. This was like those stories he had read, where prisoners talked to each other by tapping on the walls of their cells in a secret code. This was exciting stuff. Little Papa could have gone on all night, but the knocking from the other side was getting a little too loud. Someone might wake up. It was time to stop. He gave one last goodnight knock, and turned over in his bunk.

Little Papa lay awake for a long time, happy in the knowledge that the girl he loved loved him back. Eventually he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew he was standing on the edge of a cliff, with nothing behind him but a long, sheer drop to the jagged rocks below. The enemy, his eyes glinting through the slits in his black mask, was pressing a sword to little Papa’s throat and grinning an evil grin. Little Papa took a desperate step back – and then he was tumbling through the air. Somehow he managed to grab on to the edges of the top bunks. Only one of his feet landed on Aunt Linka, who sat up with a grunt. “Damn it, I think I fell down,” mumbled little Papa, climbed up the ladder and went right back to sleep.

The next morning, he didn’t remember any of this. He only found out what had happened when Aunt Linka told everyone about the frightful shock she had last night, and showed a bruise on her arm to prove it.

***********

         The train was slowing down. They dragged their suitcases into the corridor. The fat lady and the girl were there too. Little Papa tried to catch the girl’s eye, and when he did, he gave her a look filled with meaning, to remind her of their last night’s shared secret. The girl frowned and looked away.

“Good morning,” little Papa’s mom was saying to the fat lady. “Did you sleep well?”

         “Actually, no,” replied the lady sternly. “Someone,” – and she glared down at little Papa – “someone was banging on the wall right next to my ear all night long! I didn’t sleep a wink!”

         Little Papa turned beet-red and stared at his toes. His heart was shattered.

With a grinding of brakes, the train came to a stop. They were in Leningrad.

**************

They were all staying in the apartment of some friends of little Papa’s parents, who were away at their summer cottage. The next morning, after a quick breakfast, they headed out to see the Peterhof. This was where Peter the Great, the emperor of Russia back when Russia still had emperors, had built his grand palace. Oh, the place was grand all right, with all sorts of beautiful buildings, gardens and statues. But best of all were the Joke Fountains. This was a big round area covered with paving stones. If you stepped on a particular stone, a jet of water would come shooting out and spraying everyone nearby. There were lots of kids and even some grown-ups running around and jumping up and down, trying to hit the right stone that would make the water come gushing out. But there were so many people rushing about, so many feet stomping and jumping, that there was absolutely no way to tell when the water would come and from where. That was the beauty of it!

Borya stayed outside: he was afraid to catch a cold. Little Papa jumped right in. At first he tried to guess when the next spray would come. He looked around him to watch the others. He tried stepping now on one stone, now on another, to see is there was some kind of a pattern. But after a while he just gave up and joined the pandemonium of squealing, dripping and delighted kids.  

The sun was hot. The water was cool. Little rainbows formed in the air where the two met. The suspense of now knowing when the water would hit you was delicious. This was heaven!

Eventually, panting and soaking wet, he left the circle and came to take a breather on a bench next to his mom. At first he just sat there and watched the action. Then he noticed a man sitting on the other side of the bench. Something about that man caught little Papa’s eye. Maybe it was the bored expression on his face, in the middle of all the fun that was going on. Or the way his knee kept rising up and down, as if he was playing the piano.

Little Papa leaned over and pretended that he was tying his shoelaces. Out of the corner of his eye, he followed the man’s knee down to his foot – and then he froze! There were pedals hidden under the bench. The man’s foot kept pressing the pedals, sometimes one, sometimes two or three at a time. Little Papa was puzzled at first. He looked up at the fountains. He looked back at the man’s foot. And then it all clicked into place. Every time the man pressed a pedal down here, a jet of water would shoot out over there. The man was controlling the jets! There were no right stones to step on! This was all a set-up!    

Little Papa whirled back to his mom and nudged her with his elbow. In a shocked whisper, he told her what he had seen. His mom leaned over and peeked at the man, who kept raising and lowering his knee with the same bored expression. She leaned back with a sigh. “Well, what do you know,” she said, shaking her head.

“Mom, shouldn’t we tell everyone about this?” whispered little Papa, nodding at all the kids squealing and running through the water jets. “Mom?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said his mom.

He looked again at the man next to him. Well, this would be a perfect time to deliver his line. To stand up, face the man, and exclaim: “Put up your sword, you wretched vermin! I shall make you pay for this!” And then watch him squirm, the lousy cheat. He didn’t do it, though. Somehow his heart wasn’t in it.

