The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [84]
Orwell asks, do the working classes really smell? Certainly they are dirtier than more prosperous people, because their work is more physical, their workplaces are often unclean, and they lack the plumbing that makes cleanliness easy. “Besides, the habit of washing yourself all over every day is a very recent one in Europe, and the working classes are generally more conservative than the bourgeoisie.” But more important than any actual smell is the fact that the middle class believes that the working class has a repellent odour, and that conviction begins early, when the bourgeois child “is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the ‘lower classes.’”
That particular class distinction could begin to die out only when workers could wash their own necks with ease. Louis Heren was born in 1919 in Shadwell, a slum district in the East End of London. Just as Orwell defined the middle classes as people who pronounced their h’s and had a servant and a bathroom, Heren’s passage from Cockney messenger boy to foreign editor of the London Times was marked by bathrooms, or the lack of them.
Heren’s widowed mother ran a coffee shop, and the Shadwell house he grew up in had no bathroom. On Friday evenings, the three children bathed in a galvanized iron tub in front of the sitting room fire. His uncle Lou went to the local public baths, where he paid two pence for a tub with hot water, a fresh towel and soap. How and when his mother washed remained a mystery to the boy Heren; the adult Heren assumes she used the wash basin in her bedroom. Each bedroom had a china basin, a jug of cold water, a bar of red Lifebuoy soap and a well—used chamber pot under the bed. (The house’s one toilet was too far away to use at night.) Within this late-blooming Victorian environment, “we were expected to be clean, and were never really dirty although I was then known in the family as Stinker.”
“Dirt is matter in the wrong place.”
—Henry J. Temple, Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865)
In 1934, the fifteen-year-old Heren left school and began work as a messenger for the London Times. All Times employees were eligible for the Boxing Club, and Heren trained religiously despite a fatal deficiency: his eyes instinctively closed whenever he saw a straight right heading for his face. He remained a member of the Boxing Club for the exercise, he writes, “and because of the baths.” For an adolescent, the tin tub in front of the sitting room fire was no longer an option. The public baths were crowded “and a bit mean.”
In comparison the baths at The Times were sheer luxury. There were rows of them, showers and long baths, glistening with white tile and stainless steel taps and rails, and with an unending supply of hot water, I would wallow in them with the tap trickling hot water to maintain an almost unbearable heat. Our mother would warn me about catching cold, but I must have been the cleanest boy in Shadwell. The baths in the gym were further proof of the superiority of The Times, and my good fortune.
When Heren was eighteen, in 1937, his mother moved the family to a dingy neighbourhood called Crofton Park—a definite step up, because the house included their first bathroom. And Heren too moved up, from wartime soldiering, where he learned the correct way to use a knife and fork at Sandhurst, to Times assignments as a correspondent on five continents, ending up in 1970 as the paper’s foreign editor. Looking back on his life, he writes,