cruelty of the wardens, but when her analysis describes the dirt, it protests
her incompetence (‘I can hardly describe the feeling of personal contam-
ination caused by even one night in such surrounds’) followed by pages
and pages of description. An uncharacteristic fervour also breaks out at
the end:
No words could tell the passionate longing that seized me to breathe free breaths.
No such inward struggle may come to those inured to hard conditions. Yet for
them, also, the summer life is free, and for freedom they sacrifice much... It is
best to fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of man. The vagrant life is
sweetest. That is how tramps are made.^26
The aphorisms and determined pauses at the end suggest that Mrs
Higgs is breathing hard to keep her anarchic emotions under firm control.
Davies, on the other hand, has none of these emotional storms and
wounded feelings as he goes in and out of the workhouse; he appears
not to notice the dirt greatly, although Helen Thomas remembered him
to be ‘fastidious’ in hygiene.^27 At one point he even maintains that tramps
are often cleaner than others because they have to wash every night, and in
consequence the dirtiest tramp is the ‘most honest and respectable’,
because he will neither beg new clothes nor commit himself to the
workhouse.^28 More importantly, where he does talk about his feelings,
they are events that happen and disappear again: part of the sequence, not
a key to the man’s character. Losing a leg is the turning-point of the book’s
story, but Davies omits to mention the fact that originally he only lost a
foot. His biographer tells us that on waking up he thrashed around in so
violent a mental agony that he bruised the stump and caused it to begin to
rot again, necessitating a second amputation at the knee.^29 The book itself
gives no hint of this, indulging only once in then-and-now recriminations:
Soon I reached Montreal. Only two months had elapsed, and what a difference
now! Two months ago, and it was winter, snow was on the earth, and the air was
cold; but I was then full limbed, full of vitality and good spirits, for summerlike
prospects golden and glorious possessed me night and day. It was summer now,
the earth was dry and green, and the air warm, but winter was within me; for I
felt crushed and staggered on crutches to the danger of myself and the people on
my way.
With that uncharacteristically literary metaphor, his unhappiness ends,
for the next sentence begins brightly: ‘I soon got over this unpleasant
feeling, roused by... a one legged man, who defied all Neptune’s
attempts to make him walk unsteady. Seeing this man so merry, I knew
that my sensitiveness would soon wear off.’^30
136 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism