This Is the Schoolroom by Nicholas Monsarrat

Author:Nicholas Monsarrat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: This is the Schoolroom
ISBN: 9780755131396
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Ten o’clock of a July night, still intolerably close and heated: I sat in my little furnace of a room making up my accounts, wishing that the sour smell of cooking and dirt which overhung the whole house did not invade the room at such strength, wishing that I could get rid of the idea that Sievvitch’s room next door was haunted, doing sums on a torn scrap of paper and trying to calculate how I could bring the weekly budget down from twenty-five shillings to a pound.

I had lived for six months at the rate of five pounds a month – an achievement of which I felt inordinately proud; and having earned so far twelve pounds by writing, I now had just over thirty left of my original capital. But even at this modest rate the money was going too fast: evidently six-and-six for rent, fourteen shillings for food, three shillings for tobacco, and a daily pint of beer, was too princely a style; and as it took no account of various things – shoes, clothes, and the like – with which I was well supplied but which would not last for ever, nor of various intermittent necessities such as haircutting, shaving, toothpaste, typing paper and ribbons, which occasionally cropped up to throw the budget out of gear, it was clear that if I didn’t soon begin to sell stuff more quickly I should have to confess to failure and start crawling for a regular job again. (I worked an average of ten hours a day, quite apart from whatever I did for the Party, but apparently this did not rate as work in the commercial sense.) It did not seem possible to spend less than two shillings a day on food – an egg for breakfast, bread and cheese for lunch, tea for tea, and one square meal at Caz’ café in the evening. Tobacco might be cut down, from three ounces a week to two; and the pint of beer was not a necessity except in so far as it enlivened, to a minute extent, the dreary uniformity of life on this scale.

And how dreary it was, whenever I stopped working and looked about me … Writing and politics were the only things which made it tolerable: had I been unemployed in those surroundings and with the same lack of money, I could not have borne it with a fraction of the patience of the people living round me. I walked to the open window now, and leant out, feeling the sour heat rising from the pavements, aware of the garbage smells and the filth which turned that corner of London into a little hell-hole. The old woman across the way was no longer there – I had subscribed half a crown to her funeral a few weeks back – and the blank window which had been her setting for nearly two years now looked like a robbed picture frame; but at least she was free of

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