Love, Let Me Not Hunger Read Online Free PDF Page A

rings, and whose rough-and-tumble playmates were tiger and lion cubs. These children, utterly fearless, thought nothing of staggering bandy-legged before a great swaying elephant and demanding to be lifted up in his curling trunk and set down upon his broad forehead.
    But then they grew up to share with other adults the same fears and desires, learned to tell the same lies and spread the same kind of gossip. Above all, they came to close ranks and turn stony hearts and frozen faces to the outsider. Occasionally, these ramparts could be breached by one not of the circus, but who showed that he or she could love and understand this world and its people; and then they proved themselves open, liberal, free-handed and warm-hearted. But never, of course, would they tolerate such a one as Rose, who, in addition to her flouting of the moral code, had not a single accomplishment in any of the fields connected with performing.
    Her full name was Rose Rokcyszinski, though she was British born and brought up in London’s East End. Her mother had once, for a brief period, married a Polish sailor ashore from his ship. This had come to an end when on the next voyage the sailor slipped away, deserting his wife and unborn child but at least leaving a name behind for her. This name when she grew up she detested because it was so foreign-sounding, and when asked always gave an abbreviated version—Rose Rockie—or merely said, “Just Rose—”
    The fact was that Rose had never been a tart. She had never wished to be one and therefore had always worked for her living. She had slept with men, yet never once in all her life had she prostituted herself, even when she was homeless or starving. She would never have been able to explain this fastidiousness but there it was. Her mother, for instance, practised a kind of amateur home prostitution as a sideline to charring and a means of earning some extra money or having what was known as “a good time.”
    Since they lived in one room of a cold and squalid warren in the heart of a slum district, Rose when she was a child was well aware of these activities, and, even though they were usually conducted at night, both heard and saw what was going on. There was a memory which lingered in her mind long after she was grown. It was of a man’s voice speaking from the semi-darkness, saying, “What about the kid?” and her mother replying, “Never mind the kid. She’s just a baby. She don’t know nothing.”
    Rose, however, was not a baby—one might doubt if she ever had been one—and she knew plenty. She herself had been violated at the age of thirteen, an experience which left her curiously undamaged, probably because all of her life was a perpetual violation of her longings, needs, and desires. The dockside night-watchman who lured her into his shack and then intruded himself into her person seemed, in retrospect, no more than a part of the squalor with which she was surrounded.
    Her mother had been a slattern who never in her adult life was wholly clean or washed. Although the law had compelled her to send her daughter to school in reasonably neat clothes and not smelling too strongly, her dwelling remained a cesspool of blocked drains, communal lavatories, dirt swept under the bed, and all of the sour odours of penury pervading the building: sweat, onions and cabbage cooking, stale clothes, beer and whisky dregs, cigarette butts, and unwashed bodies.
    Rose ate bad food, breathed bad air, was surrounded by unlovely people, and yet survived. It was a way of life that toughened her fibre, inured her to almost anything, and yet, oddly, did not coarsen her.
    Rose ought to have grown up into a rough, tough little gutter product. That she did not could only have been due to the fact that within her was the heritage of another race and another people, and hence some of the softness, weakness, sadness, and unrequitable longing of a folk who for centuries had been squeezed between the harshness and