As they walked away from the fountains, little Papa kept looking back at the screaming children and the shooting water and the hunched figure on the bench. All the gladness was gone out of him like air from a punctured balloon.

And then he saw something that made him forget all about it. He knew what these things were. He had seen them in pictures and movies about cowboys and Mexican bandits. But he had never seen them in real life before: cactuses! Rows and rows of cactuses all along the sides of the path. Some were tall and spindly, others round and fat. Some looked like big balls, others like Mickey Mouse with ears sticking out on top.

Little Papa thought how cool it would be to take one along and show it to his friends back home. He let the others walk ahead. When he was sure no one was looking, he quickly bent down and tore an ear off a Mickey Mouse. Then he hid it in the first place he could find: down the front of his shirt. Which, if he had only stopped to think, was not such a great idea.

         It took his mom quite a while to pluck all the tiny thorns out of little Papa’s chest and stomach. She threw away the cactus ear, and little Papa wasn’t a bit sorry. In fact, he would have been quite happy not to see another cactus for the rest of his life.

All in all, that day’s disappointments were getting to be a little too much. It didn’t help when, back in the apartment, little Papa lost to Borya in checkers, three games in a row. Little Papa called Borya a fat blob, and was sent to bed without desert. A perfect ending to a perfect day.

***************

         “Why in the world are you taking the raincoat?” little Papa’s mom was asking Lusya. “”It’s a sunny day out there.”

         “Well, you just never know,” replied Lusya with a shrug. In her other hand, she held a bulging handbag. She had been lugging this bag during their entire trip. It contained everything one needed to survive for a week in the snake-infested jungles of the Amazon. Bandages, matches, a flashlight, a roll of toilet paper. Hard-boiled eggs, apple slices and cucumber sandwiches to keep her precious little Borya from starving. Even a kitchen knife, for god’s sake. Because, that’s right, “you just never know”.

         Today, they were going for a walk along the Neva River to look at Leningrad’s famous bridges. Little’s Papa’s mom had already seen the famous bridges before, and so she stayed behind to make supper. They took a bus to the river, and then had a nice enough walk, although little Papa was feeling a little bored with the famous bridges. They all looked pretty much the same to him. He couldn’t even pick on Borya, because Borya was sticking to his mother’s side all the way.   

         As they walked back, heavy drops of rain were starting to fall. Within minutes, it was pouring. With a look of “Well, now you know!”, Lusya produced the raincoat, which she spread over the heads of Borya and little Papa. They all began to trot in the direction of the bus stop.

Little Papa was feeling uncomfortable all hunched over under the raincoat. It was hard to see where he was going. So he slipped out from under it. As he did so, the raincoat fell over Borya’s head, completely covering his face. Borya veered off the path and ran headfirst into an iron lamppost. There was a resounding crack. Borya stood swaying for a moment, then fell over and opened his mouth in a blood-curdling scream. Aunt Linka and Lusya braked to a stop and came rushing back.

         “What happened!” cried Lusya and put her arms around Borya, who was wailing at the top of his lungs.

         Little Papa told her. She scowled at him as if it were his fault, then rummaged in her bag and whipped out the kitchen knife. Little Papa stepped back in alarm, but all she did was press the knife blade against the bump the size of a golf-ball that had sprouted in the middle of Borya’s forehead. “There, there, my sweetie-pie, my precious,“ she crooned. “This will stop the swelling, you’ll see, it will all be better in a moment.” Borya wailed even louder, vainly trying to push the knife away.

         Somehow they made it to the bus stop. The people on the bus stared open-mouthed as the four of them, drenched to the bone, tumbled into their seats. Borya kept screaming non-stop. Lusya was wiping his wet cheeks with toilet paper and waving the knife dangerously close to his nose.

         As they were crossing the road from the bus stop to the apartment, little Papa’s mom happened to look through the window. What she saw made her gasp in shock. In the pouring rain, four figures were running toward the building. First came Linka, pulling little Papa by the hand. They were followed by Borya, who was tripping over the raincoat and wailing so loudly little Papa’s mom could almost hear him through the glass. Last came Lusya, wet hair plastered over her face, shouting at Borya’s back and brandishing the kitchen knife.

         What went through little Papa’s mom’s head, before they all came bursting through the front door, is best left to imagination. 

**************

         They were at the train station again. This time waiting for the train to take them back home. Aunt Linka and little Papa stayed to guard the suitcases, while the others went to the cafeteria to get some sandwiches and water for the road.

         Little Papa looked around the platform. Not far from where they were standing, there was a family of three: father, mother – and a little girl. She had light-brown hair, gray eyes, and dimples in her cheeks. She was everything a girl should be. Little Papa was in love.

