Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page B

collected gulls’ eggs from the cliff face.He poached and scavenged, and sometimes the locals would bring them gifts of potatoes or fuel.It was a heady life, and cheap.
    Soon after Roy and Mary’s two daughters were born the family moved to France, lured by the romance of Provence, bullfights and troubadours, but also by the favourable exchange rate then prevailing.In 1925 you could get over a hundred francs to the pound; in the late twenties George Orwell rented a room in Paris for two hundred francs a month, and found he could live – just – on six francs a day.It was this fact as much as the inspiring quality of the Mediterranean light, the intoxicating conversation of the Montparnasse cafés, or even the wonder of seeing Florence or Rome, that led many artists like Roy Campbell to forsake England and find a place where it was, quite simply, cheaper to live.Fact and fiction, tell us how, with the post-war exchange rate at its most favourable for years, the exodus to the Mediterranean was irresistible, because you could live in the sunshine for half what it cost to live in England.Even after the crash, one could still get over eighty francs to the pound, and a prix fixe menu cost six francs; while in Italy in the 1930s for example, the exchange rate was nearly sixty lire to the pound.Aldous Huxley found that he could live ‘in comfort’ there on £ 300 a year.‘The worst is however that I haven’t got £ 300 a year…’
    In her novel Ragged Banners (1931) Ethel Mannin’s hero the young poet Starridge shakes the gloomy poverty of London from off his feet and, with an artist friend, heads for the Riviera.After paying for third-class travel to Italy they have £ 12 left between two: ‘We can live on that for six weeks at least… We’ve really nothing to worry about.The gods, anyhow, will take care of their own…’
    This deeply held assumption that one would never really have to go hungry died hard.The Campbells, Huxley, and the fictional Starridge all came from educated middle-class backgrounds, and adapting to poverty was hard for them.Such people, brought up to expect a certain level of comfort, might well be loath to scrounge drinks and borrow money because they were too broke to stand a round.Their asceticism was often nominal, and having to be stingy went against the grain.Recalling his youth in the 1920s, the writer Douglas Goldring summed it up:
    No one who has not actually been through the experience of dropping suddenly from middle-class comfort to the income level of a farm labourer, can understandits effect on men old enough to have acquired certain regular habits, such, for example, as changing occasionally into evening clothes, taking cabs… In 1919 I used to be genially mocked by Alec Waugh:…‘Look at Douglas!If he’s only got half-a-crown in his pocket, he hails a taxi.’… Going abroad broke the shock.Cheap hotel accommodation, cheap – and delicious – food and even cheaper drinks also made it possible for the depressed intelligentsia to enjoy for a while the indulgences and menus plaisirs to which, in pre-war days, they had been accustomed.
    For despite the strong imperatives that kept Bohemians poor – idealism, artistic status, rejection of materialism, contempt for wealth – Bohemia often proved in the end a dispiritingly necessitous place in which to live.For a group of people who to some extent defined themselves by their denial of the moneyed world, they were indeed noticeably obsessed with it.It could be very hard, if you were a painfully impecunious artist, not to feel that the rich world was undeserving.Living with the consequences of a difficult choice can strain one’s powers of endurance.Indeed, a sense of monstrous injustice that ‘they’ should have all the money and none of the capacity truly to feel or appreciate the finer things, burned in many breasts.It was quite simply unfair that the rich should be so rich, when there was no money left in the kitty, and