re worth the terror of the pawnshop. Oh, Kew, those pawnshops!
Those little secret stalls that put shame into you where none was before.
The pawn man--why is it that when you're already frightened is the moment
that men choose to frighten you? Because weakness is the worst crime.
That I have proved. My work was putting fluff into bolsters. There was a
big bright grocers' calendar--the Death of Nelson--and if I could see it
through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day. I had to eat my
lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches--not fruit jam, you know, but
raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air.
The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew
newspapers. Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew
newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were
standing on your head? My governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he
looked wet, and his hair was a horror to me. His voice was tired of
dealing with fluff--though he didn't deal with it so intimately as we
did--and it only allowed him to whisper. The forewoman was always cross,
but always as if she would rather not be so, as if she were being cross
for a bet, and as if some one were watching her to see she was not kind
by mistake. She looked terribly ill, because she had worked there for
three months, which was a record. I stood it five weeks, and then I had a
hemorrhage--only from the throat, the doctor said. I wanted to go to
bed, but you can't, because the panel doctors in these parts will not
come to you. My doctor was half an enormous mile away, and it seemed he
only existed between seven and nine in the evenings. So I stayed up, so
as not to get too weak to walk. I went and asked the governor for my
stamps. I had only five stamps due to me, only five valuable threepences
had been stopped out of my wages. But I had a silly conviction at that
time that the Insurance Act was invented to help working people. What an
absurd idea of mine! I went to the Jew for my card. He said mine was a
hard case, but I was not entitled to a card; nobody under thirty, he
said, was allowed by law to have a card. So I said it was only fair to
tell him I was going to the Factory and Insurance Inspectors about him. I
told him lots of things, and I was so angry that I cried. He was very
angry too, and made me feel sick by splashing his wet hair about. He said
it was unfair for ladies to interfere in thin