Luckily he had to go to work at five in the morning, so I could uncoil my legs and have a couple of hours’ proper sleep after he was gone. He was an elderly man named Mr Reilly, a mechanic of sorts and employed ‘on top’ at one of the coal-pits.

There was another bed across the foot of it and jammed hard against it (it had to be in that position to allow the door to open) so that I had to sleep with my legs doubled up if I straightened them out I kicked the occupant of the other bed in the small of the back. My bed was in the right-hand corner on the side nearest the door. The room had been turned into a bedroom by thrusting four squalid beds in among this other wreckage. And covering most of one wall there was a huge hideous piece of junk, something between a sideboard and a hall-stand, with lots of carving and little drawers and strips of looking-glass, and there was a once-gaudy carpet ringed by the slop-pails of years, and two gilt chairs with burst seats, and one of those old-fashioned horsehair armchairs which you slide off when you try to sit on them. Hanging from the ceiling there was a heavy glass chandelier on which the dust was so thick that it was like fur. We were therefore sleeping in what was still recognisably a drawing-room. Years earlier the house had been an ordinary dwelling-house, and when the Brookers had taken it and fitted it out as a tripe-shop and lodging-house, they had inherited some of the more useless pieces of furniture and had never had the energy to remove them. There were generally four of us in the bedroom, and a beastly place it was, with that defiled impermanent look of rooms that are not serving their rightful purpose. Earlier than that, I suppose, there were factory whistles which I was never awake to hear.

The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street. Cover-image, George Orwell_The Road to Wigan Pier

The road to wigan pier by george orwell