THE WORLD AS BOOTS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE

“It does not do,” said a friend of mine, “to think about boots.” For my own part, I have always been particularly inclined to look at boots, and think about them. I have an odd idea that most general questions can be expressed in terms of foot-wear—which is perhaps why cobblers are often such philosophical men. Accident it may be, gave me this persuasion. A very considerable part of my childhood was spent in an underground kitchen; the window opened upon 6a bricked-in space, surmounted by a grating before my father’s shop window. So that, when I looked out of the window, instead of seeing—as children of a higher upbringing would do—the heads and bodies of people, I saw their under side. I got acquainted indeed with all sorts of social types as boots simply, indeed, as the soles of boots; and only subsequently, and with care, have I fitted heads, bodies, and legs to these pediments.

There would come boots and shoes (no doubt holding people) to stare at the shop, finicking, neat little women’s boots, good sorts and bad sorts, fresh and new, worn crooked in the tread, patched or needing patching; men’s boots, clumsy and fine, rubber shoes, tennis shoes, goloshes. Brown shoes I never beheld—it was before that time; but I have seen pattens. Boots used to come and commune 7at the window, duets that marked their emotional development by a restlessness or a kick.... But anyhow, that explains my preoccupation with boots.

But my friend did not think it did, to think about boots.

My friend was a realistic novelist, and a man from whom hope had departed. I cannot tell you how hope had gone out of his life; some subtle disease of the soul had robbed him at last of any enterprise, or belief in coming things; and he was trying to live the few declining years that lay before him in a sort of bookish comfort, among surroundings that seemed peaceful and beautiful, by not thinking of things that were painful and cruel. And we met a tramp who limped along the lane.

“Chafed heel,” I said, when we had parted from him again; “and on these 8pebbly byways no man goes barefooted.” My friend winced; and a little silence came between us. We were both recalling things; and then for a time, when we began to talk again, until he would have no more of it, we rehearsed the miseries of boots.

We agreed that to a very great majority of people in this country boots are constantly a source of distress, giving pain and discomfort, causing trouble, causing anxiety. We tried to present the thing in a concrete form to our own minds by hazardous statistical inventions. “At the present moment,” said I, “one person in ten in these islands is in discomfort through boots.”

My friend thought it was nearer one in five.

“In the life of a poor man or a poor man’s wife, and still more in the lives of 9their children, this misery of the boot occurs and recurs—every year so many days.”

We made a sort of classification of these troubles.

There is the TROUBLE OF THE NEW BOOT.

(i) They are made of some bad, unventilated material; and “draw the feet,” as people say.

(ii) They do not fit exactly. Most people have to buy ready-made boots; they cannot afford others, and, in the submissive philosophy of poverty, they wear them to “get used” to them. This gives you the little-toe pinch, the big-toe pinch, the squeeze and swelling across the foot; and, as a sort of chronic development of these pressures, come corns and all the misery of corns. Children’s feet get distorted for good by this method of fitting 10the human being to the thing; and a vast number of people in the world are, as a consequence of this, ashamed to appear barefooted. (I used to press people who came to see me in warm pleasant weather to play Badminton barefooted on the grass—a delightful thing to do—until I found out that many were embarrassed at the thought of displaying twisted toes and corns, and such-like disfigurements.)

(iii) The third trouble of new boots is this: they are unseasoned and in bad condition, and so they squeak and make themselves an insulting commentary on one’s ways.

But these are but trifling troubles to what arises as the boots get into wear. Then it is the pinch comes in earnest. Of these TROUBLES OF THE WORN BOOT, I and my friend, before he desisted, reckoned up three principal classes.

11(i) There are the various sorts of chafe. Worst of the chafes is certainly the heel chafe, when something goes wrong with the upright support at the heel. This, as a boy, I have had to endure for days together; because there were no other boots for me. Then there is the chafe that comes when that inner lining of the boot rucks up—very like the chafe it is that poor people are always getting from over-darned and hastily-darned socks. And then there is the chafe that comes from ready-made boots one has got a trifle too large or long, in order to avoid the pinch and corns. After a little while, there comes a transverse crease across the loose-fitting forepart; and, when the boot stiffens from wet or any cause, it chafes across the base of the toes. They have you all ways. And I have a very lively recollection too 12of the chafe of the knots one made to mend broken laces—one cannot be always buying new laces, and the knots used to work inward. And then the chafe of the crumpled tongue.

(ii) Then there are the miseries that come from the wear of the sole. There is the rick of ankle because the heel has gone over, and the sense of insecurity; and there is the miserable sense of not looking well from behind that many people must feel. It is almost always painful to me to walk behind girls who work out, and go to and fro, consuming much foot-wear, for this very reason, that their heels seem always to wear askew. Girls ought always to be so beautiful, most girls could be so beautiful, that to see their poor feet askew, the grace of their walk gone, a sort of spinal curvature induced, makes me wretched, and angry 13with a world that treats them so. And then there is the working through of nails, nails in the shoe. One limps on manfully in the hope presently of a quiet moment and a quiet corner in which one may hammer the thing down again. Thirdly, under this heading I recall the flapping sole. My boots always came to that stage at last; I wore the toes out first, and then the sole split from before backwards. As one walked it began catching the ground. One made fantastic paces to prevent it happening; one was dreadfully ashamed. At last one was forced to sit by the wayside frankly, and cut the flap away.

(iii) Our third class of miseries we made of splitting and leaks. These are for the most part mental miseries, the feeling of shabbiness as one sees the ugly yawn, for example, between toe cap and 14the main upper of the boot; but they involve also chills, colds, and a long string of disagreeable consequences. And we spoke too of the misery of sitting down to work (as multitudes of London school children do every wet morning) in boots with soles worn thin or into actual holes, that have got wet and chilling on the way to the work-place....

From these instances my mind ran on to others. I made a discovery. I had always despised the common run of poor Londoners for not spending their Sundays and holidays in sturdy walks, the very best of exercise. I had allowed myself to say when I found myself one summer day at Margate: “What a soft lot all these young people must be who loaf about the band-stand here, when they might be tramping over the Kentish hills inland!” But now I repented me of that. 15Long tramps indeed! Their boots would have hurt them. Their boots would not stand it. I saw it all.

And now my discourse was fairly under way. “Ex pede Herculem,” I said; “these miseries of boots are no more than a sample. The clothes people wear are no better than their boots; and the houses they live in far worse. And think of the shoddy garment of ideas and misconceptions and partial statements into which their poor minds have been jammed by way of education! Think of the way that pinches and chafes them! If one expanded the miseries of these things.... Think, for example, of the results of the poor, bad, unwise food, of badly-managed eyes and ears and teeth! Think of the quantity of toothache.”

“I tell you, it does not do to think of such things!” cried my friend, in a sort of 16anguish; and would have no more of it at any price....

And yet in his time he had written books full of these very matters, before despair overtook him.