Free Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell Page A

Mario, a huge,
    excitable Italian—he was like a city policeman with operatic
    gestures— and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we
    called the Magyar; I think he was a Transylvanian, or some-
    thing even more remote. Except the Magyar we were all big
    men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.
    The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were nev-
    er idle, but the real work only came in bursts of two hours
    at a time—we called each burst ‘UN COUP DE FEU’. The
    first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the guests upstairs
    began to wake up and demand breakfast. At eight a sud-
    den banging and yelling would break out all through the
    basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed
    through the passages, our service lifts came down with a
    simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors began
    shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don’t remember
    all our duties, but they included making tea, coffee and
    chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from the
    cellar and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing
    bread, making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam,
    opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs,
    cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee—all this
    for from a hundred to two hundred customers. The kitchen
    was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or seventy
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    yards. Everything we sent up in the service lifts had to be
    covered by a voucher, and the vouchers had to be carefully
    filed, and there was trouble if even a lump of sugar was lost.
    Besides this, we had to supply the staff with bread and cof-
    fee, and fetch the meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it
    was a complicated job.
    I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen
    miles during the day, and yet the strain of the work was
    more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the
    face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonish-
    ingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and
    fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack of
    cards against the clock. You are, for example, making toast,
    when bang! down comes a service lift with an order for tea,
    rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneous-
    ly bang! down comes another demanding scrambled eggs,
    coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs
    and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning
    so as to be back before your toast bums, and having to re-
    member about the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen other
    orders that are still pending; and at the same time some
    waiter is following you and making trouble about a lost bot-
    tle of soda-water, and you are arguing with him. It needs
    more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt
    truly, that it took a year to make a reliable cafetier.
    The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of
    delirium. Sometimes we were going as though we had only
    five minutes to live; sometimes there were sudden lulls
    when the orders stopped and everything seemed quiet for a

    Down and Out in Paris and London
    moment. Then we swept up the litter from the floor, threw
    down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or cof-
    fee or water—anything, so long as it was wet. Very often
    we used to break off chunks of ice and suck them while we
    worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating; we
    swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a few
    hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat. At times
    we were hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the
    customers would have gone without their breakfast, but
    Mario always pulled us through. He had worked fourteen
    years in the cafeterie, and he had the skill that never wastes
    a second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid and I
    was inexperienced, and Boris was inclined to shirk, partly
    because of his lame leg, partly because he was ashamed of
    working in the cafeterie