Down and Out 1 – dead flies, bugs and expensive lies

Poverty bites in the French capital when you have hardly a sou to your name …

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Sometimes, to keep up apearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short on food. Your linen gets filthy and you run out of soap and razor blades. Your hair wants cutting and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All day your are telling lies, and expensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail and it falls plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy and cuts more than a pound. ‘Pardon monsieur,’ she says. ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra?’ Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.

You go the greengrocers to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop and can never go there again.

You have strayed into a respectable quarter and you see a prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something so you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.

Dreaming of croissants

A sobering account of a city under seige during the Bosnian war.

The Quick and the Dead by Janine Di Giovanni.

Marija is walking slowly, opening her eyes, closing them because she cannot face another day. Then she is rising, rubbing her eyes with her beautiful hands, now scarred from chopping wood in the cellar of her cousin’s house where they have a room at the top. Chopping wood, like everything else in her life now, is something that last year, when she worked as a dental technician and met her friends for lunch every day, just to gossip, to laugh, to talk, is something that she could not conceive of doing. She had never chopped wood before. She was the wife of a distinguished professor, the mother of two beautifuly daughters, one of them born in America, where they lived for seven years. New York … 24 years married and always a good life. Now, she can’t remember what New York, even Zagreb, looks like; all she can see is the dark skyline of Sarajevo outside the plastic window.

Breakfast is tea left over from Mario’s last trip to England. Getting down to the last bits and she is beginning to panic, because there is no tea, no coffee in the city and the two things Bosnians cannot live without are coffee and tobacco. There is no milk – she cannot remember the last time she had milk – and no bread yet. She is about to pull on her layers and layers of clothes and the boots she wore in the mountains above the city during winter holidays (where the Serb gunners now point their guns – hard to believe that they are the same hills) and she will stand in the long, long bread queue at the one functioning kitchen in the neighbourhood to get a loaf for the entire family. Some days, Marija stands for four, five hours, and gets to the head of the queue and there is none left. Remember croissants for breakfast? Remember biscuits? It all seems like a dream.

She sighs, pulls on her woolly hat, another scarf and leaves the room where Mario is slowly waking up, They feed Sunny (the dog) his usual diet, rice or macaroni. 6am.

Purple drops and red roses

Waves drumming on the shore and one long meditation on the meaning of life …

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Kettle boiled yet?

But I never rise at dawn and see the purple drops in the cabbage leaves, the red drops in the roses. I do not watch the setter nose in a circle, or lie at night watching the leaves hide the stars and the stars move and the leaves hang still. The butcher calls: the milk has to be stood under a shade lest it should sour.

Sleep, I say, sleep, as the kettle boils and its breath comes thicker and thicker issuing in one jet from the spout. So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, ‘No more, I am glutted with natural happiness.’ Yet more will come, more children; more cradles, more baskets in the kitchen and hams ripening, and onions glistening, and more beds of lettuce and potatoes. I am blown like a leaf by the gale; now brushing the wet grass, now whirled up. I am glutted with natural happiness; and wish sometimes that the fullness would pass from me and the weight of the sleeping house rise, when we sit reading, and I stay the thread at the eye of my needle. The lamp kindles a fire in the dark pane. A fire burns in the heart of the ivy. I see a lit-up street in the evergreens. I hear traffic in the brush of the wind down the lane, and broken voices, and laughter, and Jinny who cries as the door opens, ‘Come, come.’

Hot milk in a cold heaven

Marie thinks her husband is dead … no point in ordering a breakfast for him then. Actually he isn’t dead at all. Then it gets complicated …

Cold Heaven by Brian Moore

Brrrrrr ...

The breakfast waiter put his rump against the swinging doors of the kitchen and backed out into the breakfast room, balancing three trays of cafes complets. He turned around and went to Number 6, a Belgian couple and their daughter, putting in front of each of them a tray containing hot milk, hot coffee, butter pats, jam, marmalade, croissants, and petits pains. ‘Bon appetit,’ he told them and turned to see if any other guests had arrived. Number 24 was there, not the young man, just the young lady. He went over. He remembered that, although she was American, she had spoken French to him yesterday.

‘Bonjour madame. Vous avez bien dormi?’

Yes, Marie said, she had slept well.

‘Et Monsieur? Il arrive, Monsieur? Je vous apporte deuz cafes complets?

No, she said, just one breakfast. Monsieur would not come this morning.

Grifters and mother’s milk

A small-time con artist gets all philosophical in classic crime noir from the 1950s …

The Grifters by Jim Thompson

Roy had his delayed dinner in a downtown restaurant. He ate hungrily, telling himself, and doubtless meaning it, that it was good to be eating in a restaurant. It was what he was used to. The subtle sameness of the food, whatever the restaurant, had a reassuring quality about it, not unlike a mother’s milk to a child. In its familiar and dependable nurture, it bolstered one’s believe-or-perish credo that the more things changed, the more they remained the same.

Seduction - tick Betrayal - tick Murder - tick

Breakfast in the Rye

If you really want to hear about it, here are some dietary tips from that lovable teenager Holden Caulfield …

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

After I put my bags in one of those strong boxes at the station, I went into this little sandwich bar and had breakfast. I had quite a large breakfast, for me – orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Usually I just drink some orange juice. I’m a very light eater. I really am. That’s why I’m so damn skinny. I was supposed to be on this diet where you eat a lot of starches and crap, to gain weight and all, but I didn’t ever do it. When I’m out somewhere, I generally eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk. It isn’t much, but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H.V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.