as he
crawled up the stairs to his bed somewhere under the rafters. They couldn't, they complained
perpetually, get the kind of lodgers they wanted--good-class 'commercial
gentlemen' who paid full board and were out all day. I heard dreadful stories from the other lodgers about the place
where the tripe was kept. The Brookers never ate tripe
themselves, I noticed. //-->. For tea there was more bread-and-butter and
frayed-looking sweet cakes which were probably bought as 'stales' from the
baker. Besides these there was a floating clientele of commercial travellers
of the poorer sort, travelling actors--always common in the North because
most of the larger pubs hire variety artists at the week-ends--and
newspaper-canvassers. named Joe--he was the
kind of person who has no surname.
For quite a long time, perhaps another
twenty minutes, the train was rolling through open country before the
villa-civilization began to close in upon us again, and then the outer
slums, and then the slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals,
and gaso-meters of another industrial town. Nineteen Eighty-Four Summary, plot, characters, interpretations: Contact Sitemap About: Work : Summaries & Interpretations : Road to Wigan Pier. I doubt whether any of their businesses
had ever paid; they were the kind of people who run a business chiefly in
order to have something to grumble about. If they failed to secure a minimum of
twenty orders a day, they got the sack. Emmie was a fair-haired, sharp-nosed, unhappy-
looking girl who worked at one of the mills for some starvation wage, but
nevertheless spent all her evenings in bondage at the Brookers' house. It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a
kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole. But in their eyes
the two old men were a kind of dreadful parasite who had fastened on them
and were living on their charity.
like the refrain of a ballade. The most dreadful thing about
people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over
again.
Their job seemed to me so hopeless, so appalling that I wondered
how anyone could put up with such a thing when prison was a possible
alternative. The whole place had the unmistakable dusty, flyblown air of a
business that is going down. I believe all newcomers spent their first
night in the double bed, which was used, so to speak, as bait. The old-age pensioners had, as
usual, been driven from their homes by the Means Test. Joe,
being on the P.A.C., was practically in the same category as the old-age
pensioners. They were on their feet ten
hours a day, 'working' their appointed streets, and then busy late into the
night filling in blank forms for some swindle their paper was running--
one of those schemes by which you are 'given' a set of crockery if you take
out a six weeks' subscription and send a two-shilling postal order as well.
Unlock This Study Guide Now. I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron,
her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. This was his first
glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which the poor
tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their endless journeys. google_color_text = "000000"; She had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on one
of her blankets.
Mrs Brooker had her meals separately but also
took snacks from any meal that happened to be going, and manoeuvred with
great skill for what she called 'the bottom of the pot', meaning the
strongest cup of tea.
I suppose it
is the complete lack of responsibility that makes so many of these men look
younger than their ages. 'It's a b-,
ain't it?'
Joe, like the Scotchman, was a great reader of newspapers and spent
almost his entire day in the public library. The newspapers engage
poor desperate wretches, out-of-work clerks and commercial travellers and
the like, who for a while make frantic efforts and keep their sales up to
the minimum; then as the deadly work wears them down they are sacked and
fresh men are taken on. She had a round pale
face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and
looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the
second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have
ever-seen. Road to Wigan Pier Summary. In spite
of hard trying, man has not yet succeeded in doing his dirt everywhere. The Scotch miner was a bore when you got
to know him. We don't seem to get no customers nowadays. So long as they kept up their
twenty orders a day they received a small salary--two pounds a week, I
think; on any order over the twenty they drew a tiny commission. You cannot disregard them if you accept the
civilization that produced them. To my eye the snow and the black walls were more
like a white dress with black piping running across it. My bed was in the right-hand corner on the side nearest the door. There was no need to say more; I had heard all
about old Hooker's ways already.
What tales I heard
about old Hooker and his fractiousness, the nuisance of making his bed, the
way he 'wouldn't eat' this and 'wouldn't eat' that, his endless ingratitude
and, above all, the selfish obstinacy with which he refused to die! The only permanent lodgers were the Scotch miner, Mr Reilly, two old-
age pensioners, and an unemployed man on the P.A.C. Several bottles of Worcester Sauce
and a half-full jar of marmalade lived permanently on the table. You could see the hatred of this 'bloody
woman's work', as he called it, fermenting inside him, a kind of bitter
juice. According to the
almanac this was spring, and a few of the birds seemed to believe it. Mr Brooker had a queer way of pronouncing
his name, without the H and with a long U--'Uker'. They handed their
weekly ten shillings over to the Brookers and in return got the kind of
accommodation you would expect for ten shillings; that is, a bed in the
attic and meals chiefly of bread-and-butter. It was said that they were overheard
anxiously asking the insurance-tout 'how long people lives when they've got
cancer'.
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