But Flo and Charlie were in a much worse case than she. They were not so much exhausted as amazed and scandalised by the distances they were expected to walk. Walking twenty miles in a day was a thing they had never even heard of till now. They were cockneys born and bred, and though they had had several months of destitution in London, neither of them had ever been on the road before. Charlie, till fairly recently, had been in good employment, and Flo, too, had had a good home until she had been seduced and turned out of doors to live on the streets. They had fallen in with Nobby on Trafalgar Square and agreed to come hop-picking with him, imagining that it would be a bit of a lark. Of course, having been “on the beach” a comparatively short time, they looked down on Nobby and Dorothy. They valued Nobby’s knowledge of the road and his boldness in thieving, but he was their social inferior—that was their attitude. And as for Dorothy, they scarcely even deigned to look at her after her half-crown came to an end.
Even on the second day their courage was failing. They lagged behind, grumbled incessantly and demanded more than their fair share of food. By the third day it was almost impossible to keep them on the road at all. They were pining to be back in London, and had long ceased to care whether they ever got to the hopfields or not; all they wanted to do was to sprawl in any comfortable halting place they could find, and, when there was any food left, devour endless snacks. After every halt there was a tedious argument before they could be got to their feet again.
“Come on, blokes!” Nobby would say. “Pack your peter up, Charlie. Time we was getting off.”
“Oh, —— getting off!” Charlie would answer morosely.
“Well, we can’t skipper here, can we? We said we was going to hike as far as Sevenoaks to-night, didn’t we?”
“Oh, —— Sevenoaks! Sevenoaks or any other bleeding place—it don’t make any bleeding difference to me.”
“But —— it! We want to get a job to-morrow, don’t we? And we got to get down among the farms ’fore we can start looking for one.”
“Oh, —— the farms! I wish I’d never ’eard of a —— ’op! I wasn’t brought up to this —— ’iking and skippering like you was. I’m fed up; that’s what I am—fed up.”
“If this is bloody ’opping,” Flo would chime in, “I’ve ’ad my bloody bellyful of it already.”
Nobby gave Dorothy his private opinion that Flo and Charlie would probably “jack off” if they got the chance of a lift back to London. But as for Nobby, nothing disheartened him or ruffled his good temper, not even when the nail in his boot was at its worst and his filthy remnant of a sock was dark with blood. By the third day the nail had worn a permanent hole in his foot, and Nobby had to halt once in a mile to hammer it down.
” ’Scuse me, kid,” he would say; “got to attend to my bloody hoof again. This nail’s a mulligatawny.”
He would search for a round stone, squat in the ditch and carefully hammer the nail down.
“There!” he would say optimistically, feeling the place with his thumb. “That b ——’s in his grave!”
The epitaph should have been Resurgam, however. The nail invariably worked its way up again within a quarter of an hour.
Nobby had tried to make love to Dorothy, of course, and, when she repulsed him, bore her no grudge. He had that happy temperament that is incapable of taking its own reverses very seriously. He was always debonair, always singing in a lusty baritone voice—his three favourite songs were; “Sonny Boy,” “ ’Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse” (to the tune of “The Church’s One Foundation”), and “ ‘——!’ was all the band could play,” given with lively renderings of military music. He was twenty-six years old and was a widower, and had been successively a seller of newspapers, a petty thief, a Borstal boy, a soldier, a burglar and a tramp. These facts, however, you had to piece together for yourself, for he was not equal to giving a consecutive account of his life. His conversation was studded with casual picturesque memories—the six months he had served in a line regiment before he was invalided out with a damaged eye, the loathsomeness of the skilly in Holloway, his childhood in the Deptford gutters, the death of his wife, aged eighteen, in childbirth, when he was twenty, the horrible suppleness of the Borstal canes, the dull boom of the nitro-glycerine, blowing in the safe door at Woodward’s boot and shoe factory, where Nobby had cleared a hundred and twenty-five pounds and spent it in three weeks.
On the afternoon of the third day they reached the fringe of the hop country, and began to meet discouraged people, mostly tramps, trailing back to London with the news that there was nothing doing—hops were bad and the price was low, and the gypsies and “home pickers” had collared all the jobs. At this Flo and Charlie gave up hope altogether, but by an adroit mixture of bullying and persuasion Nobby managed to drive them a few miles farther. In a little village called Wale they fell in with an old Irishwoman—Mrs. McElligot was her name—who had just been given a job at a neighbouring hopfield, and they swapped some of their stolen apples for a piece of meat she had “bummed” earlier in the day. She gave them some useful hints about hop-picking and about what farms to try. They were all sprawling on the village green, tired out, opposite a little general shop with some newspaper posters outside.
“You’d best go down’n have a try at Chalmers’s,” Mrs. McElligot advised them in her base Dublin accent. “Dat’s a bit above five mile from here. I’ve heard tell as Chalmers wants a dozen pickers still. I daresay he’d give y’a job if you gets dere early enough.”
“Five miles! Gripes! Ain’t there none nearer’n that?” grumbled Charlie.
“Well, dere’s Norman’s. I got a job at Norman’s meself—I’m startin’ to-morrow mornin’. But ’twouldn’t be no use for you to try at Norman’s. He ain’t takin’ on none but home pickers, an’ dey say as he’s goin’ to let half his hops blow.”
“What’s home pickers?” said Nobby.
“Why, dem as has got homes o’ deir own. Eider you got to live in de neighbourhood, or else de farmer’s got to give y’a hut to sleep in. Dat’s de law nowadays. In de ole days when you come down hoppin’, you kipped in a stable an’ dere was no questions asked. But dem bloody interferin’ gets of a Labour Government brought in a law to say as no pickers was to be taken on widout de farmer had proper accommodation for ’em. So Norman only takes on folks as has got homes o’ deir own.”
“Well, you ain’t got a home of your own, have you?”
“No bloody fear! But Norman t’inks I have. I kidded’m I was stayin’ in a cottage near by. Between you an’ me, I’m skipperin’ in a cow byre. ’Tain’t so bad except for de stink o’ de muck, but you got to be out be five in de mornin’, else de cowmen ’ud catch you.”
“We ain’t got no experience of hopping,” Nobby said. “I wouldn’t know a bloody hop if I saw one. Best to let on you’re an old hand when you go up for a job, eh?”
“Hell! Hops don’t need no experience. Tear ’em off an’ fling ’em into de bin. Dat’s all dere is to it, wid hops.”
Dorothy was nearly asleep. She heard the others talking desultorily, first about hop-picking, then about some story in the newspapers of a girl who had disappeared from home. Flo and Charlie had been reading the posters on the shop-front opposite; and this had revived them somewhat, because the posters reminded them of London and its joys. The missing girl, in whose fate they seemed to be rather interested, was spoken of as “The Rector’s Daughter.”