Love, Let Me Not Hunger Read Online Free PDF

cruelty of the Germans and the primitive savagery of the Russians.
    She had come by some tiny streak of poetry which is sometimes expressed not on paper or in song, but by living it. As child, girl, and woman she had always craved for love and affection which she was never given, but she herself also had it to give. It manifested itself in love for helpless living things, such as a mouse or a stray, battered kitten or dog; she would stop to fondle a cart-horse in the street and lay her cheek against its soft nose. She was never able to possess any animal for herself, but anything living and lonely touched her: a calf being led to slaughter; rabbits cramped in a cage for sale; furry things seen in a pet-shop window. She would, had she been able, have gathered them all to her breast and held them closely to still the frightened beating of their hearts.
    Rose was fortunate that when she was sixteen her mother died of septicaemia induced by filth infecting a cut and Rose was free and alone in the world.
    She was at the time employed sewing in an East End tailor’s shop and looked more mature than her sixteen years.
    The Health Service looked to the burial, after which Rose disappeared before she should attract the attention of the police or social welfare workers. She escaped from the room which had been her prison until then and took a lodging for herself only to discover that she had merely exchanged one squalid den for another, with the same assortment of stinks and torn-up newspapers blocking the lavatories.
    The one thing that Rose had gained was independence—independence of movement as well as of action—and she discovered now that she no longer had to remain in the same place or in the same job. If she found herself with a pound or so in her purse she could board a train or a bus and go somewhere else where there were other people and other jobs. Yet, in the end, the economics of the situation always returned her to the dirty bed in the dreadful room with the cracked sink, stopped-up drains, and the fretful cries of children rising through the house. She knew her level and unerringly made for it in whatever town or city she happened to find herself, for she could afford nothing better and was used to it.
    For four years she was a stray, homeless at home, never at home, in the ten-shilling lodging that was hers for a week or as long as she could put up the money. She was no stranger to hunger and penury, to newspaper inserted into the soles of her shoes, and nights spent on benches, in public parks, or sitting up in railway stations.
    For she would not sell herself to live; she refused and rejected this, because by this refusal she kept alive a glow of dignity and self-respect.
    Nor was she the striking kind of beauty who burns like a flame even from the husks of cheap clothing and down-at-heel shoes to light men to her side. She had wistfulness, some mischievous humour and a soul filled with yearning, all of which was concealed by poverty and shabbiness. Pathos was not a lure to attract men.
    Yet she encountered them but never cared for one, as she moved from one job to another. She could be a waitress, a dishwasher, a chambermaid, a char, a factory hand when times were good, but not a salesgirl or receptionist, or anything connected with that clean, bright upper world that existed all about her but which was denied to her. She was shabby and hid her inner self beneath the hard crust of one who had been through it all and knew not only all the answers, but the questions as well.
    She made friends easily: girls in the jobs at which she worked, and boys or men round about. And before long these last would want her, attracted by they knew not what, sometimes perhaps just by her availability. When the boy was kind, which was rare, she would sometimes yield, but more often not, and when she did it was without participation.
    To Rose, the possession and the use of her body were something apart from her, and all of its