         Suddenly little Papa noticed that Aunt Linka wasn’t alone. A tall young man was talking to her. Little Papa moved closer so he could hear better. The young man was smiling, for some reason asking Aunt Linka for her name and phone number. Aunt Linka was blushing, shaking her head and smiling in an embarrassed sort of way.

         Little Papa didn’t like this man. He didn’t like the way he smiled. He was clearly bothering Aunt Linka. Something had to be done. He looked around, but the others were nowhere in sight. It was all up to him. It was now or never.

         He came right up to the young man and took a breath. He placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. Then, in a shaking voice, he said: ““Put up your sword, you wretched vermin! I shall make you pay for this!”

         As soon as the words left his mouth, he couldn’t believe he had actually said it. Apparently, neither could the man. He raised his eyebrows in astonishment. He looked like he was about to say something, but no words came out. He just stared down at little Papa, and little Papa stared up at him, his face bright red, his heart beating hard. Then the young man curved his lips in a thin smile. He shrugged, gave Aunt Linka a wink, and moved away down the platform.

Little Papa couldn’t believe it! He won! He won! It worked!

Aunt Linka looked at the young man’s retreating back with a mixture of relief, and strangely, what looked like regret. She gave a little sigh, then turned to little Papa.

“My hero,” she said, and tousled his hair. 

*************

         In their compartment, little Papa climbed into a top bunk. He lay on his stomach and stared through the window. Houses, lampposts, trees and sky streaked past in a blurry stream. The wheels of the train beat out a soothing, hypnotic rhythm. He closed his eyes, and images came rushing in. A man was playing the organ. Every time he pressed the pedals, jets of multi-colored water came shooting out of the organ pipes. Then he turned, and little Papa saw it was Borya. A horn from growing from the middle of his head. Little Papa ran. Lusya was chasing him through the train corridors, with a sword in one hand and a cucumber sandwich in the other. He jumped from the train and swam through the air in slow motion. There was a river, with a bridge over it. Little Papa began to walk across the bridge. At the other end, the girl of his dreams was waiting for him. She was smiling and holding out a cactus.

            "When daddy was a little boy/ All little boys were good/ And did just what their nurses/ And their parents said they should.// And sometimes when I'm naughty/ He takes me on his knee./ And tells me when he was little,/ how good he used to be."

From a 1900 child’s handkerchief                       

When Papa was a little boy, he had no pets. Not really. He lived with his parents, Ark and Yana, and Grandma Fenya, in a city in Russia, in a large apartment they shared with three other families. When little Papa asked his dad and mom if he could have a dog or a cat, they said, “Of course not, you know we are living in an apartment we have to share with three other families, we have no room for a dog or a cat” – and that was that. 

         And so little Papa had no pets. Unless you count the ants that lived in the windowsill. He played with the ants sometimes. He would lay out little piles of sugar or breadcrumbs, and watch the ants grab the food and drag it into their hole in the windowsill. Or he would pretend the ants were an enemy army, and bomb them from the air with little balls of plasticine. But ants don’t count as pets.

         So, little Papa had no pets. Not really. Well, once his mom brought home a cage with a family of guinea-pigs – a father, a mother, and a baby guinea-pig. Little Papa was very happy. It wasn’t his fault that in Russia, guinea-pigs are called sea-pigs. He felt sorry for the poor sea-pigs, having to live in a cage so far away from their home in the sea. He decided at least to let them swim in the bathtub for a while – starting with the father sea-pig. That didn’t go very well – and the two sea-pigs that survived were eventually given away to someone else.

         Other than that, little Papa had no pets. Not really. The closest he ever came to a pet was a chicken. And this is how it happened.

         That summer, like every other summer, little Papa and his parents went to live in the little summer-house they had next to the Black Sea. One morning, on the way home from the beach, little Papa and his dad took a different road. They passed a big yard with a fence, and inside they saw hundreds and hundreds of baby chickens. Little Papa came closer and saw one tiny baby chicken, fluffy and yellow, who had somehow managed to get out through the fence, and was running around outside. “Oh Papa,” said little Papa to his dad, “can’t we take it home? Please?” His dad looked at the chicken, looked at little Papa, sighed and said, “Well, I guess if we take just this one little chicken, no one will miss him, I guess.” And that is how Tzipka came to live with little Papa.

         Little Papa was very happy. It was almost as good as having a dog. Tzipka followed little Papa everywhere. He would come running when little Papa whistled or called his name. He would let little Papa pick him up, and even sat on his shoulder and pecked him lightly on the ear. Others thought it was very funny. They told little Papa, “This chicken thinks you are his mother.” That made little Papa very proud.

