The Road to Wigan Pier - libcom.org

1 The road to Wigan Pierby George OrwellSTYLED BYLIMPIDSOFTC ontentsPART ONE41 .. 42 .. 183 .. 314 .. 445 .. 686 .. 837 .. 96 PART TWO1098 .. 1099 .. 12410 .. 13911 .. 15312 .. 16713 .. 1962 CONTENTSCONTENTST itle: The road to Wigan PierAuthor: George OrwellIt is a pleasure to acknowledge that the textof this eBook was provided, free of charge, by <ahref= >Project Guten-berg of Australia</a>: eBook No: and packaging of this eBook was by <ahref= >LimpidSoft</a>using the Lexxia scripts, which are free and open-source downloading Lexxia and joining a FreeeBook Movement!

2 3 PART ONE1 THEfirst sound in the mornings was the clumping of themill-girls clogs down the cobbled street. Earlier thanthat, I suppose, there were factory whistles which I was neverawake to hear. My bed was in the right-hand corner on theside nearest the door. There was another bed across the footof it and jammed hard against it (it had to be in that posi-tion to allow the door to open) so that I had to sleep with mylegs doubled up; if I straightened them out I kicked the oc-cupant of the other bed in the small of the back.

3 He was anelderly man named Mr Reilly, a mechanic of sorts and em-ployed on top at one of the coal pits. Luckily he had to goto work at five in the morning, so I could uncoil my legs andhave a couple of hours proper sleep after he was gone. In thebed opposite there was a Scotch miner who had been injuredin a pit accident (a huge chunk of stone pinned him to theground and it was a couple of hours before they could leverit off), and had received five hundred pounds was a big handsome man of forty, with grizzled hair and aclipped moustache, more like a sergeant-major than a miner,4 PART ONE1and he would lie in bed till late in the day, smoking a shortpipe.

4 The other bed was occupied by a succession of com-mercial travellers, newspaper-canvassers, and hire-purchasetouts who generally stayed for a couple of nights. It was adouble bed and much the best in the room. I had slept in itmyself my first night there, but had been manoeuvred out ofit to make room for another lodger. I believe all newcomersspent their first night in the double bed, which was used, soto speak, as bait. All the windows were kept tight shut, witha red sandbag jammed in the bottom, and in the morning theroom stank like a ferret s cage.

5 You did not notice it whenyou got up, but if you went out of the room and came back,the smell hit you in the face with a never discovered how many bedrooms the house con-tained, but strange to say there was a bathroom, dating frombefore the Brookers time. Downstairs there was the usualkitchen living-room with its huge open range burning nightand day. It was lighted only by a skylight, for on one side of itwas the shop and on the other the larder, which opened intosome dark subterranean place where the tripe was blocking the door of the larder there was a shapelesssofa upon which Mrs Brooker, our landlady, lay permanentlyill, festooned in grimy blankets.

6 She had a big, pale yellow,anxious face. No one knew for certain what was the matterwith her; I suspect that her only real trouble was front of the fire there was almost always a line of dampwashing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchentable at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never sawthis table completely uncovered, but I saw its various wrap-pings at different times. At the bottom there was a layer ofold newspaper stained by Worcester Sauce; above that a sheetof sticky white oil-cloth; above that a green serge cloth; abovethat a coarse linen cloth, never changed and seldom taken ONEG enerally the crumbs from breakfast were still on the table atsupper.

7 I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight andwatch their progress up and down the table from day to shop was a narrow, cold sort of room. On the. outsideof the window a few white letters, relics of ancient choco-late advertisements, were scattered like stars. Inside therewas a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe,and the grey flocculent stuff known as black tripe , and theghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. It was the or-dinary tripe and pea shop, and not much else was stockedexcept bread, cigarettes, and tinned stuff.

8 Teas were adver-tised in the window, but if a customer demanded a cup of teahe was usually put off with excuses. Mr Brooker, though outof work for two years, was a miner by trade, but he and hiswife had been keeping shops of various kinds as a side-lineall their lives. At one time they had had a pub, but they hadlost their licence for allowing gambling on the premises. Idoubt whether any of their businesses had ever paid; theywere the kind of people who run a business chiefly in or-der to have something to grumble about.

9 Mr Brooker wasa dark, small-boned, sour, Irish-looking man, and astonish-ingly dirty. I don t think I ever once saw his hands Mrs Brooker was now an invalid he prepared most ofthe food, and like all people with permanently dirty handshe had a peculiarly intimate, lingering manner of handlingthings. If he gave you a slice of bread-and-butter there wasalways a black thumb-print on it. Even in the early morn-ing when he descended into the mysterious den behind MrsBrooker s sofa and fished out the tripe, his hands were al-ready black.

10 I heard dreadful stories from the other lodgersabout the place where the tripe was kept. Blackbeetles weresaid to swarm there. I do not know how often fresh consign-ments of tripe were ordered, but it was at long intervals, for6 PART ONE1 Mrs Brooker used to date events by it. Let me see now, I vehad in three lots of froze (frozen tripe) since that happened, etc. We lodgers were never given tripe to eat. At the timeI imagined that this was because tripe was too expensive; Ihave since thought that it was merely because we knew toomuch about it.