MORE THAN JUST A TRAMP'S TRAVEL DIARY

George Orwell is principally known for two novels, Animal Farm, published in 1945, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). They're his last two works of full-length fiction, and both engage in highly politicised polemic, offering grim warnings against totalitarianism, though the first speaks against Communism and the second against Fascism. They're brilliant books, full of terrifying imagery, horribly prescient, and essential reading.

Still well-known, but perhaps less feted, are Orwell's non-fiction books, the first of which was Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), describing his experiences of poverty and life on the streets in those two capital cities. I finished reading it this morning, which is why I'm writing about it today.

Orwell describes it as 'fairly trivial', and 'interesting in the same way as a travel diary is interesting', but I think he does himself a disservice, and knows it. He talks also of the English propensity to experience the shame of poverty, yet another trait is false modesty, which is what he shows here. It's not a long book, but it is jam-packed full of intense and visceral descriptions of a life lived at the very bottom of post-First World War society. His intention must have been to highlight the horrendous conditions in which many people lived, and how those conditions could be alleviated quite simply, rather than just to tell a mildly diverting story, and in that he is profoundly successful.

The book is divided in two: the first part tells of Orwell's life as a plongeur in Paris, and the second as an itinerant (he uses the word 'tramp') in London and its near surrounds. In Paris, a plongeur is the lowest form of life in the catering swamp, an amoeba of such worthlessness that he is trampled on, insulted, and degraded by everyone else in the kitchen and above. I've read that Orwell was there to research the scandal of poverty in a major city, and so it could be that he wrote an exaggerated account for the purpose of increasing sales of whatever he intended to publish, but I doubt it was just that. The squalor of the underclass exists even today, and it's no stretch of the imagination to extrapolate backwards, the struggle out of the shocking expense and personal toll of full-scale war, the terrible grind of recovery, the abandonment of the weak and impoverished.

The contempt in which scullery staff were held is vividly related by Orwell, and I think he means to say that we should consider that the doer of any menially-considered occupation was treated in the same way. He is simply describing what he experienced. We're told that kitchens were filthy places, dirty, sweaty, rubbish and mess everywhere, greasy, intensely hot, and of course with none of the appliances, such as washing machines or dish washers, that we're used to today.

So many bodies crammed into such a small space, so much frustration and anger, all taken out on each other, so few opportunities to take oneself mentally or bodily out of that situation. In many places, smoking was banned, so you'd sneak a quick puff in the toilets or at the bottom of the lift shaft. If you were caught, you'd be sacked, and back on the streets with no money to pay your rent. You'd get some food, a little, to supplement your already poor diet, and some wine, but often you were swindled by the person who paid your wages; they'd take a cut, and no good came from complaining, for who would you complain to? Who would care? Hours of work, perhaps fifteen a day, or more, including Saturdays, and even Sundays sometimes, when it was required, and how could you argue?

What little spare time you had was passed in a bistro, spending a tiny amount of money on whatever might last the longest. Or you'd go home, a filthy boarding house, and sleep in dirty sheets, being marched over by bugs, barely sleeping because of the discomfort, or the fear that someone might come into your room and steal what little you had. This was working life in Paris. Working life, in a civilised country's capital city. This barely scratches the surface of Orwell's story.

It's not all misery though. The Parisian passages contain some funny stories, perhaps wry, that do raise a half-smile. And since I was in Paris in early December, I was able to read about places I knew, including the very street in which we stayed, and where some eighty years earlier, Orwell had visited with a friend to tap an acquaintance for a few francs, ending up with a fight in the street.

The London passages are if anything worse, because here Orwell had no work and lived on the streets (or at least, that is how he chose to approach this part of the book). His descriptions become if anything more grotesque, and yet are totally believable. Homeless men (for they were almost exclusively men that he encountered) crammed together in box-like hostels, jammed up one against another, the stink of enforced confinement, the cold, dirt, sweat, sour stench. Indignity is the watch-word here, and it's palpable and terrible.

Orwell makes a calm plea for changes, in the law and in society's attitude in general, as a result of the shocking things he witnessed, and of course the world is different now. I don't know if things changed as a consequence of this book - the welfare state was still fifteen years away - but change they did. Let's not pretend, though, that our world is perfect, because that is very far from the truth. The internet is littered with statistics that show, for example, that around 18 per cent of people are in poverty at any one time in the UK, that hundreds of people still sleep rough on the streets (most of them in London), or that a fifth of children are living with poverty. All of which leads me to conclude that Down and Out in Paris and London is as relevant now as it was when it was first published.