         As the summer went on, Tzipka lost his fluff and turned white. Every day he grew bigger and bigger. His parents would sometimes say, “Look how big and fat your chicken is. What do you think, should we have some chicken soup tomorrow?” They would laugh, which meant this was a joke, but little Papa didn’t think it was that funny.

         With time, though, little Papa began to get tired of Tzipka following him everywhere. Tzipka was no longer fluffy and cute, and he was too big to be picked up. I am sorry to say that sometimes, when little Papa wanted to be alone, he even kicked Tzipka and shouted, “Go away, leave me alone, stop following me!” Tzipka soon learned to keep out of little Papa’s way.

         Then, one night, Tzipka was gone. They found a hole dug in the earth under the box where Tzipka slept, and there were some white feathers scattered on the ground. “It must have been a fox,” little Papa was told. “See, the fox made a hole under the box and dragged your chicken away. Don’t cry. He was too big anyway. It was either this or the soup.”

         Little Papa didn’t cry – because he knew better. He knew it wasn’t a fox. He knew that Tzipka had been hurt by his shouting and kicking, he had probably heard them talking about chicken soup, he had realized little Papa wasn’t his mother, and so he had escaped to the forest, where he would live with other wild chickens and be free.

         Still, little Papa was sorry and sad for a while after that. And he made a promise to himself that when he grew up and had a kid of his own, he would make sure that he would have real pets, instead of just ants, sea-pigs and chickens.

         And that is exactly what happened. Little Papa did grow up, and had not just one but two kids. They live in a big house with a back yard they don’t have to share with anyone. They have a cat, and a dog, and four hens as well. The dog follows big Papa everywhere, but big Papa never kicks him. And he never jokes about making soup out of the hens – at least not where they can hear him.

It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil, everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling. blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn’t call your soul your own when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back answer. When you came to be searched, he fair held you upside down and shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was hell to pay, and if you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. ‘For the love of Christ, mate,’ the old hands advised me, ‘don’t you take it in. You’d get seven days for going into the spike with eightpence!’

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But it is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong moment, and was impounded.

At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself he looked hard at me, and said:

‘You are a gentleman?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor,’ he said, ‘that’s bloody bad luck, that is.’ And thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men refused the bath, and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, the horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reaching to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the diningroom, where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or supper—half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us with three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for the next twelve hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except a tiny barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night’s rest. But I did not get it, for there is always something wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season—a little sacrifice to the gods of spring, perhaps—the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent the night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.

As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall comfortably asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp. Major came marching down the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was Only One tub full of water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.

We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the diningroom to bolt our breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight, so that it was as hard as ship’s bisciut. But we were glad of our tea after the cold, restless night. I do not know what tramps would do without tea, or rather the stuff they miscall tea. It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all evils. Without the half goon or so of it that they suck down a day, I truly believe they could not face their existence.

After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what manner of men we were. It, was an instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles—every kind of malformation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old ‘Daddy’, aged seventy-four, with his truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.

This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The windows were so high up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight o’clock in the morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next meal.

Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back bent like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor. George, a dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the toad. Bill the moocher, the best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar who smelt of beer even after twelve hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints stood him in the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got him seven days. William and, Fred, two young ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled, about an imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities. Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and he was so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major’s step, for smoking though connived at, was officially forbidden.

Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is hard to imagine how they put up with 11. I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp’s evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.

I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o’clock the Tramp Major picked me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the job of helping in the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to be done there, and I was able to make off and hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some workhouse paupers who were skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There was a stove burning there, and comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back numbers of the FAMILY HERALD, and even a copy of RAFFLES from the workhouse library. It was paradise after the spike.

Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the biggest meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice in the year, in the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over the cook set me to do the washing-up, and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of broad and vegetables, were pitched away like rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And while I did so my follow tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in the spike, their bellies half filled with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away from deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The, boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp’s only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time 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. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott’s novels on all his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case—six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.

‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum.’

I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:

‘You don’t want to have any pity on these tramps—scum, they are. You don’t want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum.’

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.

The clock’s hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to see that the hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock’s hands stood at four, and supper was not till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

At last six o’clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion, hungry though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in the spike was up, but we could riot go until the doctor had examined us again, for the authorities have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours this time, and it was ten o’clock before we finally escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hunk of bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the spike and its discipline, This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike, where the game would begin anew.

I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downhearted tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges. Our late companions were scattering north, south, cast and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing, the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we had been packed with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.

‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another—here y’are.’

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.