OUTCAST WOMEN

Evening Star, Issue 19026, 22 August 1925, Page 10

OUTCAST WOMEN

THAT AWFUL DESOLATION

A PLACE TO WEEP

[By Mrs Cixic Chesterton, in the ‘Sunday Chronicle.’]

Hundreds of homeless women 'walk the streets of London every night. Some of them get shelter if they have the money to pay for a. hod. Others, utterly without pence or friends, sleep under arches, in doorways. To discover just what happens to the outcast woman, and to find out the truth, I went myself into this world of destitution and joined the homeless band.

Under these arches of Hungerford Bridge, facing the Thames, _ with its long line of glittering lights, is a small room set round with benches. From this room there opens another, where sits an official of the Metropolitan Asylums Board. It is a clearing house for casuals, where each night gather some of the forlorn of London. “"What is your name?” the official asked me. one bitter night, when the wind cut like a knife, and I had not the prospect of the poorest roof. “Where do you come from and what is your work?” I said truly that when I could got employment I did odd jobs at charing, and he finished up by handing, me two red discs, vouchers for the tram fare to the house, arid a recommendation to the matron. There were some pitiful specimens of womanhood in that mom, derelicts of life whose only hearthplace is the pavement, whoso sole liope of homo is an alien bed. Women who make some sort of a living by soiling matches and other trifles in the street come to Hungerford Bridge. Those belong to the lower walks of street sellers. The profits on their wares are pitifully small, and their dirt and rags prevent them from working the West End, so that they are forced into mean streets. PITIFUL SPECIMENS. When I sold matches in a good-class neighborhood I very often got a shilling and, once, even half a crown, for a box. But the women who have not even the semblance of decent boots on their feet, who have worn their clothes for days on end, and have not the coppers to spare for a wash, would bo chivvied immediately from a fashionable locality. They seek custom, therefore, in South London and the East End, and witii luck they may make enough to buy a meal at an eating house, and pay 4d or 5d for a shakedown in a doss-house or a bed in the Salvation Army Centro, Hanbury street. It is only when you are at the last gasp that you go to Hungerford Bridge. Certain cases, as I have said, are drafted to the charitable centres and given free lodging. But this cannot be repeated more than once or twice at the most, and there remains only the casual ward against which every outcast fights. The cheaper form of courtesan will only go to the house when the last vestige of resistance is broken .down. They have a passionate terror of 1 officialdom. They believe, poor souls, that if _ they spend even a night in an institution the hand of the law will close on them and prevent their escape. I remember now a pretty little creature shook with terror at the prospect. She could not have been more than twenty, and wore her thin coat with an air. She had on the fashionable sunset artificial silk stockings, but her cheap patent leather shoes were deplorably broken. PATHOS OF THE TOILETTE.

“They won’t send me to prison, will they, clear?” she asked me. “It was a bobby who told me to come here. You see, I haven’t had a hod for two nights. Business has been too bad. The bobby said they’d fix mo up somehow—but but—l’m afraid.” , She gulped a bit, _ but screwed her courage up and went in to the relieving officer. I listened through the half-open door—each derelict is dealt with separately. “I’ve come up from Manchester,” she said. “Up for the day, of course, and I’ve lost my train. Parents? Oh, certainly. _ My father’s a Nonconformist minister and my mother’s the daughter of a sergeant-major. Anything else you’d like to know?”

There was a catch in' her voice, for all her bravery, but whatever tlio otliciaJ thought he accepted her tale, and she went off to Southwark Workhouse.

There are outcasts, however, who would rather die than go into the house. The casual ward demands cleanliness of body and hair. There is no rooted objection to a hot bath, though even the most derelict woman shrinks from the exhibition of her rags necessary to such ablution. It is the hair that is the trouble. For with that tragic clinging to femininity which is the last thing any one of us will sacrifice, they will retain a tangled mass, whatever its condition, with dogged persistence. Sometimes in the early morning you will see them on the Embankment or up the side court trying to perform some sort of toilet. They run a jagged comb through their hair, wipe their poor face with a soiled rag. Hut always they are infinitely kindly. When the derelict can collect the price of a bed, where does she go? If she can muster one shilling and twopence she can have a bed for the night —of not invariable cleanness—at a woman's public lodging-house, licensed by the L.C.C. There are not many ol these for our sex.

Those lodging-houses are used by the cheaper among the fallen to a large extent. They arc mostly quite young, and have been forced on the streets, generally speaking, by a series of trivial accidents.

One girl I met was a nursemaid wlio had stayed out beyond her allotted time. Apprehensive of the reception her mistress would give her, she did not go back. Sho walked about the whole night, and worried through the next day. The strain of the second night without a bed was too much for her, and for the sake of a lodging sho went home with a man. This is one of the chief causes of a girl’s initial entry into evil courses. It may seem incredible to the woman well fed and comfortably housed that any one should sacrifice the future which we all desire—husband, home, and children—for the sake of a bed. But when you have endured the awful desolation, spiritual and physical, of being cut off from those things that make us what we are, you begin to understand. SOMEWHERE TO CRY.

I do not think it is sufficiently realised that woman’s morality is centred in the home; and by morality 1 do not mean sex alone. All those instincts which go to make good wives, devoted mothers, generous friends, flower to their fullest in an atmosphere of security. Try, then, to imagine what must happen when there is no home, even the poorest room, even a permanent bed, that you may call your own. When you have only the vast, aching desert of pavement as your dwelling place. When—and this is the most terrible of all—there is no place where you can cry out aloud. For this reason the emotions of the fallen woman when she has secured a night’s lodging tumble out hot, fierce, and unrestrained. As a woman once said to me: “If I don’t cry now, I may not have a place to cry in to-mor-row,” and she wept with a racking passion that left me shaking. I wish I could make the woman with a home understand what it moans to lie without even a place in which to keep those poor belongings—letters, per-

haps, photographs, a curl of baby's hair, which the most destitute in_ this great city cherish. The most pitiful little Raphian will show you a picture of “Dad” and “Mum,” or sometimes one of a dead babv. The most forlorn match-seller will carry something that belonged to a man, once the clear lover or son. Hidden among their rags is the sum total of their possessions. The next time yon tarn over your ribbons and laces just think of this.